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John Bolton replacing HR McMaster as Trump’s national security advisor (effective April 9) likely means more war and greater world instability, not less.

His appointment to a sensitive administration position is something to lose sleep over.

Hillary’s defeat didn’t dodge a nuclear bullet, as hoped for. It gave Trump the trigger, perhaps as willing to squeeze it to prove his machismo, a terrifying possibility.

Straightaway in office he proved he’s America’s latest warrior president, placing hawkish generals in charge of geopolitical policymaking – accentuated by replacing Rex Tillerson with Mike Pompeo, and now raging hawk John Bolton as national security advisor.

The most perilous time in world history is now more frightening. Long forgotten is Trump’s campaign hyperbole, calling NATO “obsolete,” along with criticizing trillions of dollars spent on militarism and warmaking.

Instead of stepping back from wars he inherited, he escalated them. With Pompeo at State and Bolton as national security advisor, greater war on humanity is likely.

One observer ripped Bolton, saying

“(h)e never met a country he didn’t want to destroy.”

Another said he’s much more than “a run-of-the-mill hawk…He’s never seen a foreign policy problem that couldn’t be solved by bombing.”

Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation director Alexandra Bell said

“(b)etween Pompeo and Bolton, you’re looking at a neocon foreign policy jacked up on steroids.”

Bolton is militantly hostile to Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and Syria, among other nations on his target list.

In February, he called for a “decidedly disproportionate,” anti-Russia cyber offensive. He urged Trump to let Putin “hear the rumble of artillery and NATO tank tracks conducting more joint field exercises with Ukraine’s military.”

During a recent Fox News interview, he said

“Russia, China, Syria, Iran, North Korea. (They) make agreements and lie about them,” adding:

“A national security policy that is based on the faith that (nations) like that will honor their commitments is doomed to failure.”

He joined the “Russia meddled in America’s electoral process” crowd straightaway – recently calling Moscow’s (nonexistent) attempt to undermine the 2016 presidential election “a casus belli, a true act of war, and one Washington will never tolerate,” adding:

“For Trump, it should be a highly salutary lesson about the character of Russia’s leadership to watch Putin lie to him.”

“And it should be a fire-bell-in-the-night warning about the value Moscow places on honesty, whether regarding election interference, nuclear proliferation, arms control or the Middle East: negotiate with today’s Russia at your peril.”

“I think in order to focus Putin’s thinking, we need to do things that cause him pain…”

He called for “abrogat(ing) New START between Washington and Moscow, a nuclear arms reduction treaty agreed to in 2009, signed in 2010.

He urged a “very strong response” to the Sergey Skripal incident Russia had nothing to do with.

He advocates confronting nonexistent Chinese “aggressiveness…shak(ing) up” Washington’s relationship with Beijing – urging greater toughness along with closer ties to Taiwan.

According to East Asia analyst Abraham Denmark,

“(w)e should expect an even more confrontational approach to China. A trade war may just be the beginning of a broader geopolitical competition.”

Bolton earlier called for military action on Iran and North Korea. In a 2015 NYT op-ed, he headlined: “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” turning truth on its head saying “Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear weapons has long been evident,” adding:

“The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure. The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required.”

In an April 2017 interview with Breitbart News, he urged ending North Korea, saying “the only longterm way to deal with (its) nuclear weapons program is to end (the) regime.”

“It’s not enough…to impose sanctions…(North Korea) poses a threat to stability in the region that undermines security…”

“I think further discussions with North Korea, further efforts to pressure North Korea, are basically a waste of time. The way to end the North’s nuclear program is to end the North.”

Bolton bashed Bashar al-Assad, calling him “a satellite of the ayatollahs in Iran”. He said Obama’s “red line” Syria strategy restrained US policy against the government.

Commenting on Bolton’s appointment, former State Department official Philip Crowley tweeted:

“EU diplomats will not sleep well tonight given the latest news.”

Anti-nuclear weapons Ploughshares Fund president Joe Circincione tweeted:

“This is the moment the administration has officially gone off the rails.”

According to Third Way foreign policy vice president Mieke Eoyang,

“Bolton is so much of an ideologue that I don’t think he would accurately portray the consequences (of policy options) to the president.”

In February 2015, he launched the Foundation for American Security and Freedom (FASF), a neocon advocacy group “committed to restoring and protecting our vital national security interests and preserving our way of life for our children.”

Bolton’s way is through militarism and endless wars of aggression. He considers all sovereign independent states a threat to US security.

As national security advisor, he’ll exert considerable influence over Trump’s geopolitical agenda.

With him involved in administration policymaking, escalated wars of aggression are likely, a greater risk of nuclear war instead of stepping back from the brink.

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

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

1. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/16/tony-blair-iraq-war-prosecution-attempt-goes-back-to-court

“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!)

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Tags: John Bolton, United States, war hawk, war propaganda

US Sponsored “Regime Change” in Asia and Africa: Five Things that Ethiopia and Myanmar’s Leadership Changes Have in Common

March 23rd, 2018 by Andrew Korybko

An ordinary person might not think that Ethiopia and Myanmar have anything in common, but an analysis of their latest leadership changes shows that these two Chinese Silk Road partners actually share five structural vulnerabilities with one another, and identifying these points of pressure could reveal some crucial insight about the US’ latest Hybrid War plans in the New Cold War.

The past month has seen the formal leaders of Ethiopia and Myanmar resign from their posts, with Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn stepping down at the end of February and President Htin Kyaw doing so in the middle of this week, respectively. On the surface, these two events on opposite ends of the Afro-“Indian” Ocean appear to have nothing to do with one another, nor would an ordinary person think that these countries have anything in common whatsoever, but these peaceful “regime changes” actually reveal five structural vulnerabilities afflicting both Ethiopia and Myanmar. Identifying these points of pressure is more than just an academic exercise, however, since it could provide some crucial insight into the US’ latest Hybrid War strategies that it’s employing against these two Chinese Silk Road partners in the latest stage of the New Cold War.

Image on the right: PM Hailemariam Desalegn

1. Figurehead/Symbolic Leaders

Image result for Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn

Ethiopia watchers know that the country’s Prime Minister is mostly a figurehead for the powerful Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF, modelled off of the Chinese Communist Party) that rules the country behind the scenes, with the real decision-making competencies of the state reportedly resting in the hands of the party’s Tigrayan minority elite who are supposedly deeply entrenched in the military-security services.

Something similar can be said about the Myanmarese President, since he too is a symbolic leader who merely acts as a stand-in for powerful military interests, though it should be mentioned in the same vein that unelected “State Counsellor” Suu Kyi also wields disproportionate influence, though she too has lately come to be considered as more of a military instrument than the independent power center that she previously was thought to be in her own right.

2. Deep State Divisions

There’s speculation that Premier Desalegn resigned because of growing rifts within the EPRDF between its de-facto Tigrayan coalition leader and the front’s Amhara & Oromo “junior” partners. While no such rumors have yet to arise in Myanmar, there have been clear signs that foreign forces endeavor to drive a wedge between the civilian government and its military backers, the stress of which might have contributed to President Htin Kyaw’s recent resignation.

3. Escalating Unrest

Ethiopia has been in an off-and-on state of Hybrid War unrest for nearly the past 18 months as its largest ethnic group of the Oromo violently agitated against the government on the pretext of defending their communal land rights from the state’s “eminent domain” encroachment, and other disturbances that have since sprung up with the country’s second-largest ethnic group of the Amhara and geographically expansive one of the Somalis are thought to have contributed to the aforementioned deep state divisions.

By the same token, Myanmar has been beset by Hybrid War violence in recent months as a result of “Rohingya” “rebel”-terrorist groups wreaking havoc in the country’s northwestern Rakhine State along the Bangladeshi border, with this sudden conflict prompting the military to decisively intervene and in turn trigger a flurry of international condemnation, some of which may have succeeded in pressuring members of the civilian government such as the president into distancing themselves from the former junta and resigning out of unstated protest over what happened.

4. Federalization

Ethiopia is officially a federation but the manner in which it functions has given rise to accusations that it’s really just a thinly disguised centralized state, with this claim being used as the basis (whether rightly or wrongly) for “justifying” the recent ethno-regional violence in the country that purports to be motivated by a desire to “reform” the system through “decentralization”.

Myanmar, on the other hand, is a centralized state that’s formally moving towards “federalization” per what’s been called the “Panglong 2.0”or “21^st-century Panglong” process in honor of its pre-independence powwow that previously decentralized the country prior to the 1962 military coup, and the “Rohingya” issue is yet another ethno-regional conflict that adds credence to the argument that “federalization” is the only sustainable “political solution” to Myanmar’s many problems.

5. Silk Road Connectivity

The Chinese-built Djibouti-Addis Ababa Railway (DAAR) could easily be called “Africa’s CPEC” because of its strategic importance to the People’s Republic, which among other things connects the Asian Great Power to its top continental partner that also doubles as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

Myanmar, for its part, hosts the Chinese-built port of Kyaukphyu which is expected to function as the terminal point for a forthcoming “China-Myanmar Economic Corridor” (CMEC) that will run parallel to the two oil and gas pipelines that already transit the country en route to Yunnan Province.

“Containing China”

The common thread connecting these five structural vulnerabilities together in each of these two countries and between them is that the US can exploit them individually or altogether in order to contribute to the Hybrid War “containment” of China. The external aggravation of preexisting identity conflicts within each of these two geostrategic transit states along the New Silk Road is comparatively easy for the US to pull off and cost-effectively pays for itself many times over if it succeeds in catalyzing a situation of “scenario superiority” whereby manufactured crises become “self-sustaining”.

Ethiopia and Myanmar are both “National Democracies”, though this relatively more stable form of government has nevertheless been weaponized by foreign forces in order to tear apart their nation-states via “Identity Federalism” (“Bosnification”), all with the intent of creating a checkerboard of quasi-independent statelets through which the US can then exert influence along each country’s crucial Silk Road corridors. The challenge that both countries face is in simultaneously managing their “grassroots” pressure and deep state divisions as they progressively “reform” their systems, taking care not to drag their heels in this regard but also not to move too fast either.

The latest leadership changes in Ethiopia and Myanmar indicate that there are serious problems behind the scenes in both states and that the US’ Hybrid War campaigns have worked to the extent that they’ve begun to produce visible results in shaking up the state of affairs in both countries. China will need to assist its partners as needed if it’s to ensure the strategic security of its Silk Road transit routes and not surrender them to American proxy influence, but therein lays the danger because Beijing will also have to avoid falling into the US’ “mission creep” trap as it navigates the latest turns in the New Cold War.

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

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Tags: containment of China, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Rohinya, Silk Road

Response to Trump’s “Protectionist Measures”: “Workers Need an Industrial Policy Not Tariffs”

March 23rd, 2018 by UE

Meeting in Chicago on Friday, March 9, the UE General Executive Board issued the following statement on President Trump’s announcement about steel and aluminum tariffs.

Workers Need an Industrial Policy Not Tariffs

President Trump’s recent announcement that he intends to impose a 25% tariff on steel and a 10% tariff on aluminum is not a new or effective strategy for reviving American manufacturing. George W. Bush imposed tariffs on steel in 2002 and quietly removed them after only 18 months. Protectionist measures in a capitalist economy of global “free” trade are not adequate tools for building a sustainable US infrastructure and improving the lives of workers.

What American workers need is not partial half-measures, but a trade and industrial policy that is based on international cooperation, respect for workers’ rights, and environmental sustainability — one that raises living standards for workers across industries and across borders through investment in infrastructure, jobs and social programs.

It is troubling that there are “progressive” voices and organizations that are falling into the Trumpian trap of using trade as a tool to divide the working class on all sides of our borders. Instead of pursuing industrial policies that raise wages and working conditions for workers across industries and across borders, these tariffs are simply an effort to secure the best possible deal for one sector of business. They will only have the effect of whipsawing U.S. steel and aluminum workers against other U.S. manufacturing workers whose industries are dependent on steel and aluminum imports, and against steel and aluminum workers in other countries.

Corporate executives regularly hide behind notions of “market forces” or “economic efficiency” as they make calculated decisions to destroy workers’ living standards and rip industries from US, Canadian and Mexican communities in their search for cheaper wages and worse environmental standards. We have heard it thousands of times in union contract negotiations. However, it is not just “markets” or “economics.” Trade deals and tariffs have real impacts on human beings and our ability to make a life for ourselves and our families. To treat our relations with other nations, especially those nations that are some of our closest allies, as a business deal speaks volumes about our government’s view of its relationship with other countries and their lack of concern for workers.

Most troubling about the President’s executive order is his threat to Canada and Mexico that their “exemption” is conditional on the positions they take during the NAFTA negotiations. Canada has made demands in the negotiations to improve labor rights and conditions in both Mexico and the US, to level the playing field between our three nations and blunt the ability of corporations and their allies to exploit workers and communities. We are concerned that the basis of the President’s threats is to enforce the continued use of NAFTA as a tool for corporate greed and exploitation.

As has been widely reported in the press, the Trump administration imposed these tariffs under World Trade Organization rules by claiming they are for “national security” purposes. This is a false claim. In fact, Secretary of Defense James Mattis challenged that premise in a “Memorandum for Secretary of Commerce” by stating, “As noted in both Section 232 reports, however, the US military requirements for steel and aluminum each only represent about three percent of U.S. production. Therefore, DoD does not believe that the finding in the reports impact the ability of DoD programs to acquire the steel or aluminum necessary to meet national defense requirements.” (Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 gives executive branch the ability to conduct investigations to “determine the effects on the national security of imports”.)

As Senator Sanders consistently repeated during his presidential campaign, the greatest threat to our national security is global climate change. Investing in infrastructure and transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy would not only improve our national security but could create millions of sustainable and good-paying union jobs. We could transform our nation into one where our air and water are clean, our cities livable, our education system top-notch, and workers and residents have the same affordable access to healthcare, housing, and food regardless of income.

We are not opposed to tariffs or trade agreements in all circumstances. Countries use them all the time to protect key segments of their economy and ensure employment in those sectors. However, we firmly oppose using them as a cudgel to extract concessions from trading partners and allies, and to bolster corporate profits at the expense of workers’ living standards and the health and safety of our communities.

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Tags: industrial policy, NAFTA, tariff

Islamophobia and Religious Discrimination in Canada

March 23rd, 2018 by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) urges the government to move promptly on the recommendations from the M-103 report put forth last month by Parliament’s Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. The government announced Tuesday that it will be launching pan-Canadian consultations on racism as a response to the Committee’s report. Nevertheless, CJPME would prefer to see a more prompt and concrete response to the 30 recommendations of the Committee and is concerned that drawn out consultations will simply delay much-needed action by the government.

“With the Committee’s M-103 report and numerous Canadian surveys on the problem, there is already a clear picture of what priorities should be,” asserted Thomas Woodley, President of CJPME. CJPME has issued recommendations for rapid action on:

Targeting funding to nascent Muslim Canadian community institutions, as part of recommendation 20. The Muslim Canadian minority is one of Canada’s newest and most vulnerable communities: its members are often unaware how to more fully participate in Canadian civic society.
Increasing funding for law enforcement and security agencies to investigate hate speech and to enforce existing laws. This aligns with the Committee’s recommendation 29.
Providing education and training programs to combat Islamophobia in Canada, aligned with recommendation 22 of the Committee.
Mandating cultural sensitivity training for government service employees, mentioned in recommendation 26 of the Committee.

CJPME points out that the Committee took a year to complete the M-103 report, when it was slated to be published after 6 months. Pan-Canadian consultations may additionally delay much need action for vulnerable communities. CJPME is also concerned that such consultations will only intensify polarized debate around the issues. A survey co-sponsored by CJPME demonstrated that attitudes around Islamophobia and related questions are highly politically polarized, and more public sessions around well-understood phenomena may simply deepen the polarization.

CJPME points out that motion M-103 was triggered by the Quebec City mosque attack, yet the Committee’s M-103 report smothers real action on Islamophobia under generalized concerns about religious discrimination overall. Beyond the Quebec City attack, Canada’s Muslim community is reeling from a surge of Islamophobic attitudes: from acts of racism faced day-to-day by Canada’s Muslims, to offensive comments by some politicians, to racist attitudes promulgated in electronic media.

“Given current trends, we expect the government to provide prompt action specifically on anti-Muslim bigotry,” said Thomas Woodley, President of CJPME.

Featured image is from CJPME.

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Tags: Canada, islamophobia, racism, religious discrimination

Video: Blaming Russia: “No Proof Needed, We Did It!”

March 23rd, 2018 by In the Now

Below is a satirical video on blaming Russia for the alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter without hard evidence.

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Death and Destruction: Fifteen Years in Iraq

March 23rd, 2018 by Black Alliance for Peace

Monday marked the 15th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “Humanitarian intervention” to depose a “dictator” was the excuse. Now Iraq—home to a major civilization—is littered with military waste that has caused birth defects in Iraqi infants and has been a breeding ground for armed, right-wing Islamic groups. The bill for re-constructing Iraq is estimated at $100 billion. The United States says it will not pay a cent. Keeping Iraq in ruins allows the United States to control the oil Iraq produces and keep that crucial resource out of the hands of China and Russia, both of which have been demonized by the ruling class with the help of the Western press.

Voices from around the world lamented the anniversary. Here’s journalist Ben Norton on Twitter:

The illegal invasion of Iraq is one of the worst crimes of the 21st century. It led to 1M+ deaths and destabilized the region.

And many of the people who supported it have since rebranded as regime change "experts" on Syria and members of The Resistance™https://t.co/vt7XqtPeNk

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 19, 2018

Iraqi Sami Ramadani mourned the destruction of his homeland:

Fifteen years ago today, US, UK & forces from 38 other aggressor states invaded & occupied #Iraq. Beloved city of my childhood, #Baghdad, was blitzed & within few years over a million people were killed by an imperialist war based on lies and deception pic.twitter.com/Whl2hCAXQ4

— Sami Ramadani سامي (@SamiRamadani1) March 19, 2018

Close to a half-million people (civilians and combatants) have been documented as casualties, according to the Iraq Body Count. Although many people associate the Iraq War with U.S. President George W. Bush, it was under Barack Obama’s reign that most deaths took place.

Here’s then-FBI director Robert Mueller lying about weapons of mass destruction being detected in Iraq. He’s now Special Counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections—basically, he’s helping concoct another lie to mislead the U.S. public into what could be another war to maintain Full Spectrum Dominance and loot resources, as the United States is doing in Afghanistan.

Oppose U.S. Imperialism—in Washington, D.C.

Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) is supporting an action as part of the Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases at the Japanese Embassy this Friday to oppose the repressive sentence handed down by the court against Okinawan activists fighting for Okinawa’s self-determination and demanding the closure of toxic U.S. military bases.

Join the action in Washington, D.C., 1-3 p.m., March 23, at 2520 Massachusetts Avenue, NW. Bring your signs and banners.

Say Her Name: Marielle Franco

A number of Black communities are under military occupation in Brazil because of the U.S.-supported right-wing government that is also persecuting a revolutionary candidate for president. Black human-rights activists organizing opposition have been targeted. This is not isolated. It is happening in Honduras, a nation where the United States—under Obama—gave a green light to a coup and is imposing a terroristic government on the people now. This is also the reality that the United States wishes for Venezuela, as it supports an opposition that has burnt alive Black people because they assumed the victims were supporters of the government. The latest fatality is Marielle Franco, a lesbian, Black Brazilian woman raised in a favela (Brazilian shanty town) who fought police brutality against the Black community. Thousands of Brazilians have since marched in the streets, protesting her state-sponsored murder.

Everywhere the people are resisting the dying—but dangerous—racist, Western, colonial/capitalist patriarchy, women are emerging in the leadership and paying a price as a consequence. From the racist apartheid state of Israel to Brazil, Colombia and South Africa, to the streets of the South Side of Chicago and Detroit, they have struck a rock as revolutionary women are assuming their rightful place at the center of our global resistance. Palestine’s Ahed Tamimi has been offered a plea deal of eight months in prison for bravely fighting Israel.

And here in the United States, Black folks are resisting the same white-supremacist apparatus that has been oppressing our people since we were stolen from Africa.

The Intercept reported the FBI tracked an activist who was involved with Black Lives Matter as that person traveled across the United States.

Radio program Law and Disorder interviewed BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka on these issues on a recent episode.

Free Herman Bell

The New York State Board of Parole granted parole for Black political prisoner Herman Bell, who has been imprisoned for 45 years. Since the Board’s decision, right-wing forces, including the Police Benevolent Association, have been angered.

It is important politicians and policymakers know public support exists for the release of Black political prisoners, many of whom have been jailed for over four decades.

Herman has a community of friends, family and loved ones eagerly awaiting his return. At 70, after decades inside, it is time for Herman to come home.

Here are three things you can do right now to support Herman Bell:

CALL New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office: 518.474.8390
EMAIL Governor Cuomo’s office here
TWEET at Governor Cuomo using the following sample tweet: “.@NYGovCuomo: stand by the Parole Board’s lawful & just decision to release Herman Bell. At 70 years old and after more than 40 years of incarceration, his release is overdue. #BringHermanHome”

Gun Control and Militarism

While the U.S. public tries to figure out why gun violence is so prevalent, Ajamu placed that discussion in a larger context: That we need to make deeper connections between violence and weapons in the United States and U.S. imperialism around the world.

If you’d like to say no to militarism, get involved in opposing Trump’s military parade, a brash show of imperialist power.

You can also join a Spring Action near you. These events for April 14-15 were called by the Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases—which BAP helped found—and are being endorsed by dozens of organizations across the country.

Twitter has been blocking the use of the Spring Action website. Help get the website unblocked by tweeting:

Hey, @Twitter. Stop blocking the revolution and unblock our website. In the meantime, head to springaction2018 DOT org if you’d like to get involved in taking down the empire. #SpringAgainstWar

No compromise.

No retreat.

Featured image is from Project Syndicate.

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Tags: 15 years, barack obama, George W. Bush, Iraq invasion

How Secular Is the West? The U.S., Britain, Australia… Secular Nation States, “So Help Me God”??

March 23rd, 2018 by Shenali D Waduge

Of late there have been quite a number of know-it-all ‘academics’ ‘political analysts’ dollar earning civil society coming forward promoting the displacement of Buddhism enshrined in Article 9 to be replaced with a ‘secular’ constitution in Sri Lanka. They love to quote extensively how West is secular.

If readers were wiser they would look for themselves & discover that a majority of Western nations are not in the least secular though they publicly profess to be so. What also needs to be reiterated that some of these professing to be secular countries have a history of less than 300 years having stolen lands from the indigenous & created a country on Christian ideology. Are those professing ‘secular’ tag for Sri Lanka ignorant of ground realities or are they simply carrying out an agenda on behalf of nations who wish to completely abolish the historical, cultural ethno-religious identity of non-Christian countries.

Britain

The British monarch is not only the Head of State but also the head of the Anglican church,
Queen is Supreme Governor of the Church of England and ‘Defender of the Faith’
The National Anthem of Britain starts with ‘God save the Queen’
The Head of State CANNOT marry a Roman Catholic
The place of Church of England has been secured since 1707 Treaty of the Union – Church of England was founded in 1534, quite a long time before Scotland, England and Ireland came to share the same monarch in 1603
Celebration of 5th November/Guy Fawkes night
Senior Anglican bishops sit in the upper chamber of the Parliament by right
Legal traditions also enable the right of Church of England bishops to attend the House of Lords.
The Royal Coat of Arms used by the monarch contains Latin phrases meaning “God and my right” and “Shamed be he who thinks ill of it”.
When taking oaths, the monarch places hand on Bible and pledges solemn oath to God
In a 1649 case, an English court declared that ‘the law of England is the law of God’ and ‘the law of God is the law of England.’
Former British PM David Cameron said ‘we are still a Christian country’,

“In God We Trust” is the official motto of the United States of America
“In God We Trust” first appeared on the two-cent piece in 1864 and has appeared on paper currency since 1957. President Dwight Eisenhower on July 30, 1956, declared “In God We Trust” must appear on American currency.
The Declaration of Independence refers to God
Preamble to US Constitution – “In the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity”
United States Code contained 68 mentions of “God.” 46 of these references were in shipping and environmental codes
United States coins shall have the inscription ‘In God We Trust.’
“An individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services, shall take the following oath, ‘I, …So help me God.'”
“Each person enlisting in an armed force shall take the following oath:
“…So help me God.'”
“Each person enlisting in the National Guard shall sign an enlistment contract and subscribe to the following oath:
‘…So help me God.”
Boy Scouts oath of allegiance to God and country…”
“Each justice or judge of the United States shall take the following oath or affirm before performing the duties of his office: ‘I, _______, do solemnly swear (or affirm),…So help meGod.'”
“I will support the Constitution of the United States, and that I will conduct myself, as an attorney and counselor of this Court, uprightly and according to law. So help me God.'”
The applicant shall be admitted either (A) upon oral motion by a members of the bar of this court or of the Supreme Court of the United States, before a judge of this court who will administer the following oath: ‘I, ______, do solemnly swear (or affirm)…so help me God.'”
“The President shall issue each year a proclamation designating the first Thursday in May as a National Day of Prayer on which the people of the United States may turn to Godin prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals.”
“The Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag: ‘I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’, should be rendered by standing at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart.” [First effective without phrase “under God” as of June 22, 1942.
If US is Secular why is only Christmas a Federal holiday?

Where the Constitutions of countries mention God

Australia

Christian ideology penetrates both the legal and governmental customs
The Constitution of Australia Bill was passed by the Imperial (British) Parliament on 5 July 1900. Sir John Downer, declared: ‘The Commonwealth of Australia will be, from its first stage, a Christian Commonwealth’.
Sir Henry Parkes, known as ‘the Father of Australia’s Federation’, believed that Christianity comprised an ‘essential part’ of Australia’s common law. Sir Henry stated: ‘We are pre- eminently a Christian people—as our laws, our whole system of jurisprudence, our Constitution… are based upon and interwoven with our Christian belief.’
Religion is still taught in Australia’s public schools, and the Bible is still present in every court of the land. Furthermore, prayers are conducted prior to opening proceedings at both state and federal Parliaments.
Speaker concludes the opening proceedings with this prayer: Almighty God, we humbly beseech Thee to vouchsafe Thy blessing upon this Parliament. Direct and prosper our deliberations to the advancement of Thy glory, and the true welfare of the people of Australia.
“Whereas the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, andTasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown … Be it therefore enacted … as follows:”

Ireland

Irish constitution preamble has an invocation to God & Jesus

Canada

preamble to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms also mentions God “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law”
Royal Anthem of Canada remains ‘God Save the Queen’
Christian holidays are generally state holidays.

Germany

The Preamble to the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany begins with the words: “Aware of its responsibility before God and humankind…”
On a legal level, the German constitution and state-level constitutions all include references to man’s responsibilities before God
“Conscious of their responsibility before God and man, (…) the German people, in the exercise of their constituent power, have adopted this Basic Law.”
Church Tax is collected by the State – 8% of adult income tax
A person’s religion is recorded on his birth certificate. Upon entering school, the child’s church affiliation is declared so he can attend the appropriate religion class — Lutheran or Catholic.
In both the German Basic Law and the regional constitutions, God is called upon in the swearing-in of the respective governments. The official oath of the members of government ends with the affirmation “So help me God!”.
German political party is referred to as Christian Democrats

Norway

“Verdigrunnlaget forblir vår kristne og humanistiske arv.” – “Our values remain from our Christian and humanist heritage…”

Brazil

“We, the representatives of the Brazilian People, … promulgate, under the protection of God, this CONSTITUTION OF THE FEDERATIVE REPUBLIC OF BRAZIL.”

Switzerland

“In the name of Almighty God! The Swiss People and the Cantons (…) adopt the following Constitution”

These are the countries insisting Sri Lanka remove the place of Buddhism from its constitution. Some of these countries have hardly 300 years of history, most of these countries were created after stealing lands from the indigenous and we have a history of over 2600 years!

Co-existing with the notion of secular state is the notion of neutrality. Is neutrality possible? No person is not without bias of some form or the other. No one can be 100% neutral.

Those peddling for the secular tag are in fact using the secular slogan to promote concepts that non-secular states would find taboo…for example special status for homosexuality, gay marriage etc…while no one is stopped from being homosexual, non-secular states does not advocate open display of homosexuality but it is nothing homosexuals need to complain about since they enjoy homosexual lives privately.

No one can plug terms & concepts and expect people to comply with them. No new theories can be dropped from the sky and enforced legally forcing citizens that have been carrying centuries old customs and cultures to forget or erase. What is unfair & uncouth is that elements promoting secular changes are adopting multipronged programs to destroy cultures and value systems of countries and using the podium of media to run well-funded campaigns to claim that a country does not have any meaningful values to protect & foster and therefore the proposed secular programs should be adopted.

Therefore when groups land promoting new faiths, trying to ruin lives of children as young as 3 claiming to educate them on ‘homosexuality & lesbian’ rights, parents in Sri Lanka should not only worry but gather to refuse to allow their children to be subject to these brainwashing experiments.

Then at another end you find countries that have been more than accommodating are now up in arms against multiculturalism claiming that every rights & freedoms are being misused and abused and immigrants are not assimilating to society while they are creating ghetto areas where whites are now shunned from and have to retreat to more peaceful areas. This has given rise to fundamental Christian groups and in large measure contributed to Brexit.

We must be intelligent enough to realize that these experiments have done countries no good and a nation needs to remain linked to its ancient past, history, heritage culture, values etc. Anyone wanting to adopt foreign cultures may as well go and live in countries where those cultures are part of that countries heritage, they have no right to force them upon citizens who wish to remain tied to their roots.

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Psychiatric Drugs: Create Violence and Suicide, School Shootings and Other Acts of Senseless Violence

March 23rd, 2018 by Citizens Commission on Human Rights

De-mystifying the uniquely American epidemic of mass shootings:

This extensive CCHR report is the very best I have read concerning psychoactive drugs and drug-induced violence, suicidality and irrational behaviors.

Note especially the latter pages that will enforce the notion that it isn’t so-called mental illnesses that need addressing, it is the brain-altering effect of the dependency-inducing (so-called) psychiatric drugs that are given out like candy by physicians for the normal emotions of sadness, nervousness, insomnia, low self-esteem, social anxiety, brain malnutrition, etc, all of which are NOT mental illness but rather normal human realities. Please spend a lot of time studying this well-documented treatise.

Note: Psychiatrist Peter Breggin (google him and watch his powerful videos on YouTube) has always said that people diagnosed with so-called mental illnesses (usually false diagnoses) are never violent UNTIL they start taking the brain-altering, addictive psych drugs or are going through withdrawal syndromes from the drugs!

Dr. Gary G. Kohl

***

Introductory Text of CCHR Report

A lthough there can be numerous reasons for mass murder, violent crime and suicide,

with just as many solutions proposed to curb it and funding poured into its prevention, senseless acts of violence continue unabated, with more than 80 dead and 500 injured between the Las Vegas concert shooting on October 1, 2017 and Texas church shooting on November 5, 2017 alone. Then the shocking Parkland, Florida school shooting on February 14, 2018, left 17 dead and some 15 injured.

Media quote experts saying that such individuals are “mentally disturbed,” or have “untreated mental illness,” but that doesn’t explain the level of violence we are seeing or what drives a person to pull a trigger or intentionally crash an airplane, killing all 150 people on board. The facts paint a disturbing picture. A review of scientific literature published in Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry regarding the “astonishing rate” of mental illness over the past 50 years revealed that it’s not “mental illness” causing the problem; rather, it’s the psychiatric drugs prescribed to treat it. 1 Mental disorder is not a predictor of aggressive behavior, but rather the adverse effects of the drugs prescribed to treat it. Whatever psychiatric assessment, “treatment,” including the drugs reportedly given the teen charged over the Parkland school massacre, all failed to predict or prevent the murderous outcome and potentially exacerbated his troubled mental state.

Since the introduction of antipsychotic drugs in 1955 and the newer Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI) antidepressants, like Prozac, in 1987, both are documented to be linked to violent effects in a percentage of the people taking them.

“The irritability and impulsivity [from antidepressants] can make people suicidal or homicidal.” 2

– Joseph Glenmullen Harvard Medical School Psychiatrist

“The link between antidepressants and violence, including suicide and homicide, is well established.” 3

– Patrick D. Hahn Affiliate Professor of Biology, Loyola University Maryland

“Violence and other potentially criminal behavior caused by prescription drugs are medicine’s best kept secret.” 4

– Professor David Healy Leading Psychopharmacology Expert and Professor of Psychiatry in Wales

Drug proponents argue that there are many shootings and acts of violence that have not been correlated to psychiatric (psychotropic) drugs, but that is exactly the point. It has neither been confirmed nor refuted, as law enforcement is not required to investigate or report on prescribed drugs linked to violence, and media rarely pose the question.

Click here to read the CCHR report. (pdf)

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Iraq: Will Tony Blair Finally Stand Trial for His Part in the “Supreme International Crime”?

March 23rd, 2018 by Felicity Arbuthnot

The article below, first published on GR in July 2017, is relevant to the commemoration of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“I think most people who have dealt with me, think I’m a pretty straight sort of guy, and I am.” (Tony Blair, BBC “On the Record”, 16^th November 1997.)

On 30th November last year, Michael Gove, currently UK Environment Minister, pretty well unloved by swathes of the population whatever Ministry he heads, declared, at the post Chilcot Inquiry debate in Parliament regarding Tony Blair’s role in dragging the UK in to a monumental tragedy for which history will not forgive:

“History, I think will judge him less harshly than some in this House do.”

Deciding whether or not to illegally invade Iraq was a “finely balanced act”, fantasized Gove.

It was not. It was a pack of lies, many of which came from the Blair regime, as confirmed by Colin Powell’s delusionary address to the UN on 5^th February 2003, in subsequently unearthed correspondence and of course, the Chilcot Inquiry.

On 15^th September 2004, the then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, in an interview with the BBC World Service, asked if the invasion was illegal, stated:

“Yes, if you wish.” He continued without caveat: “I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of view and from the Charter point of view it was illegal.”

Blair, his Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw and his Attorney General Lord Goldsmith did not face a Nuremberg type trial – and surreally, Blair, after his 2007 resignation was appointed Middle East Peace Envoy. Straw and Goldsmith went back to business as usual.

However, after fourteen years, maybe two million deaths, the decimation by ISIS, the US, and the UK of Iraq’s (Mesopotamia’s) history, culture stewardship and witness, over millennia, to one of the world’s great, ancient civilizations, there is a chance that Antony Charles Lynton Blair, Jack Straw and Lord Goldsmith may yet face a Court of Law.

File:Chirac Bush Blair Berlusconi.jpg

George W. Bush poses with G8 leaders during the G8 Summit in Evian, France, on June 2, 2003. From left, President Jacques Chirac of France, President Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy. (Source: White House photo by Eric Draper / Wikimedia Commons)

In April this year the UK Attorney General, Jeremy Wright, intervened in an attempt to halt a private prosecution of the three brought by General Abdul-Wahid al-Ribat, former Chief of Staff of the Iraqi Army under Saddam Hussein’s government.

The Attorney General argued that the basis of the case, the crime of aggression “the supreme international crime” as enshrined in the Nuremberg Tribunals, did not apply in British law and that the former Prime Minister, Blair and his Ministers had:

“implied immunity as former Head of State and government Ministers, therefore offence not made out … Allegations involve potential details being disclosed under the Official Secrets Act for which Attorney General and Director of Public Prosecutions consent are required.” (1)

The implication seemingly being that those consents would not be forthcoming.

However, in direct contradiction, relating to the argument regarding the crime of aggression:

“In his 2003 memo on the legality of the Iraq war (Lord) Goldsmith, then Attorney General, appeared to concede the key point of those now seeking his prosecution. ‘Aggression is a crime under customary international law which automatically forms part of domestic law’ “, he wrote in an advice to then Prime Minister Blair prior to the invasion. (2)

Nevertheless the case was dismissed by the Judge at Westminster Magistrates Court. The legal team for General al-Ribat, led by Michael Mansfield QC and lawyer Imran Khan are not easily deterred.

Mansfield has been described thus:

“The radical lawyer has become an icon in a disenchanted age … (Mansfield’s) high profile victories take on a hallowed significance: the good guys against the rotten state … with a flourish of his insolence and a refusal to shut up they flock to him … and he looks after them all. The Establishment loathes him.” (Guardian, 25^th October 1997.) Imran Khan: “is one of the most highly regarded human rights layers in the country” and “a rebel with many causes.” (The Lawyer, 17^th June 2015.) “My objective is to make sure the State is held accountable”, he is quoted as saying.

This week, on Wednesday, 5^th July, General al-Ribat’s case returned to the High Court in an appeal which is being heard by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and Mr. Justice Ouseley.

The General had been motivated, Mansfield told the Court, by the findings of the Chilcot Inquiry that the Iraq invasion was unnecessary and undermined the United Nations.

‘Mansfield summarised the report’s findings as:

“Saddam Hussein did not pose an urgent threat to the UK, intelligence reporting about [Iraqi] weapons of mass destruction was presented with unwarranted certainty, that the war was unnecessary and that the UK undermined the authority of the UN Security Council.”

“Nothing could be more emphatic than these findings,” he said. “It was an unlawful war.”

He further argued that in 1945:

“… when the British prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross, opened the cases against Nazi leaders at the Nuremburg war crimes trials at the end of the second world war, he acted as though the crime of aggression had already been assimilated into English law.” (3)

James Eadie, QC. representing the Attorney General, Jeremy Wright stated that:

“The crime of aggression is not know to English law” and does not exist in the statute book.

Sabah al-Mukhtar, of the Arab Lawyers Network, commented of the case:

“This is just looking at whether the first Court was right in refusing to entertain the case.

“The Magistrates Court dismissed it on the grounds that Tony Blair had immunity and that the crime of aggression was not part of English law. Many think they were not correct on that.”

The case can be brought in Britain since the British were part of the occupying forces in Iraq, thus General al-Ribat, now living in exile is: “under the European Convention on Human Rights, deemed to have been within the jurisdiction at a relevant time.”

The High Court’s decision has been reserved to allow a further week for the General’s legal team to make “additional specified submissions.” If the Appeal is not dismissed: “the issue of whether the crime of aggression exists in English law will be sent up to the Supreme Court to decide.”

Sir John Chilcot (Source: Iraq Inquiry)

It has not been Blair’s week. In the light of the Court hearing, Sir John Chilcot – who headed the seven year Inquiry in to the decimating attack on Iraq and found that the Blair Cabinet’s decisions on the matter had been “far from satisfactory” – broke a year long silence in an interview with the BBC.

Asked if the former Prime Minister had been as truthful with him and the public as he should have been, Sir John replied:

“Can I slightly reword that to say I think any Prime Minister taking a country into war has got to be straight with the nation and carry it, so far as possible, with him or her. I don’t believe that was the case in the Iraq instance.”

Millions would surely agree, including a swathe of the media, as encapsulated by media correspondent Roy Greenslade (4) exactly a year ago, on the publication of the Chilcot Inquiry. The sub-heading was:

“Without exception, the ‘feral beasts’ of the press tear the former Prime Minister apart over the Iraq invasion, leaving his reputation in tatters.”

A few front page examples were: “Chilcot Report into Iraq war delivers harsh verdict on Blair” (Financial Times); “A monster of delusion” (Daily Mail); “Weapon of mass deception” (Sun); “Blair’s private war” (Times); “Blair is world’s worst terrorist” (Daily Star) and “Spinning on their graves” (Independent). The Mail cited: “the duplicitous, dishonest, secretive, shallow and incompetent conduct of Tony Blair…”

In November 2011:

“In Kuala Lumpur, after two years of investigation by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC), a Tribunal (the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, or KLWCT) consisting of five Judges with judicial and academic backgrounds reached a unanimous verdict that found George W Bush and Tony Blair guilty of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and genocide as a result of their roles in the Iraq War.” (5)

Of relevance to this week’s case may be that: The Tribunal also added several recommendations to its verdict:

1) Report findings in accord with Part VI (calling for future accountability) of the Nuremberg Judgment of 1945 addressing crimes of surviving political and military leaders of Nazi Germany;

2) File reports of genocide and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in The Hague;

3) Approach the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution demanding that the United States end its occupation of Iraq;

4) Communicate the findings of the tribunal to all members of the Rome Statute (which governs the International Criminal Court) and to all states asserting Universal Jurisdiction that allows for the prosecution of international crimes in national courts; and

5) Urge the UN Security Council to take responsibility to ensure that full sovereign rights are vested in the people of Iraq and that the independence of its government be protected by a UN Peacekeeping Force.

It is ten years nearly to the day (27^th June 2007) since Blair left Downing Street, left Iraq bathed in blood and tears and walked off to make £millions and a joke of all peace stands for, as a “Peace Envoy.”

Perhaps, at last, justice may have a chance, one which might set a precedent and also deter any politician or leader from embarking on the “supreme international crime”, ever again. Here’s fervently hoping.

Notes

2. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/16/uk-attorney-general-in-bid-to-block-case-against-tony-blair-over-iraq-war

3. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/05/tony-blair-should-be-prosecuted-over-iraq-war-high-court-hears

4. https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/jul/07/national-newspapers-savage-tony-blair-over-the-chilcot-report

5. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111128105712109215.html

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The United Nations and Its Conduct During the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq

March 23rd, 2018 by Denis Halliday

Important article on the role of the UN in Iraq originally published by Global Research in March 2005

Introduction and Background

Since 1990, the people of Iraq have been the victims of continuous US/UK-driven United Nations Security Council aggression. Triggered by the Iraq take-over of Kuwait, this aggression on the Iraqi people cannot be justified. I say that in no way defending the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait for there can be no justification for such aggression. Instead this view reflects US rejection of peaceful withdrawal offers by Iraq. This was due to the determination of Washington to destroy Iraq’s potential and violently overthrow a no longer useful former friend and ally in Baghdad.

The resulting 1991 UN-endorsed Gulf War, the war crimes committed in the name of the UN by US armed forces during that war, set a pattern of militaristic aggression towards the people of Iraq that continues until today. The result has been massive loss of civilian life some through both political and military negligence, and some intentional, as meets one essential element in the definition of genocide. This primitive response by the UN to this founding-member state via deadly UN Sanctions through 2002 is now sadly sustained following the illegal invasion in 2003 and military and ideological occupation by troops of Bush II and Blair.

Since 1945, manipulated and corrupted by the five permanent members, the UN Security Council has often been brutally employed to serve the narrow interests of the powerful. This is as intended by the “victors” of the Second World War, if you read between the lines in the Council’s terms of reference as set out in the UN Charter.

As result, the UN was structured to fail the people of Iraq and continues to do so in all respects. I refer to the so-called UN coalition, US led [war] of the 1991 Gulf War that destroyed civilian lives and infrastructure in breech of the Geneva Conventions and Protocols, massacred thousands, and buried alive in mass graves hundreds more Iraqi troops. The US leadership deployed that new nuclear weapon of choice, namely hundreds of tons of depleted uranium missiles and shells with horrific cancerous consequences still being revealed today.

In addition, the UN silently accepted the totally illegal no-fly zone bombing by the US/UK of Iraq culminating in “softening up attacks” preliminary to the unlawful invasion of 2003. More than twelve years of genocidal UN sanctions constitute a massive breech of the UN Charter itself, I refer to Articles 1 and 2 in particular and underline the incompatibilities therein.

By these various means, the UN has itself destroyed the basic human rights of the Iraqi people through the willful neglect of Articles 22-28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN failed to protect and safeguard the children and people before and after the 2003 invasion. And as rare but honest news coverage demonstrates, the UN continues to fail Iraq and its people now in mid 2005, as this Tribunal sits in Istanbul.

US/UK Invasion March 2003

Respect for human rights and international law, including the UN Charter itself, was hidden by the polluted and murky world of self-interest amongst UN member states that favours sweaty embraces of the Bush regime. The world watched Bush threaten the Heads of State present in the GA of September 2002 and then saw he and Blair deceive all who seemed willing to be mislead, a deception culminating in General Powel lying to the Security Council early 2003 about weapons of mass destruction and the “danger” Iraq presented!

We were asked to believe that the spirit of Article 51 of the UN Charter dealing with national self-defense somehow justified the US invasion of Iraq! as in the case of the invasion of Afghanistan. Blair informed us that Baghdad could surprise-attack London in 45 minutes with terrible and illegal weapons. He referred to chemical and biological weapons that were sold to Iraq by the UK itself, or by European and American friends when earlier Baghdad took on Iran largely due to the urging and active support of Washington and London.

To argue that the Security Council in early 2003 was courageous in refusing to endorse the intended US/UK invasion is a nice thought, but nothing more. The UN was not, repeat not, enhanced by its action, or lack thereof, to protect the sovereign state of Iraq from raw US/UK military aggression. This was perhaps the lowest point reached yet by the UN in its short history. Even the tyranny of the “veto” did not save UN credibility, which might have been the case had the three remaining veto powers used that dictatorial device. They did not. And the failure of the remaining member states to walk out, resign, stand up and be counted was and remains simply disgusting. When 20 months later the Secretary-General remembered his responsibility to speak up as per Article 99, he mumbled off-the-record, but was sadly much too late.

Without the authority that resides in Article 42 of the Charter, and a Security Council resolution authorizing the specific use of force, the Bush/Blair invasion of Iraq is in complete breech of international law. The war crimes committed in that blatant military aggression the most serious of international crimes must be charged to Bush as the Commander-in-Chief, and to Blair as the Prime Minister who abused war powers. Bush should be charged with use of State terrorism for the opening salvo of “Shock and Awe” bombing strikes on Baghdad designed to terrorize by physically and mentally attacking a civilian population. This is the kind of state terrorism that provides a tragic reminder of the US nuclear crime of bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is the kind of state terrorism besides which small scale “terrorist” resistance pales in comparison. However, both forms of terrorism are internationally unlawful and unacceptable.

The UN member states listened mutely and swallowed some painfully the false arguments of Iraqi capacity to threaten not only its neighbours none of whom appeared to share this fear and the physical threats to the UK and USA! The world tried desperately to believe the nonsense of massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction residing in Iraq. And to top off the US/UK lies and rubbish was the charge of a close Iraqi linkage to “al Qaeda” and the attack on those Twin Towers of capitalistic greed in New York City on 9/11/ 2001. To those who understood the secular nature of the Baghdad government, and Ba’athist philosophy … this supposed linage broke the last straw of credibility. And the UN stood mutely by. Even to this day, the Security Council is unwilling to define terrorism for fear that state terrorism employed by its permanent five member states would thereby be constrained.

Thus, the March 2003 invasion took place in breech of all known international laws, executed with the application of terrorism and commission of war crimes, including further and massive use of depleted uranium. The UN … its member states and its Secretary-General failed to employ all possible means to protect the people of Iraq … worse the UN was generally seen around the world to be acquiescent and collaborative. Ironically, at the same time, Americans were outraged that the UN had failed to support US foreign policy and their self-serving military aggression on Iraq but that is material for another session!

UN collaboration with US/UK Occupation

Whereas the invasion was in breech of international law, although eased by the acquiescence of the UN, and was globally condemned, the occupation was on the other hand more readily accepted as a new, if unlawful, reality. The occupation was supported by member states and donor agencies, and then actively supported by the UN. That support and active involvement constitutes collaboration. And UN collaboration with the occupying enemy was, and is, a tragic mistake. Collaboration of this kind is an unacceptable role for the UN.

We are all familiar with the rights of Iraqi self-defense and resistance to foreign military occupation as set out in UN Charter Article 51. We are equally familiar with the often murderous consequences of collaboration, which the French Resistance made famous, and even bizarrely glorious under occupation in the 1940s. There is nothing glorious about killing be it of the enemy, or of one’s own country men and women who decide, for whatever reason, to collaborate.

There was and is nothing glorious about UN collaboration in Iraq, and nothing glorious about the consequence the deadly truck-bombing of the UN Office building in Baghdad on 19 August 2003 when some 20 UN staff died. The Security Council and particularly the Secretary-General, responsible for the welfare of staff members, appear to have failed to understand that the UN was, even before collaboration, the most hated organization in Iraq. Why? Why not? after 12 years of deadly UN sanctions that cost Iraq over one million lives, mostly children, followed by conspicuous collaboration with the common Iraqi enemy, that is, the American and British occupying enemy. After 12 years of humiliation and loss of dignity under UNSCOM’s intrusive search for weapons of mass destruction why was anyone surprised?

The UN Secretary-General and his staff were obligated to remain apart from the illegal occupation, at best on standby. Unless invited by a legitimate Iraqi government to assist, and there was none remaining in Iraq after the unlawful overthrow of the Baghdad government the UN had no place in the country. The UN had no mandate to be in Iraq. A demand from Washington and/or London does not constitute a legitimate invitation. And puppet regimes cannot be recognized by the UN, even if set up by two permanent member states of the Security Council. Airlifting of long expatriated Iraqis together with their own armed thugs and mercenaries, and setting them up as an interim regime, does not create a representative, or legal government with which the UN can legitimately serve.

However, it is considered that occupation, even unlawful occupation, comes with obligations under international law. Such obligations included the rule of domestic law, the protection of state and private property and perhaps most importantly … the protection and wellbeing of the civilian population as per international law. The occupying US and UK forces blatantly failed to meet these obligations.

They allowed, even facilitated, a complete breakdown in law and order. They stood back as looting and destruction in the cities and towns of Iraq took place. As days became weeks and months, they neglected to meet the basic needs of the people including food, housing, water, power, health care, education and employment. And tragically the gutless UN stood back silently as the Americans and British created anarchy. The UN remained silent as the occupiers disbanded Iraqi defense forces, including border guards thereby opening the country up to intrusion and looting by thousands intent on chaos. In addition to the cost of Iraq civilian well being and lives, the intruders also came to attack the occupying common enemy of the Region i.e. the intrusive and hated American armed forces – the fearsome crusaders of Bush fundamentalism. Again the UN failed to protect the sovereign rights of Iraq – the Security Council and the Secretary-General were gagged.

Before the Iraqi economy could even begin the process of recovery from UN sanctions and military invasion, the American occupiers abolished the Oil for Food Programme. Even after the invasion, this Programme remained the prime source of food and other essentials for over 85% of the population of some 24 million. With unemployment over 70%, plus thousands of newly disbanded defense personnel, invasion war-damage and increased homelessness, the social and economic plight of the Iraqi people had deteriorated further.

Ignorant and grossly irresponsible, Washington looked to the modest private sector of Iraq to suddenly sell food, medicines and other essentials … to a population of largely unemployed and impoverished in the face of growing inflation. In a matter of weeks an economy that had been centralized and public sector driven under UN Sanctions was disbanded with very painful results. Under the US/UK occupation, for example, rates of child mortality have increased and malnutrition has risen. Where was the UN voice to protect basic civilian interests and demand that occupation obligations be fully met by the US and the UK?

The breakdown of personal security, social services, health care, education and basic needs has been almost total. In other words, the occupying military forces have failed in all aspects of meeting their responsibilities under international law. And the UN has been silent.

The UN has also been silent as the US set about building some 14 military bases for their own long term strategic military requirements in the Region. These are strategies relating to Regional military presence, natural gas and oil reserves and control thereof. However, in regard to reconstruction and new investment in infrastructure destroyed by the Gulf War of 1990, constrained UN sanctions and weakened further by the Bush/Blair invasion, little has been done. Instead the presence of US/UK forces has created chaos and armed resistance to their military occupation. They have alienated most of the population … not unexpectedly but in addition, they have split this secular country of Iraq into religious and ethnic divides that had been long submerged under an Iraqi national identity. Has the UN spoken up?

For the first time in many years, the dreadful possibility of civil war has been created by foreign occupation that … like an old colonial regime … has discovered the benefits of divide and rule, with disastrous results. Where is the UN demand to an end to military occupation and the belated return of Iraq to the people of Iraq?

Under initial occupation, the UN transferred some US$8 Billion to a Provisional Authority headed by an American. And this was not UN money. This was Iraq Government oil revenue obtained under Oil for Food Programme oil sales! Worse, it is now revealed that the UN did not monitor, or audit the expenditure of this $8 Billion and it appears much was miss handled and is unaccounted for by the US authorities. Some $4 Billion was handed without benefit of competitive bidding to the American Corporation Haliburton, connected to the White House through Cheney, the Vice-President. Hundreds of millions was disbursed in cash to the “new” Ministries set up with and by the Americans, staffed and managed by the Americans, without accounting. These billions improperly handed over by the UN was the property of the Iraqi people. Again the UN has failed in its responsibility.

As a diversion from its own disastrous occupation, costs and loss of life, Washington has attacked the Oil for Food Programme within which it appears there has been some UN miss-management, poor contracting, weak accounting of Iraqi monies and maybe even some theft amounting to perhaps as much as $150,000. Nevertheless this unique and largely successful US$65 billion Programme fed and provided basic human needs from 1997 to 2002 for some 24 million Iraqi people. The scandal is not UN mismanagement it is Washington-approved billion dollar oil sales by Baghdad outside the constraints of Oil for food, it is the granting of 30% of Iraqi oil revenue under UN Oil for Food arrangements to Kuwait while Iraqi children died for lack of financial investment in electric power, and potable water supplies. It is the genocide that the UN perpetrated in respect of the Iraqi people over some 12 years of strangulation under uniquely comprehensive sanctions.

Conclusion

We find in Iraq today almost total political and social chaos. Foreign military occupation has influenced interim arrangements that are not representative and have not the confidence of many Iraqis. We find chaos and misery for the Iraqi people made homeless by brutal US/UK military action in civilian areas and towns such as seen in the neighbourhoods of Baghdad and Fallujah with horrific civilian casualties. For the survivors, homelessness, unemployment and little means to survive have resulted. Health care and education is in disarray as families are afraid to send their children to clinics and schools for fear of bombing and kidnapping. Child morality and malnutrition is on the increase. Personal security does not exist. University students stay away for reasons of fear. The breakdown in policing since the occupation has led to level of murder and killing unknown in a free Iraq before occupation. Many essentially experienced civil servants, intellectuals, doctors and educators have been murdered. The UN is largely silent.

Despite the courage of many Iraqis to vote under these near impossible conditions and work towards a replacement system of government, the national institutions remain in very bad shape. Financial and human capital are both in short supply. The much needed constitution being drafted under American supervision and interference is likely to have a long and hard road to acceptance. It will undoubtedly need much rewriting once the country has an elected and representative government when free of foreign occupation. It is expected that Iraq will reject many American pressures, including privatization to foreign corporations of public sector essentials such as water, oil resources and power. It is feared that IMP interference will lead to structural adjustment devices that will destroy the remaining strengths of the welfare system so many Iraqis have learned to depend upon over many years.

Due to corruption of the Security Council and abuse of the UN Charter by the five permanent members in particular, the unlawful invasion, occupation of Iraq and the many tragic consequences thereof, have not led to UN Security Council condemnation. Outrageously, the US and UK continuing to enjoy the benefits of member states in good standing, retain their veto powers and permanent seats on the Council. They have not been obliged to terminate illegal military action within the sovereign state of Iraq. They have not been forced to withdraw occupying military forces. They have failed to meet their occupation obligations under international law. They have stolen and abused limited Iraqi financial resources and have under spent their own funds that they obligated very publicly for reconstruction and development.

The UN has watched the lost of life in Iraq. The UN has watched the war crimes of US/UK forces, including the negligent bombing of civilians and use of depleted uranium devices yet again without comment. The UN has witnessed massive loss of innocent civilian life over 100,000 has been estimated so far. As you know, US occupation forces do not bother to count the civilians they kill and/or maim. The UN has watched the employment of some 80,000 hired-guns who serve the US authorities under no known law. The UN has watched in silence American human rights abuses, torture and killing of Iraq prisoners … arrested and jailed without respect for their human rights or explanation to their families.

Having tragically weakened Iraq and its people under 12 years of sanctions, the UN has taken no action to stop, condemn or punish the blatant US/UK transgressions of the UN charter, human rights and other provisions of international law.

The world has witnessed in Iraq the most serious of international crimes the crime of military aggression on a sovereign member state by US and UK forces. The world waits for the people of Iraq to be given an opportunity to make their own decisions and resolve their own differences as only they can hope to do without foreign occupation and interference. The world waits for the UN to act in keeping with the provisions of international law, including the application of International Criminal Court provisions to Bush, Blair and their henchmen and women who have violated the core tenets of the UN Charter, Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions and Protocols.

In the meantime, this World Tribunal in Istanbul has this opportunity, this obligation to demand full international prosecution of US/UK war leaders and war criminals involved in the destruction of Iraq, the lives of its people and their human rights and well being, through unlawful and unjustifiable armed invasion and military occupation.

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Death and Impunity: Iraq Fifteen Years After

March 23rd, 2018 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

Featured image: At the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to conduct a devastating aerial assault on Baghdad, known as “shock and awe.” (Source: Consortiumnews)

It might have made a bit more than a whimper had the US political scene not found itself in yet another paroxysm of the drama known as the Trump White House. Fifteen years before, governments aligning with the dogs of war decided, in defiance of millions of protestors globally, to invade a sovereign state. Papers cheered with blood lust; propagandists and public relations firms were hired to push the politics of regime change in a country that was already hemmed in by sanctions and surveillance.

The invasion of Iraq must, over time, be given its own specific criminal gravity. It sundered the Middle East, it tore at the artificially imposed borders contrived by former colonial masters. It emboldened new foes and generated further disagreements. For generations, chaos will be guaranteed on the heaped folly of the 2003 decision.

“The results are in,” went a sombre Charles P. Pierce for Esquire. “Iraq never recovered. Syria devolved into civil war. We got closer than ever to the inhumane regime in Saudi Arabia, now engaged in mass slaughter in Yemen with weapons we supplied, because there’s never been a problem with that before.”

As Matt Taibbi reflected, the invasion had the element of “awesome drama, made more thrilling by the seemingly obvious craziness of it all.” The subtext was a lack of sensible reason, distorted by the mania that Iraq had somehow become a global threat with a trigger happy maniac. In place was ample hysteric delight, characterised by the opening phase of the campaign: “Shock and Awe”.

As with the Indochina War, the invasion mirrored an emerging malaise back home. Invading Iraq was “one of the great crimes of this or any age and destined to be a crossroads event in the history of America’s decline”. It was “a cold, calculated, opportunistic power grab, aimed as much at future targets, and even our own population, as at the Iraqi ‘enemy’.”

The US allies who, with unfazed enthusiasm went in with similar destructive intent, were also showing mixed degrees of reflection. In Australia, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd saw a chance to chastise his predecessor, John Howard, for having joined the US-led enterprise.

“John Howard’s decision to commit thousands of Australian troops to the invasion of Iraq 15 years ago,” began his opening salvo, “ranks as one of the two great failures of Australian foreign policy since the Second World War.”

Rudd can show periods of sensible reflection. The decision to invade Iraq had to also rank alongside another US-led mission that was doomed: the Vietnam War. Again, the leadership in Canberra felt it logical and automatic that the soldiers of the South Cross should shed blood alongside those of the Stars and Stripes.

In Rudd’s reflection, analysis of legitimacy and interest was lacking. There was no specific Australian take on it, not a consideration of “the credibility of American military strategy to both win the war and secure the peace, as well as the long-term consequences for Australian national interests.”

Being a former diplomat, Rudd’s survey of the grotesque consequences is even deeper than Pierce. Sectarian violence between the Shia majority and Sunni minority was unleashed; Christians, having co-habited with Muslims for some 1,300 years were, were brutally expelled; Iraq was pushed into Iran’s orbit while Iraq duly imploded, becoming the base for regional terrorist influences.

The apologist’s tactic in these instances is one tried in history. We were sincere in inflicting our butcheries; we were solemn in making our errors of judgment. We only did what was appropriate at the time. Even if those weapons of mass destruction had never turned up, Saddam Hussein was vicious, a sadist, murderer and torturer. Never mind those who knew better.

For John Howard, it was a case of making a decision on “available evidence” from Australian intelligence agencies at the time tying the Saddam regime with those ultimately elusive weapons of mass destruction. Howard duly “concluded that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction” and insisted that Rudd place himself in “the shoes of the government at the time”.

In the case of the evangelised Tony Blair of Britain, such ham sincerity is pure theatre, even convincing the likes of Sir John Chilcot, chairman of the public inquiry examining the lead-up to the 2003 invasion. While he was not “straight with the nation” about the reasons for invading Iraq, he was “emotionally truthful”.

As Chilcot explained to the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg last July,

“Tony Blair is always and ever an advocate. He makes the most persuasive case he can. Not departing from the truth but persuasion is everything.”

As for President George W. Bush, he remains, along with Howard and Blair, elusive from the judicial bench of any tribunal, foreign or domestic. War criminals have received weighty sentences for less but this triumvirate are at little risk of being apprehended. In the autumn of their lives, they are witnessing a conflagration they happily initiated when in office.

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. Email: [email protected]

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Tags: 15 years, George W. Bush, iraq, Tony Blair, US invasion of Iraq

Selected Articles: America’s Search for the “Big War”

March 22nd, 2018 by Global Research News

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The US Has Run Amok in the Pursuit of Global Domination

* * *

U.S. Regime Has Killed 20-30 Million People Since World War II

By James A. Lucas, March 22, 2018

The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation.

Pentagon Officials Searching for a “Big War” against Russia and China. A World War Might Sound Crazy, But It Could be America’s Last Act of Desperation

By Darius Shahtahmasebi, March 22, 2018

Though some have been warning about the catastrophic potential for a third global conflict for years, it wasn’t until recently that these warnings became more mainstream. The calamitous nature of the violence in Syria — which has one nuclear power defending a government that has been the target of a regime change operation led by the world’s superpower — combined with 2017’s threats of “fire and fury” against another state intently pursuing a nuclear weapons supply of its own, has pushed the issue of a third world war directly into the public discourse.

Video: The Ultimate War Crime: America’s “Global War on Terrorism”. “The Criminalization of War” is The Avenue to Reaching World Peace

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 22, 2018

This military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the world simultaneously, resulting in millions of civilian deaths and countless atrocities.

Syrians Have Names and Faces

By Mark Taliano, March 21, 2018

NATO terrorists have murdered about 10,000 civilians in Damascus, in addition to the 40 + civilians that they murdered in SE Damascus on March 20, 2018. Meanwhile, the SAA and allies have lost about 545 soldiers in the last ten weeks trying to liberate East Ghouta, the area from which the terrorists fire missiles at students, men, women, children. And Canadians think Assad is the bad guy.

The Cliff of Nuclear Annihilation: Humanity is on the Brink of Extinction! Thirty Seconds to Midnight

By Regis Tremblay, Helen Caldicott, Ray McGovern, David Vine, Chris Hedges, and Colonel Ann Wright, March 21, 2018

Humanity is on the brink of extinction! Nuclear power is not safe. 48 of America’s nuclear power plants are leaking and there is no way to get rid of nuclear waste.

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Donald Trump on Violence in Video Games: “This Is Violent, Isn’t It?” Is There a Connection Between “Video Game Violence” and “Real Violence”?

March 22nd, 2018 by Dr. Rudolf Hänsel

On March 8, 2018, President Trump invited top executives from the gaming industry, some of their critics, and members of Congress for a meeting to discuss violence in video games. Since the president’s comments on the questionable products of the gaming industry were unusually critical, the reporting of the meeting in the White House in the German-speaking as well as US-American media was correspondingly negative. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, one of the world’s leading experts in the field of human aggression, was also invited to present his research results. But the press has hushed them up.

The extent of violence in video games shapes the thoughts of young people.

Long before his election as US President and a few days after the shots at Parkland High School in Florida, Trump had commented on the negative effects of screen violence on children and adolescents:

“I hear that more and more people are saying that the extent of violence in games really shapes the minds of young people.” (1)

Also during the White House meeting, he expressed concern about the violent nature of these games, he asked many questions to those present according to the Washington Post and listened attentively to the arguments from all sides (2). He is also a father of a nearly twelve-year-old son.

Right at the beginning of the one-hour non-public meeting, the President presented the participants with a short video game compilation of extremely bloody and brutal scenes. This supercut was later published in the official YouTube account of the White House. After the video ended, Trump asked the group: “This is violent, isn’t it?“ Then the games industry lobbyists admitted:

“There is some programming that contains just absolute mind-boggling violence.” (3)

But this exaggerated illustration of violence – such as the physically accurate mapping of the destruction of bones and organs – is also controversial within the games industry and games media.

In the course of the conversation it was then about more robust age restrictions, that is, an availability only at age 21 as in alcohol and tobacco. Furthermore, possible state restrictions on content were discussed and voluntary measures that could be done by the games industry itself. In doing so, the President encouraged game developers to “explore things they can do on their own to make things healthier in society” (4).

In a White House statement after the meeting it was said:

“President Trump acknowledged that some studies have revealed that there is a connection between video game violence and real violence.” (5)

A congressman also spoke up and wrote:

“The president’s approach to leave no stone unturned is reasonable, and similar meetings with the film industry about film violence should also be held.” (6)

Also, the observation of the President of the US Media Research Council is worth mentioning:

“I think”, he said, “the President is deeply disturbed by some of the things you see in these video games that are so brutal and unfit for children. And I think that bothers him.” (7)

“The White House Meeting on Video Game Violence was Unproductive and Bizarre.”

Because of the many critical comments on video violence that could not please the powerful representatives of the gaming industry, the tone of the coverage of the round table discussion was very negative. For example, it was claimed “The White House Meeting on Video Game Violence was Unproductive and Bizarre” (8). But what decisions could be expected from a one-hour conversation? “Bizarre“ is how supporters of violence-glorifying video games found the screening of bloody video clips. The main criticism of the journalists, however, was that the White House event was only a deliberate distraction from the real causes of recurrent rampage in the US, the feeble arms control measures.

The lobbyists in the games industry were particularly annoyed that the “conservative critics” claimed that media impact research demonstrated a causal link between the excessive playing of violence-glorifying video games (killer games) and the growth of aggressive thoughts and aggressive behavior of adolescents. Such studies, according to the lobby group, do not exist. Such statements caused partly outraged reactions because one did not want to be misused as a scapegoat (9).

Dave Grossman was also able to present his research results.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman is an internationally recognized scholar. He is one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of human aggression, the roots of violence, and violent crime. In his last book Assassination Generation. Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing, there are new research results that go beyond those he has published in his previous books, On Killing, On Combat, and Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill.

For the understanding of his new book, he writes in the introduction:

“Over the years, I’ve delved into the body of scientific data and discovered the existence of a ‚safety catch‘ in humankind that inherently exists in healthy members of our species to prevent them from killing or seriously injuring one another. I studied how to work around this safety catch in military and police training. As I did so, I was continually plagued by one question: If it is so difficult to turn off the safety catch and teach our soldiers to kill in the face of deadly threats, how is it that acts of criminal violence are often committed with seeming easy?” (S. 5f.)

This expert was mentioned in the reports of the German-speaking media just at Heise without attribution as a book author, “according to whom video games train killers” (10). Even in the US media available to me, he was mentioned by name only on an online portal as someone better known for teaching police officers military tactics (11). His research results were nowhere mentioned.

Dave Grossman is a longtime friend of mine. He told me, that in the White House round-table discussion, he was able to present the President and others present with his firm position on the effects of video game violence.

Science has the duty to protect children and adolescents from becoming victims and perpetrators!

The games industry as well as the film and television industry do not take note of the proven results of the media impact research. Either they ignore them or they attack them. They often even twist and distort them. They come through with their attitude, because the power is on their side and the opinion of the society is ambiguous and divided. The annual revenue of the games industry in the US alone in 2017 was more than $ 36 billion. This corresponds to an increase of 18 percent over the previous year.

The (reputable) science remains the only independent body that can criticize the powerful mass media organizations and the games industry. It has a control task. Science has the duty to protect the powerless, especially children and adolescents, from becoming victims and perpetrators. Despite overwhelming research results, science does not adopt a uniform attitude towards the powerful organizations that fight with all the resources at their disposal. Many scientists believe that they can distinguish themselves and have the publicity on their side, by representing opinions that encourage the mass media and the games industry in their wrong attitude (13).

Dr. Rudolf Hansel is an educationalist and psychologist and expert in the prevention of youth violence, school violence and media violence. More information at www.psychologische-menschenkenntnis.de.

Notes

1. https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000075762936/nach-schul-amoklauf-trump-nimmt-videospiele-ins-visier.

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/ff827f1c-22f3-11e8-946c-94…

3. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17098230/trumps-video-game-violence-meeting-esa.

4. Ebenda.

5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/ff827f1c-22f3-11e8-946c-94…

6. Ebenda.

7. Ebenda.

8. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17098230/trumps-video-game-violence-meeting-esa.

9. https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/ff827f1c-22f3-11e8-946c-94…

10. https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Nach-Massaker-in-Florida-…ump-diskutiert-Gewalt-in-Computerspielen-3989615.html.

11. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17098230/trumps-video-game-violence-meeting-esa.

12. http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-video-games-violent-real-reel-youtube-video-montage-gun-violence-837569.

13. Vgl. Schneider, H. J. (2001). Kriminologie für das 21. Jahrhundert. Münster-Hamburg-London, S. 147.

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The Political Vulnerability and Impunity of the Israel Lobby. The Intellectual Advocates of “Greater Israel”

March 22nd, 2018 by Diana Johnstone

This paper was written in response to certain persons whose strict “Marxist” interpretation of the world – seeing imperialism as caused solely by capitalist economic interests – can prevent them from fully recognizing important ideological factors of political causality.

Marx said that philosophers had only interpreted the world, but the point was to change it.

“Interpreting the world” in strictly Marxist scholastic terms can be an obstacle to trying to change it. This may be why Marx said he was not a “Marxist”. The political effort to change the world requires more than theory. It calls for readiness to grasp facts and mass psychological factors that offer handles to educating the public (or “raising class consciousness”, as Marxists prefer to say), in order to exploit points of political vulnerability in ruling class projects.

The case of the “pro-Israel lobby” illustrates this.

In Marx’s time there was no Israel and no “pro-Israel lobby”, and so neither Marx nor Hegel nor even Lenin could have analyzed the phenomenon. But Marx was a journalist as well as a theoretician, and it is not far fetched to say that were Marx alive and active today, he would not ignore the political effects of the pro-Israel lobby.

To use Marxist terms, today the ideological superstructure projected by capitalist relations of production is also very different from what it was a century and a half ago. Religious repression has been replaced by hedonistic distraction. Moral authorities have been replaced by the ubiquitous mass media and entertainment industry, projecting images of an alternative reality clearly designed to influence both the self-images of subservient classes and their vision of a dangerous outside world, in order to prevent massive opposition to social injustice at home and aggressive military enforcement of American global hegemony.

The imperialist project is fundamentally contrary to the interests not only of the working class, but increasingly of the middle class as well, including sectors of small business and capitalist enterprises targeting the domestic market, whether in goods or services. But people are often more influenced by their emotions and their moral sense than by their economic self-interest. The ruling class propaganda machine exploits emotions and moral sensibility, with tales of murderous “dictators” and appeals to defend “human rights” and “democracy” in unfamiliar countries.

The notion that the inherent contradictions in capitalist production will cause the system to collapse had not been confirmed by reality, especially since capitalism thrives on the creative aspect of contradictions. Waiting for these contradictions to destroy capitalism is a very long wait. However, political action can thrive on spotting and exploiting contradictions in the imperialist propaganda narrative. And this is essential for building popular opposition to the U.S.-led global hegemonic project whose endless wars appear increasingly to be leading toward nuclear apocalypse.

One of these contradictions which is a potential weak point in the ideological superstructure justifying wars is the pro-Israel influence on foreign policy in the United States, and also in European NATO countries.

The Role of the Israel Lobby

In the United States, there is no problem using the term “lobby”, since lobbyists constitute a considerable portion of the Washington social scene. Legitimately, lobbyists are there to plead for a cause, but increasingly, they add “campaign contributions” to their arguments, to such an extent that almost the entire Congress is working not for just one lobby but for several.

Hillary Clinton speaking to the 2016 AIPAC Policy Conference.

The two most notorious lobbies in terms of financial contributions are the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The influence of the NRA is both financial and ideological. Its lawyers have managed to persuade the courts of an absurd interpretation of the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, which reads:

“A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

To any sensible person with a minimum understanding of history, it is obvious that the purpose of this amendment was to protect an organized right to bear arms, and not the right of every individual, sane or insane, to wander the streets and school grounds brandishing automatic weapons. The idea back in 1791 was to prevent the Federal Government from imposing military rule on the States, and to nullify a traditional aristocratic privilege. Thanks to the propagandistic work of the lobby and its supporters, “the right to bear arms” as an individual right has become practically a dogma in the United States, which far from protecting individuals from tyranny, allows themselves to kill each other in record numbers and to be gunned down all the more readily by police who “feel threatened” by the slightest gesture of a “suspect” – even for a minor traffic violation. Economically, the NRA lobby benefits the arms manufacturers, but has long been tolerated by the public because of its ideological justification in terms of “individual liberties” – an ideological superstructure that is currently being challenged by a movement of high school students fed up with being massacred in their classrooms.

Image result for obama + netanyahu

In the United States, both the financial and ideological influence of the Israel lobby is enormous, but on foreign rather than domestic policy. The evidence of this is blatantly obvious and massively documented, and can be illustrated by the repeated standing ovations by the U.S. Congress to Benjamin Netanyahu precisely at a time when he was in open opposition to the President of the United States, Barack Obama.

The military industrial complex dominates the U.S. economy. Its very survival demands wars to justify its existence.

U.S. imperial wars require pretexts. This is where Israel comes in.

Many observers have pointed to resemblances between the historic and religious myths of Israel and the United States: settler nations “chosen by God” with the divine right to drive out the indigenous peoples, and with an infinite sense of being morally superior to their neighbors: “the only democracy in the Middle East”, or the “exceptional shining city on the hill”.

Intellectual advocates of Greater Israel, many of them with double American-Israeli nationality, usually designated as “neo-conservatives”, have vigorously and successfully exploited these mythical points of resemblance in order to construct an ideology of “exceptionalism” which provides the superstructure of American globalizing capitalism at its most aggressive. The main vehicle of this influence has been the “think tanks”, the privately funded research centers in Washington that create the propaganda echoed by mainstream media and politicians. Take the example of the Brookings Institution, which until about twenty years ago, was considered relatively “liberal” in the American sense, potentially critical of military expansion. But then Brookings accepted a record donation of thirteen million dollars from Israeli-American billionaire HaimSaban and in 2002 responded by establishing the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which of course promotes the pro-Israel line in Congress and the media. Note that Saban was the primary donor to Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy, while another Israeli billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, successful bet on Trump. Their influence is undeniable all the more since both of them boast about it.

All of this is as far from a “plot” or a “conspiracy” as you can get, since it is all perfectly open. Israeli leaders do not hesitate to brag about their influence on U.S. policy.

The political point is not that Israel “created U.S. imperialism”, which of course has its roots in the 19th century wars to wrest control of former Spanish colonies, both in Central America and in the Philippines, all in the name of a glorious “manifest destiny”.

The political point about the Israel lobby is that it is potentially a particularly vulnerable element in the propaganda narrative, a point that, if denounced, could contribute to building popular opposition to U.S. imperialism.

Most Americans are no longer pioneers, and their religious convictions are weakening. This development is hidden by the apparent growth in influence of Evangelical Christian sects. This is due primarily to a Republican Party strategy to win over Southern states by catering to the religious views of poorly educated sectors of the populations in the region. The Evangelical narrative of “the Rapture” is certainly considered nonsense by U.S. ruling classes and has absolutely no influence on their policy-making, although it may be exploited to gain support. What does have an influence is the prospect of a big United States and a little Israel hand in hand dictating the world’s political and economic order.

But just as the excess of school massacres is producing a popular movement against NRA policies, the obvious influence of the Israel lobby is beginning to encounter open opposition. And the U.S. imperialist narrative is so tied to Israel that if support for Israel collapsed, it would deal a serious blow to the “superstructure” or propaganda narrative used to sell militarism and war to the American people.

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Richard D. Clarke, Director, Strateggic Plans and Policy (J5, Joint Staff), poses for a command portrait in the Army portrait studio at the Pentagon in Arlington, VA, Aug. 9, 2017.

On the eve of massive joint U.S. Israeli military maneuvers this month, U.S. Third Air Force commander Lt.Gen. Richard Clark (image on the right) reassured the Jerusalem Post that U.S. ground troops would be ready to risk their lives for Israel.

“We are ready to commit to the defense of Israel and anytime we get involved in a kinetic fight there is always the risk that there will be casualties. But we accept that, as in every conflict we train for and enter, there is always that possibility,” Clark told the Post.

Dying for Israel is unlikely to be a wildly popular prospect among Americans, who might wonder why heavily armed, U.S.-subsidized, nuclear-power Israel can’t defend itself.

In short, a political campaign denouncing the Israel lobby, which is directly responsible for unanimous pro-Israel votes in Congress, for billions of dollars appropriated to Israel every year, and for dragging the U.S. into Middle East “wars for Israel”, would have the best chance of building serious political opposition to a military buildup that threatens to lead to a major clash with Russia. This is an opportunity that should not be missed.

But what obstructs such a campaign, which certainly can’t be mounted by mainstream media, but must come from the grass roots?

The left. Or large sectors of a very weakened left.

On the one hand, there are those (self-styled Trotskyists in particular) who like to fancy that every uprising anywhere, for whatever reason, must be the start of a “revolution”, and who confound Islamic fanatics with Spanish Republicans and are ready to support all measures taken against “dictators” (who in the Middle East turn out to be exclusively Israel’s chosen enemies). And there are also those who cry that one absolutely must not denounce the Israel lobby because anything that sounds like “the Jewish lobby” can only be a revival of the anti-Semitism of the 1930s which led to the Holocaust.

Finally, the role of the lobby is hotly denied by certain more or less dogmatic Marxists, who maintain that imperialism can only be the product of economic interests, such as oil pipelines, and who dismiss ideological factors as trivial.

It is clear that the Israeli lobby is able to exert an extraordinary influence on the quality and direction of U.S. imperialism precisely because, for over a generation, the mere hint of “anti-Semitism” is enough to destroy a person’s reputation, career and even friendships. Jews and Zionists are not the same thing, but it is in the interest of Israel to insist that they are, which is a way of shielding Israel – and its lobby – from effective criticism. All that is needed to shut people up is to insist that mentioning the “lobby” is a step toward reopening Auschwitz.

This attitude is not only mistaken, it is precisely what is fostering anti-Jewish feeling.

Denunciation of the Israel lobby has nothing in common with the attacks on the alleged “Judeo-Masonic lobby” and its alleged “plots” back in the 1930s.

In those days, a large number of Jews were engaged in progressive causes, defending the Spanish Republic, fighting for equal rights for African-Americans, playing an important role in labor unions. The 1930s attacks on “Judeo-Bolshevism” or “the Judeo-Masonic plot” came from a reactionary rightthat attacked Jews precisely because they were a key element of the left.

Today, there is nothing progressive about Zionism, with its ethnic claims of Jewish privilege, or about Israel as it wages its endless war of attrition against the Palestinian inhabitants of the land its has arrogated to itself.

Jews themselves are sharply divided. It is true that many have been wooed away from progressive causes by the Zionist illusion. But many remain active as a positive force for equality, social justice and peace.

Israel has no right to speak for “all Jews” or to claim that criticism of Israel is “anti-Semitic”. That claim is a form of hostage taking – Zionists hide behind the Jewish martyrs to Nazism.

So long as the left, with its somewhat contrived bad conscience, refuses to insist on that distinction, the identification of Jews with Zionism – originating with the Zionists – is being taken up by two wings of the emerging right – emerging precisely because the left is declining as a result of its lack of intellectual rigor and political courage.

On the one hand, part of the far right, which sees clearly that Israel is a reactionary, racist state, are hastening to proclaim their support for Netanyahu and his policies.

On the other hand, a tour of the Internet shows that a growing number of bloggers accept the identification of Jews with Israel, considering its obvious strong political influence in Congress and the media, as evidence that “Jews rule the world”. This idea grows precisely because it is taboo and cannot be debated publicly.

Especially in Europe, for obvious reasons, fear of being labeled “anti-Semitic” is particularly strong, and stands in the way of recognizing the existence of an Israeli “lobby”. The very word is taboo because of its irrelevant historic connotations. The United States could not pursue aggressive military policy in the Middle East and against Russia without the existence of NATO and the support of Europeans leaders. This fear in Europe of being identified with past persecution of Jews is an element that preserves NATO and leads the world into catastrophic war.

We are not living in the time of Marx, nor in the 1930s, nor in the 1940s. The manifestations of imperialism have altered considerably and offer their own ideological weak points. The Israel lobby is one of these. It is a serious error to shy away from this attack, either on the grounds that “the lobby” is not a sufficient cause of imperialism, or from fear of being falsely stigmatized as complicit with the crimes of an earlier generation.

To change the world, one must live in the present.

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Pentagon Officials Searching for a “Big War” against Russia and China. A World War Might Sound Crazy, But It Could be America’s Last Act of Desperation

March 22nd, 2018 by Darius Shahtahmasebi

While certain hotspots throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe (i.e. Ukraine) have seen some notable escalations in the last few years, a direct conflict between Russia and the United States is still yet to emerge. That’s because the idea of a third world war in today’s world is completely insane. If the two countries that currently possess the world’s greatest supplies of nuclear weapons go to war, there may not be a world left for the victors to inhabit after the war is done, thereby making it an unthinkable proposal.

Then again, the U.S. did just recently bomb a significant number of Russian-linked forces in Syria, reportedly killing scores of them. The targets of these air strikes were also predominantly Iranian-backed militias (just in case there weren’t enough state actors already involved in this ongoing conflict).

Speaking of Iran, Donald Trump recently fired Rex Tillerson as secretary of state and immediately appointed CIA director Mike Pompeo to replace him. Pompeo is a notable anti-Iran hawk who will almost certainly go further than Tillerson was ever prepared to go with regard to the Iranian nuclear accord, a deal Pompeo believes is “disastrous.”

There are also reports now emerging that Donald Trump is planning to oust his national security advisor, General H.R. McMaster. McMaster originally replaced anti-Iran war hawk Michael Flynn, but apparently, McMaster’s non-stop allegations against Iran were not enough to please Trump. McMaster was not on board with Trump’s attempt to completely derail the Iranian nuclear deal.

One should bear in mind that when Donald Trump made the decision to strike the Syrian government in April of last year in what amounted to one of the year’s most important and over-publicized geopolitical events, it was McMaster who drew up the strike plan options and presented them to Trump to choose from. If this is a man not hawkish enough for Trump’s administration, his looming removal from the administration is a worrying sign of what’s to come.

Donald Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review entails that, as Katrina vanden Heuvel noted in an article published in the Washington Post:

“The United States reserves the right to unleash nuclear weapons first in ‘extreme circumstances’ to defend the ‘vital interests’ not only of the United States but also of its ‘allies and partners’ — a total of some 30 countries. ‘Extreme circumstances,’ the review states explicitly, include ‘significant non-nuclear attacks,’ including conventional attacks on ‘allied or partner civilian population or infrastructure.’ The United States also maintains a ‘portion of its nuclear forces’ on daily alert, with the option of launching those forces ‘promptly.’ [emphasis added]

Considering that a former analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations, Micah Zenko, just warned that Pentagon officials are actively searching for a “big war” against Russia and China, the trajectory we are currently on starts to make a lot more sense.

In other parts of the world, we are witnessing a new era of hostilities towards Russia. The debacle taking place in the U.K. right now, which has seen allegations of a Russian chemical attack on British soil, has prompted the U.K., U.S., France, and Germany to band together and condemn Russia for something that hasn’t even been conclusively investigated yet.

After years of constantly being painted as the enemy, Russia just declared via Twitter that a “Cold War II” has begun, and who can blame them?

A third world war might sound crazy, but it is only crazy if we fail to understand the desperation that continues to plague the men in suits who pull the strings guiding American foreign policy. Consider that the Syrian government, with Russian and Iranian backing, has managed to stabilize significant parts of the country despite all odds so that refugees can return home safely. It should be clear that the best way to solve the Syrian crisis is to discontinue America’s regime change policy in Syria and allow the people of Syria to normalize their own lives without Washington’s interference. Yet, after seven years of brutal violence, the U.S. still refuses to admit defeat in Syria. If anything, the U.S. has now officially set its sights on directly combatting Iranian influence in the country, raising the potential for significant escalations.

Maybe, just maybe, the U.S. is that desperate. Apparently, the U.S. has to remain in Syria out of necessity. It cannot afford to sit on the sidelines as Russia re-emerges as the major power broker in the region, eating up all the major contracts coming out of Syria (together with Iran) as it looks to poach American allies left, right, and center.

Additionally, Russia recently warned the U.S. that it will not tolerate Washington’s aggressive attacks on the Syrian government and will respond with strikes of their own should the U.S. military threaten Russian personnel. One should expect that eventually, there will be a point where Russia will no longer allow these attacks to go unanswered.

As America’s power and influence wane, the time will come for both Russia and China to make their mark on the global stage. Just on a side note, it should come as no surprise that Trump’s nominated ambassador to Australia, Adm. Harry Harris, is a known anti-China war hawk who recently warned Congress to prepare for a war with China.

Why should we need to prepare for a war with China? Who talks and thinks like that? A nation on a slow and inevitable decline that cannot refuse to admit defeat in almost any battle theater since World War II, that’s who.

Realistically, nobody wants a third world war, but as the U.S. increasingly thrashes to maintain its control of the global financial markets, its network of over 1,000 bases worldwide, and its status as the world’s global policemen, a third world war may be Washington’s only hope at staying afloat as the world’s top power.

Featured image is from the author.

“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
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Tags: Donald Trump, nuclear war, United States, US war propaganda

US Is Stepping on the Cuban Rake Again

March 22nd, 2018 by Dmitry Bokarev

The relations with the Republic of Cuba have long been one of the most painful problems of the United States. Even after the withdrawal of its main ally – the USSR – from the global stage, all the US attempts to get Cuba under its influence have failed. Lately, Cuba has acquired a new strong ally – China.

The deterioration of the US-Cuban relations occurred in the middle of the 20th century due to a number of mistakes made by the US leadership. In the 19th century, America helped Cuba in its struggle for independence from Spain. Since that time, it has considered this small island state as a part of its area of influence ignoring construction of mutually beneficial cooperation. After the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the new leader of the Republic of Cuba Fidel Castro visited the USA. However, the American President of that time Dwight Eisenhower refused to meet. Such neglect on the part of the American leadership accelerated the downfall of the US-Cuban relations and promoted the strengthening of cooperation between Cuba and the USSR.

Soon, expulsion of the American capital from the Island of Freedom began. Many companies, banks, and factories owned by the US citizens were nationalized.

Instead of taking attempts on establishing friendly relations, America responded by strong economic and political pressure. In 1960, America stopped the oil supply to Cuba and imports of the Cuban sugar. It was a strong blow for the Cuban economy. However, the Soviet Union came for assistance. In 1961, Fidel Castro announced the socialist orientation of the Cuba, after which America ruptured diplomatic relations with it. In early 1962, Washington imposed a ban on trade with Cuba for all American companies.

Very soon America paid a heavy price for underestimation of the new Cuban leadership and for its habit of solving issues by force. In autumn 1962, the Soviet missiles with nuclear warheads were located on the Island of Freedom, after which the Cuban missile crisis broke out putting the USA on the verge of a nuclear war with the USSR. Perhaps, it was the time when the USA felt sorry for its policy towards Republic of Cuba. The isle of Cuba is located 180 km away from the US coast, and missiles located there could easily reach Washington and many other strategic facilities in America.

Fortunately, military clash was prevented. Nonetheless, the opposition between the USA and Cuba continued even after the USSR breakup.

Some thaw in relations was reached during the presidency of Barack Obama (2008-2016). The weakening of the US economic sanctions against Cuba started in early 2015. The diplomatic relations between the two countries were resumed in July 2015. A number of trade barriers were lifted in 2015-2016. Certain categories of the US citizens were allowed to visit Cuba. The air service between the countries was also resumed.

However, these insignificant achievements were brought to naught after the acting US President Donald J. Trump moved to the Office. Prior to his election in November 2016, Trump stated that America made too many concessions for the Republic of Cuba to the detriment of its own interests. Donald Trump also announced his intention to cancel the decision of Barack Obama if the Cuban leadership failed to meet a number of US requirements.

In June 2017, Donald Trump announced cancellation of the US-Cuban agreement on normalization of relations due to the violation of the human rights in the Republic of Cuba. He demanded the Cuban government to elaborate a new agreement that meets the US interests. The Republic of Cuba flatly refused.

In November 2017, the US Treasury Department announced new sanctions against Cuba. The American citizens are prohibited to carry out financial transactions with institutions related to the Cuban security agencies and make private educational visits to Cuba.

The story of the 1960s, when the rough US policy pushed Cuba away and contributed to the development of relations with the USSR, is apparently repeating. The difference is that now the leader of the communist world is the People’s Republic of China.

China has long been a reliable partner for Cuba. Cuba was the first Latin American country to recognize China as a country in 1960 and established diplomatic relations with it.

In 2008, China’s leader Hu Jintao declared that the Communist Party of China intended to keep friendship with Cuba and support it in building socialism and confronting the United States.

Now the economic and political interaction between Cuba and China is experiencing a period of the rapid development. In 2015, the Chinese imports to Cuba reached a record level of $1.9 billion. Cuba buys Chinese automobile and agricultural equipment, household appliances, PCs, and many other goods. China’s business is rapidly developing on the Island of Freedom. In early 2017, the media reported China’s intention to invest about $500 million in the new resort close to Havana. The Chinese Haier factory producing computer hardware launched its work in Cuba in 2017. In early 2018, the Chinese-Cuban projects in the sphere of renewable energy resources have started, and China is planning to give a loan worth $120 million to Cuba for this purpose. China has already became Cuba’s main creditor.

The growing presence of China in close proximity to the US territory causes anxiety of many American politicians, but Trump’s administration stubbornly continues its policy. As it was a half the century ago, it results in a number of unpleasant consequences for America.

As mentioned above, the isles of the Republic of Cuba are in close proximity to the USA. Therefore, the deployment of the nuclear weapon in Cuba was important for the USSR under its project of containment their possible enemy – the USA.

In addition, the importance of Cuba’s location is not only in the proximity to the USA but to the Panama Canal as well. This Canal that separates the two American continents and unites the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans has huge importance for the global trade. About 5% of the cargo shipping on the planet passes through it.

As you know, the main task for the Chinese foreign policy now is the implementation of the project the One Belt – One Road (OBOR), under which China and its partners intend to create a global transport system. While speaking about the OBOR, they usually mean the merger of the Eurasian and African countries in one transport network. In fact, this project does not have restrictions, and the Latin American states also perfectly fit into it. Cuba is not the only country where China expands its presence. China is working actively with all the states and pushing out America from them at the same time. Even now China is the main trade partner of Brazil, Peru, and Chile – the most economically developed countries of South America. It also develops cooperation with Mexico. Every year, China’s influence is also growing in Panama, through which territory the Panama Canal flows.

However, Cuba has particular importance as a possible stronghold of China in the Caribbean Sea. If China, as the USSR back in the day receives permission from the Cuban authorities to deploy its armed forces on the island, it will be able to ensure the safety of navigation through the Panama Canal and control all shipping in the Caribbean Sea. This fact will finally turn China in the prime force in Latin America and put an end to the US domination in this region.

Dmitry Bokarev is political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Featured image is from the author.

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Tags: China, Cuba-US relations

When They Lie, Millions of People Die

March 22nd, 2018 by Massoud Nayeri

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Tags: condoleeza rice, iraq, nikki haley, Russia, United States, US war propaganda

VIDEO – L’Arte della Guerra. Libia, sette anni di sventura Nato.

March 22nd, 2018 by Manlio Dinucci

PandoraTV

Sette anni fa, il 19 marzo 2011, iniziava la guerra contro la Libia, diretta dagli Stati uniti prima tramite il Comando Africa, quindi tramite la Nato sotto comando Usa. In sette mesi, venivano effettuate circa 10.000 missioni di attacco aereo con decine di migliaia di bombe e missili.

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Under a False Flag, UK Attempts Three Chemical Attacks in the Ghouta

March 22nd, 2018 by Voltaire Network

On 17 March 2018, the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov denounced the presence of the US, British and French Special Forces in Syria; this is something that both London and Paris deny. He drove home the point, insisting: “What this presence means is that the issue is no longer a war by proxy but direct intervention in a war”.

Mr. Lavrov then went on to give a stern warning to Washington, London and Paris, should they take the decision to bomb Damascus. The documents seized by the Syrian and Russian Secret Services confirm the existence of a plan to attack Damascus along similar lines to the plan conceived against Baghdad in 2003. Part of this plan includes killing off President al-Assad. Allied ships have been positioned to enable them to carry out this attack from the Mediterranean.

On 19 March 2018, the Syrian and Russian armies warned of a new chemical attack in Eastern Ghouta instigated by the United Kingdom under a false flag. The Syrian and Russian armies have already seized two chemical laboratories on 12 and 13 March. On 20 March, during a meeting of the Leaders of the Russian Armed Forces, the Russian Minister for Defence, General Sergey Shoygu, referred to three attempts to use these weapons during the week in Eastern Ghouta. While he explicitly avoided inculpating London with backing these attempted bombings, the way his words were couched, removes any possible doubt from his listeners’ minds. He continued:

“We are hoping that in the current situation, our Western Partners will allow good sense to guide their decision-making; that they stop flirting with terrorists and come together with Russia in their peaceful initiatives in Syria”.

In five days, more than 79 000 prisoners of armed groups in the Ghouta have successfully sought refuge in the Syrian Arab Republic. This is thanks to the humanitarian corridors of Muhayam al-Wafedin and Hamouriyah.

Translation by Anoosha Boralessa

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

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

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Pages: 240 Pages

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Tags: chemical attack, East Ghouta, false flag, Syrian war, United Kingdom

What You Really Need to Know About the Scandal Engulfing Cambridge Analytica

March 22nd, 2018 by True Publica

It’s not just Conservative party donors who are among the investors in the company that spawned the election consultancy at the centre of a storm about use of data from Facebook, embroiled in a scandal over elections and a referendum. Both of these events have changed the course of history, upset the rules based international order and shaken geopolitical alliances the world over. This is more than just a scandal.

On Wednesday, Theresa May faced questions in the House of Commons over Tory links to the company.

“As far as I’m aware the government has no current contracts with Cambridge Analytica or with the SCL Group,” the prime minister said.

“An approach was made and the (Conservative) party decided not to take that forward,” May’s spokesperson said later. Then later again, reported The Guardian, a spokesperson acknowledged that the government had previously held three contracts with SCL Group, the parent company of CA. The Tories are yet again on the back-foot of an emerging war of words, much like their stumbling cover story over Novichoks and an insignificant retired conman called Sergei Skripal.

Then it emerges via The Guardian that former Conservative MPs, and a peer who was a business minister under David Cameron along with Tory party donors were investors in Cambridge Analytica. Lord Marland, a successful businessman who became a minister in 2010, held shares personally. One of Marland’s fellow investors, and the person now registered as having “significant control” over SCL Group, is a big Conservative party donor called Roger Gabb, who has over the years donated over £700,000 to the party.

The Guardian and this interesting blog piece reveals other individuals who are linked to the Royal family, senior members of Britain’s armed forces and other members of high society.

Interestingly, Sir Geoffrey Pattie, a former Conservative defence and industry minister, took a key role in the company for its first three years. This is interesting because SCL, the parent company, uses known military strategies and tactics for its business model and has contracts with the US and UK military establishments and intelligence services. It’s all very fishy isn’t it.

Around the world

On Monday, hidden-camera footage appeared to show Alexander Nix (image on the right), Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, offering to bribe and blackmail public officials around the world. If Nix did so, it would violate not just U.K. laws but many others too. Cambridge Analytica suspended Nix on Tuesday. Presumably the police will be wanting to interview this man quite soon.

India has just shut down the CA website effectively declaring it and its parent SCL an enemy of the state. SCL India, a venture between the SCL group in London and Ovleno Business Intelligence, says both India’s major political parties are its clients. The BBC reports that both the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and main opposition Congress deny links with SCL India but have accused one another of utilising the services of the company.

Another accusation is that SCL/CA was offered material from Israeli hackers who had accessed the private emails of two politicians who are now the heads of state of Nigeria and St Kitts and Nevis. The reality of this story is truly, truly shocking. The Guardian investigation aligns Israeli intelligence, CA, Bell Pottinger and the Western intelligence operatives of more than one country.

There are multiple wider political questions about what went on in the Nigerian election of 2015 and the role western powers played. The implications go far beyond the simplicities of asking what happens to lucrative Nigerian oil deals.

Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who revealed all to the Observer, called it “post-colonial blowback”.

The Observer/Guardian investigation interviewed employees of CA with one saying: “Everything the company did after the Mercers got involved was about refining a set of techniques that they would go on to use in the US elections. These campaigns in other countries were experiments. They worked out how to harvest data and weaponise it. And they got steadily better at it.”

“That work seems to have come about through Brittany Kaiser, a senior director at Cambridge Analytica, who would go on to play a public role at the launch of Nigel Farage’s Leave.eu campaign, and a senior strategist on the Trump campaign.”

At TruePublica, we made this connection a year ago, even before the mainstream media scrum of the last few days exposed the activities of SCL/CA.

CA boasted that they ran the successful campaigns of President Uhuru Kenyatta in the 2013 and 2017 Kenyan elections. In a secretly filmed video, Mark Turnbull, the M.D. for Cambridge Analytica and sister company SCL Elections, told a Channel 4 News’ undercover investigative reporting team that his firm secretly stage-managed Kenyatta’s hotly contested campaigns.

CA boasts of manipulating voters’ deepest fears and worries. Last year’s Kenyan election was dogged by vicious online propaganda targeting opposition leader Raila Odinga, with images and films playing on people’s concerns about everything from terrorism to spiralling disease. No-one knows who produced the material. But one can guess.

Bell Pottinger

Related image

Another company wrapped up in this saga is the public relations firm, Bell Pottinger. It apologised for stirring up racial hostility in South Africa on behalf of former President Jacob Zuma’s alleged financiers – the Gupta family. Bell Pottinger has, quite rightly, since gone out of business.

But let’s not forget what that this so-called PR firm was involved in. The Pentagon paid half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda programme during the Iraq war. They made short TV segments made in the style of Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos. These were confirmed by Bell Pottinger as “covert” military operations “covered by various secrecy agreements.” Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Council on its work in Iraq. Bell Pottinger were effectively involved in ‘black ops’ and ‘falsely attributing fake videos’, again, confirmed by Bell Pottinger employees. All of this is now a matter of fact – like Tony Blair’s ‘dodgy dossier’ – made up stories to keep us all paying for yet more war.

Its founder was Tim Bell who is credited with honing Margaret Thatcher’s steely image and helping the Conservative party win three elections. The agency he co-founded has had a roster of clients including a number of repressive regimes around the world.

Mark Turnbull, who joined Alexander Nix at CA, heads up SCL Elections as managing director. His profile at the University of Exeter Strategy and Security Institute boasts of his record in achieving “campaign success via measurable behavioural change” in “over 100 campaigns in Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean”.

Turnbull previously spent 18 years at Bell Pottinger, heading up the Pentagon funded PR drive in occupied Iraq which included the production of fake al-Qaeda the aforementioned videos. Obviously, there’s a connection here.

The MOD, SCL, Russia and Prostitutes

A freedom of information request from August 2016, shows that the MOD has twice bought services from Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) in recent years.

Bella Caledonia in its report entitled “SCL – A very British Coup” claims that “In May 2015, SLC Defence, another subsidiary of the umbrella organisation, received $1 million (CAD) to support NATO operations in Eastern Europe targeting Russia.”

As recently as July 2017, the website for Cambridge Analytica said its methods has been approved by the “UK Ministry of Defence, the US State Department, Sandia and NATO” and carried their logos on its website.

Then the whole thing gets a bit seedy. A recent Channel 4 news undercover investigation revealed that Alexander Nix offered to use bribery and sex workers – to entrap politicians and subvert elections. The purpose of these tactics would have utilised the finest variations of blackmail to get a result – presumably.

One does not have to imagine that organisations such as these could be at the heart of all sorts of stories, fake news, disinformation and propaganda campaigns that ends up affecting each and every one of us.

Indeed, it is quite evident from reading all this that organisations like SCL and CA are little more than the shadowy alliances formed between extreme neoliberal venture capitalists and ageing elements of former British military and intelligence officers. It should be of no surprise, of course, that there are strong connections to not just ‘the establishment’ but the ruling Conservative party.

These strategies used against citizens of a nation are developed originally by ‘black operations’ in defence and military work. It is described officially as – the fifth dimension of warfare. This definition has been honed and defined by the US military as “information operations” commonly in use in wider society to this very day. The Novichok story would be a classic fit.

However, let’s call this out for what it is. The SCL/CA modus operandi is selling a product that uses systems, procedures, strategies and tactics to illegally usurp democracy – for money.

Is this not neoliberalism’s ultimate humiliation? It is literally eating itself from the inside out like terminal bowel cancer.

Like Bell Pottinger, the operations of SCL and CA need to be shut down and people questioned not by politically motivated commissioners, but by the police. Once done, they should focus their attention on that other extreme capitalist who couldn’t care less about the hard won principles of democracy – the ultimate motherzucker of social media, which is another story.

Featured image is from TruePublica.

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Tags: Bell Pottinger, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook

Elections in Russia, 2018: Managed Democracy?

March 22nd, 2018 by David Mandel

This article examines the bases of popular support for recently re-elected Russian president Vladimir Putin. Although this support is strenuously “cultivated” by the regime by various illicit means, it nevertheless has a genuine basis that needs to be understood by people on the left who are trying to develop an enlightened position in the escalating confrontation between the “West” and Russia.

Putin’s speeches during his brief electoral campaign did not point to any major changes in domestic and foreign policies. In the international realm, one can expect the continued degradation of relations with the “West,” for which the West is largely responsible. One can also suppose that there will be a significant effort made to prepare Putin’s succession after 24 years in power (starting in 1998 as Security Director to the end of his current presidency in 2022). However, his leaving power is not certain in a system where personal relations of corruption play an important role.

Some spokespersons for the regime have themselves described it as a “managed democracy.” This is a regime that is somewhere between a classic dictatorship (one that tolerates no organized and public opposition) and a capitalist democracy that does tolerate political liberties (but in which the interests of the dominant class are guaranteed by means other than brutal repression). “Managed democracy” tolerates political freedoms, but only to the degree they do not present a serious threat to the continuity in power of the political élite.

Managed Democracy

This said, support for Putin among the people of Russia cannot be explained entirely by the state’s repressive measures or by its abuse of the so-called “administrative resources.” The latter include, among others, its control of the major television networks, severe restrictions on public demonstrations, various illicit pressures exerted on public sector employees, and, when necessary, falsification of electoral results.

Putin’s popularity is clearly cultivated by the regime. But it also finds a real basis in the population, even if that basis is not easily separated from the regime’s efforts to cultivate it.

The first element of that popularity is the profound contrast, especially economic, between the Putin and Yeltsin periods. Even if the younger generation has no direct personal memory of the Yeltsin era, it still looms large in the popular consciousness. The 1990s were a period of very deep and prolonged economic depression, hyperinflation, dramatic impoverishment of the people, mass unemployment, deferred payment of wages and pensions (sometimes many months – with no indexation), massive theft of national wealth, and domination by the mafia of entire sections of the economy.

Even if it is not principally thanks to Putin’s effort but to the rapid increase in the price of oil starting at the end of the 1990s, these processes ended and were largely reversed under Putin. While popular living standards have stagnated, even declined somewhat in the last few years, they saw a rapid rise in the 2000s, and the stark contrast of the present with the 1990s is still very much alive in popular memory. To cite one demographic indicator of popular well-being, life expectancy in 2000 was 65 years (as against 79 in Canada). Today it is 72.

The Mafia, The Oligarchs and The State

As for the suppression of democracy, which is usually attributed wrongly in the West to Putin, it, in fact, already occurred under Yeltsin. Putin at least removed mafia control of the economy and restored the state’s monopoly of violence. And he domesticated the oligarchs, without, however, touching their illicit fortunes, except in the few cases where they persisted in interfering in political affairs. Putin also arrested and reversed the centrifugal tendencies that threatened the integrity of the state, even if he used terroristic methods to achieve that in the case of irredentist Chechnya.

The second factor in Putin’s popularity is his affirmation of Russia’s sovereignty in the face of the West’s actions, which are largely perceived by Russians as aggressive and antagonistic. This popular perception has, in my opinion, a significant basis in reality.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Russia of the 1990s was under the colonial administration of the G-7, in particular of the USA. Shock therapy, concocted by the IMF and World Bank at the request of the G-7, in the course of a few years transformed an industrial giant into a country dependent on the export of natural resources. Adoption of that policy was the condition of G-7 support, which was precious for Yeltsin. The G-7 also encouraged and then approved the violent suppression of democracy by Yeltsin in the fall of 1993 and validated his theft of the 1996 presidential election.

To this one must add the illegal bombardment by NATO in 1999 of Serbia, traditional ally of Russia, the abrogation of the ABM treaty by the U.S. in 2002, the continued expansion of NATO, and, finally, the role played by the West in the armed overthrow of the regime in the Ukraine and in the civil war that followed.

Twelve nations have joined NATO in the past 15 years, bringing it to its current level of 29 member countries.

It is true that the Putin regime has put a lot of effort into cultivating patriotic sentiment. He even had the election date postponed to coincide with the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, a very popular act. But the regime finds fertile ideological terrain for these efforts in the population – of all political colours, except the most neoliberal. To understand that, one has only to have a passing knowledge of Russian history and to recognize the aggressive nature of NATO policy, particularly of the U.S., in defence of its domination of a unipolar world.

The third factor in Putin’s popularity is the outcome of the so-called “revolution of dignity” of February 2014 in Ukraine – the overthrow of a corrupt, but legally elected government by a movement that was popular in its origins but was soon joined by armed neo-fascist forces and NATO emissaries. While it is true that Russian media, controlled by the government, propagate an image of chaos and disaster in Ukraine, it is the case that they really do not have to exaggerate that reality.

However one looks at it – except from the point of view of the ultranationalists and the oligarchs – the situation of the popular classes in Ukraine has radically deteriorated. And that makes the situation in Russia look so much better. This contrast weighs heavily on the political choice even of people who hate the Putin regime. While it is true that this is aided by the regime’s efforts to prevent the emergence of a credible alternative to Putin, the Ukrainian situation is of great help.

A few words about Russia’s young people. Recent reports cite surveys that show that the youth support Putin even more than the rest of the population. That is perhaps the case – the mass of young people appears even more apolitical than their elders. But 2017 saw some very big protest demonstrations, mainly of people 16-24 years of age. These demonstrations were called – but not organized – by Alexei Navalny, known as an anti-corruption campaigner. These young people came out despite the very real threat of arrest, of which there were hundreds. Having witnessed one of these myself, I can say that what mobilized these young people was less their anger at corruption in high levels than their protest against the arbitrary limits on their freedom. This beginning of an awakening among Russia’s young people perhaps augurs change in that country’s hitherto rather stagnant political scene.

David Mandel teaches political science at the Université du Québec à Montréal and has been involved in labour education in the Ukraine and Russia for many years. He is the author of The Petrograd Workers in the Russian Revolution.

All images in this article are from the author.

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Tags: elections, managed democracy, popular support, Russia, Vladimir Putin

EU Money for Military Research?

March 22nd, 2018 by Researchers for Peace

The EU has set up a military research programme for the first time this year, with the objective of helping to preserve the competitiveness of the arms industry. The so-called Preparatory Action on Defence Research (PADR) allocates a total sum of 90 million euros to military research projects over a three-year period up to 2020.

The EU is prioritising highly controversial research under the PADR, such as the development of robotic weapon systems. Not only will this exacerbate a global race in such technologies, but this could also lead to an increase in arms exports to repressive regimes and fuel conflict. Already EU-made weapons are facilitating violations of international humanitarian law and human rights in a number of conflict zones.

The Preparatory Action is only a first step in paving the way for a full blown European Defence Fund of an estimated 40 billion euros for research and development of military hardware over the next ten years.

We invite all scientists, academics and researchers to sign this pledge and to call on the European Union to stop funding military research programmes.

Europe has a long tradition of innovation and EU research programmes have been shown to be a powerful policy tool. The EU should continue to invest in civilian research areas that benefit Europeans and the rest of the world, helping to solve health and environmental problems, and contributing to stability and equality in society.

Investing EU funds in military research will not only divert resources from more peaceful areas, but is also likely to fuel arms races, undermining security in Europe or elsewhere. The EU, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, should instead fund more innovative and courageous research which helps to tackle the root causes of conflict or contributes to the peaceful resolution of conflict.

Therefore, as a scientist, academic and/or researcher I call on the European Union to refrain from any further steps towards the funding of military research and development programmes.

Sign the pledge here.

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Tags: Arms deal, European Union, militarization

U.S. “Soft Power”: How to Dominate Without the Use of Force or Coercion

March 22nd, 2018 by Joseph Thomas

US soft power is included in US policy papers and promoted by US politicians and diplomats on a regular basis. It is also included as the admitted purpose of US, UK and European international programmes like Chevening and Fulbright scholarships.

Foreign Affairs magazine, published by big-business-funded US policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, would reveal in a review of Joseph Nye’s book, “Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics,” that (my emphasis):

…the term “soft power” — the ability of a country to persuade others to do what it wants without force or coercion — is now widely invoked in foreign policy debates.

The United States can dominate others, but it has also excelled in projecting soft power, with the help of its companies, foundations, universities, churches, and other institutions of civil society; U.S. culture, ideals, and values have been extraordinarily important in helping Washington attract partners and supporters.

And in reality, US domination and its soft power work together to create what is modern day empire and the foundation of US global hegemony.

The United States’ many organisations, from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to its Young Leaders Initiatives targeting the Americas (Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative/YLAI), Africa (Young African Leaders Initiative/YALI) and Southeast Asia (Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative/YSELAI), all seek to indoctrinate and co-opt the populations of targeted nations to serve the interests of Wall Street and Washington rather than their own.

While the US does this often under the guise of promoting “democracy,” it is clearly engaged in precisely the opposite. While democracy is generally understood as a process of self-determination, through US soft power, the process is co-opted and abused to allow Wall Street and Washington to determine the policies and direction a targeted nation takes rather than its own people.

Often times victims of US soft power are youths who are indoctrinated in university programmes or targeted by US-funded fronts posing as nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). They believe they have arrived at their conclusions and adopted their personal set of principles on their own, unaware of the amount of time, money and energy invested in ensuring they adopt a worldview and a set of political proclivities that serve US interests rather than those of their own nation, people and those of the individuals themselves.

The use of soft power is not new. It is a practice as old as empire itself.

The ancient Romans engaged in sophisticated cultural colonisation we could easily describe as soft power.

Ancient Roman historian Tacitus (c. AD 56 – after 117) would adeptly describe the systematic manner in which Rome pacified foreign peoples and the manner in which it would extend its sociocultural and institutional influence over conquered lands.

In chapter 21 of his book Agricola, named so after his father-in-law whose methods of conquest were the subject of the text, Tacitus would explain (my emphasis):

His object was to accustom them to a life of peace and quiet by the provision of amenities. He therefore gave official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and good houses. He educated the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts, and expressed a preference for British ability as compared to the trained skills of the Gauls. The result was that instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptation of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as ‘civilization’, when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.

In a very similar manner, youths today in nations targeted by US soft power describe the notions of “democracy” and “human rights’ as well as Western-style neo-liberal politics and institutions as “civilisation.” They often seek out every opportunity to disparage the culture and institutions of their own nation, describing them as backwards and demanding they be promptly replaced with new notions and institutions modelled after or directly beholden to those in the US and Europe.

We can see across the whole of Asia this full process of soft power coming to fruition. Years and millions of dollars spent in infiltrating universities, indoctrinating youths through programmes like YSEALI or the British Chevening scholarships and funding and directing fronts posing as NGOs has led to the creation of entire political parties contesting power, comprised of indoctrinated youths beholden both to the notions of Western culture and institutions as well as the money and technical support nations like the US and UK directly provide these parties.

Hong Kong’s “Demosisto” political party is made up entirely of youths and NGO representatives that have been created and funded for years by the US, UK and various other European interests.

Myanmar’s ruling National League for Democracy has the top echelons of its party run by former journalists, activists and politicians cultivated, funded and trained by US-funded programmes for decades. This includes the current minister of information, Pe Myint.

Case Study: Thailand

The recently formed “Future Forward” opposition party headed by Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, the heir of a multi-million dollar auto-parts business, has overtly advertised itself as an amalgamation of Western-style neo-liberal political ideology.

While the supposed “founders” of the party appear to fully represent various social issues, the immense amount of money needed to perform “Future Forward’s” campaigning indicates the true founders (and financial sponsors) have chosen to remain behind the scenes.

Reuters in its article, “Thai auto heir launches new party, promises to heal political rift,” would admit:

Thanathorn introduced other party co-founders on Thursday, including a filmmaker and a number of activists involved in LGBT and environment causes, among other issues.

Party co-founder Piyabutr Saengkanokkul, a law lecturer at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, said the party hopes to transcend Thailand’s political divide, a sentiment echoed by the student-led groups that have held anti-junta protests across Bangkok in recent weeks.

But some say the party might find it difficult to appeal to grassroots voters.

“Will they, academics and NGOs … be able to connect with grassroots people, which is a large part of the electoral base?,” asked one Twitter user.

To create that electoral base, the US is currently funding programmes inside Thailand specifically to infiltrate and co-opt local, regional and national concerns. Everything from environmental issues regarding the building of dams and power plants to women’s rights and access to education have been used as vectors by US-funded organisations seeking to co-opt and knit together various genuine individual pragmatic causes into a singular, national political clearinghouse.

Part of this singular front’s responsibilities will be to serve as a voting bloc to place parties like “Future Forward” into power.

NED and YSEALI are two examples of how single US organisations are targeting and cultivating youths much in the way Tacitus described in Agricola. These individuals are cultivated to be “leaders” who then create their own organisations (often US funded) to begin recruiting and indoctrinating additional members.

Like a pyramid scheme, the efforts’ structure enables the US to recruit and indoctrinate Thais faster than any single US organisation could do on its own. While programmes like YSEALI boast of thousands of leaders who undoubtedly have infected thousands more with US-funded indoctrination, its still isn’t likely enough to create a voting bloc big enough to place “Future Forward” into power.

But it doesn’t need to be. The US is still depending on existing political machines of politicians like US proxy Thaksin Shinawatra to create the support needed to propel “Future Forward” and other parties like it politically.

Future Forward: The Evolution of a US Proxy

While Reuters admits that Future Forward has been accused of ties to US proxy Thaksin Shinawatra, the article fails to mention the substantial evidence those making the accusations are citing.

Piyabutr, mentioned by Reuters as the party’s co-founder, had previously abused his academic credentials to organise and host an indoor event for Thaksin Shinawatra’s United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) also known as red shirts. The event held at Thammasat University, included Thaksin Shinawatra’s lobbyist Robert Amsterdam given a front row seat during the proceedings.

The red shirts are Shinawatra’s street front whose reputation had become a political liability after back-to-back riots and deadly armed violence the front carried out in 2009-2010.

Piyabutr and fellow academics endeavoured to rehabilitate the UDD’s public image by transforming it into a more academic movement, papering over the crass populism and demagoguery used to create it in the first place. While the “red shirt” street front is still used to give emerging successors to Shinawatra’s political machinery the numbers they need at public events, protests and rallies, this new, more academic face is what is being presented to the public, and the world.

Soft Power’s Final Destination: Consume All, Including Allies

The US will continue attempting to create a voting bloc independent of traditional political figures like Thaksin Shinawatra and his own networks of patronage. While Thaksin Shinawatra has been a loyal servant of US interests for years, the US would prefer a political party and a voting bloc it controls entirely on its own. By Shinawatra supporting the creation of parties like “Future Forward” he is in reality sealing his own political fate.

Special interests sponsoring “Future Forward’s” political activities are also creating a monster that will eventually consume them both politically and economically in the future. As demonstrated in nations around the world subjected to the full cycle of US meddling, co-opting, infiltration and domination, even those special interests that eagerly assisted US ambitions find themselves unwelcomed competitors once the US finally succeeds.

Those who believe they can “ride the tiger” of US hegemony into power often find themselves the target of the very domestic networks of agitators and activists they helped the US create.

Protecting Against US Soft Power

Clearly, the soft power process has nothing to do with any genuine interpretation of democracy. It is simply using democratic themes and procedures to lend legitimacy to what is modern day imperialism and the very sort of soft power employed by the Romans against the ancient world centuries ago.

Thailand and other nations targeted by US soft power can only defend themselves by being able to both effectively expose US soft power methods, and by countering them through the work of indigenous institutions and genuine NGOs filling Thailand’s political, activist, educational, information and economic space sufficiently enough so that no room remains for foreign-funded alternatives.

As to why the US is so interested in co-opting and controlling Thailand politically, the answer lies in Washington’s larger Asia-Pacific agenda which includes the encirclement and containment of China with nations that do business with and are entirely under the influence of Washington. A political party run by the products of decades of US cultural colonisation and soft power efforts taking office in Thailand would directly serve Washington’s wider regional ambitions and augment its efforts to co-opt and control Thailand’s Southeast Asian neighbours as well.

Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image is from the author.

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Tags: Chevening, Fulbright, Thailand, US soft power

Setting the Record Straight on Israel’s 2007 Bombing of an Alleged Syrian Nuclear Reactor

March 22nd, 2018 by Stephen Lendman

Featured image: Before and after picture of building struck during Operation Orchard in Syria (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE:

Contact at [email protected].

After saying nothing about the incident for over a decade, the IDF falsely claimed it destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007 before it became active.

Israeli and Western media are all over the story, reporting the ruse, what Haaretz called former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s “finest hour” – a shameful perversion of what actually happened.

Syria had no nuclear reactor. Claims otherwise were fabricated. A lawless IDF September 6, 2007 attack indeed occurred on its territory.

At the time, anonymous sources claimed Israel destroyed a partially constructed nuclear reactor.

None existed. The site attacked had nothing to do with nuclear reactor development. Israel committed premeditated aggression. It wasn’t the first or last time.

In February 2008, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh explained what happened, his article headlined “A Strike in the Dark,” saying:

At least four “low-flying” IDF warplanes entered Syrian airspace illegally.

Unprovoked, they “carried out a secret bombing mission on the banks of the Euphrates River, about ninety miles north of the Iraq border.”

Syria denounced the incident. Assad admitted Israeli warplanes struck their intended target – an “unused military building,” he explained, not a “nascent nuclear reactor,” as anonymous sources claimed.

Media reports at the time cited an unconfirmed North Korean connection to an eastern Syrian agricultural area construction site, adding:

Days before the bombing incident, a North Korean ship arrived at Syria’s Tartus port city. Satellite imagery falsely claimed a building under construction “was designed to hold a nuclear reactor when completed,” Hersh explained.

Reportedly, Washington signed off on the Israeli bombing. The Olmert regime and IDF maintained silence about it.

Hersh:

“(I)n three months of reporting” following the incident, “I was repeatedly told by current and former intelligence, diplomatic, and congressional officials that they were not aware of any solid evidence of ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syria” – because there was none.

Then IAEA director-general Mohamed ElBaradei issued a statement saying:

“Our experts who have carefully analyzed the satellite imagery say it is unlikely that this building was a nuclear facility.”

Center for American Progress director for nuclear policy Joseph Cirincione said

“Syria does not have the technical, industrial, or financial ability to support a nuclear-weapons program,” adding:

“I’ve been following this issue for 15 years, and every once in a while a suspicion arises and we investigate and there’s nothing.”

“There was and is no nuclear-weapons threat from Syria. This is all political. (S)ome of our best journalists were used.”

Hersh explained similar information came from congressional members weeks after the bombing, following intelligence briefings – including about an alleged North Korean connection.

At the time, an unnamed congressional member said

“(t)here’s nothing that proves any perfidy involving the North Koreans.”

Hersh stressed “serious and unexamined contradictions” in published accounts of the incident.

An unnamed IAEA official mocked the notion that the Syrian building under construction was for a nuclear reactor, saying “(a) square building is a square building” – nothing else, nothing sinister or illegal about it.

Before the bombing, a former State Department intelligence expert told Hersh there was no security around the building in question, adding:

“No barracks for the Army or the workers. No associated complex.”

Nonproliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis said the building wasn’t high enough to house a Yongbyon-size reactor – with enough room to extract control rods.

Nor did satellite imagery indicate major underground construction. Lewis added “(a)ll you could see was a box. You couldn’t see enough to know how big it will be or what it will do. It’s just a box” like countless other buildings.

A former senior US intelligence official with access to current information told Hersh:

“We don’t have any proof of a reactor – no signals intelligence, no human intelligence, no satellite intelligence.”

A Syrian Foreign Ministry official told Hersh the site Israel struck “was an old military building that had been abandoned by the Syrian military. What they targeted was a building used for fertilizer and water pumps.”

Soil samples of the targeted site would have found “only cement.” Hersh believes

“(w)hatever was under construction, with North Korean help, it apparently had little to do with agriculture – or with nuclear reactors – but much to do with Syria’s defense posture, and its military relationship with North Korea,” adding:

According to a former US intelligence official, “America’s involvement in the Israeli raid dated back months earlier, and was linked to the Administration’s planning for a possible air war against Iran.”

Hersh is highly respected, his reports credible. In September 2007, Israeli warplanes did not target and destroy a Syrian nuclear reactor – as reported at the time, what Israel for the first time now falsely claims.

Netanyahu lied tweeting:

“The Israeli government, the Israel Defense Forces and the Mossad prevented Syria from developing nuclear capability,” adding:

“They are worthy of full praise for this. Israel’s policy was and remains consistent – to prevent our enemies from arming themselves with nuclear weapons.”

Israel is the only regional armed and dangerous nuclear power since the atom was split.

Neither Iran, Syria or any other Middle East country pursued development of these weapons earlier or now.

Claims otherwise are bald-faced lies.

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

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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Tags: israel, Syrian nuclear reactor

Has Russia Had Enough?

March 22nd, 2018 by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

This morning I watched a briefing the Russian Foreign Ministry provided for the diplomatic community where international toxic substances experts presented information concerning the alleged nerve agent used in the alleged attack on Skripal and his daughter. This information has been known for some time, and none of it has been reported in the Western presstitute media.

In the briefing the Russians once again relied on facts and existing agreements that govern the investigation of such events and asked why the British were demanding explanations from Russia when the British refuse to comply with established procedures and refuse to produce any evidence of what the British allege to have occurred.

The response from the US and French embassy representatives was simply to state that they needed no evidence to stand in solidarity with their British friends, that Russia was guilty by accusation alone, and that they would hold Russia accountable.

The benefit of this absurd response, which the Russians declared to be shameful, is to make clear to the Russian government that it is a waste of time to try, yet again, to confront unsupported accusations from the West with facts and appeals to follow the specified legal processes. The West simply does not care. The issue is not the facts of the case. The agenda is to add another layer to the ongoing demonization of Russia.

Sooner or later the Russian government will realize that its dream of “working with its Western partners” is not to be and that the hostile actions and false accusations from the West indicate that the West is set on a course of conflict with Russia and is preparing the insouciant Western peoples to accept the consequences.

The Russian official hosting the briefing compared the Skripal accusation with the Malaysian Airliner accusation and the many others that resulted in instant accusations against Russia and refusal to cooperate in investigations.

The Russian official also drew the parallel of the accusations against Russia with the US and UK false accusations against Serbia, which led to the bombing of Serbia, and to the false accusations against Iraq, for which Colin Powell and Tony Blair had to apologize, that resulted in the destruction of Iraq and the death and displacement of millions of Iraqis.

The Russian official also said, pointedly, that the days were gone when no one challenged statements by the US government. The world, he said, is no longer unipolar. Russia, he said, does not respond to unsupported allegations. He also said that the way the Americans, British, and French are proceeding suggests that the Skripal affair is an orchestration created for the purpose of accusing Russia.

This conclusion is supported by the history of US and UK interventions. In recent times we have seen the West’s orchestrated interventions based on obvious and blatant lies in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and the attempts to destabilize Iran and Venezuela. History provides almost endless examples of the lies used by the US and UK to implement their agendas.

Nothing Washington and London say can ever be believed. Is it possible for Russia or any country to work with “partners” who are shameless, short on integrity and honesty, and have proven themselves unworthy of trust?

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

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

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Tags: European Union, Russia, United Kingdom, United States

Novichok Nerve Agent Histrionics

March 22nd, 2018 by Ann Garrison

Most national and international news reported in the US is now an extended Red Scare narrative punctuated by stories about Trump’s unparalleled boorishness and recklessness, which can of course be blamed on Russia since Trump never would have been elected if thirteen Russian trolls hadn’t prowled the Internet for potential Trump voters and targeted them with information about Hillary Clinton’s international crimes and the global influence peddling operation known as the Clinton Foundation.

The new bogeymen blamed for electing Trump—Facebook and Cambridge Analytica—are getting some play, but President Obama’s 2008 campaign won prominent advertising awards for integrating social and traditional media, and Carole Davidson, Obama’s 2012 Obama for America Media Director, just stepped up to say that Facebook allowed them to mine data. That doesn’t mean that rationality will win the day, and so far Russia treachery continues to dominate the news.

Just last night my local community radio station—which prides itself on bringing you the news that no one else will because it doesn’t rely on corporate money—reported at least three Russia-did-it or Russia’s-about-to-do-it stories on its hour-long newscast One was a Feature Story Newswire about Bill Browder, an international investor who gave up his US citizenship to avoid taxes, became the largest foreign investor in Russia, after which he was convicted of tax fraud in Russia, and then testified before the House Intelligence Committee about Russian intervention in the last US presidential election.

Browder now resides in Britain and says he’s likely to be the next target of an international Russian hit squad because he’s been a very vocal public critic of Vladimir Putin. He’s demanding a firm British and international response to Russia’s alleged chemical weapons poisoning of defunct double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in a British cathedral town of 40,000 on March 4. Russia released Skripal from prison and sent him into retirement in Britain in a 2010 spy swap.

The Washington Post speculated at great length about the Russian motive for such an admittedly implausible attack to make it seem less so. Like all the other outlets in control of the American mind, they began with the a priori assumption that “a former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, was poisoned with Novichok, an extremely toxic Russian nerve agent.”

The Post did not appear to have come across Judith Miller’s May 25, 1999 New York Times report that the Pentagon—in cooperation with the government of Uzbekistan, in the former Soviet Union—would take charge of “demilitarization and decontamination” at the Nukus, Uzbekistan chemical weapons plant. The plant, she wrote, had been the Soviets’ major research and testing site for “a new class of secret, highly lethal chemical weapons called ‘Novichok.’”

However, since the formula for manufacturing Novichok is available in a book for sale on Amazon, we shouldn’t rush to conclude that the US or Russia or any other determinate entity used it in a botched attempt to assassinate the Skirpals.

Corporate press, US and UK state press, and US and UK officialdom nevertheless univocally repeat that since Russia [the Soviet Union] manufactured Novichok, Russia must have been behind the attack. This text from a March 12 ABC News story is just one of many histrionic examples.

ABC News: And today Prime Minister Theresa May told Parliament the weapon was Russian made!!!

Theresa May: It is now clear that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. It is highly likely that Russia was responsible.

LIONS AND TIGERS AND RUSSIAN BEARS!!! OH MY!!! UK Foreign Minister Boris Johnson was all over US and European airwaves snorting that “the Russian denials grow increasingly absurd,” and that Vladimir Putin had directly ordered this assassination-by-Novichok on British soil.

Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, writes on his blog that “The Novichok Story Is Indeed Another Iraqi WMD Scam.” The fifth and last point of his argument is:

“The ‘Novichok’ programme was in Uzbekistan, not in Russia. Its legacy was inherited by the Americans during their alliance with Karimov, not by the Russians.”

Murray continues to post updates on the Novichok scam on his blog, CraigMurry.uk.org. On May 19, he told RT that

“it’s absolutely astonishing that anyone believes this.” He also, said, “The idea that we have an investigative or free journalism in this country has been sadly exposed [as false] by this case.”

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. She can be reached at @AnnGarrison or [email protected].

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Tags: nerve agent, Novichok, Russia, Sergei Skripal, United Kingdom

Google Sets up “News Initiative” to Censor Political Opposition and Promote Mainstream Media

March 22nd, 2018 by Andre Damon

Google announced Wednesday that it is partnering with the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times and other major news outlets to reinforce their monopoly over news coverage by blocking independent news organizations.

The New York Times, whose stock price soared after the announcement, said Google’s initiative was aimed at combatting “the epidemic of false and unreliable information on the internet,” by “pledging to spend $300 million over the next three years to support authoritative journalism.”

In reality, Google’s action is the latest step in a protracted campaign on the part of the major technology companies, working with the Democratic Party and the US intelligence agencies, to censor the Internet.

The campaign for Internet censorship has been spearheaded by the major media outlets, including the Times and the Post, who have seen their subscription base eroded by the growth of oppositional news outlets and “citizen journalism.” By working with the technology giants and intelligence agencies to censor smaller news outlets, the media giants hope to regain the monopoly over the distribution of news they held before the rise of the Internet.

In April of last year, Google announced measures to promote “authoritative content” over “alternative viewpoints,” which led search traffic to left-wing, antiwar, and socialist web sites to plunge by over 50 percent.

After Google’s announcement last year, other major technology companies followed suit in implementing their own measures to censor the Internet. This year, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that it would promote “trusted” news sources, such as the New York Times, over public postings by individuals and independent news agencies. At a congressional hearing this year, Facebook said it had hired some 10,000 content moderators, and would double that number by the end of the year.

But despite Facebook’s moves to rapidly implement the demands of the intelligence agencies for Internet censorship, leading Democrats, including Senator Mark Warner, have called on them to do more to crack down on social opposition.

Amid a growing strike wave by workers all over the world, including struggles this month by teachers in West Virginia and Oklahoma, university lecturers in the United Kingdom, and Amazon warehouse workers in Spain, leading news outlets have repeatedly warned that Facebook was being used to mobilize social opposition outside of the framework of the trade union establishment.

Within this context, the major news outlets have, in pursuit of their own aims, seized upon revelations that the election data firm Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal information of some 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge in 2014. At the time, the firm was owned by Robert Mercer, a billionaire who would later back the Trump campaign, and was headed by Steve Bannon, who would later serve as Trump’s campaign manager.

While the type of data harvesting conducted by Cambridge Analytica raises serious privacy concerns, the media firestorm that has followed the revelations is highly selective.

Cambridge Analytica had access to only a fraction of the data that Facebook itself collects and uses—often in secret—for political purposes. The company’s actions, moreover, are par for the course for the conduct of bourgeois election campaigns, which have come more and more to rely on data analytics and artificial intelligence to assess and impact voters’ political views.

A recent report by Investor’s Business Daily noted

“In 2012, the Obama campaign encouraged supporters to download an Obama 2012 Facebook app that, when activated, let the campaign collect Facebook data both on users and their friends.”

According to the report, up to 190 million people may have “had at least some of their Facebook data vacuumed up by the Obama campaign — without their knowledge or consent.”

Commenting on the Obama campaign’s data mining operation, former campaign director Carol Davidsen tweeted,

“Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.”

In leaked emails released by WikiLeaks in 2016, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told Clinton campaign officials that she “badly” wanted Clinton to win, and that she had met with the candidate and campaign officials on multiple occasions.

While the actions taken by Cambridge Analytica point to a substantial violation of users’ privacy, they pale in comparison to the massive surveillance and content harvesting operation carried out by Facebook itself, with the assistance of the leading US intelligence agencies and Democratic Party, which, in the name of fighting “fake news” and extremist content, aim to review and censor everything posted on the social media platform.

Even more importantly, the Democrats’ highly selective outrage over the Cambridge Analytica scandal is being used to hold Facebook’s feet to the fire, with the aim of forcing it to more aggressively censor social opposition in the name of cracking down on Russian “bots and trolls.” Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a leading proponent of internet censorship, seized on the scandal to put further pressure on Facebook to declare that it was “misused” by the “Russians” in the 2016 election campaign.

Warner told ABC,

“Facebook, since the beginnings of this investigation, has been reluctant, to say the least, to be fully forthcoming. I think it’s time for the CEO, Mr. Zuckerberg, and other top officials, to come and testify, and not tell part of the story, but tell the whole story of their involvement, not only with the Trump campaign, but their ability to have their platform misused by the Russians.”

In an op-ed entitled “Facebook Doesn’t Get It,” New York Times columnist David Leonhardt claimed that,

“By spreading false news stories and giving a megaphone to Russian trolls, Facebook — a vastly larger social network than Twitter — played a meaningful role in the presidential campaign.”

In fact, the massive data mining operations carried out by both the Democratic and Republican parties render absurd the argument that a few hundred thousand dollars of Facebook advertisements allegedly bought by “Russians” swayed the 2016 election. Both parties spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the type of data operations carried out by Cambridge Analytica, seeking to analyze, quantify, and affect the political viewpoints of hundreds of millions of people.

In fact, undercutting his own argument, Leonhardt called alleged Russian meddling a “scapegoat” for the election of Donald Trump and the electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton. Regardless, the “scapegoat” of “Russian meddling” is being used to fuel an even further crackdown on the Internet, in the name of blocking “fake news” and “divisive content.”

In just one example of the growing crackdown on freedom of expression on the Internet, over the past 48 hours, Facebook deleted a link published by the World Socialist Web Site to its recent review of the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War, allegedly because the posting contained “nudity.” In fact, the article contained well-known images of Vietnamese civilians fleeing the atrocities of the United States and its proxy South Vietnamese forces; photos that have been published in dozens of leading newspapers all over the world.

With the class struggle heating up throughout the world, the US ruling elite is working with ever-greater speed to block the expression of social opposition on the Internet. We urge workers and young people seeking to defend the freedom of expression to contact the World Socialist Web Site and join its campaign against Internet censorship.

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Tags: Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, Google, online censorship

Why America’s Major News-Media Must Change Their Thinking

March 22nd, 2018 by Eric Zuesse

America’s ‘news’-media possess the mentality that characterizes a dictatorship, not a democracy. This will be documented in the linked-to empirical data which will be subsequently discussed. But, first, here is what will be documented by those data, and which will make sense of these data:

In a democracy, the public perceive their country to be improving, in accord with that nation’s values and priorities. Consequently, they trust their government, and especially they approve of the job-performance of their nation’s leader. In a dictatorship, they don’t. In a dictatorship, the government doesn’t really represent them, at all. It represents the rulers, typically a national oligarchy, an aristocracy of the richest 0.1% or even of only the richest 0.01%. No matter how much the government ‘represents’ the public in law (or “on paper”), it’s not representing them in reality; and, so, the public don’t trust their government, and the public’s job-rating of their national leader, the head-of-state, is poor, perhaps even more disapproval than approval. So, whereas in a democracy, the public widely approve of both the government and the head-of-state; in a dictatorship, they don’t.

In a dictatorship, the ‘news’-media hide reality from the public, in order to serve the government — not the public. But the quality of government that the regime delivers to its public cannot be hidden as the lies continually pile up, and as the promises remain unfulfilled, and as the public find that despite all of the rosy promises, things are no better than before, or are even becoming worse. Trust in such a government falls, no matter how much the government lies and its media hide the fact that it has been lying. Though a ‘democratic’ election might not retain in power the same leaders, it retains in power the same regime (be it the richest 0.1%, or the richest 0.01%, or The Party, or whatever the dictatorship happens to be). That’s because it’s a dictatorship: it represents the same elite of power-holding insiders, no matter what. It does not represent the public. That elite — whatever it is — is referred to as the “Deep State,” and the same Deep State can control more than one country, in which case there is an empire, which nominally is headed by the head-of-state of its leading country (this used to be called an “Emperor”), but which actually consists of an alliance between the aristocracies within all these countries; and, sometimes, the nominal leading country is actually being led, in its foreign policies, by wealthier aristocrats in the supposedly vassal nations. But no empire can be a democracy, because the residents in no country want to be governed by any foreign power: the public, in every land, want their nation to be free — they want democracy, no dictatorship at all, especially no dictatorship from abroad.

In order for the elite to change, a revolution is required, even if it’s only to a different elite, instead of to a democracy. So, if there is no revolution, then certainly it’s the same dictatorship as before. The elite has changed (and this happens at least as often as generations change), but the dictatorship has not. And in order to change from a dictatorship to a democracy, a revolution also is required, but it will have to be a revolution that totally removes from power the elite (and all their agents) who had been ruling. If this elite had been the nation’s billionaires and its centi-millionaires who had also been billionaire-class donors to political campaigns (such as has been proven to be the case in the United States), then those people, who until the revolution had been behind the scenes producing the bad government, need to be dispossessed of their assets, because their assets were being used as their weapons against the public, and those weapons need (if there is to be a democracy) to be transferred to the public as represented by the new and authentically democratic government. If instead the elite had been a party, then all of those individuals need to be banned from every sort of political activity in the future. But, in either case, there will need to be a new constitution, and a consequent new body of laws, because the old order (the dictatorship) no longer reigns — it’s no longer in force after a revolution. That’s what “revolution” means. It doesn’t necessarily mean “democratic,” but sometimes it does produce a democracy where there wasn’t one before. The idea that every revolution is democratic is ridiculous, though it’s often assumed in ‘news’-reports. In fact, coups (which the U.S. Government specializes in like no other) often are a revolution that replaces a democracy by a dictatorship (such as the U.S. Government did to Ukraine in 2014, for example, and most famously before that, did to Iran in 1953). (Any country that perpetrates a coup anywhere is a dictatorship over the residents there, just the same as is the case when any invasion and occupation of a country are perpetrated upon a country. The imposed stooges are stooges, just the same. No country that imposes coups and/or invasions/occupations upon any government that has not posed an existential threat against the residents of that perpetrating country, supports democracy; to the exact contrary, that country unjustifiably imposes dictatorships; it spreads its own dictatorship, which is of the imperialistic type, and any government that spreads its dictatorship is evil and needs to be replaced — revolution is certainly justified there.)

This is how to identify which countries are democracies, and which ones are not: In a democracy, the public are served by the government, and thus are experiencing improvement in their lives and consequently approve of the job-performance of their head-of-state, and they trust the government. But in a dictatorship, none of these things is true.

In 2014, a Japanese international marketing-research firm polled citizens in each of ten countries asking whether they approve or disapprove of the job-performance of their nation’s head-of-state, and Harvard then provided an English-translated version online for a few years, then eliminated that translation from its website; but, fortunately, the translation had been web-archived and so is permanent here (with no information however regarding methodology or sampling); and it shows the following percentages who approved of the job-performance of their President or other head-of-state in each of the given countries, at that time:

China (Xi) 90%
Russia (Putin) 87%
India (Modi) 86%
South Africa (Zuma) 70%
Germany (Merkel) 67%
Brazil (Roussef) 63%
U.S. (Obama) 62%
Japan (Abe) 60%
UK (Cameron) 55%
France (Hollande) 48%

In January 2018, the global PR firm Edelman came out with the latest in their annual series of scientifically polled surveys in more than two dozen countries throughout the world, tapping into, actually, some of the major criteria within each nation indicating whether or not the given nation is more toward the dictatorship model, or more toward the democracy model. The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer survey showed that “Trust in Government” (scored and ranked on page 39) is 44% in Russia, and is only 33% in the United States. Trust in Government is the highest in China: 84%. The U.S. and Russia are the nuclear super-powers; and the U.S. and China are the two economic super-powers; so, these are the world’s three leading powers; and, on that single measure of whether or not a country is democratic, China is the global leader (#1 of 28), Russia is in the middle (#13 of 28), and U.S. ranks at the bottom of the three, and near the bottom of the entire lot (#21 of 28). (#28 of 28 is South Africa, which, thus — clearly in retrospect — had a failed revolution when it transitioned out of its apartheid dictatorship. That’s just a fact, which cannot reasonably be denied, given this extreme finding. Though the nation’s leader, Zuma, was, according to the 2014 Japanese study, widely approved by South Africans, his Government was overwhelmingly distrusted. This distrust indicates that the public don’t believe that the head-of-state actually represents the Government. If the head-of-state doesn’t represent the Government, the country cannot possibly be a democracy: the leader might represent the people, but the Government doesn’t.)

When the government is trusted but the head-of-state is not, or vice-versa, there cannot be a functioning democracy. In other words: if either the head-of-state, or the Government, is widely distrusted, there’s a dictatorship at that time, and the only real question regarding it, is: What type of dictatorship is this?

These figures — the numbers reported here — contradict the ordinary propaganda; and, so, Edelman’s trust-barometer on each nation’s ‘news’-media (which are scored and ranked on page 40) might also be considered, because the natural question now is whether unreliable news-media might have caused this counter-intuitive (in Western countries) rank-order. However, a major reason why this media-trust-question is actually of only dubious relevance to whether or not the given nation is a democracy, is that to assume that it is, presumes that trust in the government can be that easily manipulated — it actually can’t. Media and PR can’t do that; they can’t achieve it. Here is a widespread misconception: Trust in government results not from the media but from a government’s having fulfilled its promises, and from the public’s experiencing and seeing all around themselves that they clearly have been fulfilled; and lying ‘news’-media can’t cover-up that reality, which is constantly and directly being experienced by the public.

However, even if trust in the ‘news’-media isn’t really such a thing as might be commonly hypothesized regarding trust in the government, here are those Edelman findings regarding the media, for whatever they’re worth regarding the question of democracy-versus-dictatorship: Trust in Media is the highest, #1, in China, 71%; and is 42% in #15 U.S.; and is 35% in #20 Russia. (A July 2017 Marist poll however found that only 30% of Americans trust the media. That’s a stunning 12% lower than the Edelman survey found.) In other words: Chinese people experience that what they encounter in their news-media becomes borne-out in retrospect as having been true, but only half of that percentage of Russians experience this; and U.S. scores nearer to Russia than to China on this matter. (Interestingly, Turkey, which scores #7 on trust-in-government, scores #28 on trust-in-media. Evidently, Turks find that their government delivers well on its promises, but that their ‘news’-media often deceive them. A contrast this extreme within the Edelman findings is unique. Turkey is a special case, regarding this.)

I have elsewhere reported regarding other key findings in that 2018 Edelman study.

According to all of these empirical findings, the United States is clearly not more of a democracy than it is a dictatorship. This particular finding from these studies has already been overwhelmingly (and even more so) confirmed in the world’s only in-depth empirical scientific study of whether or not a given country is or is not a “democracy”: This study (the classic Gilens and Page study) found, incontrovertibly, that the U.S. is a dictatorship — specifically an aristocracy, otherwise commonly called an “oligarchy,” and that it’s specifically a dictatorship by the richest, against the public.

Consequently, whenever the U.S. Government argues that it intends to “spread democracy” (such as it claims in regards to Syria, and to Ukraine), it is most-flagrantly lying — and any ‘news’-medium that reports such a claim without documenting (such as by linking to this article) its clear and already-proven falsehood (which is more fully documented here than has yet been done anywhere, since the Gilens and Page study is here being further proven by these international data), is no real ‘news’-medium at all, but is, instead, a propaganda-vehicle for the U.S. Government, a propaganda-arm of a dictatorship — a nation that has been overwhelmingly proven to be a dictatorship, not a democracy.

The American public seem to know this (though the ‘news’-media routinely deny it by using phrases such as ‘America’s democracy’ in the current tense, not merely as referring to some past time): A scientifically designed Monmouth University poll of 803 American adults found — and reported on March 19th — that 74% believed either probably or definitely that “a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy” (commonly called the “Deep State”) actually exists in America.

The question as asked was: “The term Deep State refers to the possible existence of a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy. Do you think this type of Deep State in the federal government definitely exists, probably exists, probably does not exist, or definitely does not exist?” 27% said “Definitely”; 47% said “Probably”; only 16% said “Probably not”; and only 5% said “Definitely not.”

In effect, then: 74% think America is a dictatorship; only 21% think it’s not. So: this isn’t only fact; it’s also widespread belief. How, then, can the American Government claim that when it invades a country like Iraq (2003), or like Libya (2011), or like Syria (2012-), or like Ukraine (by coup in 2014), it’s hoping to ‘bring democracy’ there? Only by lying. Even the vast majority of the American public now know this.

So: America’s major ‘news’-media will have to change their thinking, to become at least as realistic as the American public already are. The con on that, has evidently run its course. It simply discredits those ‘news’-media.

This article was originally published on Strategic Culture Foundation.

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

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Tags: fake news, propaganda

Gaddafi’s Son, Saif al Islam Welcomes Sarkozy Arrest, Offers Evidence

March 22nd, 2018 by Daniel Mumbere

Saif al-Islam alluded to the evidence he gave to European media channel, Euronews in Tripoli in 2011, and lamented that it had taken the French justice system seven years to act on the matter.

An official of the French Judiciary told journalists on Tuesday that Sarkozy was being held in police custody for questioning by magistrates looking into allegations of Libyan funding for his 2007 election campaign.

A judiciary inquiry into the matter had been opened by France in 2013, while in January this year, Britain arrested and charged a French businessman suspected by investigators of funneling money from Gaddafi to finance Sarkozy’s campaign.

Speaking to Africanews, Saif al-Islam mentioned that there are several witnesses willing to testify against Sarkozy, including Abdallah Snoussi, the former director of the Libyan intelligence services and also Bashir Saleh Bashir, the former CEO of Libya Investment.

According to Saif al Islam, Snoussi has a recording of the first meeting between Sarkozy and Gaddafi held in Tripoli before his 2007 election campaign.

Saif al Islam adds that he too can testify, having witnessed the delivery of the first portion of the money to Sarkozy’s former chief of staff, Claude Guant in Tripoli.

He goes on to accuse Sarkozy of being a war criminal who is responsible for the spread of terrorism and illegal immigration in Libya. He urges French president Emmanuel Macron to right the wrongs of his predecessor and prosecute Sarkozy for crimes committed against Libya.

WATCH: During an exclusive interview with Euronews in 2011, Colonel Gaddafi's son demanded Sarkozy to repay Libya the money he took for his 2007 campaign election that helped him become French president.

Read more: https://t.co/JE4l87W762 pic.twitter.com/Mo3SHK2D1V

— euronews (@euronews) March 20, 2018

Saif al Islam who has expressed interest in the Mlibyan presidency also told Africanews that he supports an expeditious organisation of presidential elections in the North African country.

He warned that there are parties in Libya and abroad that seek to maintain the current chaotic situation in Libya, saying an endless war is imminent if elections are not held quickly.

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Artificial Intelligence and Sensor Systems: Uber Halts Nationwide Testing of Self-Driving Vehicles Following Death of Pedestrian

March 22nd, 2018 by Nicholas West

Even as robotics experts, universities and tech luminaries sound the alarm about the potential for a future filled with killer robots powered by artificial intelligence, this technology already has arrived … minus the stringent ethics.

Fox News is reporting that a Tempe, Arizona woman was struck and killed near a crosswalk by an Uber vehicle that was in full autonomous mode at the time of the accident, despite having a human inside the vehicle. Fox stated that this is “an incident believed to be the first of its kind.”

While strictly correct that this is the first pedestrian killed, regular readers of Activist Post might recall that in July, 2016 I warned about some disturbing indications that this would be inevitable.

At the time, I highlighted the failure of Tesla’s autopilot sensors to detect an oncoming tractor trailer, which killed the test driver. Previous to that, there were ominous signs of this potential when Google’s self-driving cars first had failures that resulted in them being hit, but later actually caused an accident with a bus. As I stated then:

These incidents and dilemmas have thus far occurred during training and testing, which might mitigate some of the seriousness, but nonetheless points to some genuine flaws that should preclude these vehicles from being widely employed.

Now that autonomous vehicles have been unleashed upon the public, we are starting to see the unfortunate ramifications. To Uber’s credit, they at least are announcing a halt to all autonomous testing nationwide.

Aside from the technical challenges, questions have been raised about the ethics and morality that will be required in certain fatal situations. That area, too, has raised eyebrows. Is it right to sacrifice the lives of some to save others?

The standards are already becoming morally complex. Google X’s Chris Urmson, the company’s director of self-driving cars, said the company was trying to work through some difficult problems. Where to turn – toward the child playing in the road or over the side of the overpass?

Google has come up with its own Laws of Robotics for cars: “We try to say, ‘Let’s try hardest to avoid vulnerable road users, and beyond that try hardest to avoid other vehicles, and then beyond that try to avoid things that that don’t move in the world,’ and then to be transparent with the user that that’s the way it works,” Urmson said. (Source)

The truth is that researchers are still in the process of developing foolproof sensor systems and artificial intelligence that can properly recognize all surroundings and develop true situational awareness, yet they continue to be deployed into the real world. It’s also worth noting that the general public is overwhelmingly concerned about having A.I. vehicles in public, as Fox News cites a 78% disapproval.

Now we will wait to see if the response to this event will be a technological solution or a political one. As The Daily Sheeple rightly notes, this very well could be a crisis that the government can’t let go to waste. Currently, regulations for autonomous vehicles tend to vary by state. Will this Uber accident spur quick calls for stricter federal oversight?

The fatal crash will most likely prompt an even bigger and overbearing government response complete with regulations for self-driving cars. Legislators are already debating how much freedom the private sector should have. The proposed bills would preempt states from establishing their own laws overseeing autonomous testing, which could clash with California’s well-established system. But the bill is stalled in the Senate, with several lawmakers “expressing concern about the amount of leeway offered to the private sector.” Translation: the intrusive government is debating how much if any, freedom the private sector deserves. (Repeat: “we are free.”)

Please give us your thoughts about the solutions that are needed as Big Tech is all-in on autonomous vehicles.

Nicholas West writes for Activist Post. Support us at Patreon for as little as $1 per month. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Steemit, and BitChute. Ready for solutions? Subscribe to our premium newsletterCounter Markets.

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Tags: Arizona, self-driving car, Uber

Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and “Surveillance Capitalism”

March 22nd, 2018 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

Whether it creeps into politics, marketing, or simple profiling, the nature of surveillance as totality has been affirmed by certain events this decade. The Edward Snowden disclosures of 2013 demonstrated the complicity and collusion between Silicon Valley and the technological stewards of the national security state.

It took the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 to move the issue of social media profiling, sharing and targeting of information, to another level. Not only could companies such as Facebook monetise their user base; those details could, in turn, be plundered, mined and exploited for political purpose.

As a social phenomenon, Facebook could not help but become a juggernaut inimical to the private sphere it has so comprehensively colonised.

“Facebook in particular,” claimed WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in May 2011, “is the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.” It furnished “the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence.”

Now, the unsurprising role played by Cambridge Analytica with its Facebook accessory to politicise and monetise data reveals the tenuous ground notions of privacy rest upon. Outrage and uproar has been registered, much of it to do with a simple fact: data was used to manipulate, massage and deliver a result to Trump – or so goes the presumption. An instructive lesson here would be to run the counter-factual: had Hillary Clinton won, would this seething discontent be quite so enthusiastic?

Be that as it may, the spoliations of Cambridge Analytica are embedded in a broader undertaking: the evisceration of privacy, and the generation of user profiles gathered through modern humanity’s most remarkable surveillance machine. The clincher here is the link with Facebook, though the company insists that it “received data from a contractor, which we deleted after Facebook told us the contractor had breached their terms of service.”

Both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have attempted to isolate and distance that particular contractor, a certain Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University researcher whose personality quiz app “thisisyourdigitallife” farmed the personal data of some 50 million users who were then micro-targeted for reasons of political advertising.

The sinister genius behind this was the ballooning from the initial downloads – some 270,000 people – who exchanged personal data on their friends including their “likes” for personality predictions. A broader data set of profiles were thereby created and quarried.

Kogan claims to have been approached by Cambridge Analytica, rather than the other way around, regarding “terms of usage of Facebook data”. He was also reassured that the scheme was legal, being “commercial” in nature and typical of the way “tens of thousands of apps” were using social media data. But it took Cambridge Analytica’s whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, to reveal that data obtained via Kogan’s app was, in fact, used for micro-targeting the US electorate in breach of privacy protocols.

Mark Zuckerberg’s response has entailed vigorous hand washing. In 2015, he claims that Facebook had learned that Cambridge Analytica shared data from Kogan’s app.

“It is against our policies for developers to share data without other people’s consent, so we immediately banned Kogan’s app from our platform”.

Certifications were duly provided that such data had been deleted, though the crew at Facebook evidently took these at unverified face value. Not so, as matters transpired, leading to the claim that trust had not only been breached between Facebook, Kogan and Cambridge Analytica, but with the users themselves.

Facebook, for its part, has been modestly contrite.

“We have a responsibility to protect your data,” went Zuckerberg in a statement, “and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.”

His posted statement attempts to water down the fuss. Data protections – most of them, at least – were already being put in place. He described the limitations placed on the accessing of user information by data apps connected to Facebook friends.

The networked sphere, as it is termed in with jargon-heavy fondness by some academics, has seen the accumulation of data all set and readied for the “information civilisation”. Google’s chief economist Hal Varian has been singled out for special interest, keen on what he terms, in truly benign fashion, “computer-mediated transactions”. These entail “data extraction and analysis,” various “new contractual forms” arising from “better monitoring”, “personalisation and customisation” and “continuous experiments”.

Such are the vagaries of the information age. As a user of such freely provided services, users are before a naked confessional, conceding and surrendering identities to third parties with Faustian ease. This surrender has its invidious by products, supplying intelligence and security services accessible data.

Cambridge Analytica, for its part, sets itself up as an apotheosis of the information civilisation, a benevolent, professionally driven information hitman. “Data drives all we do,” it boldly states to potential clients. “Cambridge Analytica uses data to change audience behaviour.”

This sounds rather different to the company’s stance on Saturday, when it claimed that,

“Advertising is not coercive; people are smarter than that.” With cold show insistence, it insisted that, “This isn’t a spy movie.”

Two services are provided suggesting that people are not, in the minds of its bewitchers, that intelligent: the arm of data-driven marketing designed to “improve your brand’s marketing effectiveness by changing consumer behaviour” and that of “data-driven campaigns” where “greater influence” is attained through “knowing your electorate better”.

On the latter, it is boastful, claiming to have supported over 100 campaigns across five continents. “Within the United States alone, we have played a pivotal role in winning presidential races as well as congressional and state elections.”

CA has donned its combat fatigues to battle critics. Its Board of Directors has suspended CEO Alexander Nix, claiming that

“recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation.”

The comments in question, caught in an undercover video, show Nix offering a range of services to the Channel 4 undercover reporter: Ukrainian sex workers posing as “honey-traps”; a video evidencing corruption that might be uploaded to the Internet; and operations with former spies. “We can set up fake IDs and Web sites, we can be students doing research projects attached to a university; we can be tourists.”

The company has also attempted to debunk a set of what it sees as flourishing myths. It has not, for instance, been uncooperative with the UK’s data regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, having engaged it since February 2017. It rejects notions that it peddles fake news. “Fake news is a serious concern for all of us in the marketing industry.” (Nix’s cavalier advertising to prospective clients suggests otherwise.)

In other respects, Cambridge Analytica also rejected using Facebook data in its political models, despite having obtained that same data. “We ran a standard political data science program with the same kind of political preference models used by other presidential campaigns.” Nor did it use personality profiles for the 2016 US Presidential election. Having only hopped on board in June, “we focused on the core elements of a core political data science program.”

The company’s weasel wording has certainly been extensive. Nix has done much to meander, dodge and contradict. On the one hand, he would like to take credit for the company’s product – the swaying of a US election. But in doing so, it did not use “psychographic” profiles.

Surveillance capitalism is the rope which binds the actors of this latest drama in the annals of privacy’s demise. There are discussions that political data mining designed to manipulate and sway elections be considered in the same way political donations are. But in the US, where money and political information are oft confused as matters of freedom, movement on this will be slow. The likes of Cambridge Analytica and similar information mercenaries will continue thriving.

Featured image is from BetaNews.

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Tags: 2016 US elections, Cambridge Analytica, Donald Trump, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg

Four Days to Declare a Cold War

March 22nd, 2018 by Thierry Meyssan

The week that has just ended was exceptionally rich in events. But no media were able to report it, because they had all deliberately masked certain dimensions in order to protect the story that was being woven by their government. London had attempted to provoke a major conflict, but lost to Russia, President Trump and Syria.

The British government and some of its allies, including US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have attempted to launch a Cold War against Russia.

Their plan was to fabricate an attack against an ex-double agent in Salisbury and at the same time a chemical attack against the “moderate rebels” in the Ghouta. The conspirators’ intention was to profit from the efforts of Syria to liberate the suburbs of its capital city and the disorganisation of Russia on the occasion of its Presidential election. Had these manipulations worked, the United Kingdom would have pushed the USA to bomb Damascus, including the Presidential palace, and demand that the United Nations General Assembly exclude Russia from the Security Council.

However, the Syrian and Russian Intelligence Services got wind of what was being plotted. They realised that the US agents in the Ghouta who were preparing an attack against the Ghouta were not working for the Pentagon, but for another US agency.

In Damascus, the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Fayçal Miqdad, set up an emergency Press conference for 10 March, in order to alert his fellow citizens. From its own side, Moscow had first of all tried to contact Washington via the diplomatic channels. But aware that the US ambassador, Jon Huntsman Jr, is the director of Caterpillar, the company which had supplied tunneling materials to the jihadists so that they could build their fortifications, Moscow decided to bypass the usual diplomatic channels.

Here’s how things played out:

12 March 2018

The Syrian army seized two chemical weapons laboratories, the first on 12 March in Aftris, and the second on the following day in Chifonya. Meanwhile, Russian diplomats pushed the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to get involved in the criminal investigation in Salisbury.

In the House of Commons, British Prime Minister Theresa May violently accused Russia of having ordered the attack in Salisbury. According to her, the ex-double agent Sergeï Skripal and his daughter were poisoned by a military nerve gas of a type « developed by Russia » under the name of “Novitchok” Since the Kremlin considers Russian citizens who have defected as legitimate targets, it is therefore highly likely that they ordered the crime.

Image on the right: Russian ex-counter intelligence officer Vil Mirzayanov defected to the United States. Now 83 years old, he comments on the Skripal affair from Boston.

JPEG - 35.4 kb

“Novitchok” is known by what has been revealed by two Soviet personalities, Lev Fyodorov and Vil Mirzayanov. The scientist Fyodorov published an article in the Russian weekly Top Secret (Совершенно секретно) in July 1992, warning about the extremely dangerous nature of this product, and warning against the use of old Soviet weaponry by the Western powers to destroy the environment in Russia and make it unlivable. In October 1992, he published a second article in the News of Moscow (Московские новости) with a counter-espionage executive, Mirzayanov, denouncing the corruption of certain generals and the traffic of “Novitchok” in which they were involved. However, they did not know to whom they may have sold the product. Mirzayanov was first of all arrested for high treason, then released. Fyodorov died in Russia last August, but Mirzayanov is living in exile in the United States, where he collaborates with the Department of Defense.

Novitchok was fabricated in a Soviet laboratory in Nurus, in what is now Uzbekistan. During the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was destroyed by a US team of specialists. Uzbekistan and the United States, by necessity, have therefore possessed and studied samples of this substance. They are both capable of producing it.

British Minister for Foreign Affairs Boris Johnson summoned the Russian ambassador in London, Alexandre Iakovenko. He gave him an ultimatum of 36 hours to check if any “Novitchok” was missing from their stocks. The ambassador replied that none was missing, because Russia had destroyed all of the chemical weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union, as witnessed by the OPCW, which had drawn up a certified report.

After a telephone discussion with Boris Johnson, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in turn condemned Russia for the attack in Salisbury.

Meanwhile, a debate was under way at the UN Security Council concerning the situation in the Ghouta. The permanent representative for the US, Nikki Haley, declared –

“About one year ago, after the sarin gas attack perpetrated in Khan Cheïkhoun by the Syrian régime, the United States warned the Council. We said that faced with the systematic inaction of the international community, states are sometimes obliged to act on their own. The Security Council did not react, and the United States bombed the air base from which al Assad had launched his chemical attack. We are reiterating the same warning today”.

The Russian Intelligence Services handed out documents from the US staff. They showed that the Pentagon was ready to bomb the Presidential palace and the Syrian Ministries, on the model of what it had done during the taking of Baghdad (3 to 12 April 2003).

Commenting the declaration by Nikki Haley, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, who had always called the attack in Khan Cheïkhoun a “Western manipulation”, revealed that the false information which had led the White House into error and triggered the bombing of the Al-Chaayrate air base, had in fact come from a British laboratory which had never revealed how it came to possess its samples.

13 March 2018

The Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs published a Press release condemning a possible US military intervention, and announcing that if Russian citizens were harmed in Damascus, Moscow would riposte proportionally, since the Russian President is constitutionally responsible for the security of his fellow citizens.

Bypassing the official diplomatic channels, Russian Chief of Staff General Valeri Guerassimov contacted his US counterpart General Joseph Dunford to inform him of his fear of a false flag chemical attack in Ghouta. Dunford took this information very seriously, and alerted US Defense Secretary General Jim Mattis, who referred the matter to President Donald Trump. In view of the Russian insistence that this piece of foul play was being prepared without the knowledge of the Pentagon, the White House asked the Director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, to identify those responsible for the conspiracy.

We do not know the result of this internal enquiry, but President Trump acquired the conviction that his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was implicated. The Secretary of State was immediately asked to interrupt his official journey in Africa and return to Washington.

Theresa May wrote to the General Secretary of the United Nations accusing Russia of having ordered the attack in Salisbury, and convened an emergency meeting of the Security Council. Without waiting, she expelled 23 Russian diplomats.

At the request of President of the House of Commons Interior Committee Yvette Cooper, British Secretary for the Interior Amber Rudd announced that MI5 (Military Interior Secret Services ) is going to re-open 14 enquiries into deaths which, according to US sources, were ordered by the Kremlin.

By doing do, the British government adopted the theories of Professor Amy Knight. On 22 January 2018, this US Sovietologist published a very strange book – Orders to Kill – the Putin régime and political murder. The author, who is “the” specialist on the ex-KGB, attempts to demonstrate that Vladimir Putin is a serial killer responsible for dozens of political assassinations, from the terrorist attacks in Moscow in 1999 to the attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013, by way of the execution of Alexandre Litvinenko in London in 2006 or that of Boris Nemtsov in Moscow in 2015. However, she admits herself that there is absolutely no proof of her accusations.

The European Liberals then joined the fray. Ex-Prime Minister of Belgium Guy Verhofstadt, who presides their group in the European Parliament, called on the European Union to adopt sanctions against Russia. His counterpart at the head of their British party, Sir Vince Cable, proposed a European boycott of the World Football Cup. And already, Buckingham Palace announced that the royal family has canceled their trip to Russia.

The UK communications regulator, Ofcom, announced that it might ban the channel Russia Today as a retaliatory measure, even though RT has on no occasion violated British law.

The Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs summoned the British ambassador in Moscow to inform him that reciprocal measures would soon be indicated in retaliation for the expulsion of Russian diplomats from London.

President Trump announced on Twitter that he had fired his Secretary of State, with whom he had not yet been in contact. He was replaced by Mike Pompeo, ex-Director of the CIA, who, the night before, had confirmed the authenticity of the Russian information transmitted by General Dunford. On his arrival in Washington, Tillerson obtained confirmation of his dismissal from White House General Secretary General John Kelly.

Ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is a product of the Texan middle class. He and his family worked for the US Scouts, of whom he became the National President (2010-12). Culturally close to England, he did not hesitate, when he became President of the mega-multinational Exxon-Mobil (2006-16), not only to wage a politically correct campaign favouring the acceptance of young gays into the Scouts, but also to recruit mercenaries in British Guiana. He is said to be a member of the Pilgrims Society, the most prestigious of Anglo-US clubs, presided by Queen Elizabeth II, a number of whose members were part of the Obama administration.

During his functions as Secretary of State, the quality of his education provided a bond for Donald Trump, considered by US high society to be a buffoon. He was in disagreement with his President on three major subjects which allow us to define the ideology of the conspirators:

Like London and the US deep state, he thought it would be useful to diabolise Russia in order to consolidate the power of the Anglo-Saxons in the Western camp ;
Like London, he thought that in order to maintain Western colonialism in the Middle East, it was necessary to favour Iranian President Cheikh Rohani against the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khamenei. He therefore supported the 5+1 agreement.
Like the US deep state, he considered that the swing of North Korea towards the United States should remain secret, and be used to justify a military deployment which would be directed in reality against the People’s Republic of China. He was therefore in favour of official talks with Pyongyang, but opposed to a meeting between the two heads of state.

14 March 2018

While Washington was still in shock, Theresa May spoke once again before the House of Commons to develop her accusation, while all around the world, British diplomats spoke to numerous inter-governmental organisations in order to broadcast the message. Responding to the Prime Minister, Blairist deputy Chris Leslie qualified Russia as a rogue state and demanded its suspension from the UN Security Council. Theresa May agreed to examine the question, but stressed that the outcome could only be decided by the General Assembly in order to avoid the Russian veto.

The North Atlantic Council (NATO) met in Brussels at the request of the United Kingdom. The 29 member states drew a link between the use of chemical weapons in Syria and the attack in Salisbury. They then decided that Russia was “probably” responsible for these two events.

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Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, and permanent representative for the United Kingdom to the North Atlantic Council Sarah MacIntosh. She is the ex-Director of Defence and Intelligence questions to the British Minister for Foreign Affairs, a post that she handed on to Jonathan Allen, current chargé d’affaires at the UNO.

In New York, the permanent representative of Russia, Vasily Nebenzya, proposed to the members of the Security Council that they adopt a declaration attesting to their common will to shed light on the attack in Salisbury and handing over the enquiry to the OPCW in the respect of international procedures. But the United Kingdom refused any text which did not contain the expression that Russia was « probably responsible » for the attack.

During the public debate which followed, UK chargé d’affaire Jonathan Allen represented his country. He is an agent of MI6 who created the British War Propaganda Service and gives active support to the jihadists in Syria. He declared –

“Russia has already interfered in the affairs of other countries, Russia has already violated international law in Ukraine, Russia has contempt for civilian life, as witnessed by the attack on a commercial aircraft over Ukraine by Russian mercenaries, Russia protects the use of chemical weapons by Assad (…) The Russian state is responsible for this attempted murder.”

The permanent representative for France, François Delattre, who, by virtue of a derogation by President Sarkozy, was trained at the US State Department, noted that his country had launched an initiative to end the impunity of those who use chemical weapons. He implied that the initiative, originally directed at Syria, could also be turned against Russia.

Russian ambassador Vasily Nebenzya pointed out that the session had been convened at London’s request, but that it is public at Moscow’s request. He observed that the United Kingdom is violating international law by treating this subject at the Security Council while keeping the OPCW out of its enquiry. He noted that if London had been able to identify the Novotchik, it’s because it has the formula and can therefore make its own. He noted Russia’s desire to collaborate with the OPCW in the respect for international procedures.

15 March 2018

The United Kingdom published a common declaration which had been cosigned the night before by France and Germany, as well as Rex Tillerson, who at that moment was still US Secretary of State. The text reiterated British suspicions. It denounced the use of “a neurotoxic agent of military quality, and of a type developed by Russia”, and affirmed that it was “highly probable that Russia is responsible for the attack”.

The Washington Post published an op-ed piece by Boris Johnson, while the US Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, established new sanctions against Russia. These are not connected to the current affair, but to allegations of interference in US public life. The decree nonetheless mentions the attack in Salisbury as proof of the underhand methods of Russia.

British Secretary for Defence, the young Gavin Williamson, declared that after the expulsion of its diplomats, Russia should “shut up and go away” (sic). This is the first time since the end of the Second World War that a representative of a permanent member state of the Security Council has employed such a vocabulary in the face of another member of the Council. Sergueï Lavrov commented –

“He’s a charming young man. He must want to ensure his place in History, by making shock declarations […] Perhaps he lacks education”.

Conclusion

In the space of four days, the United Kingdom and its allies have laid the premises of a new division of the world, a Cold War.

However, Syria is not Iraq and the UNO is not the G8 (from which Russia has been excluded because of its adhesion to Crimea and its support of Syria). The United States are not going to destroy Damascus, and Russia will not be excluded from the Security Council. After having resigned from the European Union, then having refused to sign the Chinese declaration about the Silk Road, the United Kingdom thought to improve its stature by eliminating a competitor. By this piece of dirty work, it imagined that it would acquire a new dimension and become the “Global Britain” announced by Madame May. But it is destroying its own credibility.

Translation by Pete Kimberley

Thierry Meyssan is a political consultant, President-founder of the Réseau Voltaire (Voltaire Network). Latest work in French – Sous nos Yeux. Du 11-Septembre à Donald Trump(Right Before our Eyes. From 9/11 to Donald Trump).

All images in this article are from the author.

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Tags: chemical gas, cold war, Novichok, OPCW, Russia, Theresa May, United Kingdom

Russia Denied the “Right of Discovery” in Skripal Affair. Moscow Demands Release of Relevant Documents

March 22nd, 2018 by Stephen Lendman

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE:

Contact at [email protected].

Pre-trial judicial proceedings in America and elsewhere afford all parties the right to as much information as possible – so nothing is kept secret except for constitutional protection from self-incrimination.

Defendants especially have the right to relevant documents, witness depositions, questions and answers from interrogations, crime scene and other forensic evidence including toxicology results, police reports, “raw evidence,” arrest and search warrants, grand jury testimony, and other relevant data.

The purpose of discovery is to assure judicial fairness, or at least greater fairness than otherwise possible.

Prosecutors are required to provide defendants will all relevant evidence enabling a proper defense.

Criminal legal experts explain that unlike film-portrayed crime dramas, actual ones rarely include surprise evidence by any party during proceedings, especially anything introduced near their conclusion.

Britain accused Russia of poisoning Sergey Skripal, his daughter and police detective Nick Bailey – yet refused to alleged reveal evidence corroborating its charges.

Accusations without evidence are groundless. No legitimate tribunal would accept them. The court of public opinion is another matter entirely – especially when manipulated by one-sided Russophobic finger-pointing.

Moscow justifiably demands release of all relevant information on the Skripal affair – nothing so far presented, indicating nothing incriminating Russia exists.

If otherwise, Britain would have revealed it straightaway to make its case.

Image result for Dmitry Peskov

Interviewed by RT, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov (image on the right) strongly denied Russian involvement in the Skripal incident. No evidence refutes him or other Russian officials.

Peskov:

“The first accusations came from politicians just a couple of hours after the accident…that ‘highly likely, Russia was responsible of that attempt of murder.’”

“And now we see the words of experts…from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) that say that the preliminary examination of this agent will take about three weeks. Is it contradictory? Yes, it is.”

Skripal is “of zero value…zero importance” to Russia, Peskov stressed.

Separately, Sergey Lavrov slammed Britain for breaching its legal obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention for refusing to provide Moscow with samples of the alleged toxin it claims, along with any other relevant information it has on the Skripal incident.

A statement by Russia’s embassy in Washington said:

“Our efforts to obtain facts on the incident from (Britain) have been in vain. They have been busy accusing Russia without proof of poisoning its citizens and attacking the UK, and feverishly seeking support from its partners without presenting any evidence.”

“We are convinced it is obvious that Russophobes in the hysteria-gripped West have been trying to hide their weakness behind ‘solidarity.’ “

The statement further criticized the Trump administration, blaming Russia for an incident it had nothing to do with.

Britain and Washington should present credible evidence of Kremlin culpability or apologize for their affront, the embassy stressed.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry Department for Nonproliferation & Arms Control director Vladimir Ermokov questioned the unlikely impartiality of the OPCW assessment of toxic samples provided by Britain, saying:

“(A) deeper, (independent) expert assessment (is) needed…for Russia to be able to come to any conclusions.”

The OPCW lost credibility by colluding with the West against Syria in investigating CW incidents.

It’s findings were “a total fake,” Ermakov stressed – notably for the sham Kahn Sheikhoun probe conducted off-site with toxic samples supplied by the anti-Assad al-Qaeda-connected White Helmets.

Clearly, Britain has plenty to conceal about the Skripal affair, nothing to reveal incriminating Russia.

Other Western nations are complicit by going along with the ruse, notably America – instead of forthrightly rejecting it.

A Final Comment

US-led Western nations are hostile Russian adversaries, not Kremlin partners as it persists in claiming. Nothing they say or pledge is credible.

Trusting them is self-defeating – expecting them to change foolhardy, after a century of evidence proving otherwise, punctuated by short-lived periods of improved relations.

Russia’s only sensible option is allying East with reliable partners, abandoning efforts to join the Western community of nations, seeking its transformation into vassalage to their domination, its sovereignty destroyed.

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

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

Iraq and the “Gulf War”: Remembering the 1991 Al-Amiriyah Bombing by the US Air Force

Featured image is from Euronews.

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Tags: right of discovery, Russia, Sergei Skripal, United Kingdom

Pentagon Admits Missile Defenses Powerless in Face of Russian Hypersonic Weapons

March 22nd, 2018 by Sputnik

In testimony before the US Senate Armed Services Committee, StratCom commander Gen. John Hyten struggled to find the right words before admitting that there is nothing in the US arsenal that could stop Russia’s new hypersonic weapons.

“We have a very difficult – well, our defense is our deterrent capability. We don’t have any defense that could deny the employment of such a weapon against us, so our response would be our deterrent force, which would be the triad and the nuclear capabilities that we have to respond to such a threat,” Hyten said, responding to Senator Jim Inhofe’s question about what kind of defense the US could mount against the threat of hypersonic missiles.

Echoing the proposals outlined in February’s Nuclear Posture Review, Hyten said that the US might consider the deployment of sub-launched missiles with low-yield nuclear weapons to respond to Russia’s plans for battlefield nukes.

The commander noted that these weapons, together with the US’s existing nuclear triad of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, strategic bombers and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, would serve as the best deterrent against Russia, China, or North Korea. At the present time, he admitted, while Russia and China are “aggressively pursuing hypersonic capabilities,” the US’s own hypersonic weapons remain either at the concept or testing stage.

Hyten’s startling admission may signal the beginning of a shift in Washington’s nuclear policy of the last decade and a half, which saw the US’ withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the creation of a missile shield on Russia’s Western border. Moscow has repeatedly emphasized that Russia has a nuclear no-first use policy, except in cases where a conventional attack threatens the existence of the Russian state.

Hyten’s concerns were also apparently echoed by the White House. According to the New York Times, in a phone call to President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, President Trump voiced concerns over his Russian counterpart’s recent speech to lawmakers, where Putin had discussed the creation and deployment of unstoppable ultra-long cruise missiles and nuclear torpedoes capable of outsmarting all US strategic defense systems. During the call, Trump also boasted that the US was spending some $700 billion to upgrade its military, and that Russia would lose in any new arms race.

On March 1, Putin announced a series of new Russian weapons systems designed to serve as an asymmetric response to US missile defenses and the deployment of NATO forces on Russia’s borders.

Improvement of the Russian Armed Forces

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Tags: hypersonic weapons, Nuclear weapons, Russian Armed Forces, US Armed Forces

Calm Down, Turkey Is Not Going to Invade the Balkans

March 22nd, 2018 by Andrew Korybko

President Erdogan’s regular addresses to the Muslim and Turkish people of the Balkans are a soft power tactic that isn’t any functionally different from the transnational outreach attempts that other forces engage in elsewhere across the world and on different ideological-identity pretexts.

The Alt-Media Community has once again been thrown into hysteria after one of President Erdogan’s latest speeches where he addressed his fellow Muslim co-confessionalists and ethnic Turkish kin in the Balkans on the eve of what ended up being his country’s monumental military victory in the northwestern Syrian town of Afrin. His words were reported on widely in the press and ominously framed in such a way as to imply that a similar operation might be commenced in Southeastern Europe one of these days as well, though nothing could be further from the case. The Balkan people are psychologically scarred by the centuries of Turkish occupation and have a reason to fear Ankara’s aggression against them, but their historical experiences over the previous centuries might be blinding them to how much the world has changed since then.

The World Order

One of the mainstays of post-World War I International Relations, and especially the world order after the conclusion of the Second World War and the Cold War, has been the inviolability of national borders, and it was the Axis’ aggressive undermining of this core tenet of stability that eventually led to the largest bloodletting in history. This is why the global community is so sensitive to anything that could be interpreted as hinting at this goal, and it’s also why the only time that it’s “accepted” is if it pertains to secessionist movements or internationally recognized legal unions of sovereign states. Saddam Hussein’s invasion, occupation, and subsequent annexation of Kuwait was too reminiscent of Hitler for global comfort, while countless double standards have been applied in the cases of Kosovo, the former Georgian Republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Crimea’s reunification with Russia.

The point being made is that the forceful absorption of one country’s territory into another’s by means of the incorporating state’s conventional military is universally frowned upon and technically illegal under international law, though the latter doesn’t matter much so long as there’s no real political will among the UNSC to collectively enforce this statute against the offending country. Turkey is obviously well aware of this reality and therefore has no intention of waging a massive war against a coalition of Balkan countries like it did a century ago, after which it would probably have to ethnically cleanse the native Christian non-Turkish population from any prospectively conquered regions prior to their annexation by what could then be described as the “Neo-Ottoman Empire”. It doesn’t make sense for Turkey to go through all of this “trouble” in the Balkans if it’s not even interested in doing this through the comparatively easier scenario that just presented itself in northwestern Syrian region of Afrin.

Making Sense Out Of The Syrian Scenario

Turkish armed forces preparing for their Operation Olive Branch in the SDF-controlled Afrin district

The Turkish Armed Forces assisted their FSA proxies in capturing this Kurdish-controlled city, but Ankara has been adamant that it has no desire whatsoever to annex it to Turkey. The government’s statement that it won’t return Afrin to the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) shouldn’t have been surprising because Ankara has always endeavored to carve out a sphere of influence in northern Syria, but this in and of itself doesn’t equate to an “annexation” like its critics have alleged. If Turkey wanted to, though, it could certainly experiment with this scenario prior to perfecting it for use in the Balkans, but it’s clearly abstaining from doing so for reasons that are understandable. No country wants to be bothered by securing newly acquired territory and suppressing a population that doesn’t want to join the neighboring state, nor does that government want to be financially responsibility for their affairs either.

In this day and age, it’s much more effective to leverage soft power and indirect means of influence in exerting one’s sway abroad than to do so directly through military means. This explains why Turkey is resorting to proxy measures for securing northern Syria after driving out the Kurdish terrorists. As it relates to the Balkans and President Erdogan’s regular addresses to its Muslim and Turkish minorities, all that he’s doing is virtue signaling in a way that’s appealing to them and doing his utmost to maximize his country’s soft power. At the end of the day, it needs to be objectively acknowledged that those demographics are in the Balkans as a legacy of the centuries-long Ottoman occupation, and that Turkey rightly recognizes them as key instruments of influence inside of their host countries. Just like the Russian population in the post-Soviet republics, the Muslim-Turkish one shouldn’t be automatically equated with being “fifth columnist”.

Fear Mongering About “Fifth Columnists”

To elaborate a bit more, the post-war division of territory after any given conflict isn’t always “perfect”, especially in the sense of carving out “pure” nation-states, and many countries have “inherited” various ethno-religious and regional minorities through this means. Sometimes an entity embraces its identity diversity like the Russian Empire did (which served as a springboard for geographic expansion further afield at the time) whereas others like post-coup Ukraine have nothing but contempt for its non-titular peoples. The end of World War I saw population exchanges between Greece and Turkey, but not between Turkey and the other Balkan states, which is why some of the remaining Muslims and Turks didn’t leave the new countries that they ended up finding themselves in after this conflict. To be fair, ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia and ethnic Belarussians & Ukrainians in the interwar Second Polish Republic were also in a similar position, et al.

It’s just as natural for a Turkish leader to address the minority groups in the Balkans who identify more closely with his country (whether right or wrong) as it is for a Russian leader to do the same in the countries of the Near Abroad. Transcending ethnicity, many religious leaders throughout the world do the same thing when speaking to their co-confessionals, whether they’re Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, or Hindus, for example. Not only that, but ideology is also used in soft power outreaches too, such as when communists and capitalists tried to spread their message during the Old Cold War or when proponents of unipolarity and multipolarity attempt to do the same in the New Cold War. Furthermore, the internet has made it much easier to practice soft power than ever before, thereby “decentralizing” it away from its prior state monopoly and enabling a variety of non-state actors to experiment with it.

Debunking The Double Standards

One can argue about whether this is a “good” or “bad” development, but it’s nevertheless indisputable that soft power has become a defining characteristic of the contemporary world order. Every actor engages in this for their own reasons, and in the Turkish case, it may very well be because its government feels like the internationally recognized borders are morally illegitimate because they were imposed after military defeats and enforced by foreign powers. This same argument can be modified in explaining why some Russians feel similarly about how the post-Soviet borders separated them from their ethno-religious kin in the Near Abroad, and the historical extreme of this attitude be seen in Bolivia agitating for the return of its maritime border through what is nowadays northern Chile and Mexican ultra-nationalists claiming that the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo should be scrapped.

The only way that any of this can be changed is through legal means or forceful ones, both of which are difficult to pull off for their own reasons. Exceptions exist, but as the saying goes, “the exception proves the rule”, and that’s why Pandora’s Box has yet to be fully opened in the sense of countries waging Hobbesian “wars of consolidation” against each other. Depending on the historical benchmark that one sets, the case can generally be made that some portion or another of most countries’ territory was previously under the control of another entity, and it’s precisely because of the impossibility of setting a single standard for how far back any territorial revisionism should go that no responsible actor seriously wants to entertain this possibility. That’s not to say that there aren’t any forces who have this goal in mind, but just that it’s not as simple as drawing a line on a map, moving in one’s military and administrative representatives, and seamlessly incorporating the new territory.

Turkey has no desire to try this against the Balkan countries that are mostly comprised of civilizationally dissimilar (i.e. Christian non-Turkish) populations if it won’t even take a shot at doing so against the neighboring Mideast ones where its military forces are already active and which have Muslim Turkish minorities living in the border region. This “inconvenient fact” debunks the “alternative reality” (alt-reality) that some Alt-Media pundits and outlets have been fear mongering about, one which is more influenced by the “populist” “Turkophobia” of their intended Turkish-neighboring audiences (Armenians, Greeks, etc.) and fellow sympathizers abroad than any objective facts or logical thought. The legacy of Turkish rule hangs heavy over the minds of all non-Muslim and non-Turkish Balkan people, which is why it’s very easy for them to be manipulated into thinking that the “Sultan” is just a split-second away from deciding to invade their countries once again and force their people to submit to Islam.

Concluding Thoughts

It’s not the fault of the regional audience for reacting to these scare tactics because the blame lays squarely in the lap of those who invented this narrative for their own purposes, be it in rallying the targeted population for whatever their reason may be and/or in smearing Turkey as an “aggressive, Hitler-like, Islamo-fascist state”. The topic of territorial revisionism – especially in regards to post-war borders – is an ultra-sensitive one that must be approached with the utmost caution and objectivity, since the subjective judgments of “right/moral” and “wrong/immoral” don’t necessarily apply in a Neo-Realist world where power and interests trump values and ethics. Holding the position that Mexico is entitled to all of the territory that it lost to the US after only a few decades of independence but not feeling the same about the land that Turkey forfeited after centuries of occupation is a red flag that someone is exercising double standards in order to advance an agenda, for example.

In the same vein, supporting secular forces and principles in non-secular countries such as Saudi Arabia or Iran yet condemning Turkey’s soft power outreaches to its ethno-religious supporters abroad is another sign of hypocrisy because it denies Ankara the same right to do what others are in different contexts. The bottom line is that the exercise of soft power is here to stay and that its influence is only growing, and while there are cases where its practice might portend future problems (e.g. NGOs “spreading democracy” inside of China or Wahhabis proselytizing in Europe), there are also others where the actual “threat” is largely imaginary but manipulatively triggered by third-party forces taking advantage of recent history (e.g. fear mongering about President Erdogan’s outreaches to Muslims by invoking the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans, and doing the same with Russians and Russian media in the Near Abroad by obsessing over the Soviet experience).

Turkey isn’t going to invade the Balkans just like Russia won’t invade the Baltics even though both Great Powers have legitimate soft power reasons for interacting with their targeted audiences there, but most of Alt-Media and Mainstream Media respectively are relying on hyped-up threats of an “impending invasion” to advance their own interests, with the common casualty being the objective truth in both infowar instances.

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Tags: Recep Erdogan, Syria, The Balkans, Turkey

A World War Has Begun. Break the Silence

March 22nd, 2018 by John Pilger

Below is a relevant article selected from the GR archive, first published in March 2016.

This is an edited version of an address by John Pilger at the University of Sydney, entitled A World War Has Begun:

I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island.

Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 — the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years.

Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.

Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.” A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different “bikini bodies”; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers.

Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us. The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government”.

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying.

The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.

A new mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkable.”

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.

This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China.

Seldom a day passes when China is not elevated to the status of a “threat”. According to Admiral Harry Harris, the US Pacific commander, China is “building a great wall of sand in the South China Sea”.

What he is referring to is China building airstrips in the Spratly Islands, which are the subject of a dispute with the Philippines – a dispute without priority until Washington pressured and bribed the government in Manila and the Pentagon launched a propaganda campaign called “freedom of navigation”.

What does this really mean? It means freedom for American warships to patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China. Try to imagine the American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of California.

I made a film called The War You Don’t See, in which I interviewed distinguished journalists in America and Britain: reporters such as Dan Rather of CBS, Rageh Omar of the BBC, David Rose of the Observer.

All of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.

The propaganda laying the ground for a war against Russia and/or China is no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the Western “mainstream” — a Dan Rather equivalent, say –asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea.

The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear -armed bombers.

This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.

In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman Sabre. Its aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes, such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits, that cut off China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism.

Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.

According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is “unleashing the dark forces of violence” in the United States. Unleashing them?

This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.

No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as “a world substantially made over in [America’s] own image”. The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.

Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted “exceptionalism” is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.

As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies – just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope”. And the drool goes on.

Described by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as “funny, charming, with a coolness that eludes practically every other politician”, Obama the other day sent drones to slaughter 150 people in Somalia. He kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to the New York Times, when he is handed a list of candidates for death by drone. So cool.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons. As Secretary of State under Obama, she participated in the overthrow of the democratic government of Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, was publicly sodomised with a knife – a murder made possible by American logistics – Clinton gloated over his death: “we came, we saw, he died.”

One of Clinton’s closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of State, who has attacked young women for not supporting “Hillary”. This is the same Madeleine Albright who infamously celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as “worth it”.

Among Clinton’s biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East. She and her husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is about to be ordained the women’s candidate, to see off the evil Trump, the official demon. Her supporters include distinguished feminists: the likes of Gloria Steinem in the US and Anne Summers in Australia.

A generation ago, a post-modern cult now known as “identity politics” stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes and individuals they supported — such as the fakery of Obama and Clinton; such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece, which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their enemies.

Self absorption, a kind of “me-ism”, became the new zeitgeist in privileged western societies and signaled the demise of great collective movements against war, social injustice, inequality, racism and sexism.

Today, the long sleep may be over. The young are stirring again. Gradually. The thousands in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader are part of this awakening – as are those who rallied to support Senator Bernie Sanders.

In Britain last week, Jeremy Corbyn’s closest ally, his shadow treasurer John McDonnell, committed a Labour government to pay off the debts of piratical banks and, in effect, to continue so-called austerity.

In the US, Bernie Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when she’s nominated. He, too, has voted for America’s use of violence against countries when he thinks it’s “right”. He says Obama has done “a great job”.

In Australia, there is a kind of mortuary politics, in which tedious parliamentary games are played out in the media while refugees and Indigenous people are persecuted and inequality grows, along with the danger of war. The government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a so-called defence budget of $195 billion that is a drive to war. There was no debate. Silence.

What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action, unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world? Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?

Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?

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The Arab Spring: Made in the USA

March 22nd, 2018 by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall

This article was first crossposted on GR in October 2015.

Arabesque$: Enquête sur le rôle des États-Unis dans les révoltes arabes (Investigation into the US Role in the Arab Uprisings) is an update of Ahmed Bensaada’s 2011 book L’Arabesque Américaine. It concerns the US government role in instigating, funding and coordinating the Arab Spring “revolutions.”

Most of this history has been carefully suppressed by the western media.The new book devotes much more attention to the personalities leading the 2011 uprisings. Some openly admitted to receiving CIA funding. Others had no idea because it was deliberately concealed from them. A few (in Egypt and Syria) were officially charged with espionage. In Egypt, seven sought refuge in the US embassy in Cairo and had to be evacuated by the State Department.

Democracy: America’s Biggest Export

According to Bensaada, the MENA Arab Spring revolutions have four unique features in common:

None were spontaneous – all required careful and lengthy (5+ years) planning, by the State Department, CIA pass through foundations, George Soros, and the pro-Israel lobby.¹
All focused exclusively on removing reviled despots without replacing the autocratic power structure that kept them in power.
No Arab Spring protests made any reference whatsoever to powerful anti-US sentiment over Palestine and Iraq.
All the instigators of Arab Spring uprisings were middle class, well educated youth who mysteriously vanished after 2011.

Nonviolent Regime Change

Bensaada begins by introducing non-violent guru Gene Sharp (see The CIA and Nonviolence), his links with the Pentagon and US intelligence, and his role, as director of the Albert Einstein Institution, in the “color” revolutions.²in Eastern Europe and the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002.))

The US goal in the Arab Spring revolutions was to replace unpopular despotic dictators while taking care to maintain the autocratic US-friendly infrastructure that had brought them to power. All initially followed the nonviolent precepts Sharp outlines in his 1994 book From Dictatorship to Democracy. In Libya, Syria and Yemen, the US and their allies were clearly prepared to introduce paid mercenaries when their Sharpian “revolutions” failed to produce regime change.

Follow the Money

Relying mainly on Wikileaks cables and the websites of key CIA pass through foundations (which he reproduces in the appendix), Bensaada methodically lists every State Department conference and workshop the Arab Spring heroes attended, the dollar amounts spent on them by the State Department and key “democracy” promoting foundations³, the specific involvement of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Obama’s 2008 Internet campaign team in training Arab Spring cyperactivists in encryption technologies and social media skills, US embassy visits, and direct encounters with Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, John McCain, Barack Obama and Serbian trainers from CANVAS (the CIA-backed organization that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic in 2000).

Bensaada focuses most heavily on the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt. TheWashington Post has estimated approximately 10,000 Egyptians took part in NED and USAID training in social media and nonviolent organizing techniques. For me the most astonishing information in this chapter concerned the role of an Egyptian exile (a former Egyptian policeman named Omar Afifi Suleiman) in coordinating the Tahrir Square protests from his office in Washington DC. According to Wikileaks, NED paid Suleiman a yearly stipend of $200,000+ between 2008-2011.

When Nonviolence Fails

Arabesques$ devotes far more attention to Libya, Syria and Yemen than Bensaada’s first book.

In the section on Libya, Bensaada zeroes in on eleven key US assets who engineered the overthrow of Gaddafi. Some participated in the same State Department trainings as the Middle East opposition activists and instigated nonviolent Facebook and Twitter protests to coincide with the 2011 uprisings in Tunisian and Egypt. Others, in exile, underwent guerrilla training sponsored by the CIA, Mossad, Chad and Saudi Arabia. A few months after Gaddafi’s assassination, some of these same militants would lead Islamic militias attempting to overthrow Assad in Syria.

Between 2005 and 2010, the State Department funneled $12 million to opposition groups opposed to Assad. The US also financed Syrian exiles in Britain to start an anti-government cable TV channel they beamed into Syria.

In the section on Syria, Bensaada focuses on a handful of Syrian opposition activists who received free US training in cyberactivism and nonviolent resistance beginning in 2006. One, Ausama Monajed, is featured in the 2011 film How to Start a Revolution about a visit with Gene Sharp in 2006. Monajed and others worked closely with the US embassy, funded by the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI). This is a State Department program that operates in countries (such as Libya and Syria) where USAID is banned.

In February 2011, these groups posted a call on Twitter and Facebook for a Day of Rage. Nothing happened. When Sharpian techniques failed to produce a sizable nonviolent uprising, as in Libya, they and their allies (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and Jordan) were all set up to introduce Islamic mercenaries (many directly from Libya) to declare war on the Assad regime.

Notes

I was astonished to learn that Forum Fikra, a forum for Arab activists working against authoritarian governments, was mainly funded by the Nathan and Esther K Wagner Family Foundation. The latter also funds numerous pro-Israel groups and projects, as well as the Washington Institute for Near East policy (a pro-Israel group with close ties to AIPAC).
The color revolutions were CIA-instigated uprisings that replaced democratically elected pro-Russian governments with equally autocratic governments more friendly to US corporate interests:
Serbia (2000) – Bulldozer Revolution
Georgia (2002) – Rose Revolution
Ukraine (2004) – Orange Revolution
Kyrgyzstan (2005) – Tulip Revolution
Democracy promoting foundations (as used here, “democracy” is synonymous with capitalism, ie favorable to the interests of US investors). Here are seven of the main ones involved in funding and training Arab Spring activists:
• USAID (US Agency for International Development) – State Department agency charged with economic development and humanitarian aid with a long history of financing destabilization activities, especially in Latin America.
• NED (National Endowment for Democracy) – national organization supported by State Department and CIA funding dedicated to the promotion of democratic institutions throughout the world, primary funder of IRI and NDI.
• IRI (International Republican Institute) – democracy promoting organization linked with the Republican Party, currently chaired by Senator John McCain and funded by NED.
• NDI (National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) – democracy promoting organization linked with the Democratic Party, currently chaired by Madeline Albright and funded by NED.
• OSI (Open Society Institute) – founded by George Soros in 1993 to help fund color revolutions in Eastern Europe. Also contributed major funding to Arab Spring revolutions.
• Freedom House – US organization that supports nonviolent citizens initiatives in societies were liberty is denied or threatened, financed by USAID, NED and the Soros Foundation.
• CANVAS (Center for Applied Non Violent Action and Strategies) – center originally founded by the Serbian activists of Otpor who the US funded and trained to over throw Slobodan Milosevic and who were instrumental in training Arab Spring activists. Funded by Freedom House, IRI and OSI.

Dr. Bramhall is a retired American psychiatrist and political refugee in New Zealand. She has published a free, downloadable non-fiction ebook 21st Century Revolution. Her first book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee describes the circumstances that led her to leave the US in 2002. Email her at: [email protected].Read other articles by Stuart Jeanne, or visit Stuart Jeanne’s website.

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Hillary Clinton Approved Delivering Libya’s Sarin Gas to Syrian Rebels: Seymour Hersh

March 22nd, 2018 by Eric Zuesse

Relevant article selected from the GR archive, first crossposted on GR in May 2016.

The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the London Review of Books («Whose Sarin?» and «The Red Line and the Rat Line») has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles.

Hersh also said that a secret agreement in 2012 was reached between the Obama Administration and the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, to set up a sarin gas attack and blame it on Assad so that the US could invade and overthrow Assad. «By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria».

Hersh didn’t say whether these «arms» included the precursor chemicals for making sarin which were stockpiled in Libya, but there have been multiple independent reports that Libya’s Gaddafi possessed such stockpiles, and also that the US Consulate in Benghazi Libya was operating a «rat line» for Gaddafi’s captured weapons into Syria through Turkey. So, Hersh isn’t the only reporter who has been covering this. Indeed, the investigative journalist Christoph Lehmann headlined on 7 October 2013, «Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria» and reported, on the basis of very different sources than Hersh used, that «Evidence leads directly to the White House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia´s Interior Ministry».

And, as if that weren’t enough, even the definitive analysis of the evidence that was performed by two leading US analysts, the Lloyd-Postal report, concluded that, «The US Government’s Interpretation of the Technical Intelligence It Gathered Prior to and After the August 21 Attack CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT». Obama has clearly been lying.

However, now, for the first time, Hersh has implicated Hillary Clinton directly in this «rat line». In an interview with Alternet.org, Hersh was asked about the then-US-Secretary-of-State’s role in the Benghazi Libya US consulate’s operation to collect weapons from Libyan stockpiles and send them through Turkey into Syria for a set-up sarin-gas attack, to be blamed on Assad in order to ‘justify’ the US invading Syria, as the US had invaded Libya to eliminate Gaddafi. Hersh said: «That ambassador who was killed, he was known as a guy, from what I understand, as somebody, who would not get in the way of the CIA. As I wrote, on the day of the mission he was meeting with the CIA base chief and the shipping company. He was certainly involved, aware and witting of everything that was going on. And there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel».

Seymour Hersh Says Hillary Approved Sending Libya’s Sarin to Syrian Rebels

This was, in fact, the Syrian part of the State Department’s Libyan operation, Obama’s operation to set up an excuse for the US doing in Syria what they had already done in Libya.

The interviewer then asked:

«In the book [Hersh’s The Killing of Osama bin Laden, just out] you quote a former intelligence official as saying that the White House rejected 35 target sets [for the planned US invasion of Syria] provided by the Joint Chiefs as being insufficiently painful to the Assad regime. (You note that the original targets included military sites only – nothing by way of civilian infrastructure.) Later the White House proposed a target list that included civilian infrastructure. What would the toll to civilians have been if the White House’s proposed strike had been carried out?»

Hersh responded by saying that the US tradition in that regard has long been to ignore civilian casualties; i.e., collateral damage of US attacks is okay or even desired (so as to terrorize the population into surrender) – not an ‘issue’, except, perhaps, for the PR people.

The interviewer asked why Obama is so obsessed to replace Assad in Syria, since «The power vacuum that would ensue would open Syria up to all kinds of jihadi groups»; and Hersh replied that not only he, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff, «nobody could figure out why». He said, «Our policy has always been against him [Assad]. Period». This has actually been the case not only since the Party that Assad leads, the Ba’ath Party, was the subject of a shelved CIA coup-plot in 1957 to overthrow and replace it; but, actually, the CIA’s first coup had been not just planned but was carried out in 1949 in Syria, overthrowing there a democratically elected leader, in order to enable a pipeline for the Sauds’ oil to become built through Syria into the largest oil market, Europe; and, construction of the pipeline started the following year.

But, there were then a succession of Syrian coups (domestic instead of by foreign powers – 1954, 1963, 1966, and, finally, in 1970), concluding in the accession to power of Hafez al-Assad during the 1970 coup. And, the Sauds’ long-planned Trans-Arabia Pipeline has still not been built. The Saudi royal family, who own the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, don’t want to wait any longer. Obama is the first US President to have seriously tried to carry out their long-desired «regime change» in Syria, so as to enable not only the Sauds’ Trans-Arabian Pipeline to be built, but also to build through Syria the Qatar-Turkey Gas Pipeline that the Thani royal family (friends of the Sauds) who own Qatar want also to be built there. The US is allied with the Saud family (and with their friends, the royal families of Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, and Oman). Russia is allied with the leaders of Syria – as Russia had earlier been allied with Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile, Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, and Yanukovych in Ukraine (all of whom except Syria’s Ba’ath Party, the US has successfully overthrown).

Hersh was wrong to say that «nobody could figure out why» Obama is obsessed with overthrowing Assad and his Ba’ath Party, even if nobody that he spoke with was willing to say why. They have all been hired to do a job, which didn’t change even when the Soviet Union ended and the Warsaw Pact was disbanded; and, anyone who has been at this job for as long as those people have, can pretty well figure out what the job actually is – even if Hersh can’t.

Hersh then said that Obama wanted to fill Syria with foreign jihadists to serve as the necessary ground forces for his planned aerial bombardment there, and, «if you wanted to go there and fight there in 2011-2013, ‘Go, go, go… overthrow Bashar!’ So, they actually pushed a lot of people [jihadists] to go. I don’t think they were paying for them but they certainly gave visas».

However, it’s not actually part of America’s deal with its allies the fundamentalist-Sunni Arabic royal families and the fundamentalist Sunni Erdogan of Turkey, for the US to supply the salaries (to be «paying for them», as Hersh put it there) to those fundamentalist Sunni jihadists – that’s instead the function of the Sauds and of their friends, the other Arab royals, and their friends, to do. (Those are the people who finance the terrorists to perpetrate attacks in the US, Europe, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, India, Nigeria, etc. – i.e., anywhere except in their own countries.) And, Erdogan in Turkey mainly gives their jihadists just safe passage into Syria, and he takes part of the proceeds from the jihadists’ sales of stolen Syrian and Iraqi oil. But, they all work together as a team (with the jihadists sometimes killing each other in the process – that’s even part of the plan) – though each national leader has PR problems at home in order to fool his respective public into thinking that they’re against terrorists, and that only the ‘enemy’ is to blame. (Meanwhile, the aristocrats who supply the «salaries» of the jihadists, walk off with all the money.)

This way, US oil and gas companies will refine, and pipeline into Europe, the Sauds’ oil and the Thanis’ gas, and not only will Russia’s major oil-and-gas market become squeezed away by that, but Obama’s economic sanctions against Russia, plus the yet-further isolation of Russia (as well as of China and the rest of the BRICS countries) by excluding them from Obama’s three mega-trade-deals (TTIP, TPP & TISA), will place the US aristocracy firmly in control of the world, to dominate the 21st Century, as it has dominated ever since the end of WW II.

Then, came this question from Hersh: «Why does America do what it does? Why do we not say to the Russians, Let’s work together?» His interviewer immediately seconded that by repeating it, «So why don’t we work closer with Russia? It seems so rational». Hersh replied simply: «I don’t know». He didn’t venture so much as a guess – not even an educated one. But, when journalists who are as knowledgeable as he, don’t present some credible explanation, to challenge the obvious lies (which make no sense that accords with the blatantly contrary evidence those journalists know of against those lies) that come from people such as Barack Obama, aren’t they thereby – though passively – participating in the fraud, instead of contradicting and challenging it? Or, is the underlying assumption, there: The general public is going to be as deeply immersed in the background information here as I am, so that they don’t need me to bring it all together for them into a coherent (and fully documented) whole, which does make sense? Is that the underlying assumption? Because: if it is, it’s false.

Hersh’s journalism is among the best (after all: he went so far as to say, of Christopher Stephens, regarding Hillary Clinton, «there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel»), but it’s certainly not good enough. However, it’s too good to be published any longer in places like the New Yorker. And the reporting by Christof Lehmann was better, and it was issued even earlier than Hersh’s; and it is good enough, because it named names, and it explained motivations, in an honest and forthright way, which is why Lehmann’s piece was published only on a Montenegrin site, and only online, not in a Western print medium, such as the New Yorker. The sites that are owned by members of the Western aristocracy don’t issue reports like that – journalism that’s good enough. They won’t inform the public when a US Secretary of State, and her boss the US President, are the persons actually behind a sarin gas attack they’re blaming on a foreign leader the US aristocrats and their allied foreign aristocrats are determined to topple and replace.

Is this really a democracy?

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For These Children of Iraq, Help Did Not Arrive

March 22nd, 2018 by Claudia Lefko

Featured image: Dr. Hasanein Ghali takes temperature of a critically ill boy in Iraq. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)

In the end, help did not arrive.

In 2001, a 10-year old boy sketched this image of his sister, Faiza Amir, in her sick-bed at what is now Children’s Welfare Teaching Hospital (CWTH) in Medical City Baghdad and then, in large letters above the drawing, he made his plea, in English: “Help Cheldrin (sic) in Iraq.” Nearly all the drawings had written messages asking for help. Many asked for God’s help.

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Muhanad Shawki directed his plea to a genie floating from a magic lantern: “I want to get out of the hospital,” he wrote on his perfectly rendered Disney-esque drawing of Aladdin.

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The message was the drawing by 8-year-old Heerum Ali, terminally ill with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Arabic script in bright orange crayon fills the paper : “I don’t want presents, I want to live.”

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But help did not arrive. Not for Faiza, or Muhanad or Heerum; all three children died from childhood cancer.

Faiza died from ALL (acute lymphoblastic leukemia) only days after her brother gave me his drawing as part of the Iraqi Children’s Art Exchange. Muhanad and Heerum relapsed after their treatment and also died. Help did not arrive for children and it did not arrive for the doctors and nurses who struggled to care for them without adequate facilities, drugs or adequately trained personnel in a country devastated by the First Gulf War and isolated from the international community by stringent UN-imposed economic sanctions backed by the U.S. government. Help did not arrive, and the humanitarian crisis continued to deepen.

And then, in March 2003—fifteen years ago this month—the U.S. and a few allies waged yet another brutal war, dealing a further blow to an already devastated country and people. Still, in the months following the invasion, there was some hope in this Baghdad hospital that the worst was over, that the tide would turn, and that Iraq and Iraq’s healthcare system could begin to recover and rebuild.

Dr. Salma, the director of the pediatric oncology unit at CWTH traveled to Jordan in June 2003 for a meeting to discuss the status of children with cancer in Iraq, to strategize and develop a plan of action with the international community. The statistics were terrible. The Under 5 Mortality Rate (U5MR) had tripled in the decade 1990-2000. More than a 500,000 Iraqi children had already died, a fact confirmed by then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in her now infamous 60 Minutes interview with Leslie Stahl in 1998.

Everyone agreed children’s overall health had declined significantly. However, they needed more information and they needed more data. They proposed an international medical team should go to Iraq to conduct a comprehensive, nation-wide health assessment of children which would help determine the needs and where and what resources would be required. “But,” she told me, “nobody came because of security concerns. Nobody came.” That was in 2003.

I was in Baghdad in January of this year, visiting on the pediatric oncology unit at CWTH, the unit where the Iraqi Children’s Art Exchange began in 2001. But help has still not arrived. Aside from a dedicated group in Japan and telemedical-collaboration from an Italian NGO working with a hospital in Rome for a few years, help has not arrived for children with cancer in Iraq. To this day, no one has been willing to come.

This is the unseen cost of three decades of war in Iraq. The health care system is in ruins as are health care facilities. Doctors, especially in a highly specialized field such as oncology, need help after years of isolation created by UN Sanctions, war and violence. They need help from the global health community and from global cancer organizations concerned about the “cancer divide.”

Iraq, once the gold-standard of medical education and care in the Middle East now finds itself on the wrong side of this divide without adequately trained doctors and nurses. And no one is offering to help.

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

Claudia Lefko, a long-time educator, activist and advocate for children, is the founding director of The Iraqi Children’s Art Exchange and its project, Baghdad Resolve: An International Collaboration to Improve Cancer Care in Iraq.

All images in this article are from the author.

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Tags: Children’s Welfare Teaching Hospital, iraq

Albanian Ethnographic Origins and Kosovo-Metochia

March 21st, 2018 by Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović

The topic to be addressed in this text is the basic misconception on the question of the Balkan Albanian ethnogenesis [formation of an ethnic group] and national identity that was framed by extremely geo-politically coloured German-based “Illyrian” theory of the Albanian ethnic and cultural origin.

This (quasi) theory, unfortunately, has very deep and negative regional political-security consequences. The implementation of the “Illyrian” theory of the Albanian ethnogenesis was accepted firstly by the Rilindja, (the Renaissance)–the Albanian nationalistic and chauvinistic political movement in 1878–1913 for the sake of creating the ethnically pure Greater Albania as a national state of all Balkan Albanians composed by self-interpreted all ethnographic and (quasi) historical “Albanian” territories at the expense of historical truth, justice as well as the Slavic and the Greek national interest.

The so-called “Illyrian” theory of the ethnic origin of the Albanians (created by the German and the Austrian scholars) became purposely the most popular theory of the Albanian nation’s derivation among the majority of Albanian scholars, politicians, and intellectuals. The crucial and concluding point of this theory (in fact, it is actually a non-provable hypothesis) is that the Albanians are an authentic nation (ethnolinguistic group) of the Balkans, the oldest, aboriginal and autochthonous one in this part of Europe. As a result, the Albanians’ South Slavic neighbours (the Serbs-Montenegrins, and Macedonian Slavs) in contrast to the “indigenous” Albanians are just “newcomers” to the Balkans (who arrived at this peninsula “only” at the turn of the 7^th century AD). Therefore, their ethnicity and nationality are much more recent than that of the Albanians.

Subsequently, “historical rights” of the Balkan (quasi) autochthonous Albanian population on certain disputed Balkan territories (primarily between the Albanians and the South Slavs but also and between the Albanians and the Greeks) are stronger, more justifiable and historically more deeply rooted than the “historical rights” of the Serbs-Montenegrins or Macedonian Slavs. For that reason, it is expected that a “democratic” West will support the “justifiable” Albanian imperialistic territorial claims framed by the nationalistic idea of a united Greater Albania.

Nevertheless, shortly, according to the theory of the Illyrian-Albanian (quasi) ethnolinguistic continuity, the Albanians are descendants of the ancient Balkan population – the Illyrians. The national name of the Albanians has to come from the name of one Illyrian tribe – the Albanoi. Furthermore, the tribal name, Albanoi, was the designation applied to the entire number of the Illyrian tribes around the Ionian Sea.

However, the proponents of the Illyrian theory of the Albanian ethnographic origin built their scientifically unproved hypothesis mostly on the pure speculation that the modern Albanian language is directly descended from the ancient Illyrian one as well as that both of them belong to the same Indo-European language-group.

Nevertheless, this claim is extremely disputed by the contemporary linguistic science. The fact is that the Albanian language as a spoken language of the inhabitants of present-day Albania was not mentioned in any historical source until 1285 when it is for the first time recorded under this name in the manuscripts from Dubrovnik in which the language was referred to as lingua albanesesca. The name for the land – Albanon (the territory on which the Albanian language speakers live) is derived from the name of the language. This term for Albania, according to the supporters of this theory, appears in several 13^th-century Latin dictionaries, as well as in some of the Byzantine historical sources. The medieval sources referred to the region between Mache river on the north and Schumbe river on the south (both in present-day Albania) as Arbanon (or Arber) but without any connection with the Albanian ethnic name. The Serbs who were living there before the Albanians occupied this territory coming from Sicily in the year of 1043 called this region as Raban. According to the 2^nd century Greek geographer Ptolemy, this territory was settled by the Albanoi tribe which was of the Illyrian origin. However, the name of the Balkan Albania and subsequently of the ethnic Albanians is not derived from Albanoi or Arbanon but rather from the town-name of Albanopolis or Albanum (White Town or Belgrade).

The partisans of the Illyrian (quasi) theory of the Albanian origin speak in support of the school of thought on the origin and evolution of the Illyrians, which claims that the ancient Illyrians did not migrate to the Balkans. Instead, they were an autochthonous people in this part of Europe and even one of the oldest settlers in Europe. It has been suggested that the Albanians, as the direct ethnic, political and cultural offspring of the ancient Illyrians, are the original and indigenous inhabitants of the Balkans, even more, aboriginal than the ancient Greeks since the ancient Greeks migrated to the Balkans in two great migration waves: first, around 2000 BC, and secondly (Dorians), around 1200 BC. Clearly, Albanian “historical” rights had to be much stronger, justifiable and historically deeper based in comparison to the Serbian-Montenegrin, Greek or Macedonian Slavs’ and Bulgarian rights with respect to several Balkan territories of doubtful authenticity. In other words, the Albanians are seen as the “hosts” while their all neighbors are the “guests” in the Balkan Peninsula. American medievalist John V. A. Fine simplified the crucial point of the (quasi) theory of the Illyrian-Albanian ethnical-cultural-political continuity, writing that:

“…if the Illyrians were the ancestors of the Albanians, then the Albanians, as original inhabitants, have some historical right to that region and possibly rights to other regions which had been settled by Illyrians. And their Illyrian ancestry has been very important in Albanian nation-building myths”[Fine J., The Early Medieval Balkans, Ann Arbor, 1994, 10].

The pivotal aspect (from a historical-political point of view) of the Illyrian (quasi) theory is the claim that the Illyrian-Albanian tribes withdrew from the vast areas of the Balkans settling in the Balkan coastal towns and in the mountains of present-day Albania, Epirus, Macedonia and Montenegro during the alleged Slavic invasion and occupation of the Balkans in the 6^th and 7^th centuries. However, according to this (quasi) theory, Kosovo-Metochia was the only fertile lowlands in the entire Balkan Peninsula, which were somehow not abandoned by the Romanized Illyrians-Albanians. As a result, the Albanians of the (quasi) Illyrian ethnic origin were and are considered as an autochthonous population of Kosovo-Metochia (in fact, Ancient Serbia) while the Slavonic Serbs-Montenegrins were looked upon as newcomers and occupiers in the region of Kosovo-Metochia. Shortly, the Illyrian-Albanian (quasi) historical and ethnic rights to Kosovo-Metochia – the land claimed by both the Albanians and their Serb-Montenegrin neighbors – had to be some 15 centuries older than the Slavonic Serbian-Montenegrin historical and ethnic claims to the same territories, according to the (quasi) theory of the Illyrian-Albanian ethnogenesis.

This (quasi) theory emphasizes that in present-day North Albania an extensive settlement of old inhabitants emerged after the occupation of the Balkans by the more powerful South Slavonic tribes. There is particular emphasis on this part of the Illyrian (quasi) theory during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 as a way of refuting Serbia’s claims on the territory of the North Albania – a territory populated by the Serbs before 1043 when the Albanians became a Balkan people. Furthermore, it is claimed that the Illyrian-Albanian population from the lowland of Kosovo-Metochia began to come under the Slavonic political-cultural influence, while the Illyrian-Albanian mountainous tribes from the Albanian highlands, who had fewer contacts with the Slavs, succeeded in maintaining their social system and cultural inheritance without alteration. The defenders of this (quasi) theory claim that the Byzantine province of Theme Dyrrhachium (which was established around 809 and covered the entire present-day Albania’s territory, part of the North Epirus, the West Macedonia and the main part of the Montenegrin littoral with the area of Scodralake) was inhabited by the Albanians who “caused the region to develop a special (Albanian) character”. Charles I of Naples (1227–1285) established his own feudal domain under the name of the Regnum Albanai, which is tendentiously considered in the Albanian historiography as the first Albanian national state, located on the territory of the Byzantine Theme Dyrrhachium. Its capital became the city of Dyrrhachium (Durazo in the Italian, Durës in the Albanian or Drač in the Serbian).

In essence, an official Albanian (quasi)theory of the Albanian ethnogenesis is heavily politicized and directed to the creation of a Greater Albania which will include among other “Albanian” lands and South Serbia’s province of Kosovo-Metochia – a cradle of the Serbian nation called by the Serbs as Ancient Serbia.

Prof. Dr Vladislav B. Sotirovic is Founder & Director of the Private Research Centre “The Global Politics” (www.global-politics.eu), Ovsishte, Serbia. Personal web platform: www.global-politics.eu/sotirovic; Contact: [email protected].

Prof. Sotirovic is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Tags: Albania, Balkans, Illyrian, Macedonian Slavs, Serbs-Montenegrins

Why Are Syrian Refugees Returning to Their Homes?

March 21st, 2018 by Inside Syria Media Center

A study has found that some Syrian refugees are returning to their homes despite the ongoing conflict due to difficult conditions that they have met within bordering nations. However, the returnees have found neither security nor decent living conditions on their return. On the basis of studies and interviews conducted by humanitarian organizations and research institutes, most Syrian IDPs and refugees really want the chance to return home but the situation in the country is still dangerous in some provinces due to the ongoing conflict. Nevertheless, a small number of refugees voluntarily return to Syria every month.

This may seem like a positive development. A study by Durable Solutions Platform (DSP), a research initiative led by NGOs, found that these returns are due to unsafe, precarious living conditions in exile first of all. Though some Syrian experts claim this is a kind of a sign that the situation in Syria has improved. This is proved by some German politicians.

According to DPS, refugees face severe challenges in securing decent standards of living in Syria’s neighboring countries. Over half of Syrian refugees in the region live below the poverty line.Barriers to accessing health and education services are leaving an alarming 43 percent of refugee children out of school. The research stressed that many Syrians feel alienated from the communities hosting them and that discrimination is common. The harsh conditions of day-to-day life and the constant feeling of being a burden on host societies makes many refugees lose hope that their situation will improve. The typical Syrian refugee’s daily life in Europe is too bad, in fact.

In a recent study, DSP interviewed 400 Syrian returnees on their lives as IDPs, their decision to return and their situation on their return. Economic hardship and discrimination in countries of asylum were among the primary reasons for refugees to return: 61 percent of returnees report the lack of secure income as the main reason to return, while 43 percent could no longer cope with the humiliation and discrimination in asylum countries. The latter trend was particularly strong among those returning from Lebanon, where some refugees also indicated feeling increasingly unsafe. Seventy-one percent of refugees indicated that homesickness was a strong pull factor to return. Also returning home became the only way to keep families together. Nearly 40 percent of refugee returnees had returned for this purpose.

Meanwhile, refugees say they are happy to be home. Many of them returned to Aleppo. The city is largely at peace now after government forces defeated rebels there in December 2016.

In fact, the situation in provinces is improving with every passing day as the Syrian Government is doing its best to develop opportunities for IDPs. Despite the fact that in the cities there are still so many economic and housing problems and many of villages are suffering from the lack of jobs, the government successfully coped with the restoration of water supply and electricity. The security of the locals is now guaranteed by the Syrian Arab army (SAA) and the authorities are currently restoring communications including the airport damaged as a result of the invasion of opposition fighters. The returning families expressed their gratitude to the Syrian Arab Army and the Lebanese resistance for the sacrifices they made to liberate their towns and to restore security and stability to them, which allowed them to return home.

The locals say the Official Government calls its nationals for returning to their homeland more actively. The state makes every effort to rebuild the infrastructure destroyed, to organize uninterrupted food supplies, and to ensure the security of the locals.

This article was originally published on Inside Syria Media Center.

Featured image is from ISMC.

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Tags: IDP, Syria, Syrian refugees

Building the Iron Wall: Facebook, Google, Twitter Algorithms That Steer Traffic Away From Progressive Websites

March 21st, 2018 by Chris Hedges

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, along with 18 members of the House of Representatives—15 Republicans and three Democrats—has sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions demanding that the Qatari-run Al-Jazeera television network register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The letter was issued after Al-Jazeera said it planned to air a documentary by a reporter who went undercover to look into the Israel lobby in the United States. The action by the senator and the House members follows the decision by the Justice Department to force RT America to register as a foreign agent and the imposition of algorithms by Facebook, Google and Twitter that steer traffic away from left-wing, anti-war and progressive websites, including Truthdig. It also follows December’s abolition of net neutrality.

The letter asks the Justice Department to investigate “reports that Al Jazeera infiltrated American non-profit organizations.” It says that the

“content produced by this network often directly undermines American interests with favorable coverage of U.S. State Department-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria.”

“American citizens deserve to know whether the information and news media they consume is impartial, or if it is deceptive propaganda pushed by foreign nations,” the letter reads.

The ominous assault on the final redoubts of a free press, through an attempt to brand dissidents, independent journalists and critics of corporate power and imperialism as agents of a foreign power, has begun. FARA, until recently, was a little-used regulation, passed in 1938 to combat Nazi propaganda. The journalists Max Blumenthal and Ali Abunimah do a good job of addressing the issue in this clip on The Real News Network.

Those who challenge the dominant corporate narrative already struggle on the margins of the media landscape. The handful of independent websites and news outlets, including this one, and a few foreign-run networks such as Al-Jazeera and RT America, on which I host a show, “On Contact,” are the few platforms left that examine corporate power and empire, the curtailment of our civil liberties, lethal police violence and the ecocide carried out by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries, as well as cover the war crimes committed by Israel and the U.S. military in the Middle East. Shutting down these venues would ensure that the critics who speak through them, and oppressed peoples such as the Palestinians, have no voice left.

I witnessed and was at times the victim of black propaganda campaigns when I was a foreign correspondent. False accusations are made anonymously and then amplified by a compliant press. The anonymous site PropOrNot, replicating this tactic, in 2016 published a blacklist of 199 sites that it alleged, with no evidence, “reliably echo Russian propaganda.” More than half of those sites were far-right, conspiracy-driven ones. But about 20 of the sites were progressive, anti-war and left-wing. They included AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig, Truthout, CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web Site.

PropOrNot charged that these sites disseminated “fake news” on behalf of Russia, and the allegations became front-page news in The Washington Post in a story headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during the election, experts say.” Washington Post reporter Craig Timberg wrote in that article that the goal of “a sophisticated Russian propaganda effort,” according to “independent researchers who have tracked the operation,” was “punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy.”

To date, no one has exposed who operates PropOrNot or who is behind the website. But the damage done by this black propaganda campaign and the subsequent announcement by Google and other organizations such as Facebook last April that they had put in filters to elevate “more authoritative content” and marginalize “blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information” have steadily diverted readers away from some sites. The Marxist World Socialist Web Site, for example, has seen its traffic decline by 75 percent. AlterNet’s search traffic is down 71 percent, Consortium News is down 72 percent, and Global Research and Truthdig have seen declines. And the situation appears to be growing worse as the algorithms are refined.

Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post and the founder and CEO of Amazon, has, like Google and some other major Silicon Valley corporations, close ties with the federal security and surveillance apparatus. Bezos has a $600 million contract with the CIA. The lines separating technology-based entities such as Google and Amazon and the government’s security and surveillance apparatus are often nonexistent. The goal of corporations such as Google and Facebook is profit, not the dissemination of truth. And when truth gets in the way of profit, truth is sacrificed.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence France-Presse and CNN have all imposed or benefited from the algorithms or filters—overseen by human “evaluators.” When an internet user types a word in a Google search it is called an “impression” by the industry. These impressions direct the persons making the searches to websites that use the words or address the issues associated with them. Before the algorithms were put in place last April, searches for terms such as “imperialism” or “inequality” directed internet users mostly to left-wing, progressive and anti-war sites. Now they are directed primarily to mainstream sites such as The Washington Post. If you type in “World Socialist Web Site,” which has been hit especially hard by the algorithms, you will be directed to the site—but you have to ask for it by name. Searches for associated words such as “socialist” or “socialism” are unlikely to bring up a list in which the World Socialist Web Site appears near the top.

There are 10,000 “evaluators” at Google, many of them former employees at counterterrorism agencies, who determine the “quality” and veracity of websites. They have downgraded sites such as Truthdig, and with the abolition of net neutrality can further isolate those sites on the internet. The news organizations and corporations imposing and benefiting from this censorship have strong links to the corporate establishment and the Democratic Party. They do not question corporate capitalism, American imperialism or rising social inequality. They dutifully feed the anti-Russia hysteria. An Al-Jazeera report on this censorship begins at 14:07 in this link.

The corporate oligarchs, lacking a valid response to the discrediting of their policies of economic pillage and endless war, have turned to the blunt instrument of censorship and to a new version of red baiting. They do not intend to institute reforms or restore an open society. They do not intend to address the social inequality behind the political insurgencies in the two major political parties and the hatred of the corporate state that spans the political spectrum. They intend to impose a cone of silence and the state-sanctioned uniformity of opinion that characterizes all totalitarian regimes. This is what the use of FARA, the imposition of algorithms and the attempt to blame Trump’s election on Russian interference is about. Critics and investigative journalists who expose the inner workings of corporate power are branded enemies of the state in the service of a foreign power. The corporate-controlled media, meanwhile, presents the salacious, the trivial and the absurd as news while fanning the obsession over Russia. This is one of the most ominous moments in American history. The complicity in this witch hunt by self-identified liberal organizations, including The New York Times and MSNBC, will come back to haunt them. When the voices for truth are erased, they will be next.

The steps to tyranny are always small, incremental and often barely noticed, as Milton Mayer wrote in “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945.” By the time a population wakes up, it is too late. He noted:

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and the worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. If, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you lived in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Despots, despite their proclaimed ideological, national and religious differences, speak the same language. Amoral, devoid of empathy and addicted to power and personal enrichment, they are building a world where all who criticize them are silenced, where their populations are rendered compliant by fear, constant surveillance and the loss of basic liberties and where they and their corporate enablers are the undisputed masters.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Qatari government is seeking to improve relations with the Trump administration by forging alliances with right-wing Jewish organizations in the United States. It has promised Jewish leaders, the paper reported, not to air the Al-Jazeera documentary about the Israel lobby. Al-Jazeera in 2016 shut down Al-Jazeera America, which broadcast to U.S. audiences. With no broadcaster in the U.S., the program would have reached few American viewers even if Al-Jazeera had put it on the air.

Haaretz reported that Jewish organizational leaders who have visited Qatar in recent months include Mort Klein of the Zionist Organization of America; Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; Jack Rosen of the American Jewish Congress; Rabbi Menachem Genack of the Orthodox Union; Martin Oliner of the Religious Zionists of America; and attorney Alan Dershowitz.

“What these leaders share is that none of them are considered critics of the right-wing Netanyahu government in Israel or the Trump administration in Washington,” Haaretz correspondent Amir Tibon wrote in the newspaper.

The despotism of the United States and the despotism of Israel have found an ally in the despotism of Qatar. Professed beliefs are meaningless. Israel is bonded with the regime in Saudi Arabia and the Christian right in the United States, each of which is virulently anti-Semitic. Dissidents, including Jewish and Israeli dissidents, are attacked as “self-hating Jews” or anti-Semites only because they are dissidents. The word “traitor” or “anti-Semite” has no real meaning. It is used not to describe a reality but to turn someone into a pariah. The iron wall is rising. It will cement into place a global system of corporate totalitarianism, one in which the old vocabulary of human rights and democracy is empty and where any form of defiance means you are an enemy of the state. This totalitarianism is being formed incrementally. It begins by silencing the demonized. It ends by silencing everyone.

“You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand,” Bob Dylan sang in “Ballad of a Thin Man.” “You see somebody naked and you say, ‘Who is that man?’ You try so hard but you don’t understand just what you will say when you get home. Because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister.

Featured image is from Mr. Fish.

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Tags: free press, google algorithms, media, net neutrality, online censorship

Syrians Have Names and Faces

March 21st, 2018 by Mark Taliano

Feature image: Author Mark Taliano

NATO terrorists have murdered about 10,000[1] civilians in Damascus, in addition to the 40 + civilians that they murdered in SE Damascus on March 20, 2018. Meanwhile, the SAA and allies have lost about 545 soldiers in the last ten weeks trying to liberate East Ghouta, the area from which the terrorists fire missiles at students, men, women, children. And Canadians think Assad is the bad guy.[2]

None of the allegations against Assad and the Syrian government withstand the scrutiny of independent investigations. None.[3]

NATO imperialists create atrocity stories to demonize target leaders and to target prey countries with a view to fabricating consent to commit the Supreme International Crime of war of aggression. They have been fabricating consent and committing war crimes for the past seven years in Syria. We are accomplices in these crimes when we do not denounce our criminal governments.

Syrians have names and faces. Terrorists supported by Saudi Arabia, NATO, and most of Western media, murdered the people pictured below.

The Syrian soldiers and their allies, who are fighting international terrorism on behalf of all of us, also have names. These are the names of those who were martyred in the fight to Liberate #EastGhouta from the outset of the campaign in January:

1 – Major General Ahmed Mohamed El Housseynou as say / Idlib-Alzenbaka-population of Latakia
2 – Major: AarimeevV.g / Russia
3 – Major General Vladimir ViniaminovicArrecife / Russia
4 – Dean: Ali Diop / Guard Republican
5 – Brigadier Habib Mehrez Younis / Business Name-Qirdahh
6 – Brigadier: Mahmoud Ahmed Ma’touq / Business Name-Video
7 – Dean: Riaz Mohammad Ahmad / Business Name-protoplasm-Dalia
8 – Brigadier General Ahmad Jaber Al Humaidan / Homs Jpourin
9 – Dean: I Chagain . In / Russia
10 – Brigadier: Mohsen Younis Salem / Business Name-phosphene
11 – Colonel Ibrahim Younis hatched / Homs-Tlklkh-Hudaydah
12 – Colonel Haider Kamel Hassan / h R-experience bathroom
13 – Colonel: Fedun . In S / Russia
14. Colonel: Vladimir Vladimirovich / Russia
15. Colonel: Vyacheslav / Russia
16. Colonel: Mosyev Mikhail / Russia
17. Lieutenant Colonel: Harith Ismail New / Lattakia-Jabla-Bustan El-Pasha
18. Lt. Col. Ali Ahmed Eid / Homs-Zahra
19.
Lead :ShadiAloush / Tartous-HamamQunya 20. Major: Mahmud Muhammed Moulj / Hama-Musayaf-Reef
21. Major: Mohammad BahjatDiop / Lattakia-Beit Yashout
22. Major: Walid Jabbur Khalil / Homs-Hawash
23. Lead: Alexander Morozov / Russia
24. Lead: Smirnov. Russia
27 – Major:
EdekimovVektu / Russia
27. Lead: Alexei NikolaevichGuinayak / Russia
28. Major: Qais Mohammad Omran / Hama-Musayaf-Fendara
29 – Captain: Ahmed Ali Hammad / Tartous – Raml
30 – Captain: Bassel Emad Habib / Tartous – Banias – Tiru
31 – Captain: Mohammed Suhail Medhat / Homs – Kafr Abd
32 – Captain: Hossam Nizar Cross / Hama
– Waseem al-Hussein / Idlib-Maasran
34- Captain: Ali Nader Al-Na’imah / Hama-Salmiya
35- Captain: Mohammed Wassouf / Hama-Musayaf-Dirmama
36- Captain: Raki Abdel Karim Abdo / Homs-Safar
37- Captain: Dator
38 – Captain: KhaldounSulaimanEsber / Business Name-protoplasm-eye rift
39 – Captain: Balennox AA / Russia
40 – Captain: Trovanov a / Russia
41 – Captain: Jurban K / Russia
42 – Captain: Rasputin N.b – Medical Service / Russia
43 – Captain: Sashok AM / Russia
44 – Captain: Shinzift SV / Russia
45 – Captain: Qaiderkhov ESS / Russia
46 – Captain: YazenManhal Ibrahim / Hama – Musayaf – Bird
47 – Captain: Gorban Constantine / Russia
48 – Lieutenant: Abdul Rahim Mohammed Al – Mohammed / Damascus – Barzah Buildings
49 – Lieutenant: Ahmad Munir Alisha / Hama – HoratAmorin
50 – Lieutenant: Ali Yacoub Abu Ali / Lattakia – Qardaha – Dairutan
51 – Lieutenant: Mohammed Suleiman Daghla / Homs
– / Aleppo-Tedef-Abu Jabbar
53 – Lieutenant: Azzam Badi Suleiman / Tartous-Banias-Captain
54 – Lieutenant: Wissam Khaled Rahma / Hama-Barre eastern
55 – Lieutenant: Ali Ibrahim Ismail / Tartous-Anazh nostalgically
56 – Lieutenant: Iyad Ibrahim Al-Shamali / Tartous-Dreikish-Kolaa
57 – Lt. Ali Bilal Aboud / Business Name-protoplasm-Dalia
58 – Lieutenant: Yahya Abdul Karim Qinan / Aleppo
59 – Lieutenant Ali Sulaiman / Homs-short-Haouz
60 – Lt. Bassam Younis / Guard-cycle 71 war
61 – Lieutenant: Hazem Darwish / Guard-cycle 71 war
62 – Lieutenant: Habib news / Guard-cycle 71 war
63 – Lieutenant Khaled Mahfoud / Guard-cycle 71 war
64 – Lieutenant: Zulfiqar Harmoush / Guard-cycle 71 war
65 – Lieutenant: Mohammad Ahmad Haidar / Guard-cycle 71 war
66 – Lieutenant: Muhammad Malik Hassan / Hama-Musayaf-Shiha
67- Lieutenant: Salah Ali Al-Sayyid / Homs-Talkakh-Naara
68- Lieutenant: Majd Mohammed Ahmed / Lattakia-Ain Al-Tinah
69- Lieutenant: Hassan Ahmed Al-Haydar / Hama-Jarjra-
70 – Lieutenant: Ali Sulaiman Mohsen / Hama-Musayaf-Umrah
71 – Lieutenant: Mahmud Muhammad SulaimanAlush / Hama – Wadi Al Oyun – Kasuh
72 – Lieutenant: AlaaNidalHammoud / Tartous – Qadous – Quneya
73 – Lieutenant: MuhannadKasirZidan / Lattakia – Karsana
74 – Lieutenant: Fares Ramadan Al Ali / Hama – Musayaf -bachin
75 – Lieutenant: Yamen Mounir Habib / Business Name-Qirdahh-Msterh character
76 – Lieutenant: Naseem Hohr / Homs-Tlklkh-horsefly
77 – Lieutenant Ahmad Faisal hawks / Business Name-infidel
78 – Lieutenant: Nadeem Nabil Ismail / Tartous-Dreikish -d Mataro
79 – Lieutenant: harmony Mahmoud / Hama-jungle
80 – Lieutenant: Ali Nadeem Shaban / Hama-Salhab
81 – Lieutenant: Ghadeer Fayyad / Tartous-Zarkat
82 – Lieutenant: Wissam Ahmed Yahya / Kenitra-Roma
83 – Lieutenant Ammar Abd al-Karim Muhanna / Hama-Salhab
84 – Lieutenant: Fahd Ghassan Dardar / Hama-Salmiya-Tal New
85 – Lieutenant: Wael Mohammed Sulaiman / Tartous – Safita – HakherZehia
86 – Lieutenant: Salman Yasser Wahabi / Lattakia – Bahlutia
87 – Lieutenant: Jaafar Ahmad Dali / Hama – Rabiah
88 – Lieutenant: Rashid Mahfoud / Lattakia – Jablah
– Lieutenant: Salman prestige / Business Name-Rodo
90 – LT: O.hevchenko / Russia
91 – Lieutenant: AltonenK.n / Russia
92 – Lieutenant: D.savronov / Russia
93 – Lieutenant: Ev_ok of GS / Russia
94 – Lieutenant: M.banov / Russia
95 – Lieutenant: Hassan Khaski Soliman / Business Name-Bhloulih-high
96 – Lieutenant Samer Hussein / Business Name-protoplasm-pine
97 – Lieutenant Haider Ahmed Badran / Hama-appointed chrome-jungle
98 – Lieutenant: Ahmed Suhail We made it Qayat-Bayt Yashout-Kula’a
99 – Lieutenant: Hussam Ostrich / Business Name-protoplasm-Reef
100 – Lieutenant Samer Ali Hussein / Business Name-pine-pools Chamsine
101 – Lieutenant: Abbas Yousef Ramadan / Hama-Misyaf-Kafr colonel
102 – Lieutenant: Yamen honest shepherd / Homs Reeve
103 – Lieutenant: Khalil Mohamed Diop / Homs-openwork-Taldaa
104 – Lieutenant: Mudar Mohammad Macaiduc / Hama-Misyaf-kindergarten
105 – -: Ahmed Ali Eskandrany / Damascus
106 – – Ibrahim Hassan Mustafa / intelligence air
107 – -: Ibrahim Hussein Mohsen / Damascus-Zainab camp
108 – – Ibrahim Diab Abu Khalil / Damascus-Hrnh
109 – -: Ibrahim Taher Yousef / Business Name-protoplasm-cellar Awwamiyya
110 – -: Ibrahim Caesar Shaheen / Kenitra-Arnah
111 – -: Ibrahim Mohammed Ja’wair / Republican Guard
112 – – : Ihsan Da’bil / Swaida – criminal security
113 – -: Ingen Grapovski SV / Russia
114 – -: Ingen Gjujov MA / Russia
115 – -: Ayad Ayman Ibrahim / Hama – Salmiya – Saboura
116 – -: Iyad Jawdat Issa / Tartous
– : Aepfanov / Russia
118 – -: Ihab Abdel Wahed / Damascus-Madaya
119 – -: Abu Sami Mansour / Tartous-Banias-Anazh
120 – -: Ahmed Egyptian / Guard Republican
121 – – Ahmed Ibrahim Mahmoud / Business Name-protoplasm-Muthur
122 – -: Ahmed Ismail El Sayed / Damascus – Derakhbeh
123 – -: Ahmed Hassan Soliman / Tartous – Sheikh Badr – Jabbab
124 – -: Ahmed Hikmat Abu Durra / Tartous – Banias – bee Inventory
125 – -: Ahmed Khader Mehrez / Homs – Gabriya
126 – -: Ahmed Khalil-Hamada Radar / Tartus-Reef
127 – -: Ahmed Rashid Primo / Lattakia-Salm J
128 – -: Ahmed Samir Khatib / endosperm-residents Jaramana
129 – – Ahmed Abdul RazakDa’as / Kenitra-Joppa
130 – – Ahmed Abdullah Sheikh / Kenitra-residents M.allowavdan
131 – – Ahmed Abdul Majid Ismail / Damascus-Jubb’adin
132 – – Ahmed Adnan Ali / Tartous-Banias-Gulwa
133 – -: Ahmed Ali Abdullah / intelligence air
134 – – Ahmed Ali Assaf / Tartous-Banias-Deir inventory
135 – – Ahmad Imad al – Khatib / militia-Arab nationalist Guard
136 – – Ahmed Omar Al Nabhan / Hama – Qamhana
137 – -: Ahmed Majid Akkari / Homs – Akrama
138 – -: Ahmed Mohamed Al Zaher / Damascus – Beit Tema
139 – -: Ahmed Mohammed Yousef / Tartous – Sheikh Badr
– Ahmed Mamdouh Hurnana / air intelligence
141 – -: Ahmed Nadim Salim / Tartous-Sheikh Badr-Nimriya
142 – -: Ahmad Walid buckets / Hama-good forward
143 – -: Ahmed Yacoub Suliman / Business Name-protoplasm-Dalia
144 – -: Adib Adnan Bustami / Homs-Ikrima-saving
145 – -: Osama Almraqbi / Business Name-Qngerh
146 – – Osama Osama Ibrahim / Homs – Almakhram – Jib Abbas
147 – -: Osama Mohammed Khallouf / Hama – Musayaf – Zaghrain
148 – -: Osama Mamdouh Mohammed / Damascus – Solidarity
149 – -: Asad Bashir Shibli / Kenitra
– : Alexander Solubov / Russia
151 – – Amir Saeed Asaad / Hama-Misyaf-Bahra
152 – – Anas OstaHalabi / Damascus-news channel
153 – – Anas Kilani / Damascus-Otaiba
154 – – Oosepkin Alexander / Russia
155 – -: Ayman Nakkari / Homs-capillaries
156 – -: Ayman Saber Diab / Palestine
157 – -: Ayham Ahmad Ajamiyeh / Hama-Misyaf-Shiha
158 – -: Ayham Ayman Bose Honey / Damascus-Zahara
159 – -: Basil rice / Damascus-Guard Republican
160 – -: Basil Okush / Homs-Taldo-Hula
161 – -: Basil Fahd Hamada Hanash / Deir al – Zour
162 – -: Badr al- Din Abdul Latif mays / Damascus-field Hall
163 – -: Badr mays / Guard Republican
164 – -: Badr Abdel – sweet / Damascus-solidarity
165 – – Bassam Abdo Asami / Damascus-Building
166 – – Bassam Gharib Saleh / Hama-eye chrome-tear
167 – -: Bashar Aldndl / Deir al – Zour
168 – -: Bashar al- Khaled Talaa / Deir al – Zour
169 – -: Bashar Salim Aldbesa / endosperm-Arman
170 – – : Bashar Adnan Qatifah / Tartous-Banias-Sindyana
171 – -: Bashar Ali Aboud / Hama-Asilah-Al-Ghab
172 – -: Bashar Ayash / Hama-Salmiya-Khneves
173 – -: Bashar Mohammed Ismail / Hama – Tal Sakin Al-Qahada
174 – -: Bashar Noor Eddin / Idleb – inhabitants of Lattakia
175 – Zama
176 – -: Bashar Haitham Al-Jaban / Damascus-Qatana
177 – -: Bilal Awad / State Security
178 – -: Bahaa Hassan Mohammed Al Mousa / Kenitra – Reconciliation clan
179 – -: BahaaArefDaghman / Lattakia
– : Bogatirov / Russia
181 – – Ponomarev / Russia
182 – – Belov / Russia
183 – – Tamer Jamil Kbathil / Aleppo
184 – – Chapdarov b / Russia
185 – – facilitating Khudair / Damascus-Shia
186 – -: fixed Ahmed Melhem / Lattakia – Jablah – Qatilbba
187 – -: Thaer Khalil Yahya / Damascus-Kabbas
188 – -: Jafar Isa / Tartous-Safita-Kfrakhh
189 – -: Jaafar Mahmoud Suleiman / Tartous-Cadmus- and Yes
190 – – Jamil Musa Bush / Adalb- Foah
191 – -: George Tawfiq Al Nasr / Damascus-drummer
192 – – George Youssef Youssef / Tartous-Banias-Fayha
193 – -: Johnny Samir Esber / Tartous-Safita-Kafroun
194 – -: Hazim Mustafa Mustafa / Aleppo-militia air
195 – -: Hossam AdeebKaddour / Hama-Misyaf-Mushashin
196 – -: Hassan Ramiz Hammad / Tartous-Dreikish-February
197 – – Hassan conciliator Almagdr / Damascus-Zahara old
198 – -: Hassan Aga / Hama-peaceful
199 – -: Hassan Abdullah Ayyash / Homs-Ikrima
200 – – Hassan Abboud / Homs-Zahraa-Abasiya
201 – -: Hassan Ali Badran / Tartous-Dreikish
202 – -: Hassan Mohamed Mohamed / Tartous-net A
203 – -: Hassan Mohammed Mashmash / Damascus – Otaiba
204 – -: Hussein HikmatHarfous / Tartous – Banias – Kurdish
205 – -: Hussein Ali Ali / Aleppo – Militia Albaker
206 – -: Hussein Ali Hassan / Tartous – Sheikh Badr – Hanafiya
207 – -: Hussein Mamdouh Harrabeh / Damascus – Kafr Sousse
208 – -: Hamad Muamen Hassan / Damascus – AshrafiehSahnaya
209 – -: Hamza Samir Ahmed / Lattakia – Jblah – Bastoire
210
– : Haidar SaqrGajmoula / Hama-Misyaf-Mguibrh
212 – -: Haider Ghosn / Guard Republican
213 – -: Haider Faisal Yousef / Business Name-protoplasm-house Yashout
214 – -: Haidar Mahmoud parties / Business Name-protoplasm-Rumeileh
215 – -: Khaled Emad al-Rifai / Damascus – Diretia
216 – -: – Khaled Mahmoud Hamimi / Lattakia – Project B
217 – -: Khader Ahmed Taha / Homs – Ghor
218 – -: Khattar Khaled Younis / Hama-peaceful-Zgran
219 – -: Khalil Shukri Asaad / Business Name-Reef
220 – -: Khalil Mohammed Khrsh / Business Name-protoplasm-Jbebat
221 – -: Daniel Yasin / Tartous-Safita
222 – – : Diab Hussein Hammoud / Homs-Khirbet Ghazi
223 – -: Zulfikar Ibrahim Ahmed / Business Name-protoplasm-Valley uprooting
224 – -: RajehHshehadh / Damascus-livery-Gherkin Dannon
225 – -: Radi Mahmoud Alsnadiqi / Damascus-Gazzar
226 – – Rami Al – Hajji / Idlib-KafrTakharim
227 – – Raed Mohammed Eid / Kenitra-appointed Wit
228 – -: spring Ayman Ali / Tartous-Safita-Haddadiat
229 – -: spring Suleiman Ahmed / Business Name-protoplasm-Bsin
230 – -: Rabea Mohammed Shahin / Hama-Masiaf-Bashneen
231 – -: Rabea Noman / Tartous-Banias-Hareesoun
232 – -: Rajab Haider Jerda / Tartous-Broken Tower-Akkar
233 – – Rajab Mohammad Ali / Homs-Tlklkh-Jbak
234 – -: Radwan Rakan Salman / Tartous-Sheikh Badr-Noihh
235 – – Rana Fayez Hashim / Hama – Salama-Jadouh
236 – -: Rowad Ibrahim / Harass Jomhouri
237 – -: Rawad TawfiqMahfoud / Tartous – Sheikh Badr – Tireani
238 – -: Zakaria Abdullatif Shlash / Raqqa
239
– Samer Adnan Ali / Tartous-Safita
241 – – Samer Mohammed Hassan / Homs-or two – lane
242 – – Samer Hawash / Guard Republican
243 – -: Saad Khalaf Furaih / Deir al – Zour
244 – -: Socrates Hassan Saad / Homs-supervisor
245 – -: Solomon Aotaira / Business Name-Qirdahh-letter Msterh
246 – -: Samir N. Muhanna / Business Name-c A-Body
247 – -: Sommer Ibrahim Badran / Business Name-protoplasm-Valley gouge
248 – -: Sommer Ibrahim Muhanna / Business Name-Qirdahh-MushayrifaSamok
249 – -: SarznkovAa.o / Russia
250 – – Saif Abdul Rahman / Tartous-impregnable sea
251 – -: Shadi Diab Hassan / Homs-Reef
252 – -: Shadi Diab Rabona / Homs-Ikrima-Valley gold
253 – -: Shadi Mohamed Esber / Homs-cases
254 – -: Shadi Mohamed Shuhaiber / Aleppo
255 – -: Shehadeh Zuhair Alloush / Damascus-Otaiba
256 – – Shaaban Mohamed Srith / Homs-Tlklkh-Quriyat
257 – – net Yahya fault / endosperm-residents Jaramana
258 – -: Saleh Hassan Abu Zaher / Aleppo-militia Bagir
259 – -: Saleh Haidar Ahmad / Tartous-Safita-ratio
260 – -: Saleh Majid Akkari / Homs-Reef
261 -: – Stam Saleh insisted Valley / tenderness-clan veterinarians
262 – -: Safwan Hassan Deeb / Idlib-population protoplasm
263 – -: DiaaTurki Please / Deir Zour
264 – -: Tariq Hassan Hassan / Tartous-Sheikh Badr-lacuna is forced
265 – -: Tarek Hamdan / Tartous-suburb lion
266 – – Tariq Fayez Al-Rashwani / Damascus – Def Alsouk
267 – -: Taher Al-Dali-Sourani / Hama – Tire
268 – -: Talal Abdul Aziz Ramadan / Hama – Salmiya – Kitlon
269
– Adel Ghannoum / Hama-peaceful-Khunayfis
271 – -: Adel Mahmoud lack of / Guard Republican
272 – -: Atef al – Hindawi / Damascus-Sasa
273 – -: AmerAlKhozim / Deir al – Zour
t
274 – -: Amer Ali Rajab / Homs-Tlklkh -baaon
275 – -: Amer Ali breaker / Business Name-Qirdahh-Bsin
276 – -: Amer Mahmoud linden / Tartous-Safita-B Flour
277 – -: Abdullah Yassin Aleppo /
278 – -: Abdel Wahab Banat / Aleppo
279 – -: – Abdelhakim Suleiman Al Ajlani / Aleppo – Rural
280 – -: – Abdul Hamid Mohammed Aldafis / Damascus – Def Alsouk
281 – -:
282 – -: Abdulrahman Akkari / Homs-Khirbet figs
283 – – Abdulaziz Mahmoud Assaf / Hama-Misyaf-JubbRamlah
284 – -: Abdel QaderParotja / Aleppo-guard Republican
285 – -: Abdullah Ahmad Abu Aisha / Quneitra-Golan-camp Expats
286 – -: Abdullah Barakat Almrei / Aleppo branch air
287 – -: Abdullah Bilal / Idlib-Sgayn
288 – -: Abdullah Yasser salmon / Tartous-Cadmus-Saadanh
289 – -: Nasser Mohammed Al – Saeed / Hasaka
290 – -: Abdel Nour Ibrahim Peaceful / Daraa
291 – -: Osman Suleiman Sasani / Damascus-Kafr Sousse
292 – -: Adnan Jamal Hawks / Homs-Alsnkera
293 – -: Adnan Fares Khoury / Homs-Kfram
294 – -: loops Ahmed Sakr / Business Name-Reef
295 – -: Azzam Mohammad Ayoub Hassan / Tartous-Zarkat
296 – -: Essam Mohamed Issa / Tartous-Safita-accurate house of
297 – -: Attia Hamad forgetfulness / Hasaka-Ncohg
298 – -: AlaaBadr marrows / Aleppo-residents of Tartous
299 – -: Alaa Abdul Razak falconer / Hama-queso
300 – -: Alaa Abdullah Dawood / Business Name-protoplasm-towers
301 – -: Alaa Aziz Ismail / Business Name-protoplasm-sari character
302 – -: Alaa Mohammed Tahmaz / Homs-basement
303 – -: Alaa Yasser Sakr / Lattakia – Qardaha – Nniti
304 – -: Ali Al – Masri / Republican Guard
305 – -: Ali Ibrahim Hal M / Tartous-Banias – mean
306 -: Ali Abu Ghabra / Tartous – Banias – Blouse
307 – -: Ali Ahmed Al Ali / Homs – Talkel
– Baznaya 308 – -: Ali Ahmed Ismandar / Lattakia – Jblah – Bissein
309 – -: -aan sun
310 – – Ali Badi Hamada / Business Name-protoplasm-Germanic
311 – – Ali Haji Hammadi / Aleppo
312 – – Ali Dove / Hama-Misyaf-residents pISTON
313 – -: Ali Saeed Boyth / Damascus-validity
314 – -: Ali Salameh Salama / Hama – Msaiaf – Bira Inventory
315 – -: Ali Salhab / Jamshuri guards
316 – -: Ali Suleiman Musa / Lattakia – Beit Yashout
317 – -: Ali Samir Merhej / Tartous
– Suhail Wassouf / Lattakia-Jabla-Gniri
319 – -: Ali Abdullatif Safo / Tartous-Banias-Tiru
320 – -: Ali IssamSaqour / Lattakia-Sar Casey
321 – – Ali AlaaEddin / State Security
322 – – Ali Fayez Al Mirza – Hama – HoratAmorin
323 – – Ali Fouad Shama / Tartous – Banias – Rural
324 – – Ali Kasser Al Qabawi – Homs – Qusair
– – Ali Kazemer / Homs – Shiites Kafr Abd
326 – -: Ali Mohsen Mohamed / Tartous – Abu Afsa
327 – -: Ali Mohamed Ahmed – the outskirts / Lattakia – Jibla – Bordan
328 – -: Ali Mohamed Assaad / Tartous
– – Ali Muhammad Mesto / Homs – Shi’a Al Abbasia
330 – -: Ali Mohamed Nasser / Tartous – Safita – Umm Hosh
331 – -: Ali Mahmoud Khalil / Homs – Reef
332 – -: Ali Morshed Ayash / Hama-Masiaf-Bareen
333 – -: Ali Mansur Khaddour / Homs – basement
334 – -: Ali NazihTurkiAkkari / Hama-Salhab
335 – -: Ali Yasser Sultani / Lattakia-Qardaha
336 – -: Ali Yahya Shahoud Al-Shawardi / Hama-Morc
337 – -: Ali Yusuf / Lattakia – Qardaha – Kalmakho
338 – -: Ali Yousef Assaad / Hama – Wadi El Oyoun
339 – -: Emad Ali Ali / Hama-el-Ghab
340 – – Imad Issa Naev Yousef / Homs-Khansa
341 – -: Ammar Khalil Alsalhani / Damascus-validity
342 – -: Ammar Ali Burini / Homs-hidden
343 – -: Omar intruder / Deir Zour
344 – -: Omar Rais / Business Name-Aoanh
345 – -: Omar Ahmed Friday / Kenitra-Khan Arnaba
346 – -: Omar Khaled Houry / Aleppo
347 – -: Omar DerghamAwad / Guard Republican
348 – -: Omar Samir intruder / Deir Zour
349 – -: Imran Khalid Awwad / Damascus – Zabadani
350 – -: Anad Darwish Darwish / Homs-Sweiri
351 – -: Anan Anwar Asad / Business Name-protoplasm-Hrahar
352 – – era AlgelohShalash / Damascus-cotton
353 – -: Issa Hassan Dripati / Business Name-Qngerh
354 – -: Issa wondrous / Hama-Misyaf-Jbesnah
355 – – : 358 – -: Ghassanfar Fahad Shahin / Tartous – Safita – Kfriha
356 – -: Ghareeb Al Mawly / Hama – Salmiya
357 – -: Ghassan Mustafa Rashid / Damascus – Nabek
358 –
endosperm-R’ha
360 – -: Ghyath Mohammed Melhem / Tartous-Sheikh Badr-Dlabh
361 – -: Fadi Amin Younis / Homs-Gananat
362 – -: Fadi Hanna Tohme / Damascus-Dwylah
363 – -: FadiCissé / intelligence air
364 – -: -: -: -: -: -: -: -: FadiAwad al-
‘Ali
366 – -: Fadi Younis Mohammed / Hama-Masiaf – SarayaHazour
367 – -: Fida Hassan Zahlout / Lattakia – Bassa
368 – -: Firas Salah Salama / Hama – Musayaf – Tarmaguia
369 – Carr
Lydia
370 – -: Farhan AbboudShol / Business Name-protoplasm
371 – – Fahd Hassan Hassan / Hama-Misyaf-Dermama
372 – – Fahad Salah Zuayter / tenderness
373 – -: Fawaz Mahmoud Aqraba / Homs-new Oriental
374 – – : Faisal Bassam Macaiduc / Hama-appointed chrome-jungle
375 – -: the struggle of BadiAbdalbagi / endosperm
376 – – Kamal Abdullah Al Hammadi Attar / Homs-JouretShiah
377 – -: Corporal Colomoitsev / Russia
378 – -: Kokothkin LD / Russia
379 – -: Loskov S.vi / Russia
380 – -: Louay Zarif Driossi / Hama-p August-jungle
381 – – Mazen brave column / Hama-peaceful
382 – -: Malik Bassam Nasr / Damascus-Otaiba
383 – -: Maher Star / Hama-peaceful-Khunayfis
384 – -: Maher Chreiba / Business Name-park
385 – – Maher Abdullah – 38
– -: – Maher Merahj
/ Lattakia – Jablah – HarfMtour
388 – -: Maher Masoud / Lattakia – Jablah – Btmana
389 – -: Maher Musa al-Mahmoud / Quneitra-Golan-clan Al-Habul
390- -: Mamoun Mohammed Beqa’i / Damascus – Wadi Bardeh
391 – -: Majd al-Din al-Tahan / Damascus – Nahr Aisha
392 – -: Majd Nasser Yashouti / Tartous
– : Mohsen Mahmoud Mohamed Ali / Aleppo
394 – -: Mohsen Muhanna / Republican Guard
395 – -: Mohammed Hamoud / Ham -ekremh
396 – -: Mohammed Saleh / Guard Republican
397 – -: Muhammad Alkabkulai / Business Name-protoplasm-Kfrdbel
398 – -: Mohammed Ibrahim Ali / Hama-jungle-eye chrome
399 – -: Mohamed Ahmed Sobh / Business Name-protoplasm-appointed Oriental
400 – -: Mohamed Ahmed Silverline / Hama-peaceful
401 – -: Mohamed Ahmed Mohamed / Tartous-Dreikish-Saginaw
402 – -: Mohammad Asaad Ghosn / Damascus-Reef
403 – -: Mohammad Bassam Rajab Osman / intelligence air
404 – -: Mohammed Bakhri / Farka
405 – -: Mohamed Chech / Aleppo
406 – -: Mohammed Juma Al Rumaydeen / Aleppo – inhabitants of Jibla
407 – -: Mohammed Habib Hamdan / Lattakia – Qardaha – Nniti
408 – -: Mohamed Habib Khadour / Tartous-Dreikish-Dairuti
409 – Mohammed Hassan Al-Faqir / Damascus – Herna
410 – -: Mohammed Hassan Haj Hassan / Air Intelligence
411 – -: Mohamed Hassan Gnidi / Homs – Umm al-Dawali
412 – -: Mohammad Hussein Al-Hamdan / Hama-Mahershor
413 – -: Mohammad Hussein Al-Shayeb / Damascus-Otaiba
414 – -: Mohammed Hamami / Tartous – Banias
– Mohammed Khalil Jeroda / Tartous-regiment fasteners
416 – -: Mohammad Dawood / Homs-Alamadaba
417 – -: Mohammed Ibrahim destroyed / Tartous-Dreikish
418 – -: Mohamed Diab high / Damascus-kitten
419 – -: Mohamed Rabie Barakat / Damascus Square
420 – -: Mohammad Reza Mustafa Nasser Al -Shami / Damascus-Shiite neighborhood of the Secretary –
421 – -: Mohammad Saleem Aloguana / Damascus-industrial zone
422 – -: Mohammed Shaheen / Hama-peaceful
423 – -: Mohammad Shamsi Bribery of / Aleppo
424 – -: Mohammed Saleh Al – Ahmad / air intelligence
425 – -: Mohamed Sobhi Ali / endosperm-population offense Us
426 – -: Mohammed Adel Yassin / Tartous-Sheikh Badr-Brachin
427 – -: Mohammed Abdul Ghani / Business Name-protoplasm-Muthur
428 – -: Mohammed Abdul Karim Mohammed / Business Name-protoplasm-Mrdasih
429 – -: Mohamed Abdel – MoneimAbdeen / Guard Republican
430 – -: Mohammed Abdo Diab al – Homsi / Damascus-Qazzaz
431 – -: Mohamed Osman / Business Name-Qirdahh
432 – -: Mohammad Aziz Haddad / Business Name-denied the right-Samndel
433 – -: Muhammad Ali Rahma / Damascus-HeverFawqa
434 – -: Mohammad Ali Suleiman / Homs-Zahraa
435 – -: Mohammad Ali Mohammad Hasan Reza / Damascus-Shiite neighborhood Secretary
436 – -: Muhammad Ali Mamdouh Hawwarnh / intelligence air
437 – -: Mohamed Ammar pOTS / Damascus-Shiite Shaghour
438 – -: Mohammed Malik Rahmoun / Lattakia – Mazira
– Ruwaima 439 – -: Mohammed Mahmoud al-Kurdi / h Sucking – Tlalk – or two
434 – -: Mohamed Mahmoud Oghli / Tartous – Safita – Metras
441 – -: Mohamed Mustafa Houri / Damascus – Qazzaz
442 – -: Mohammed Mahdi Othman / Damascus – Beit Tima
443
– Mohamed Nabil Diop / Hama-jungle-Salhab
445 – -: Mohamed Naguib Omran / Tartous-Sheikh Badr-Alno.h
446 – -: Muhammad Nazar Novell / Business Name-protoplasm-towers
447 – -: Mohamed Noman Darwish / Tartous-Reef
448 – – Mohammad gull Shahin / Hama-peaceful-Jduah
449 – -: Mohammed Nouri Al – Junaid / Brigade Baqir
450 – -: Mohammad Nouri Mohammed / Homs-Al-Shinyah
451 – -: Mohammed Wissam Zakaria / Damascus-Baramkeh
452 – -: Mohammad Waseem Horda / Hama-Morak
453 – -: Muhammad Yasser Al-Khatib / Palestine
454 – -: Mohammed Yasser Battikh / Lattakia-intelligence Air
455 – -: Muhammad Yahya Al-Saheb / Damascus-Qatna
456 – -: Mahmoud Al-Khalaf Dahrouj – Al Bustan Association
457 – -: Mahmoud Bin Fahad Al-Alajati / Damascus – Field
458 – -: Mahmoud TayseerZaarour / Tartous – Rural
459 / Lattakia -DayatourDamsrkhu
460 – -: Mahmoud Saleh Abu Al-Hawa / Damascus – Kafr Sousse
461 – -: Mahmoud Salah Soldiers / Tartous – Khirbat Al-Hamam-Bazir
462 – -: Mahmoud Abdel Aziz Aboud / Lattakia – Jabla – Dalia
463 Ali Mohammed / Tartous-Banias-keen
464 – -: Mahmoud Ghazi Ekhalo / h
sucking cornea-
465 – -: Fayez Mahmoud Suleiman / Idlib-Marhamshh
466 – -: Mahmoud Fahd rig / Damascus
467 – -: Mahmoud Mohammed Barber / Hamah- Misyaf-Baarin
468 – -: Mahmoud Mohamed Hamou / Republican Guard
469 – -: Mourad Shri Daraa-Reef
470 – -: Transmitter guide Ibrahim / endosperm-image
471 – -: Mari Ali Hamidi / tenderness
472 – -: slender Habib Abboud / Homs-oak forest ,
473 – -: Marwan Khaddara / Damascus-Rural
474 – -: Mustafa Saleh / Damascus -mekhem.s.senb
475 – – Fayez Mustafa Murad / Damascus-Yafour
476 – – Matar Ahmed , Secretary / Homs-Furqlus
477 – -: Moataz Kamal Munther / endosperm
478 – -: Ali Mekdad / Damascus meze 86
479 – -: Mamdouh Haytham Abul-Laban / Hama-Reef
480 – -: Munther Ali Hamouda / Lattakia – Qirdaha
481 – -: Mehran Muhammad Hamisho / Lattakia – DaaturDamsrkhu
482 – -: Muhannad Hasan Al – Issa / Homs – Zahra
483 –
Military intelligence 484 – -: مهندعزيزحسن / Lattakia-Fakhoura-Terme
485 – -: مهندعليحسن / Tartous- A row
488 – -: مهندمحمودعز
العدين / دمشق – Solidarity 487 – -: مهندمنصورسليم / لاذقية
– داثور 488 – -: مهيبمحمودعبدالعزيزيوسف / حماة-مسياف-دوير Sheikhs
489 Contact Us Archive Top All times are GMT +4.
490 – -: Mireniukov in / Russia
491 – -: Milad Adnan Khalil / Tartous-Dreikish-Mamoura
492 – -: Nader Faisal Al-Qanabani / Swaida
493 – -: Nasser Darwish / Damascus-Otaiba
494 / Hama-Misyaf-KafrKamra
495 – -: Nizar Abdul Rahman Greens / Hama-peaceful-Alshahyb
496 – -: honest Hisham Sorour / Homs-fortress
497 – -: NasibKamel al – Saadi / endosperm-residents Jaramana
498 – -: Naseem Adnan Awad / Homs-Shin-Jablaya
499 – -: Nassim Ali Sulaiman / Tartous-Safit A-Bchbat
500 – -: Naseem dozy / Tartous-Cadmus
501 – -: Naseem star Alabdo / Damascus
502 – – Nashwan Mohammed oil / Business Name-Video
503 – -: Nidal Ahmed Sheikh Hussein Mana / Hasaka
504 – -: Nidal Ahmed Indian / Damascus
– 505 – -: Noor Adel Khel / Suweida – Residents of Jarmana 508 – -: Hani Ibrahim Salloum /
Hama – 505 – – Nader Mohammed Nader / Lattakia – Nahr al-Bared – الغاب 509 – -: هانيطالبجعفر / حماة-مصياف-بارين 510 – -:: هيثممحمدالريني / Tartous-Reef 511 Contact Us Archive Top All times are GMT +3. 513 – -: Waseem Ibrahim Diop / Lattakia – Kursana 514 -: – Waseem Ahmed Al-Marai / Homs-Shinniyah

515 – -: handsome life peaceful / Dara
516 – -: Wasim Mohammad Yousuf / Hama-Misyaf-Chmish
517 – -: handsome Nawras Ibrahim / Hama-Misyaf-Baarin
518 – -: handsome WafiqZfor / Homs-Fahil
519 – -: – 52 – – -: William Khadr, Hama-Masayaf-Bareen 522 – -: Waleed Mohammed Hijazi / Damascus – Baghdad Street 522
– -: Waleed SulaimanQandouha / Qahtani 520 – Barakat / Hama-Misyaf-Sighata 524 – -: William Essam Khader / Tartous-Banias-Tnita 525 – -: William Ali / Hama-Misyaf-guarded 526 – -: Yasser Hussein Kablawi / Damascus-airport road 527 – -: Yasser Zeravih / 525 – -: – Yasser Mohammed Al-Qasim / Homs – Hamarat 529 – -: Yaseen BahgatTohma / Republican Guard

530 – -: Yamen RajehAscol / Intelligence air
531 – -: Yahya Adel Ghayad / Damascus-Beit Tima
532 – -: Yahya Mohammed Yusuf / Regiment Hadi
533 – -: Weighing Mehrez / Guard Republican
534 – – weighing Nasser Kurd / Homs -ekremh-Valley gold
535 – – expresses Fahd ‘s sons / Hama-Misyaf-Taonh
536 – -: Youssef Habib Ibrahim / Business Name-protoplasm-body
537 – -: Yusuf Khirfan / Hama
538 – -: Youssef Suleiman Barakat / Business Name-Qirdahh -ruizh
539 – -: Youssef EssamDahrooj / Damascus-River Aisha
540 – -: Youssef Mahmoud public / Business Name-protoplasm-Zama
541 – -: Yusuf HashimAbboud / Business Name-protoplasm-Pettmana
542 – -: Yehoshua lion Shaaban / to Azqah- Jiblah-Zuhairat
543 – -: YusehNazihHarfoush / Homs-Al-Sayid
544 – -: Younis Al-Abdullah / Aleppo
545 – – Younis Mohammed Al-Khalil / Hama-El-Ghab-Asilah

*Statistical data from 1-1-2018 until 15-3-2018, by Mona Yocef

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] AlWatan Online. “HIJJ: 35 THOUSAND VICTIMS OF THE SHELLS OF MILITANTS DURING THE CRISIS IN DAMASCUS AND ALEPPO AND HOMS AND LATTAKIA.” (Source) Accessed 21 March, 2018.

[2] Mark Taliano. “Criminal Propaganda of Omission. The West and its Terrorist Proxies do not Seek Peace in Syria.” Global Research. 3 March, 2018. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/criminal-propaganda-of-omission-the-west-and-its-terrorist-proxies-do-not-seek-peace-in-syria/5630802) Accessed 21 March, 2018.

[3] Mark Taliano, Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017

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.

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Tags: East Ghouta, Syria, Syrian war, US-NATO war

Selected Articles: 2016 US Elections: Evidence for “Israelgate”? Russia Was a Scapegoat?

March 21st, 2018 by Global Research News

Global Research is a small team that believes in the power of information and analysis to bring about far-reaching societal change including a world without war.

Truth in media is a powerful instrument. As long as we keep probing, asking questions, challenging media disinformation to find real understanding, then we are in a better position to participate in creating a better world in which truth and accountability trump greed and corruption.

* * *

By Felicity Arbuthnot and Radio Islam, March 21, 2018

According to Arbuthnot, the nuclear shelter was built during the Iran-Iraq War by a Finnish company which allegedly shared the map and the design with the United States who later on bombed the shelter through its only vulnerable place which was the ventilation shaft.

The Cambridge Analytica Scandal Could Provide Hard Evidence of “Israeli” Meddling in Trump Election

By Adam Garrie, March 21, 2018

During a statement before a hidden camera, the CEO of the data harvesting firm Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix boasted of his ability to employ “Israeli companies” to gather intelligence on politicians that the firm is paid to slander, defame and entrap. Nix then went on to praise the ability of “Israeli” intelligence personnel in what can only be described as a power sales pitch to a would-be client.

Another Reason Why Imperialism Wanted Libya Overthrown

By Abayomi Azikiwe, March 21, 2018

Sarkozy wanted the Libyan state eviscerated and Gaddafi assassinated because he had borrowed millions of dollars from the African leader in 2007 to finance his presidential campaign. Rumors and later documented proof surfaced to substantiate these claims.

44 Senators Made History by Voting to End Illegal US War in Yemen

By Kate Gould, March 21, 2018

In first-ever vote on withdrawing U.S. armed forces from an unauthorized war, 44 Senators voted to withdraw U.S. troops from the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

State Power Routinely Shielded From Public Eyes

By Shane Quinn, March 21, 2018

Obama led the way with his March 2011 intervention in Libya, flanked by Britain and France, under the shield of NATO. Gaddafi’s Libya had been the wealthiest nation in Africa, boasting the highest life expectancy on the continent. In the time since, the country has descended into chaos and ruin.

The Mysterious Frank Taylor Report: The 9/11 Document that Launched US-NATO’s “War on Terrorism” in the Middle East

By Prof. Niels Harrit, March 21, 2018

he legal foundation for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has been challenged in several countries. The best known is the Chilcot Inquiry in the UK, which began in 2009 and concluded in a report in 2016. The inquiry was not about the legality of military action, but the British government was strongly criticised for not having provided a legal basis for the attack.

Why the UK, the EU and the US Gang-Up on Russia

By Prof. James Petras, March 21, 2018

Why do the Western regimes now feel Russia is a greater threat then in the past? Do they believe Russia is more vulnerable to Western threats or attacks? Why do the Western military leaders seek to undermine Russia’s defenses? Do the US economic elites believe it is possible to provoke an economic crisis and the demise of President Putin’s government?

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The Cliff of Nuclear Annihilation: Humanity is on the Brink of Extinction! Thirty Seconds to Midnight

March 21st, 2018 by Regis Tremblay

First published on GR on February 20th, 2017

Filmmaker Regis Tremblay states what few others dare to say. Humanity is on the brink of extinction! Nuclear power is not safe. 48 of America’s nuclear power plants are leaking and there is no way to get rid of nuclear waste.

America’s reckless provocations of both Russia and China, two nuclear-armed countries, risk a nuclear holocaust from which no one survives. Climate change and global warming, if not mitigated immediately, will end the human experiment on earth sooner rather than later.

A shocking documentary that traces the origins of U.S. genocides, military interventions and wars from the 15th century when the white, colonial explorers first came to the Americas to the very present. American Exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and the right to claim the earth and its resources as their own are the beliefs that are the foundation of American foreign policy in the 21st Century that has humanity on the brink of extinction.

Dr. Helen Caldicott, Ray McGovern, Chris Hedges, Ann Wright, Peter Kusnick, Bill McKibben, David Vine and other activists, scholars, and authors explain and clarify the crisis and threats to life on the planet.

The only real hope lies in the result of the epic battle for humanity’s survival between two contrasting world views. On one side is the unipolar, capitalist world-domination by the U.S. enforced by the most lethal military the world has ever seen.

On the other side is a view held by Russia, China and the BRICS nations built on a multi-polar world based on respect, the sovereignty of all nations, international law, the equal value of all people, and cooperation.

So here we are. Humanity’s epic battle for survival. An old paradigm based on white, colonial domination and empire versus the shared vision of others who are working for a peaceful world based on justice, international law and the prosperity of all people.

The only question is, will the crazed neocons in Washington, realizing they have lost, take the whole world down with them.

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Information Overload? Don’t Tune Out… Get Informed!

March 21st, 2018 by Global Research

In today’s news: War… Poverty… Crimes against humanity…

To say that the public has become disillusioned and wary of constant doomsday media reports and news coverage that adhere to corporate agendas is a gross understatement — people see their world changing and they want to understand what is happening, and why. They want to be informed and therefore be prepared. They want the freedom to make educated choices instead of being told what to do by the very individuals and institutions that have led them into chaos.

In the face of mainstream media disinformation, Global Research has remained independent and continues to deliver vital and timely information, and we are grateful for the input of our editors, contributors, staff and volunteers in helping to carry out this task. Our reader feedback has been an invaluable source of encouragement, motivation and growth.

Nonetheless, curbing the tide of disinformation being pumped out by powerful and well-funded mainstream media is a considerable challenge. Global Research operates on a shoestring budget and does not accept funding from outside sources, and is thus able to maintain its independence. However, we would not be able to do this without the financial contributions of our readers, and to continue our efforts we need your support. In the words of journalist Eric Walberg:

“Since 9/11, Global Research has been one of the best sources of news and analysis of thegrowing political, economic and social crisis the world is facing. As the mainstream western media becomes more and more embedded with the forces of empire, Global Research continues to explore different ways of understanding the complex world system. A contribution to this essential forum is a contribution to a brighter future for us all.”
— Eric Walberg, author of “Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games” (Click here for full list of articles)

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The Cambridge Analytica Scandal Could Provide Hard Evidence of “Israeli” Meddling in Trump Election

March 21st, 2018 by Adam Garrie

Even before the depth of Cambridge Analytica’s meddling in the US election was exposed, the Trump campaign’s ties to “Israel” were widely known. Prior to the election, “Israeli” regime leader Benjamin Netanyahu held private meetings with both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. At the time, Trump’s social media supporters boasted of the fact that Netanyahu’s meeting with Trump was far lengthier than his meeting with Hillary Clinton.

Recent months have seen the full scandal of Michael Flynn’s improper behaviour during the interim period between the US election and Donald Trump’s inauguration, fully exposed as “Israelgate”. At that time, Flynn, acting on the orders of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, held conversations with foreign ambassadors, including the then Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak. During his conversation with Kislyak in December of 2016, Flynn lobbied for “Israel” by effectively begging Russia to delay a vote at the UN which ultimately saw Barack Obama’s outgoing administration vote for a pro-Palestinian position.

Kushner was later praised for his lobbying on behalf of a foreign regime by the duel US-“Israeli” citizen Haim Saban. While sitting next to Kushner, Saban spoke cavalierly about how even if Kushner broke US law, Saban nevertheless supported the foreign collusion that Kushner ordered Flynn to commit, on behalf of the Zionist regime.

These personal ties to the “Israeli” regime are not secretive. Far from it, Trump openly paints himself as the most pro-“Israel” President in US history. What remains unknown is what, if anything “Israeli” intelligence officials, either acting in a personal or geopolitical capacity did for the Trump campaign.

It is an established fact that the Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica to manipulate (aka brainwash) US voters through a calculated web based campaign that relied heavily on the stolen personal data of 50 million Facebook users. It has also been established, through the hidden camera admission of Cambridge Analytica’s CEO that the firm uses “Israeli intelligence” as part of its data gathering and data manipulating campaign.

The important question for investigators into Cambridge Analytica’s relationship with both Faceboook and the Trump campaign is therefore: Did Cambridge Analytica procure the services of “Israeli” spies or other organisations directly or indirectly related to the “Israeli” regime, in efforts designed to manipulate US voters into voting for Donald Trump? Not only is this foreign meddling a strong possibility, but the fact that Trump promoted himself as a highly pro-“Israel” candidate even by American standards, means that many of these “Israeli” agents of espionage about which Alexander Nix bragged of employing, may have been all to eager to work in the services of Cambridge Analytica’s pro-Trump meddling scheme.

What the world is witnessing is the western elites from Tel Aviv, London and Washington turning against themselves. Cambridge Analytica ought to be classified as a group engaged in the practice of “Information Terrorism”, and like any terrorist group, its primary motivation is money. Therefore Cambridge Analytica seemed and still seems to be willing to work with anyone, representing anything, so long as the price is right.

Many western politicians who themselves have something to hide and who for both personal and financial reasons are on contrasting sides of both the ongoing Brexit debate, as well as debates over Donald Trump’s legitimacy as a US President, are now fighting with each other and may well throw Cambridge Analytica and perhaps Facebook too, under the gilded bus of western elites.

This spectacle of political cannibalism among a neo-liberal cabal who tend to subscribe more to group-think than to anything related to conscience, will not only be doing the world a favour in exposing the dubious practices of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, but they will be saving many independent journalists a great deal of effort.

In exposing their own as enemies of democracy and political transparency, it will soon become clear not only that many of the biggest elections are rigged, but the extent to which they are rigged by political and corporate elites and the methods they use to do their rigging, may soon see the full light of day – something which is clearly to the benefit of all ordinary people. Crucially, it is not Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela or Syria doing the exposing, something that would have inevitably lead to racist claims of untrustworthiness from the western mainstream media. Instead, the western elites and their associates in the mainstream media re exposing themselves due to their own disunity regarding the issues of Trump, Brexit and their own personal scandals that they are keen to keep away from the hands of info-mercenaries like Cambridge Analytica.

In summary, the current Cambridge Analytica scandal could blow the lid off the nefarious activities of the following actors:

–Donald Trump and his family

–The Trump campaign including and especially Steve Bannon

–The Leave.EU Brexit campaign of which Nigel Farage and his professional acquaintances were deeply involved.

–The current British government

–Alexander Nix and his Cambridge Analytica associates

–Professor Aleksandr Kogan and his employer, Cambridge University

–The “Israeli” regime

–The “Israeli” secret intelligence service known as Mossad

–Other corporate elites across the US, “Israel” and Europe

By contrast, the following have been de-facto exonerated by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

–The Russian government which has not been shown to have colluded with any American actors in the 2016 election.

–Wikileaks and Julitan Assange who personally refused to cooperate with Cambridge Analytica and by extrapolation the Trump campaign.

–Independent media that have not and in many cases cannot be bought by fiends like Alexander Nix

–Bernie Sanders who has not shown to have colluded with any corporate or state entity

–Jeremy Corbyn whose UK campaigns have been built from grassroots rather than corporate support

Conclusion

With the US Federal Trade Commission set to broke Facebook’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and with Mark Zuckerberg facing calls to testify before the British Parliament, it would seem that as the elites begin fighting among themselves, the truth of their appalling treatment of the ordinary people across the world will become increasingly apparent.

Adam Garrie is Director at Eurasia future. He is a geo-political expert who can be frequently seen on Nedka Babliku’s weekly discussion show Digital Divides, RT’s flagship debate show CrossTalk as well as Press-TV’s flagship programme ‘The Debate’. A global specialist with an emphasis on Eurasian integration, Garrie’s articles have been published in the Oriental Review, Asia Times, Geopolitica Russia, the Tasnim News Agency, Global Research, RT’s Op-Edge, Global Village Space and others.

Featured image is from the author.

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Tags: Benjamin Netanyahu, Cambridge Analytica, Donald Trump, elections meddling, Israelgate, Mark Zuckerberg

Senate Rejects Ending US Support for Saudi Aggression in Yemen

March 21st, 2018 by Stephen Lendman

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE:

Contact at [email protected].

Bush/Cheney began terror-bombing Yemen post-9/11, waging drone warfare – on the phony pretext of combating al-Qaeda Washington created and supports.

In cahoots with Riyadh, Obama escalated what they began, further escalated by Trump allied with Saudi aggression.

Already the region’s poorest country, years of war caused the world’s severest humanitarian crisis, over 80% of Yemenis dependent on way inadequate amounts of aid to survive.

US-backed Saudi air, sea and land blockades prevent enough essentials to life from entering the country.

Countless numbers of Yemenis perished from war, related violence, untreated diseases, malnutrition and starvation.

Official UN figures way understate the toll from years of war, blockade and deprivation – perhaps hundreds of thousands of Yemenis perishing needlessly post-9/11, notably since March 2015.

According to separate UNICEF figures, at least one Yemeni child under age five dies every 10 minutes from starvation alone.

Famine stalks the country, along with endless aggression – genocide against its people neither the Trump administration or Congress is willing to address.

On Tuesday, Senate members rejected a resolution to end US military support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen – voting 55 – 44 against it.

The vote came while Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) was in Washington meeting with Trump.

During a White House photo-op, Trump boasted about billions of dollars in US weapons sales to the kingdom – ignoring their use for aggression, supporting terrorism and domestic repression.

Crown prince/defense minister MBS orchestrated Saudi aggression on Yemen, supported by Washington, Britain and other nations.

Ahead of Tuesday’s Senate vote, Defense Secretary Mattis wrote GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, turning truth on its head saying:

“(R)estrictions (on) US military support (to Riyadh) could increase civilian casualties, jeopardize cooperation with our partners on counterterrorism and reduce our influence with the Saudis – all of which would further exacerbate the situation and humanitarian crisis.”

MBS is a despotic future Saudi king, a rogue actor, a war criminal – disgracefully invited to Washington, other Western capitals, Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Big Oil in Houston, other US corporate headquarters, along with events at Harvard and MIT.

It’s part of his three-week US charm offensive, aiming to improve the image of the Arab world’s most ruthless regime, along with seeking US investments to diversify Riyadh’s economy.

It’s MBS’ so-called Vision 2030, seeking economic modernization, including industrial development and tourism.

The kingdom enlisted Western PR firms and other image-makers to present him as a new breed of future Saudi leader – a similar strategy used during a three-day visit to Britain, meetings arranged with political, military and business officials.

MBS’ March 18 appearance on CBS News’ 60 Minutes preceded the start of his US tour, beginning in Washington with Trump and other administration officials.

He’s no reformer. He’s like his father King Salman and others earlier throughout the kingdom’s sordid history.

Trump strongly supports its regime, ignoring its despotic agenda, Riyadh his first foreign trip destination after taking office, lucrative trade agreements signed during his visit, especially US weapons sales.

Arms and security project director at the Center for International Policy William Hartung said MBS’ policy agenda is polar opposite the “public relations version of who he is and what he’s trying to do,” adding:

During his US visit, “the question is how critical will the media be? Will Yemen be an afterthought, or will it be front and center in the conversation?”

So far, it’s very much the former, not the latter.

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

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”