Global Research

The perfidious role of ‘human rights’ organizations in the war on Syria has been exposed again with the Amnesty International report on Syria for 2017/18, followed by an equally tendentious article in the Melbourne ‘Age’ newspaper by Claire Mallinson, Amnesty’s national director for Australia.

In the name of human rights these organizations have actually worsened the crisis in Syria. They have never dealt honestly with its primary cause, the determination of the US and its allies seven years ago to destroy the government in Damascus, as part of a bigger plan to destroy the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah strategic axis across the Middle East. Democracy, human rights and the best interests of the Syrian people were never on the agenda of these governments. They were cold-blooded and remorseless in what they wanted and the means by which they sought to get it.

By calling violent armed groups ‘rebels’ and ‘the opposition’, these ‘human rights’ organizations conceal their true nature. By calling the Syrian government a ‘regime’, instead of the legitimate government of Syria, representing Syria at the UN and representing the interests of the Syrian people, they seek to demean it. By accusing it of carrying out indiscriminate attacks on its own civilian population, on the basis of what they are being told by their tainted sources, they seek to demonize it. By accusing it of carrying out chemical weapons attacks, without having any proof, they perpetuate the lies and fabrications of the armed groups and the governments that support them.

Behind the mask of ‘human rights’ these organizations are promoting the war agenda of western and regional governments. Some are worse than others. Human Rights Watch might as well be a formal annex of the US State Department, but they all play the same duplicitous game.

East Aleppo is the template for what we are seeing now in the outrage over East Ghouta, the district on the outskirts of Damascus in which hundreds of thousands of people are being held hostage by takfiri armed groups. Aleppo was infiltrated by these groups in 2012 and the eastern sector of the city gradually taken over, as the army was already too hard-pressed on other fronts to stop this happening. Until then Aleppo, a commercial, multi-religious and multi-ethnic city, had managed to stay out of the war but now it was sucked right in. There was nil support in Aleppo for the takfiris but they had the guns and they were ready to kill to get their way. Advancing on government held positions, they devastated the old centre of the city with their attacks. Digging tunnels, they blew up some of its most famous buildings. Art architecture, history, meant nothing to them. They destroyed the square minaret of the Umayyad mosque and their attacks led to the destruction of the ancient library in the mosque and the massive destruction of the Aleppo souk, one of the oldest and most colourful markets in the world.

White Helmets (Source: The Unz Review)

In the districts they controlled they ruled by terror, massacre and murder and the institution of the most repressive sharia laws. Under the secular Syrian government, women and men have the same rights before the law, under the takfiris women have no rights that are not granted to them by men. They sought the extirpation of all those they did not regard as true Muslims (Shia and Alawi amongst others): one of their earliest acts was the kidnapping of two orthodox Christian prelates, never seen alive again. It was these armed groups and the foreign governments behind them that were responsible for the dire situation in #East Aleppo, yet it was the Syrian government, the ‘regime’ as they chose to call it, that was blamed by the media and ‘human rights’ organizations. The White Helmets, embedded with these groups, and funded by the same governments which had armed and financed them, were used as the main propaganda prop. Their staged rescues filled the pages of the corporate media. They were effectively canonised by George Clooney, the documentary on their bogus bravery and sham rescues winning an Oscar award, unfortunately not for bad acting, which should have been the prize.

As the Syrian military, with Russian air support, began to squeeze these groups in East Aleppo, the propaganda was turned up accordingly. The ‘siege’ of East Aleppo was no more a siege than the ‘siege’ of East Ghouta. The people trapped in East Aleppo were being held hostage, as are the people in East Ghouta, by some of the most violent groups on the face of the earth. These trapped civilians were their trump card. Those who tried to leave, they killed, just as the takfiris are killing civilians trying to get out of East Ghouta. Having negotiated the peaceful removal of the takfiris from East Aleppo, along with their families and camp followers, the fall-back position of the media and the ‘human rights’ organizations was to accuse the Syrian government of their forcible displacement. They made no mention of the captive Syrian soldiers whom the takfiris paused to massacre before they left. They made no mention of the civilians killed by the takfiris as they were trying to escape and no mention of the dancing in the streets, literally, by the people of Aleppo, and the honking of car horns in jubilation, as these killers were sent on their way. This just didn’t fit in with the narrative the media and these organizations had been spinning.

The takfiris fight among themselves over territory, power and money but their ideology is the same, based on the destruction of the secular state and society and the imposition of a harsh pseudo-Islamic regime in which women would be reduced to the status of cattle and all Shia and Alawi extirpated. It is they who target civilians deliberately. In Adra, at the Northern end of Ghouta, they slaughtered dozens of men, women and children in 2013, beheading some and pushing others into a bread oven. In 2015, in Douma, they put men and women into cages as hostages, to deter possible advances by the Syrian army. They are shelling the centre of Damascus every day, killing civilians, including many children, including some recently mortared in their classroom.

In its report on Syria for 2017/18 Amnesty International (AI) continues its misleading narrative on the fate of East Aleppo and east Ghouta. Those who support it financially should perhaps be considering where they could put their money and their good intentions to better use. AI refers to districts in east Ghouta controlled or ‘contested’ by unspecified ‘armed opposition groups’ and repeats the canard that the Syrian government carried out the chemical weapons attack on Khan Shaikhun in April last year. (Bear in mind the recent statement of US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis that the US had no evidence of the Syrian government using sarin, the agent allegedly fired into Khan Shaikhun.) AI has no proof of this, so why would it state this as fact, except to do more propaganda damage to the Syrian government?

AI refers to 400,000 people ‘besieged’ in East Ghouta by the Syrian military, when the true state of affairs is that their districts have been infiltrated and that they are being held hostage by extremely violent armed groups. They are besieged from within by these groups, penned in and unable to leave except at the risk of being killed by their captors. The Syrian army is not imposing a siege, it is trying to break it. The Syrian government is accused of depriving these people of access to medical care and basic necessities, when it is one or another of these armed groups, over the years, that has caused the breakdown of efforts to set up humanitarian corridors. Even now the Syrian government is waiting with medical care, buses and accommodation but those civilians who try to leave are being shot at and killed, as they were in East Aleppo.

AI’s references to ‘forced displacement’ from East Aleppo, and the way the ‘armed groups’ there were ‘compelled’ to surrender and negotiate a deal that ended the ‘unlawful siege’ are a grotesque distortion of reality. What was unlawful about the situation in East Aleppo was the presence of the armed groups, what was unlawful was the money and weapons being provided to them by outside governments, in breach of international law, what was unlawful was their killing of civilians and the restriction of their free movement (out of East Aleppo), what was lawful was the finally successful attempt of the government of Syria to break the hold of these groups.

Following the release of the AI report on Syria, Claire Mallinson, the national director of AI for Australia, charged into print under the heading of ‘Australians Need to Act on Syrian Monstrosities’ (the Melbourne Age, March 1, 2018). Her reading audience would already have been won over as the Australian media has not reported the war in Syria at all but simply pumped out the same propaganda appearing in the US or British press. Others watching Syria closely over the years know what these ‘monstrosities’ are, and they are not the same as Ms Mallinson’s.

These monstrosities begin with the conspiracy, of the US, Britain, France and their regional Middle Eastern allies, to destroy the Syrian government, and thus strike a deadly blow at the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah strategic alliance, whatever the cost to the Syrian people and whatever their aspirations. They move on to the use by these governments of takfiri proxies to do their dirty work in Syria, following the refusal of Russia and China to allow the UN Security Council to be used as the fig leaf for an air war. These governments armed and financed these groups. They did not care who they were, where they came from and what they believed as long as they were prepared to pick up a gun and bring Syria to its knees. These are the master criminals in Syria.

The monstrosities include a media picking up where it had left off in Iraq. It had peddled the lies there, it had peddled them in Libya, it peddled them again in Syria and it is still peddling them. They include the illegal presence of the US in Syria, its killing of Syrian civilians and its attacks on the legitimate armed forces of the Syrian government and people, attacks in which Australian aircraft have shamefully taken part and which have taken scores of lives of Syrian soldiers.

All of this has led to the grand monstrosity, the large-scale destruction of Syria, involving the loss of life of perhaps 400,000 people and the flight of millions of others beyond Syria’s borders. But now the same governments and the same media that brought you this war, and the same ‘human rights’ organizations that have supported it with their one-sided moralising and unbalanced reports, are expressing their outrage at the suffering in East Ghouta, as if this had nothing to do with them.

The monstrosities in the eyes of the Syrian people, if not in the eyes of Ms Mallinson, are on a par with, if not worse than, the genocidal decade of sanctions which preceded the attack on Iraq in 2003 and the crimes which followed this attack, committed by the same governments that are responsible for the onslaught on Syria. The suffering in East Ghouta is terrible and outrage is justified, but it is the causes that need to be identified and they do not include the efforts of the Syrian government and army to defend the country against attack fomented from without.

Ms Mallinson’s monstrosities are of a different order. They include the chemical weapons ‘reportedly’ being used ‘again’ by the Syrian government against its own people. This smear has been played out time and time again by ‘activists’ knowing that the media and ‘human rights’ organizations will snap it up. There is no proof of any chemical weapon attack ever being carried out by the Syrian military, as against abundant evidence of such attacks planned and carried out by the takfiris over the years, including the attack around Damascus in August, 2013.

Ms Mallinson refers to a UN report that Syria is developing chemical weapons ‘with the help of North Korea’, neatly tying in the two demonized targets of the US government. This is another canard, originating in Washington and designed again to smear the Syrian government and to set it up for whatever might come next.

What she does not say is that this ‘report’ remains unpublished, that the authors are unknown, that what we know of it comes from an account in the New York Times, which sold the lies on Iraq and has promoted the war on Syria from the beginning. The detail it gives of the material allegedly coming from North Korea indicates that it could have no possible connection with chemical weapons, which Syria does not have anyway, having given them all up under international supervision. Given the completely tendentious nature of this account, why would Ms Mallinson want to raise it except to further blacken the name of the Syrian government?

She refers to the ‘warring sides’ in East Ghouta as if both are legitimate when only one is, the government of Syria. The other is a collective of extremely violent armed groups sponsored by outside governments, in breach of international law. The presence of US and ‘coalition’ forces in Syria is a standing violation of international law and their killing of Syrian soldiers and civilians a gross aggravated violation of that law. The only legitimate armed forces in Syria are the Syrian army, which has lost tens of thousands of young men defending the country, and those forces the government has invited in, from Russian air power to Iranian and Hezbollah ground forces.

Ms Mallinson’s monstrosities include the hundreds of thousands of ‘ordinary men, women and children’ she says are at risk of annihilation by the Syrian army’s ‘siege’ of East Ghouta. In fact, the central source of the risk to the people of East Ghouta is not the Syrian government but the armed groups holding them hostage. The ‘siege’ is not of the people but of these groups. The Syrian military is trying to break their grip, as any army would in any comparable situation.   Ms Mallinson accuses ‘the Russian-backed Syrian regime’ of breaking the ceasefire, ignoring the evidence that the takfiris are breaking it and killing civilians attempting to escape their grip. Only in the past few days they shot at a family trying to leave, killing the parents and shooting at the children even after they reached a Syrian army checkpoint. They are pouring shells into the centre of Damascus every day. There are no references in her account to the ‘American-backed’ or ‘Saudi-backed’ armed groups that have created this hell on earth, as she refers to it.

Finally, she appeals to the Australian government, as it assumes its seat on the UN Human Rights Council, to ‘show leadership’ in bringing these ‘abominations’ to an end. The problem here is that the Australian government is part of the problem. It fully supports US policy in Syria and has taken part in armed action in Syria, in violation of international law. In September, 2016, its aircraft joined a US-led air attack near Deir al Zor which killed perhaps 100 Syrian soldiers and allowed the Islamic State to regain lost positions. Australia did not apologise for its participation in this outrage, only repeating the US line that the attack was a mistake, which clearly it was not.  When the Australian delegate did take his seat on the UN Human Rights Council, he merely echoed US policy, by attacking the Syrian ‘regime’ and its Russian backer.

If Australia does have a role in Syria, a moral role, a legal role, an independent role, it should not be as a sounding chamber for the US. It should distance itself from the illegal actions of the US and the violence of the takfiris against the Syrian people, their government and their army. It should be supporting the attempts of the government in Damascus to restore its authority over the whole of Syria and not supporting the attempts of the US and behind it, Israel, to break it up. It should support the Syrian people, not the actions of governments which have devastated their country.

It should define policy on the basis of the causes of the situation in Syria, not how they are being misrepresented in the media, by ‘activists’ embedded with the takfiri groups, by the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, by the White Helmets and by deluded or wilfully dishonest ‘human rights’ organizations playing politics, not serving truth, justice and the interests of humanity. This would be a credible role for Australia, an independent role, but it is not one the government is going to adopt.

Everyone should be concerned at the loss of life in East Ghouta. Ms Mallinson does not have a mortgage on morality and empathy with human suffering. How does anyone think Syrians feel about this, Syrians shelled in the heart of Damascus every day, Syrians who have lost fathers, brothers and sons in this conflict, Syrians whose relatives are trapped in East Ghouta or have been killed by the armed gangs holding the whole region with a knife to its throat? Does anyone outside seriously think Syrians want to live under their rule? Syrians know what they want, without equivocation, the purging of these gangs from their midst, whatever it takes. They fully support their army and their government. It is their interests Australians, or anyone else of good faith, should be supporting, not the highly politicized interests of Amnesty International.

Outrage is going to solve nothing: it only serves as the pretext for taking the war to a new level of destruction. The roots of this violence are clear: the decision of outside powers to destroy the Syrian government, their support for violent armed groups committed to an ideology destructive of every value these governments are supposed to represent and their refusal to allow the war to end. For the violence to end these are the roots that need to be acknowledged and torn out.

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Jeremy Salt has taught at the University of Melbourne, Bosporus University (Istanbul) and Bilkent University (Ankara), specialising in the modern history of the Middle East.  His most recent book is “The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.)

Featured image is from News Limited.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Washington has been hostile toward North Korea throughout the entire post-WW II era because of its sovereign independence – not for any threat the country poses.

The DPRK never attacked another nation throughout its entire history, threatening none now.

Unless provoked to believe its security is gravely threatened, there’s isn’t the remotest possibility it would attack another country.

If Washington and the West had normalized relations with Pyongyang, respecting its sovereignty, its leadership never would have pursued the development of nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

They’re solely for defense against a genuine threat posed by Washington, not for preemptive war against any nation.

US administrations from Truman to Trump bear full responsibility for adversarial relations – the way Washington treats all sovereign independent countries, on its target list for regime change, naked aggression its favored strategy.

America’s longstanding record of endless wars against one country after another is clear evidence of the menace it poses – to North Korea, all other sovereign independent nations and humanity.

In the run-up to the February Winter Olympics, Pyongyang extended diplomatic outreach to Seoul, reciprocated in kind.

On Monday and Tuesday, North and South Korean officials met in Pyongyang, the first high-level talks between both countries in over a decade, discussed in a same-day article.

An April summit was announced between Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, details to follow. Both countries want peace, Washington’s rage for war and regime the major obstacle to ending decades of brinkmanship on the Korean peninsula.

The DPRK expressed willingness to denuclearize if guaranteed security, a near-unattainable objective given unrelenting US hostility toward its government.

Earlier Pyongyang diplomatic efforts were undermined by Washington, DPRK leadership falsely blamed, the way US administrations operate.

Dirty tricks, double-dealing, and other deceitful actions are longstanding imperial tactics.

Washington took an initial step to undermine efforts between North and South Korea to normalize relations.

New illegal US sanctions were announced, likely more coming, perhaps an embargo on oil imports ahead, what North Korea calls a declaration of war if imposed.

The Trump administration’s phony pretext was claiming DPRK use of chemical weapons and the February 2017 killing of Kim Jong-nam – North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s paternal half brother.

The bizarre incident at Kuala Lumpur’s airport was captured on security camera videotape for the whole world to see – an obvious red flag.

Malaysian authorities said he died from VX poisoning, a banned lethal nerve agent.

At one time, he was considered heir apparent to his father, Kim Jong-il, later exiled in 2003 after falling out of favor with the ruling authorities.

An anti-North Korea media blitzkrieg followed his killing. No credible evidence suggested he planned returning to challenge Kim Jong-un’s leadership.

He was an obscure figure. What possible motive could North Korean authorities have had for wanting him eliminated – let alone by public execution, providing red meat for US-led Western vilification of its government.

At the time, senior North Korean representatives were preparing to come to New York to meet with former US officials, a chance for both sides to discuss differences diplomatically, hopefully leading to direct talks with Trump officials.

Why would Pyongyang want Kim Jong-nam killed at this potentially sensitive time, knowing it would be blamed for the incident, talks likely cancelled – precisely what happened!

Pyongyang denied involvement in Kim Jong-nam’s death. Its government is still unjustly blamed for what happened.

An opportunity for possible DPRK/US thaw was lost. New US sanctions on Pyongyang come in response to a North/South thaw, including an April summit between their leaders.

Clearly it’s a Trump administration attempt to undermine stepping back from the brink on the Korean peninsula – wanting longstanding hostility toward the DPRK unchanged, its government falsely blamed for unacceptable US actions.

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

The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) is a proud advocate of a world-class, fare-free public transport system for Scotland.

Transport has undergone enormous changes in recent decades, both in Scotland and across the world. Some have been cyclical: in Scotland’s capital, trams were built, dismantled, and then reintroduced. In other areas, we have seen consistent trends like the steady deregulation and privatization of services, which has left Edinburgh as the sole city in Scotland with a municipal bus operator.

Rail fares across the UK have soared in comparison to those of our European neighbours, and Scottish transport contracts go out to tender in a farcical franchise system whereby public sector companies in other countries can bid for control while those in Scotland are effectively barred.

Scotland, the country which gave the world the pedal bicycle and the pneumatic tyre, now has a public transport network which is broadly unfit for purpose.

Massive changes have to be made to ensure that our public transport network is not only of a standard befitting the people of Scotland, but one that is adapted to our environmental and economic needs – challenging climate change while connecting communities and creating jobs through enhanced mobility.

“We call unashamedly for the integration of services – whether bus, rail, ferry, underground or tram – under publicly-owned and democratically-run operators.”

The Scottish Socialist Party is brave enough to identify these changes. We call unashamedly for the integration of services – whether bus, rail, ferry, underground or tram – under publicly-owned and democratically-run operators.

But the bravest step we can take as a nation to totally transform the way we travel is to support the international movement for free public transport and become pioneers of true freedom of movement for working class people.

There is a strong economic, social, and environmental case for adopting this policy throughout the country. There is also precedent from successful fare-free public transport schemes in parts of France, Germany, Belgium, and Estonia as well as far-flung cities in China and the United States. [Ed.: see wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_public_transport, and FreeTransitToronto.org.] We have evidence of the policy’s affordability and benefit.

I would put to sceptics that the prospect of free healthcare was once unthinkable. With the creation of NHS Scotland in 1948, hundreds of thousands of people gained access to essential medical care for the first time; the positive impact on Scottish society has been immense. The threat of privatization and marketization is a terrifying prospect for many.

Source: The Bullet

In the same spirit that the NHS was created over half a century ago, we can come together to build a public transport system that works for everyone. We can tackle poverty and social exclusion by extending access across urban and rural Scotland; this will be a financial relief for workers, parents and carers on low incomes, and make it even easier for families to switch from road trips to more eco-friendly bus rides and train journeys.

Building free transport links between rural communities even brings forward the possibility of economic regeneration in the Highlands, the Scottish Borders, and rural Fife, where greater interconnectivity and public investment could instigate growth and begin to reverse the exodus of young people from small towns and villages.

Free transport is neither easy nor cheap, nor can it alone transform Scotland. However, as part of a comprehensive socialist strategy, it can radically change the conditions of Scottish workers and help realise the full potential of totally under-utilized modes of transport.

The SSP has a good track record of winning others to our ideas. We championed free prescriptions in Holyrood and led the broad-based campaign to tackle poverty through the provision free school meals. We are committed supporters of universalism and pioneered many policies which were later taken up by the mainstream parties.

Ambition and Vision

Free transport is yet another distinctive SSP policy with ambition, vision and a firm footing in the needs and aspirations of Scotland. It is a policy whose implementation is not only possible, but increasingly necessary – addressing the pressing ecological crisis facing the world as well as the acute issues of poverty and exclusion at home.

These are among the reasons why free transport proposals are becoming more and more popular across Europe. Many in Scotland point to more affordable and efficient public transport systems in countries like Germany to highlight the shortcomings of our own – but to seek merely to emulate them is to limit our ambition, as proven by the spirited HVV umsonst! campaigners now pushing to scrap fares in Germany’s second-largest city.

In Sweden, anarchist initiative Planka.nu takes a particularly brazen approach to free transport campaigning by encouraging members of the public to leap ticket barriers, while operating a shared pool of funds to pay off any subsequent fines for its members.

Even in Scotland, understanding and appetite for the policy is slowly building. Scottish Green activists came close to persuading the rest of their party to back the progressive policy when it was revisited at their 2014 party conference.

It is often easier in politics to identify problems than solutions. For the SSP, free transport is a valuable idea that carries great potential as an innovative solution to an intersection of problems. For this reason, it is a policy that socialists will develop and promote further in the run-up to next year’s Scottish Parliament election.

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Connor Beaton is the branch organizer of Dundee Scottish Socialist Party (SSP). He serves on the SSP’s Executive Committee.

Nine Points Arguing the Case for Free Public Transport

• Free fares would be the biggest single pro-environment policy enacted by any national government anywhere on the planet, dramatically slashing car use and CO2 emissions.
• Free fares would be the biggest anti-poverty, pro-social inclusion policy enacted in Scotland, or anywhere else in the UK. It is mainly people on low incomes who rely on public transport
• Free fares would cut the number of road accidents, reducing human suffering and relieving pressure on the NHS and the emergency services. The Scottish Executive estimates that road accidents cost £1.4-billion a year to the Scottish economy. (On an average day in Scotland there is one fatal road accident; another 8-10 involving serious injury; and 250-300 minor accidents. The vast majority involve cars.)
• Free fares would be help to reduce the levels of asthma and other respiratory illnesses, which have risen steeply in line with the expansion of road traffic
• Free fares would potentially increase the spending power of over a million workers by between £40 and £100 a month, boosting the overall economy.
• Free fares would increase business efficiency and productivity: the CBI estimates that traffic congestion costs business across Britain between £15 and £20-billion a year.
• Free fares would be a major tourist attraction, bringing hundreds of millions of pounds into the Scottish economy every year from increased visitor numbers. An increase in tourism of just 20 per cent would bring an extra £1-billion into the Scottish economy.
• Free fares would attract worldwide support, especially from the global environmental movement, and would bring pressure to bear on governments throughout Europe and the wider world to adopt a similar policy.
• Free fares would reduce Scotland’s reliance on depleting oil reserves; 67 per cent of all oil produced globally is used for transport.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

In the early 1980s, the Greater London Council under Ken Livingston slashed fares and began to move towards free public transport. The policy was backed by 71 per cent of Londoners, but was destroyed by the Thatcher government and the Law Lords, backed by the car, haulage and oil industries.

Source: The Bullet

Within a year, ticket prices in London had doubled, car journeys had rocketed and there was an extra 6000 accidents on the city’s roads. A similar policy in South Yorkshire under David Blunkett was similarly torpedoed.

That was before global warming and the dangers of greenhouse gases became widely accepted by scientists. Twenty years on, our towns and cities are heading towards permanent gridlock and scientists are pressing the panic buttons. And the idea of free public transport is starting to make a comeback.

In the Belgian city of Hasselt, which covers an area double the size of Dundee, congestion was eliminated in the late 1980s after the introduction of a totally free public transport system. Within a year, bus passenger journeys rose by 870 per cent and have now increased by over 1000 per cent. In dismal contrast, the Scottish Executive has set a target for an annual increase of one per cent in bus journeys and two per cent in rail journeys.

The Danish government has commissioned a research group to examine the feasibility of a free public transport system (Copenhagen Post November 22, 2006).

The Melbourne Age newspaper, edited by Andrew Jaspan (a former editor of the Sunday Herald, The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday) has called for state-wide free bus travel in Victoria (“A radical idea,” The Age, May 5, 2006).

Matthew Parrish, a Tory MP under Margaret Thatcher, who played a key role in destroying South Yorkshire’s cheap fares policy, now admits he was wrong and has called for London-wide free bus travel:

“I was wrong. I have changed my mind… Never mind the ideology, it just makes sense.” (“It’s big, it’s red, and it’s free – and it will save London,” The Times, May 8, 2003).

Visit Scotland (formerly the Scottish Tourist Board) recently published a report which set out the policy implications of global warming by 2015:

“In order to reduce dependency upon the car, we will see a number of measures to move people onto public transport. These will include free public transport for all in Scotland, whether this is buses or trains”. (Visit Scotland report: Tomorrow’s World, May 2006).

Aid groups once again denounce the Saudi “aid” efforts in Yemen as nothing more than a “cynical P.R. exercise”:

At the centre of accusations levelled against the British and US-backed strategy is the claim that, despite Saudi Arabia’s promise to open the key port of Hodeidah – a city of 400,000 largely controlled by Houthi rebels and closest to the areas of direst need – the plan actually perpetuates the Saudi choke on imports there.

The Saudi-led coalition has been using its blockade to try to starve Yemen into submission for almost three years now. They keep commercial imports out of Hodeidah because they want to strangle the areas of the country that continue to resist them, and they don’t care if that leads to mass starvation. It should not come as a shock to anyone that their plan to “help” Yemenis is an attempt to distract attention from what they continue to do to the civilian population. The Saudis and their allies are not the least bit interested in alleviating the terrible conditions in Yemen, but they want to appear as if they are so that their Western patrons don’t face as much political pressure to end support for the war. No one should be fooled into believing that the Saudi-led coalition’s “humanitarian” plan is anything more than a fig leaf to cover the horrifying reality of what they have done and what they continue to do to the people of Yemen.

The report continues:

Critics have highlighted the plan’s almost total failure to address the key demand that Saudi open the ports of Hodeidah and Saleef to commercial traffic and aid shipments. Agencies say this is required to relieve the threat of starvation in the large areas controlled by Houthi rebels.

There are also concerns about a section of the Saudi plan suggesting further strengthening of the existing UN arms inspection regime, designed to prevent what Saudi claims are Iranian arms shipments to the Houthis. Critics say such checks would further slow traffic through ports.

“The Saudi humanitarian support package is rather like a torturer following a session of pain-inducing activity bringing his victim a cup of coffee,” said Andrew Mitchell, the Tory MP and former international development secretary [bold mine-DL].

When Mohammed bin Salman comes to the U.S. later this month, he needs to be confronted about the grave crimes that his government and its allies are committing against the civilian population of Yemen.

This article, crossposted on GR in March 2016, explains how the mainstream media works as a machinery of the US that galvanizes the public to support the war of aggression.

Featured image: taken from the PDF version of Rick Sterling’s work The Caesar Photo Fraud that Undermined Syrian Negotiations: 12 Problems with the Story of Mass Torture and Execution in Syria. The file is available online here (free).

A 30 page investigative report on the “Caesar Torture Photos” has been released and is available online here. The following is a condensed version of the report. Readers who are especially interested are advised to get the full report which includes additional details, photographs, sources and recommendations.

Introduction

There is a pattern of sensational but untrue reports that lead to public acceptance of US and Western military intervention in countries around the world:

• In Gulf War 1, there were reports of Iraqi troops stealing incubators from Kuwait, leaving babies to die on the cold floor. Relying on the testimony of a Red Crescent doctor, Amnesty Interenational ‘verified’ the false claims.

• Ten years later, there were reports of yellow cake uranium going to Iraq for development of weapons of mass destruction.

• One decade later, there were reports of Libyan soldiers drugged on viagra and raping women as they advanced.

• In 2012, NBC broadcaster Richard Engel was supposedly kidnapped by pro-Assad Syrian militia but luckily freed by Syrian opposition fighters, the “Free Syrian Army”.

All these reports were later confirmed to be fabrications and lies. They all had the goal of manipulating public opinion and they all succeeded in one way or another. Despite the consequences, which were often disastrous, none of the perpetrators were punished or paid any price.

It has been famously said “Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” This report is a critical review of the “Caesar Torture Photos” story.  As will be shown, there is strong evidence the accusations are entirely or substantially false.

Overview of ‘Caesar Torture Photos’

On 20 January 2014, two days before negotiations about the Syrian conflict were scheduled to begin in Switzerland, a sensational report burst onto television and front pages around the world. The story was that a former Syrian army photographer had 55,000 photographs documenting the torture and killing of 11,000 detainees by the Syrian security establishment.

The Syrian photographer was given the code-name ‘Caesar’. The story became known as the “Caesar Torture Photos”.  A team of lawyers plus digital and forensic experts were hired by the Carter-Ruck law firm, on contract to Qatar, to go to the Middle East and check the veracity of “Caesar” and his story.  They concluded that “Caesar” was truthful and the photographs indicated “industrial scale killing”. CNN, London’s Guardian and LeMonde broke the story which was subsequently broadcast in news reports around the world. The Caesar photo accusations were announced as negotiations began in Switzerland. With the opposition demanding the resignation of the Syrian government, negotiations quickly broke down.

For the past two years the story has been preserved with occasional bursts of publicity and supposedly corroborating reports. Most recently, in December 2015 Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report titled “If the Dead Could Speak” with significant focus on the Caesar accusations.

Following are 12 significant problems with the ‘Caesar torture photos’ story.

1. Almost half the photos show the opposite of the allegations.

The Carter Ruck Inquiry Team claimed there were about 55,000 photos total with about half of them taken by ‘Caesar’ and the other half by other photographers. The Carter Ruck team claimed the photos were all ‘similar’. Together they are all known as ‘Caesar’s Torture Photos’.

The photographs are in the custody of an opposition organization called the Syrian Association for Missing and Conscience Detainees (SAFMCD). In 2015, they allowed Human Rights Watch (HRW) to study all the photographs which have otherwise been secret.  In December 2015, HRW released their report titled “If the Dead Could Speak”.  The biggest revelation is that over 46% of the photographs (24,568) do not show people ‘tortured to death” by the Syrian government.  On the contrary, they show dead Syrian soldiers and victims of car bombs and other violence (HRW pp2-3). Thus, nearly half the photos show the opposite of what was alleged.  These photos, never revealed to the public, confirm that the opposition is violent and has killed large numbers of Syrian security forces and civilians.

2. The claim that other photos only show ‘tortured detainees’ is exaggerated or false.

The Carter Ruck report says ‘Caesar’ only photographed bodies brought from Syrian government detention centers.  In their December 2015 report, HRW said, “The largest category of photographs, 28,707 images, are photographs Human Rights Watch understands to have died in government custody, either in one of several detention facilities or after being transferred to a military hospital.” They estimate 6,786 dead individuals in the set.

The photos and the deceased are real, but how they died and the circumstances are unclear. There is strong evidence some died in conflict. Others died in the hospital. Others died and their bodies were decomposing before they were picked up. These photographs seem to document a war time situation where many combatants and civilians are killed. It seems the military hospital was doing what it had always done: maintaining a photographic and documentary record of the deceased. Bodies were picked up by different military or intelligence branches. While some may have died in detention; the big majority probably died in the conflict zones. The accusations by ‘Caesar’, the Carter Ruck report and HRW that these are all victims of “death in detention” or “death by torture” or death in ‘government custody” are almost certainly false.

3. The true identity of “Caesar” is probably not as claimed.

The Carter Ruck Report says “This witness who defected from Syria and who had been working for the Syrian government was given the code-name ‘Caesar’ by the inquiry team to protect the witness and members of his family.” (CRR p.12) However, if his story is true, it would be easy for the Syrian government to determine who he really is. After all, how many military photographers took photos at Tishreen and Military 601 Hospitals during those years and then disappeared?  According to the Carter Ruck report, Caesar’s family left Syria around the same time.  Considering this, why is “Caesar” keeping his identity secret from the western audience? Why does “Caesar” refuse to meet even with highly sympathetic journalists or researchers?

The fact that 46% of the total photographic set is substantially the opposite of what was claimed indicates two possibilities:

• Caesar and his promoters knew the contents but lied about them expecting nobody to look.

• Caesar and his promoters did not know the contents and falsely assumed they were like the others.

The latter seems more likely which supports the theory that Caesar is not who he claims to be.

4. The Carter Ruck Inquiry was faulty, rushed and politically biased.

The credibility of the “Caesar” story has been substantially based on the Carter-Ruck Inquiry Team which “verified” the defecting photographer and his photographs.  The following facts suggest the team was biased with a political motive:

• the investigation was financed by the government of Qatar which is a major supporter of the armed opposition.

• the contracted law firm, Carter Ruck and Co. has previously represented Turkey’s President Erdogan, also known for his avid support of the armed opposition.

• the American on the legal inquiry team, Prof David M. Crane, has a long history working for U.S. Dept of Defense and Defense Intelligence Agency.  The U.S. Government has been deeply involved in the attempt at ‘regime change’ with demands that ‘Assad must go’ beginning in summer 2011 and continuing until recently.

• Prof Crane is personally partisan in the conflict. He has campaigned for a Syrian War Crimes Tribunal and testified before Congress in October 2013, three months before the Caesar revelations.

• by their own admission, the inquiry team was under “time constraints” (CRR, p.11).

• by their own admission, the inquiry team did not even survey most of the photographs

• the inquiry team was either ignorant of the content or intentionally lied about the 46% showing dead Syrian soldiers and attack victims.

• the inquiry team did their last interview with “Caesar” on January 18, quickly finalized a report and rushed it into the media on January 20, two days prior to the start of UN sponsored negotiations.
• The self-proclaimed “rigor” of the Carter Ruck investigation is without foundation. The claims to a ‘scientific’ investigation are similarly without substance and verging on the ludicrous.

5. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is involved.

In an interview on France24, Prof. David Crane of the inquiry team describes how ‘Caesar’ was brought to meet them by “his handler, his case officer”. The expression ‘case officer’ usually refers to the CIA. This would be a common expression for Prof. Crane who previously worked in the Defense Intelligence Agency.  The involvement of the CIA additionally makes sense since there was a CIA budget of $1Billion for Syria operations in 2013.

Prof. Crane’s “Syria Accountability Project” is based at Syracuse University where the CIA actively recruits new officers despite student resistance.

Why does it matter if the CIA is connected to the ‘Caesar’ story? Because the CIA has a long history of disinformation campaigns. In 2011, false reports of viagra fueled rape by Libyan soldiers were widely broadcast in western media as the U.S. pushed for a military mandate. Decades earlier, the world was shocked to hear about Cuban troops fighting in Angola raping Angolan women. The CIA chief of station for Angola, John Stockwell, later described how they invented the false report and spread it round the world.  The CIA was very proud of that disinformation achievement. Stockwell’s book, “In Search of Enemies” is still relevant.

6. The prosecutors portray simple administrative procedures as mysterious and sinister.

The Carter Ruck inquiry team falsely claimed there were about 11,000 tortured and killed detainees. They then posed the question: Why would the Syrian government photograph and document the people they just killed?  The Carter Ruck Report speculates that the military hospital photographed the dead to prove that the “orders to kill” had been followed.  The “orders to kill” are assumed.

A more logical explanation is that dead bodies were photographed as part of normal hospital/morgue procedure to maintain a file of the deceased who were received or treated at the hospital.

The same applies to the body labeling/numbering system. The Carter Ruck report suggest there is something mysterious and possibly sinister in the coded tagging system.  But all morgues need to have a tagging and identification system.

7. The photos have been manipulated.

Many of the photos at the SAFMCD website have been manipulated. The information card and tape identity are covered over and sections of documents are obscured. It must have been very time consuming to do this for thousands of photos. The explanation that they are doing this to ‘protect identity’ is not credible since the faces of victims are visible.  What are they hiding?

8. The Photo Catalog has duplicates and other errors

There are numerous errors and anomalies in the photo catalog as presented at the SAFMCD website.

For example, some deceased persons are shown twice with different case numbers and dates.

There are other errors where different individuals are given the same identity number.

Researcher Adam Larson at A Closer Look at Syria website has done detailed investigation which reveals more errors and curious error patterns in the SAFMCD photo catalog.

9. With few exceptions, Western media uncritically accepted and promoted the story.

The Carter Ruck report was labeled “Confidential” but distributed to CNN, the Guardian and LeMonde.

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour gushed the story as she interviewed three of the inquiry team under the headline “EXCLUSIVE: Gruesome Syria photos may prove torture by Assad regime”. Critical journalism was replaced by leading questions and affirmation. David Crane said “This is a smoking gun”.  Desmond de Silva “likened the images to those of holocaust survivors”.

The Guardian report was titled “Syrian regime document trove shows evidence of ‘industrial scale’ killing of detainees” with subtitle “Senior war crimes prosecutors say photographs and documents provide ‘clear evidence’ of systematic killing of 11,000 detainees”

One of the very few skeptical reports was by Dan Murphy in the Christian Science Monitor.  Murphy echoed standard accusations about Syria but went on to say incisively, “the report itself is nowhere near as credible as it makes out and should be viewed for what it is: A well-timed propaganda exercise funded by Qatar, a regime opponent who has funded rebels fighting Assad who have committed war crimes of their own.”

Unfortunately that was one of very few critical reports in the mainstream media.

In 2012, foreign affairs journalist Jonathan Steele wrote an article describing the overall media bias on Syria.. His article was titled “Most Syrians back Assad but you’d never know from western media”. The media campaign and propaganda has continued without stop. It was in this context that the Carter Ruck Report was delivered and widely accepted without question.

10. Politicians have used the Caesar story to push for more US/NATO aggression.  

Politicians seeking direct US intervention for ‘regime change’ in Syria were quick to accept and broadcast the ‘Caesar’ story.  They used it to demonize the Assad government and argue that the US must act so as to prevent “another holocaust’, ‘another Rwanda’, ‘another Cambodia’.

When Caesar’s photos were displayed at the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Congress, Chairman Ed Royce said “It is far past time that the world act…. It is far past time for the United States to say there is going to be a safe zone across this area in northern Syria.”

The top ranking Democrat in the House Foreign Affairs Committee is Eliot Engel.  In November 2015 he said “We’re reminded of the photographer, known as Caesar, who sat in this room a year ago, showing us in searing, graphic detail what Assad has done to his own people.” Engel went on to advocate for a new authorization for the use of military force.

Rep Adam Kinzinger is another advocate for aggression against Syria. At an event at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in July 2015 he said, “If we want to destroy ISIS we have to destroy the incubator of ISIS, Bashar al-Assad.”

The irony and hypocrisy is doubly profound since Rep Kinzinger has met and coordinated with opposition leader Okaidiwho is a confirmed ally of ISIS. In contrast with Kinzinger’s false claims, it is widely known that ISIS ideology and initial funding came from Saudi Arabia and much of its recent wealth from oil sales via Turkey.  The Syrian Army has fought huge battles against ISIS, winning some but losing others with horrific scenes of mass beheading.

11. The Human Rights Watch assessment is biased.

HRW has been very active around Syria. After the chemical attacks in greater Damascus on August 21, 2013, HRW rushed a report which concluded that, based on a vector analysis of incoming projectiles, the source of the sarin-carrying rockets must have been Syrian government territory. This analysis was later debunked as a “junk heap of bad evidence” by highly respected investigative journalist Robert Parry. HRW’s assumption about the chemical weapon rocket flight distance was faulty. Additionally it was unrealistic to think you could determine rocket trajectory with 1% accuracy from a canister on the ground.  To think you could determine flight trajectory from a canister on the ground that had deflected off a building wall was preposterous.

In spite of this, HRW stuck by its analysis which blamed the Assad government.  HRW Director Ken Roth publicly indicated dissatisfaction when an agreement to remove Syrian chemical weapons was reached. Mr. Roth wanted more than a ‘symbolic’ attack.

In light of the preceding, we note the December 2015 HRW report addressing the claims of Caesar.

HRW seems to be the only non-governmental organization to receive the full set of photo files from the custodian. To its credit, HRW acknowledged that nearly half the photos do not show what has been claimed for two years: they show dead Syrian soldiers and militia along with scenes from crime scenes, car bombings, etc…

But HRW’s bias is clearly shown in how they handle this huge contradiction. Amazingly, they suggest the incorrectly identified photographs support the overall claim. They say, “This report focuses on deaths in detention. However other types of photographs are also important. From an evidentiary perspective, they reinforce the credibility of the claims of Caesar about his role as a forensic photographer of the Syrian security forces or at least with someone who has access to their photographs.” (HRW, p.31)  This seems like saying if someone lies to you half the time that proves they are truthful.

The files disprove the assertion that the files all show tortured and killed. The photographs show a wide range of deceased persons, from Syrian soldiers to Syrian militia members to opposition fighters to civilians trapped in conflict zones to regular deaths in the military hospital.  There may be some photos of detainees who died in custody after being tortured, or who were simply executed. We know that this happened in Iraqi detention centers under U.S. occupation. Ugly and brutal things happen in war times. But the facts strongly suggest that the ‘Caesar’ account is basically untrue or a gross exaggeration.

It is striking that the HRW report has no acknowledgment of the war conditions and circumstances in Syria.  There is no acknowledgment that the government and Syrian Arab Army have been under attack by tens of thousands of weaponized fighters openly funded and supported by many of the wealthiest countries in the world.

There is no hint at the huge loss of life suffered by the Syrian army and supporters defending their country. The current estimates indicate from eighty to one hundred and twenty thousand Syrian soldiers, militia and allies having died in the conflict. During t

Relevant article selected from the GR archive, crossposted on GR in April 2016.

Israel’s targeting of Palestinian journalists has veered into selective collective punishment against the profession. According to the Ma’an news agency, Israel has now banned Arab and international organisations from importing bulletproof vests for journalists in Gaza, in an attempt to render Palestinian press even more vulnerable to attack.

Given Israel’s penchant for “collateral damage”, the latest oppressive tactic will allow the display of additional victims, despite the protection outlined in Article IV, Chapter III of the Geneva Convention that journalists are to be entitled to the same rights and protection granted to civilians. The disregard for international norms exhibited by Israel is once again evident, as the perpetual security concern rhetoric was woven into the purported explanation of the ban.

Quoted in Ma’an, the spokesperson for the Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territory stated that “bulletproof vests are dual-use devises whose entry requires examinations of the security establishment.” It was added that requests for vests are examined “with the security protocols.”

File photo of Israeli soldeir attacking palestinian Press officer

Seen within the wider context of Israeli oppressive tactics against Palestinian journalists, the recent prohibition is additional evidence of covert violations that will not disturb the international community’s slumber. The absence of critical thought regarding Israel’s security propaganda has resulted in international differentiation and fragmentation between the West Bank and Gaza, despite the fact that Israeli oppression in both areas is an extension of the constant struggle embodied by Palestinians as well as Israel’s necessity to widen its repertoire of human rights violations without attracting vociferous condemnations.

Whether Israel is targeting journalists through detention, including ensuing torture and medical neglect as occurs regularly in the West Bank, or directly as has been the case in Gaza particularly during Israel’s demonstrations of military capabilities against a civilian population, the end result is the creation of undesired vulnerability by exacerbating a lack of protection.

According to the Committee to Support Palestinian Journalists, 43 journalists were detained by Israel since October 2015, three of whom are suffering from serious illnesses. The detention of journalists has been described as part of an Israeli conspiracy that equates media outlets affiliated with Palestinian political parties as conforming to Israel’s distorted definition of terrorist organisations.

During “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014, the targeting of journalists by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) was based upon manipulation of international law without as much as a whisper of dissent by the international community. Earlier in 2012, a letter to the opinion pages of the New York Times penned by IDF spokeswoman Avital Leibovich insisted: “Such terrorists, who hold notebooks and cameras in their hands, are no different from their colleagues who fire rockets aimed at Israeli cities and cannot enjoy the rights and protection afforded to legitimate journalists.”

Erroneous premises aside, the quote is proof of how the international community has continuously turned a blind eye to the targeted assassinations of Palestinian journalists. Normalising Israeli violence has become enshrined in international consciousness, which thrives upon the increase of rampant bloodshed and the resulting desensitised attitude that has transformed the macabre into mundane. Not only the exhibited scorn for international humanitarian law is lauded through complicit silence; clearly, the international community has no qualms about endorsing Israel’s manipulative narrative to facilitate the slow extermination of Palestinians.

This 2013 statement from the DPRK provides a wider context of the longstanding ruse of the US for a preemptive strike to the Korean peninsula.

Text of  official DPRK statement

The moves of the U.S. imperialists to violate the sovereignty of the DPRK and encroach upon its supreme interests have entered an extremely grave phase. Under this situation, the dear respected Marshal Kim Jong Un, brilliant commander of Mt. Paektu, convened an urgent operation meeting on the performance of duty of the Strategic Rocket Force of the Korean People’s Army for firepower strike and finally examined and ratified a plan for firepower strike.

The important decision made by him is the declaration of a do-or-die battle to provide an epochal occasion for putting an end to the history of the long-standing showdown with the U.S. and opening a new era. It is also a last warning of justice served to the U.S., south Korean group and other anti-reunification hostile forces. The decision reflects the strong will of the army and people of the DPRK to annihilate the enemies.

Now the heroic service personnel and all other people of the DPRK are full of surging anger at the U.S. imperialists’ reckless war provocation moves, and the strong will to turn out as one in the death-defying battle with the enemies and achieve a final victory of the great war for national reunification true to the important decision made by Kim Jong Un.

The Supreme Command of the KPA in its previous statement solemnly declared at home and abroad the will of the army and people of the DPRK to take decisive military counteraction to defend the sovereignty of the country and the dignity of its supreme leadership as regards the war moves of the U.S. and south Korean puppets that have reached the most extreme phase.

Not content with letting B-52 make sorties into the sky over south Korea in succession despite the repeated warnings of the DPRK, the U.S. made B-2A stealth strategic bomber and other ultra-modern strategic strike means fly from the U.S. mainland to south Korea to stage a bombing drill targeting the DPRK. This is an unpardonable and heinous provocation and an open challenge.

By taking advantage of the U.S. reckless campaign for a nuclear war against the DPRK, the south Korean puppets vociferated about “preemptive attack” and “strong counteraction” and even “strike at the commanding forces”, openly revealing the attempt to destroy monuments symbolic of the dignity of the DPRK’s supreme leadership.

This clearly shows that the U.S. brigandish ambition for aggression and the puppets’ attempt to invade the DPRK have gone beyond the limit and their threats have entered the reckless phase of an actual war from the phase of threat and blackmail.

The prevailing grim situation more clearly proves that the Supreme Command of the KPA was just when it made the judgment and decision to decisively settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists and south Korean puppets by dint of the arms of Military-First politics (So’ngun), because time when words could work has passed.

Now they are openly claiming that the B-2A stealth strategic bombers’ drill of dropping nuclear bombs was “not to irritate the north” but “the defensive one”. The U.S. also says the drill is “to defend the interests of its ally”. However, it is nothing but a lame pretext to cover up its aggressive nature, evade the denunciation at home and abroad and escape from the DPRK’s retaliatory blows.

The era when the U.S. resorted to the policy of strength by brandishing nuclear weapons has gone.

It is the resolute answer of the DPRK and its steadfast stand to counter the nuclear blackmail of the U.S. imperialists with merciless nuclear attack and their war of aggression with just all-out war.

They should clearly know that in the era of Marshal Kim Jong Un, the greatest-ever commander, all things are different from what they used to be in the past.

The hostile forces will clearly realize the iron will, matchless grit and extraordinary mettle of the brilliant commander of Mt. Paektu that the earth cannot exist without Military-First (So’ngun) Korea.

Time has come to stage a do-or-die final battle.

The government, political parties and organizations of the DPRK solemnly declare as follows reflecting the final decision made by Kim Jong Un at the operation meeting of the KPA Supreme Command and the unanimous will of all service personnel and people of the DPRK who are waiting for a final order from him.

1.From this moment, the north-south relations will be put at the state of war and all the issues arousing between the north and the south will be dealt with according to the wartime regulations.

The state of neither peace nor war has ended on the Korean Peninsula.

Now that the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK have entered into an actual military action, the inter-Korean relations have naturally entered the state of war. Accordingly, the DPRK will immediately punish any slightest provocation hurting its dignity and sovereignty with resolute and merciless physical actions without any prior notice.

2. If the U.S. and the south Korean puppet group perpetrate a military provocation for igniting a war against the DPRK in any area including the five islands in the West Sea of Korea or in the area along the Military Demarcation Line, it will not be limited to a local war, but develop into an all-out war, a nuclear war.

It is self-evident that any military conflict on the Korean Peninsula is bound to lead to an all-out war, a nuclear war now that even U.S. nuclear strategic bombers in its military bases in the Pacific including Hawaii and Guam and in its mainland are flying into the sky above south Korea to participate in the madcap DPRK-targeted nuclear war moves.

The first strike of the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK will blow up the U.S. bases for aggression in its mainland and in the Pacific operational theatres including Hawaii and Guam and reduce not only its military bases in south Korea but the puppets’ ruling institutions including Chongwadae and puppet army’s bases to ashes at once, to say nothing of the aggressors and the provokers.

3. The DPRK will never miss the golden chance to win a final victory in a great war for national reunification.

This war will not be a three day-war but it will be a blitz war through which the KPA will occupy all areas of south Korea including Jeju Island at one strike, not giving the U.S. and the puppet warmongers time to come to their senses, and a three-dimensional war to be fought in the air, land and seas and on the front line and in the rear.

This sacred war of justice will be a nation-wide, all-people resistance involving all Koreans in the north and the south and overseas in which the traitors to the nation including heinous confrontation maniacs, warmongers and human scum will be mercilessly swept away.

No force on earth can break the will of the service personnel and people of the DPRK all out in the just great war for national reunification and of all other Koreans and overpower their might.

Holding in high esteem the peerlessly great men of Mt. Paektu, the Korean people will give vent to the pent-up grudge and realize their cherished desire and thus bring a bright day of national reunification and build the best power on this land without fail.

Originally posted in November of 2013, the article, “Nuclear Deal With Iran Prelude to War, Not “Breakthrough,”” warned of a premeditated, documented conspiracy to use a monumental “deal” with Iran as a pretext not for peace, but in fact, for war and regime change.

Hysteria now sweeps the headlines across the Western media regarding a “historical nuclear deal” that “Obama made” that vindicates the Nobel Peace Prize he was “prematurely awarded” so many years ago. For those aware of the ruse at play, such sentiments are to be inevitably and completely betrayed by what is sure to follow.

The global public must remember there is currently a war raging in Syria on Iran’s doorstep. The sole purpose of this war, organized and directed by the West, fueled by billions in cash, weapons, and flooded with fighters organized and trafficked from across the globe by NATO and its allies, is to destroy Iran’s chief regional ally before inevitably destroying Iran itself. If the war in Syria is still raging, then one can be assured that the proxy war in turn being waged against Iran is still raging.

The “nuclear deal,” as it was planned to be all along, is a ruse. The 2013 article, “Nuclear Deal With Iran Prelude to War, Not “Breakthrough,”” in its entirety, explains:

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

-Brookings Institution’s 2009 “Which Path to Persia?” report, page 52.

Which Path to Persia? .pdf
….

Written years ago, as the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel were already plotting to overrun Iran’s neighbor and ally Syria with Al Qaeda to weaken the Islamic Republic before inevitable war, this quote exposes fully the current charade that is the “Iran nuclear deal.”

The West has no intention of striking any lasting deal with Iran, as nuclear capabilities, even the acquirement of nuclear weapons by Iran was never truly an existential threat to Western nations or their regional partners. The West’s issue with Iran is its sovereignty and its ability to project its interests into spheres traditionally monopolized by the US and UK across the Middle East. Unless Iran plans on turning over its sovereignty and regional influence along with its right to develop and use nuclear technology, betrayal of any “nuclear deal” is all but inevitable, as is the war that is to shortly follow.

Exposing the duplicity that accompanies Western “efforts” to strike a deal will severely undermine their attempt to then use the deal as leverage to justify military operations against Iran. For Iran and its allies, they must be prepared for war, more so when the West feigns interest in peace. Libya serves as a perfect example of the fate that awaits nations reproached by the West who let down their guard – it literally is a matter of life and death both for leaders, and for nations as a whole.

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Relevant article selected from the GR archive, first published in October 2017.

If anyone is still wondering why North Korea was being “provocative” in missile tests and repeatedly declaring what would seem to be a daunting arsenal (although there is still no irrefutable, concrete proof of deliverable, long range nuclear weapons capability) here is just a small taste of what it’s southern neighbor, in cahoots with Godfather America, has planned (1):

“Decapitation.”

‘Kill the King and the regime will collapse. That is the rationale offered by South Korean military planners for a “decapitation unit” they are forming for the sole purpose of assassinating North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un. They are convinced that, in the ensuing chaos, North Korea’s leadership would disintegrate and abandon the nuclear programme on which he has staked his prestige.

“Decapitation means we have only one target,” said Choi Jin-wook, a long-time North Korea analyst at the government’s Korea Institute for National Unification. “It’s much simpler to eliminate the leader than attack military bases.”

‘South Korean defence planners have ordered “decapitation strikes” in air, naval and ground exercises in which the targets are simulated to resemble one of Kim’s many hideouts or residences. Such exercises are the prelude to the formal formation later this year of the unit, Spartan 3000.

‘South Korea’s Defence Minister, Song Young-moo, has ordered a special forces “kill brigade” of crack commandos to spearhead the group. Fighter planes and guided missile destroyers would provide whatever support they needed.’

“The ministry cited the successful test-firing of a German-made Taurus missile at a target off the south-west coast as an example of the weaponry that might be deployed in an attempt to kill the North Korean leader.

“The missile, with a range of 310 miles, flew about 150 miles, hitting its target in the Yellow Sea.”

South Korea of course is not threatened with being wiped off the face of the earth for test firing a missile in to the sea, as is its northern neighbor.

Think about the words “decapitation unit” – the horrific image which leaps in to any even semi-normal mind. This kind of plotting dwarfs even the horrors of deranged criminals literally decapitating in the Middle East. But then swathes of them too are US backed.

Perhaps “decapitation” is now casual verbal currency in US dominated political and military circles.

Chilling Principles of Defence Secretary Mattis

General James Mattis

It should also not be forgotten that in the Trumposphere, where General James Mattis is now Defence Secretary the General has some pretty arresting principles. Life is clearly very cheap and killing the most casual of undertakings:

A few of his views (2) include:

“The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event. That said, there are some assholes in the world that just need to be shot.”

“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”

“Find the enemy that wants to end this experiment (in American democracy) and kill every one of them until they’re so sick of the killing that they leave us and our freedoms intact.”

Precisely the “experiment in American democracy” inflicted most recently on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, with North Korea and Iran in their sights.

With thanks to William Blum, the list of US mass slaughtering “democracy” projects since 1949 is at (3.)

Talking of Afghanistan, here are General Mattis’ thoughts on democracy- spreading there:

“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.”

In the real world these are surely views which might well find the holder in a secure psychiatric unit, if not a maximum secure prison.

Diplomatic overtures ignored

Contrast this to an ignored approach (4) from the Korean Peninsular, where both Australia and North Korea have Embassies in Seoul.

On 28^th September:

“The Embassy of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the Republic of Indonesia presents its compliments to the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia and has the honor to inform that the Foreign Affairs Committee of the DPRK Supreme People’s Assembly sent the open letter to the Parliaments of the different countries.

“ … the Embassy of the DPRK has further the honor to enclose hereby the above-mentioned letter.”

The preamble ends with diplomatic courtesies and “highest considerations.”

The letter in part (full document at 4) written in the third person, reads as follows:

“Open Letter to the Parliaments of Different Countries.

“The letter noted that Trump, President of the U.S., styling itself ‘the superpower’, denied the existence of the DPRK, a dignified sovereign state (and threatened) ‘total destruction’ at the UN …

“The Foreign Affairs Committee of the DPRK … mission (is to) promote friendly and co-operative relations with the parliaments and peace-loving people of the countries around the world … based on the ideas of independence, peace and friendship, bitterly condemns the reckless remarks of Trump as an intolerable insult to the Korean people, a declaration of war against the DPRK and a grave threat to the global peace …

(From his first day in office, the President): “has engaged in high handed and arbitrary practice, scrapping international laws and agreements (putting America first) at the expense of the whole world.”

Threats of annihilation and sanctions have denied the people of the DPRK “normal economic development, in breach of the UN Charter …”

Trump, the letter states:

“threatened to totally destroy the DPRK, a dignified, independent and sovereign State and a nuclear power. It is an extreme act of threatening to destroy the whole world.”

The correspondence concludes with the:

“… belief that the parliaments of different countries, loving independence, peace and justice will fully discharge their due mission and duty in realizing the desire of mankind for international justice and peace (and with vigilance) against the reckless moves of the Trump Administration trying to drive the world in to a horrible nuclear disaster.”

With Trump threatening that his finger is hovering over the nuclear button, few could surely disagree with much of the DRPRK’s sentiments.

Donald Trump of course boasted menacingly to “totally destroy” North Korea in his address to the UN General Assembly on 19^th September, the UN Charter’s fine founding words clearly unknown to him.

There has been a deafening silence from world governments regarding the above letter. Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop (image left), who visited South Korea in August, instead of reacting to a hand held out commented:

“I read this as showing that the collective strategy of allies and partners to impose maximum pressure and diplomatic and economic sanctions on North Korea is working …

So I think that this shows they are feeling desperate, feeling isolated, trying to demonise the US, trying to divide the international community.”

However, Australia’s Lowy Institute Director of International Security, Euan Graham, was more positive, commenting:

“This is effectively an invitation to have high level access, to send an (Australian) delegation from Seoul.”

“Now would be a good time for Australia to exercise its still existing, even if on-off, diplomatic relations with the North.” (Sydney Morning Herald, 20^th October 2017.)

North Korea the Aggressor?

For anyone reading most of the Western media where the DPRK is the latest nation to be demonized, the best and most succinct summary of endless US betrayal since the armistice of July 1953 is at (5.) Here is an excerpt from the early 1990’s onwards.

Remember too that the US had nuclear weapons in South Korea from the late 1950’s until 1991.

“In January 1993, president Bill Clinton announced the largest military war games ever (in which all sorts of nuclear weaponry featured).

“These took place in and around Korea’s shores in March. The DPRK reacted to a more belligerent environment by giving notice of intention to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it had joined in 1985. The North also demonstrated the viability of a medium-range missile, the Nodong 1, in May 1993.” If ever cause and effect were starkly demonstrated here is a prime example.

“Kim Il Sung died in July 1994 and his son, Kim Jong Il, replaced him as leader.

Portraits of North Korea founder Kim Il Sung and late leader Kim Jong Il

“In the early summer of that year the US government concluded that a military strike on Yongbyon – under serious consideration – would start a war with the North.

“But instead of war, influenced by a voluntary shutdown by the North of the Yongbyon reactor, talks led to the October Framework Agreement of 1994.

“Under this agreement, the North agreed to continue the reactor’s shutdown in exchange for light water reactors and a new relationship with the US.

“Loans and credits were to ease the agreement, and the US undertook to supply heating oil to tide over the North’s heating problems in the short term.

“The agreement called for full diplomatic relations and a US pledge not to threaten or target the North with nuclear weapons.

“Eloquently, no missile testing by the North proceeded between May 1993 and August 1998.

“In June 1998 the Pentagon staged simulated long-range nuclear attack drills against North Korea, and in October that year a US Lieutenant General spoke publicly about plans for replacing the North Korean regime, and of even beginning the project preemptively if there were solid grounds for expecting an attack.

“These developments hardly confirmed US commitment to developing a more co-operative relationship with the North.

“George W Bush’s ascension to president in 2001 produced a declaration from his advisers that the 1994 agreement was dead in the water. (Thus)

in December 2002, the DPRK expelled the IAEA inspectors, restarted the Yongbyon reactor and withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

“Bush meanwhile, declared his intention of dealing with North Korea after Iraq.

“In spring 2003 the North made another offer to the US: it would scrap its nuclear development if the US would normalise relations and provide basic security guarantees.

“Six years later, in 2009, substantive talks involving Russia and China as well as Japan, the US and both Koreas had goals which included the normalising of diplomatic relations, an end to trade sanctions and acknowledgement of the North’s right to use nuclear energy.

“But these talks collapsed after both the US and the ROK rejected the North’s gradual dismantling of its nuclear weapons.

“In 2011 Kim Jong Il died and his second son, Kim Jong-un, became the North’s new leader.

The summary concludes:

“During these past three months the risk of war, indeed of nuclear war – not necessarily restricted to the Korean peninsula – has increased dramatically.”

General Mattis is, at time of writing, in South Korea, where he has delivered a near dead ringer copy of the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq. Washington’s mantra was that Iraq “threatened it’s neighbours” though even hostile neighbours responded that it did not. Iraq of course could destroy parts of the West “in 45 minutes.” It was a pack of lies.

Here’s Mattis:

“North Korea has accelerated the threat that it poses to its neighbors and the world through its illegal and unnecessary missile and nuclear weapons programs …” The situation had developed a “new urgency.”

Next month Trump is to visit South Korea, the man who has threatened to unleash on the small nation “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

This is the man of whom twenty seven eminent psychiatrists and psychotherapists have written in a just published book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”: “We collectively warn that anyone as mentally unstable as this man simply should not be entrusted with the life-and-death powers of the Presidency.”

It is time for the world’s diplomats to respond to North Korea’s letter and rise to the urgent occasion, before it is too late for the region and possibly the planet.

Notes

1. https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/world/south-korea-hopes-make-kim-jong-un-fear-life/

2. http://freebeacon.com/national-security/the-best-from-mad-dog-mattis/

3. https://williamblum.org/essays/read/overthrowing-other-peoples-governments-the-master-list

4. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4113487-North-Korea-Letter.html

5. http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-178f-Missed-opportunities-for-peace-in-Korea#.WfMt9kuvtFI

Amid the unrelenting campaign by the Democrats and the media—backed by powerful sections of the US military and intelligence apparatus—to whip up hysteria over alleged Russian “meddling” in the 2016 US election, scant attention has been paid to the blatant meddling of US imperialism itself in the electoral processes of the countries south of the Rio Grande.

Involved in these operations are not a few tens of thousands of dollars in Facebook advertisements, alleged activities of social media bots and supposed “fake news”, but rather support for bloody repression, the systematic impoverishment of entire populations and preparations for military coups and outright US military intervention.

A principal case in point is Washington’s attempt to sabotage the upcoming presidential election in Venezuela, which had been scheduled for next month, but has now been pushed back until May 20 following negotiations between the government of President Nicolas Maduro and opposition parties.

Of course, none of this is new. US imperialism has rigged elections, funded candidates and parties and overthrown presidents it did not like—including Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Goulart in Brazil in 1964 and Allende in Chile in 1973—for over a century.

These methods are no means merely a regrettable legacy from some distant past. In Venezuela, the US is backing right-wing political figures who participated in the abortive 2002 coup against the late President Hugo Chavez, while openly appealing for a new military coup and threatening direct US intervention to topple his successor, Maduro.

Washington has denounced the Venezuelan election as a “sham” and “illegitimate” before it has even taken place. Despite the fact that the terms of the vote originally scheduled for April 22 were negotiated between the government and elements of the opposition—including the presence of UN election monitors—the Trump administration is treating it as a political crime that must be stopped at all costs.

Administration officials have told both Reuters and McClatchy news agencies that the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department and Treasury Department are all involved in active discussions on the imposition of sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry that could lead the country’s already crisis-ridden economy to completely collapse.

Under consideration are not only a full-scale embargo on all Venezuelan oil shipments to the US—which constitutes a third of the country’s market—but also a ban on the sale of all US oil-related products to Venezuela and blocking insurance coverage for oil tankers moving Venezuelan oil.

The latter two measures could prove as crippling as an outright import ban, as the Venezuelan oil industry depends on the importation of US lighter crude oil and refined products to mix with its heavy crude to prepare it for export. And, without insurance, the country cannot ship its oil through international waters.

“The message is we will continue to ratchet up the pressure until the Maduro regime is removed and democracy is restored to Venezuela,” a senior administration official told McClatchy.

The strategy is clear. Venezuela’s economy must be brought to such a state of collapse that the military is induced to overthrow the government. Thus, the removal of an elected president, by means of starving the population and employing military force—either Venezuelan or US—constitutes for Washington the restoration of “democracy.”

Why is the Venezuelan election “illegitimate”? Apparently because it was boycotted by the MUD right-wing opposition coalition, which cited the early date selected for the vote, a date that had been agreed upon in negotiations between opposition figures and the government. The pushing back of the date by a month to placate the opposition has made no difference as far as the MUD leadership is concerned.

One prominent MUD official, Henri Falcon, the governor of the state of Lara, has decided to run against Maduro and agreed to the revised date for the election. In retaliation, the MUD leadership expelled him from the opposition coalition last week.

The MUD boycott is backed by Washington. The coalition does not want to participate in the election because it is likely to lose. While Maduro’s popular approval rating stands at roughly 25 percent—on a par with the deeply unpopular presidents Temer and Santos in neighboring Brazil and Colombia—the right-wing opposition is even more despised by masses of Venezuelans.

Both the ruling PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela) and the MUD are bourgeois parties, representing rival factions of Venezuela’s financial and corporate elites. Maduro’s government has its principal pillar in the Venezuelan military and enjoys the backing of the so-called boliburguesia, a layer of corrupt officials and capitalists who have fattened off of financial speculation and government contracts.

While the limited social assistance programs associated with the rule of Chavez and Maduro have become increasingly hollowed out, as unemployment and prices rise, the MUD has proven incapable of harnessing popular anger among working people, who see the opposition coalition as the political instrument of the country’s traditional ruling oligarchy.

Washington is backing a boycott not only out of fear that the Venezuelan right cannot be counted on to defeat Maduro at the ballot box, but because it wants a far more sweeping change in the country than can be achieved in an election.

Image on the right is Rex Tillerson at the University of Texas

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, which once exercised a monopoly over the exploitation of Venezuelan oil, expressed US preferences on the eve of his Latin American trip staged last month to drum up support for Maduro’s ouster.

“In the history of Venezuela and South American countries, it is often times that the military is the agent of change when things are so bad, and the leadership can no longer serve the people,” he told an audience at the University of Texas.

In the same address, Tillerson declared that the Monroe Doctrine “is as relevant today as it was the day it was written.”

This nearly 200-year-old canon of US foreign policy supposedly endowed Washington with the right to use force in preventing outside powers from establishing a foothold in the Western Hemisphere.

Initially invoked as a US policy of opposing any attempt by European empires to re-colonize newly independent countries in Latin America, it was turned into a declaration of a US sphere of influence and became the rationale for some 50 direct US military interventions along with a series of CIA-backed coups that imposed fascist-military dictatorships over much of the region in the second half of the 20th century.

The doctrine is once again being invoked—some four and a half years after being publicly repudiated by Tillerson’s predecessor John Kerry—to counter the rising influence of both China and Russia in a region long regarded by US imperialism as its own “backyard.”

China’s recent bid to extend its “One Belt, One Road” initiative to Latin America, with Beijing’s promise to the region of $500 billion in trade credits along with $250 billion in Chinese direct investment over the next decade, has been joined by Russia’s increased involvement, particularly in Venezuela, with the funneling of some $6 billion into the state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela in return for oil and petroleum assets, are seen as a strategic threat.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee last month, the head of Southcom, which oversees US military operations in Latin America, described the growing influence of China and Russia as his command’s “most significant concern.” While stating that the challenge posed in the region was “not yet” a military one, there is no doubt that US imperialism is preparing, just as elsewhere in the world, to counter the decline of its economic dominance by military means.

Venezuela is the foremost target of this military strategy because of its strategic petroleum reserves, estimated to be the largest of any country in the world. Washington is determined to restore its unfettered dominance over these resources—and deny them to China and Russia—something that can be achieved not by means of an election, but only through a military overthrow or intervention, the overturning of constitutional restrictions on foreign exploitation of Venezuelan oil and the savage repression of opposition within the population.

As always, the New York Times editorial board is operating in lockstep with the Pentagon and the CIA in the machinations of US imperialism in Latin America.

In its Sunday magazine section, the newspaper published a cover story dedicated to the extreme right-wing Venezuelan politician Leopoldo Lopez under the headline “Can Venezuela Be Saved?”

Casting Lopez as the embattled country’s Messiah says more about the real intentions of US imperialism than the man himself. The scion of one of Venezuela’s most aristocratic families, tracing its lineage back to the “liberator”-turned-dictator Bolivar, and with ministers in virtually every government since, Lopez is a representative of the most extreme right-wing political forces in the country.

He was arrested and sentenced to house arrest for his role in organizing a violent campaign in 2014 known as “La Salida”, or the exit, aimed at overthrowing the Maduro government in which 43 people lost their lives.

As a youth, he was reportedly influenced by the semi-fascist Catholic organization “Tradition Family and Property.” The graduate of an exclusive US prep school and Kenyon College in Ohio, Lopez went on to attend Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, an institution known for recruiting and grooming “assets” of the CIA and US imperialism all over the world.

His only elected office was that of mayor of Chacao, the center of the wealthy elite in the city of Caracas.

In 2002, Lopez was a direct participant in the abortive coup against Chavez, participating in the illegal detention of the minister of interior and justice and playing a key role in organizing a violent assault on the Cuban Embassy

In its obscenely hagiographic piece, the Times compares this extreme right-wing oligarch to Martin Luther King Jr., claiming that the slain American civil rights leader’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” is one of his principal inspirations.

After weeks of speaking with the right-wing politician, the author of the Timesarticle, Will S. Hylton, declared it “jarring” to hear him declare his totally unsurprising support for a military coup as a viable “transition to democracy.”

Hylton writes, incredibly:

“On the spectrum of American politics, he would probably land in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.”

There is, however, a grain of truth in this political characterization. Lopez and the “progressive wing of the Democratic Party” are in the same trench together with the Trump administration and its principal architect of Latin American policy, Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, when it comes to Venezuela.

Last week, a group of 11 Democratic Senators introduced a resolution in the Senate that “denounces as illegitimate any presidential election in Venezuela that fails to meet the standards” demanded by Washington.

There could be no more naked “foreign meddling” in another country’s elections, reducing the unsubstantiated allegations against Russia to insignificance by comparison. Among the signatories is the self-described “socialist” and “independent” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

The working class in the US must reject this kind of interventionism and its accompanying political hypocrisy with contempt. It is up to the working class of Venezuela to sweep away Maduro and the corrupt capitalist elements he represents, not the US military and intelligence apparatus.

*

Featured image is from Eureka Street.

In the European Union’s fourth-largest country, amid mass poverty and unemployment and growing popular disaffection with the centre-left parties and their pseudo-left apologists, Sunday’s parliamentary election in Italy resulted in a historic defeat for the governing Democratic Party (PD) and a victory for the right-wing and extreme-right parties.

Italy’s desperate levels of social distress—with youth unemployment at 30 percent—are largely the product of policies pursued by centre-left governments. While right-wing governments under Silvio Berlusconi were characterised by unrestrained corruption, the names of the centre-left prime ministers—Romano Prodi, Massimo D’Alema and Matteo Renzi—are inseparably linked to social cuts and austerity directed against the working class.

The main beneficiaries of Sunday’s election were right-wing and far-right forces—above all, Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement and the racist Lega led by Matteo Salvini. At 73 percent, voter participation was relatively low by Italian standards.

The right-wing parties’ electoral victory has deepened the crisis of the European Union because the Five Star Movement and Lega are either critical or oppose Italy’s membership in the EU. Financial observers also fear that an extended government crisis could lead to the collapse of Italy’s fragile banking system.

No party or electoral alliance secured the majority required to govern.

The PD, the former governing party, won just 18.7 percent of the vote. It now holds only 105 of 630 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 50 of 315 seats in the Senate. Free and Equal (LeU—Liberi e Uguali), a split-off from the PD led by anti-mafia state prosecutor Pietro Grasso, won just 3.4 percent of the vote.

Matteo Renzi declared his resignation as PD leader Monday evening. The alliance he led, which included a group around Giuseppe Pisapia (Insieme) and the pro-EU +Europa, won just 22.9 percent of the vote and came in third place behind Berlusconi’s right-wing alliance and Grillo’s Five Star Movement.

Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega (formerly Lega Nord), asserted his claim to the post of prime minister on Monday.

His party has “the right and the duty to govern in the years to come,” said Salvini.

With 17.4 percent of the vote, Lega outperformed its alliance partner Forza Italia (14.0 percent), led by Silvio Berlusconi. The fascist Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) of Georgia Meloni, which is also part of the alliance, won 4.3 percent.

With a total of 37 percent of the vote, this alliance emerged as the largest. Berlusconi announced his intention to appoint his party colleague Antonio Tajani as prime minister. Due to a conviction for tax avoidance, Berlusconi is no longer allowed to hold public office.

Instead, Salvini could become prime minister. After Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Austria’s Sebastian Kurz and the Czech Republic’s Andrej Babis, this would result in another notorious racist and xenophobe becoming head of government in the EU.

The Lega Nord emerged in the 1990s and campaigned for the separation of the richer northern parts of Italy, “Padania” in the Lega Nord’s propaganda, from the poorer south. Even then the party conducted virulently xenophobic campaigns. Under Salvini, the party expanded nationwide and adopted an anti-EU, far-right and racist programme modelled on Marine le Pen’s National Front in France.

However, the right-wing alliance will not be able to form a government without another coalition partner. It is also possible that the alliance will fall apart.

One option discussed prior to the election has been ruled out: a “grand coalition” of the PD and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. The two parties, which have taken turns at the head of successive governments since the early 1990s, no longer even have a third of the vote between them.

Along with Salvini, Luigi de Maio, the lead candidate for the Five Star Movement, has also claimed the position of prime minister. With 32.7 percent of the vote, the Five Star Movement emerged as the strongest party and the winner of the election. It gained support in the impoverished South in particular.

A map of Italy, divided according to the party that won in each region, reveals a new kind of division: in the north the blue of the right-wing alliance can be seen everywhere, with two exceptions, Tuscany and South Tyrol, where the Democrats still have a base of support.

But in the South and Southeast there is only one winner: the Five Star Movement, which won 49 percent of the vote in Campania, 48 percent in Sicily, 44 percent in Apulia, 43 percent in Calabria and the Basilicata, and 42 percent in Sardinia. The M5S will control more than a third of the seats in parliament, with 225 of 630 in the Chamber of Deputies and over 100 in the 315-seat Senate.

The Five Star Movement exploited the fact that it has yet to join a government in Rome, and benefited above all from widespread dissatisfaction with the other parties. M5S, which pursues a hard-right course on refugee policy and the selection of its international allies, claims to be a party that is “neither left nor right.” M5S did well among young voters, who have only experienced governments led by the PD and Forza Italia while unemployment has destroyed entire regions and forced many young people to emigrate.

The 31-year-old de Maio attempted during the election campaign to present M5S as ready for government. He spoke in front of top businessmen and investors and downplayed his party’s traditional anti-EU stance. The party also eliminated a passage from its programme banning the formation of coalitions with other parties.

“It is time to enter government,” stated de Maio.

His party would not “leave Italy in chaos,” but would hold consultations with all political forces.

In the EU, the media and on financial markets, the Italian election result triggered unrest. On the same day that a decision in favour of a continuation of the Merkel government in Germany was finalised after more than five months, a new crisis broke out—in Italy.

Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung remarked that the election results were “bad for Italy and bad for Europe.” Since Brexit, “the third most important country in the EU, and once the most European friendly of all” now threatens “to go off the rails with an irrational, anti-European populism.” Handelsblatt warned,

“After the Italian election, the country risks a debt collapse.”

France’s Le Monde described the result as an “earthquake,” while la Depeche feared that Italy could become “an ungovernable country.”

Future developments are largely in the hands of President Sergio Materella, a 76-year-old jurist and PD politician. He is holding back-room talks with the political parties and will task one with forming the government, which, if successful, will have to secure Materella’s approval of the cabinet before it is voted on by parliament. An initial indication is expected on March 23, when parliament’s two chambers meet for the first time and elect their presidents.

The Italian election outcome is the result of the deep-going dissatisfaction among the population with all previous governments. The dominant feelings are anger and disappointment with parties that call themselves left but carry out the bidding of the banks and major corporations.

In Italy, Matteo Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni have imposed the dictates of the banks and corporations with the assistance of the Jobs Act labour market reform, the slashing of anti-poverty programs for the elderly and social spending cuts. They actively participated in NATO’s military build-up and the militarisation of the EU, and backed the war threats against Russia. In Libya, a former Italian colony, Foreign Minister Marco Minniti (PD) concluded a pact with the Libyan coastguard to block refugees from crossing the Mediterranean.

The PD’s electoral debacle is due above all to this right-wing, anti-worker record. Given the absence of a progressive and socialist alternative, right-wing parties were able to profit in the election.

The electoral alliance Potere al Popolo (Power to the People, PaP), secured just 1 percent of the vote. Having served as a fig leaf for right-wing governments for years, the pseudo-left is no longer capable of presenting itself as an alternative. Its role models include Alexis Tsipras of Syriza, who as Greek prime minister has imposed a vicious austerity programme.

Rifondazione Comunista, the chief political force behind PaP, was a member of Romano Prodi’s government from 2006 to 2008, which laid the groundwork for the current policies of war and social austerity. Immediately thereafter, the rise of the Five Star Movement began.

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Is China Neoliberal?

By Kim Petersen, March 06, 2018

What is neoliberalism? To start, it is not new, and it is not liberal. It is predicated on prioritizing the private sphere over the public sphere; i.e., allowing the so-called free-market to decide. Hence, the role of the government is to be minimized, with privatization, cutting social programs, deregulating finance, and imposing austerity prescribed.

The Arctic Climate Tipping Points: Methane and the Future of the Biosphere

By Dr. Andrew Glickson, March 06, 2018

As extreme temperatures, the rate of sea ice melt, the collapse of Greenland glaciers, the thawing of Siberian and Canadian permafrost and increased evaporation in the Arctic drive cold snow storms into Europe and North America, and as hurricanes and wild fires affect tropical and semi-tropical parts of the globe, it is becoming clear Earth is entering a period of uncontrollable climate tipping points consequent on the shift in composition and thereby the state of the atmosphere-ocean system.

United States: The Political Economy of Massacres

By Prof. James Petras, March 06, 2018

The question is why does the US political system bemoan the frequent occurrence of mass shootings, and yet turn around and endorse the political process that makes these killings possible?  The size, scope and duration of massacres requires that we examine the large-scale, long-term systemic features of the US political economy.

Lessons From Cuba

By Will Podmore, March 06, 2018

The withdrawal of Soviet aid in 1990 left Cuba’s economy on a knife-edge. Cubans lost all their markets in sugar. They ceased to receive foodstuffs, fuel, wood, soap, raw materials. Calories and protein intake were reduced by half. Plans for nuclear energy had to be abandoned. The US intensified its blockade, passing the Helms-Burton Act. It was a case of adapt or die.

Trump-Netanyahu Meeting at White House to Discuss Multi-Front War in Middle East

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, March 06, 2018

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to meet U.S. President Donald J. Trump to discuss what has long been in the works, war. A war against Syria, Hezbollah, Lebanon and eventually its main target, Iran. Another issue will be discussed is the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem (which in my mind will lead to the Third Intifada).

Israeli Army’s Lies Can No Longer Salvage Its Image

By Jonathan Cook, March 06, 2018

A child horrifically injured by soldiers was arrested and terrified into signing a false confession that he was hurt in a bicycle accident. A man who, it was claimed, had died of tear-gas inhalation was actually shot at point-blank range, then savagely beaten by a mob of soldiers and left to die. And soldiers threw a tear gas canister at a Palestinian couple, baby in arms, as they fled for safety during a military invasion of their village.

Featured image: Jewish residents of the illegal outpost Amona, November 17, 2016. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)

There will be no definitive moment, event or a point in history, when we can say that annexation happened. Israel’s annexation is a process — a deliberate process — which has been carefully planned, began a long time ago, and which will continue for years to come.

It is hard to get too excited over small steps toward annexation, such as a law that moves a university from the jurisdiction of one council of higher education to another. The international community will not raise a storm. The UN Security Council will not hold an emergency session. The EU will not threaten sanctions. Yet this is precisely what the annexation of Palestine will look like.

The Knesset on Monday passed a law that places Israeli universities in the occupied Palestinian territories under the aegis of the Israeli Council for Higher Education, a civilian body created by Israeli law to oversee universities and colleges in Israel. Settlement colleges and universities were previous supervised by the Council for Higher Education in Judea and Samaria, a military body created specifically because the civilian council’s jurisdiction did not extend beyond the State of Israel’s borders.

This was not the first time the Knesset decided that it could legislate beyond the boundaries of the territory over which the state claims sovereignty. Israel rules over the West Bank not with the laws of its elected civilian government but rather with a military regime, in loose accordance with those parts of international law that deal with occupied territories. The wholesale application of civilian law to an occupied territory amounts to annexation.

There are many other small steps toward annexation being planned in the near and long term. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday stressed the need to advance those plans in an organized manner, and not as ad hoc proposals from individual politicians looking to make headlines.

“With regards to the question of the application of Israeli law in Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley,” the prime minister said in a Likud faction meeting, referring to the entirety of the West Bank, “…it should be government-sponsored legislation and not private legislation. This is a process with historic consequences … We will act intelligently.” (Listen to the recording in Hebrew.)

Construction workers begin work on the new settlement called Amichai, meant to resettle the evacuees of Amona, in Shilo Valley, West Bank, on June 20, 2017. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

The media immediately latched onto a different part of Netanyahu’s statement, in which he claimed Israel is coordinating and holding ongoing discussions with the United States regarding annexation plans. The Prime Minister’s Office was forced to retract that part the statement, which made for even better headlines. The prime minister openly and unabashedly describing how he plans to apply Israeli law to the Palestinian territories, however, is barely news anymore. It has fully penetrated the mainstream discourse.

And that is the point. Annexation is no longer a topic that the Israeli right whispers about in closed meetings and fringe conferences. The Israeli government no longer feels bound by the conventions of the past few decades, according to which it constantly reassures the world that it is working to achieve a two-state solution — even if only years down the road. Ironically, the only world leaders who are willing to call out that false sincerity these days are those, like Donald Trump, who were never invested in a two-state outcome to begin with, and those, like John Kerry, who have left public life for good.

Annexation is spoken of as if it is an outcome in and of itself. But annexation is not the goal. The goal is simply to strengthen and cement Israel’s control over the entire area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea (minus the Gaza Strip, at least these days). Annexation is merely a tool for accomplishing that.

We can expect to see more and more pieces of legislation pass through the Knesset in the coming months and years that move the process of annexation along — like the higher education law, or the so-called Regularization Law, which regularizes the theft of privately owned Palestinian land by Jewish settlers. Some of these laws may grab the world’s attention enough to garner up a few statements of protest. Many will be so seemingly insignificant that nobody will notice, and if they do, they likely will not understand what, if anything, these laws actually change. And the truth is, most of these small bills and policies don’t really amount to much when taken individually. Taken in the aggregate, however, this is what annexation looks like.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

It’s an open secret even RT fails to report – despite Russian Foreign and Defense Ministries explaining it.

Washington created and supports ISIS, al-Qaeda, its al-Nusra offshoot in Syria, and other terrorist groups in the Middle East and elsewhere.

They’re used as imperial foot soldiers, supported by US terror-bombing – responsible for massacring civilians, destroying vital infrastructure, and prolonging endless wars Washington wants continued in multiple theaters.

Western media suppress what’s vital to report, pretending US-led wars are waged for humanitarian reasons and democracy building – notions Washington, NATO, Israel and their rogue partners abhor.

They’re waged for regime change, transforming sovereign states into virtual US colonies, their resources plundered, their people exploited, freedom-fighting resisters targeted for elimination.

What’s going on in US conflict theaters and new ones planned is what imperialism is all about – raping and destroying countries, massacring millions of people, seeking unchallenged global , dominance.

In his February 1948 Memo PPS23, US diplomat, advisor, and father of Soviet containment George Kennan advocated for what became America’s post-WW II geopolitical agenda, saying:

“(W)e have 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. (It makes us) the object of envy and resentment.”

“Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships (to let us) maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national society.”

“To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.”

“We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction…”

“We should dispense with the aspiration to ‘be liked’ or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism.”

“We should (stop talking about) unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization.”

“The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans (ideas and practices), the better.”

Kennan was relatively dovish compared to neocons infesting Washington today.

Yet his views represented much of what’s ongoing today at home and abroad, a nation pursuing an imperial agenda unrestrained by international, constitutional or US statute laws – might over right, the end justifying the means, using NATO as a killing machine to achieve its objectives.

Post-9/11 laws and presidential executive orders institutionalized indefinite detention, torture, and trials by military commissions for individuals called “unprivileged enemy belligerents,” applying potentially to anyone challenging America’s imperial agenda.

Obama turned truth on its head, claiming it’s a way to “broaden our ability to bring terrorists to justice, provide oversight for our actions, and ensure the humane treatment of detainees.”

Humanity and the rule of law are incompatible with practices at Guantanamo, other US torture prisons operating globally, and endless wars of aggression.

Under National Defense Authorization (NDAA) legislation, foreign nationals and US citizens can be arrested and indefinitely detained uncharged, untried based on suspicions, secret evidence or hearsay – habeas, due process and judicial fairness denied.

Presidential authority has final say, including over who lives or dies. Protesting imperial lawlessness, social injustice, corporate crime, government corruption, or rule for privileged interests exclusively risks being targeted as an enemy of the state.

Freedoms are fast eroding. Increasing online censorship threatens digital democracy’s viability.

Endless wars of aggression against invented enemies risk nuclear war by accident or design.

With its super-weapons unmatched by Washington, Russia is unlikely to be attacked – yet remains vulnerable by other US hostile tactics.

Nuclear war on the Korean peninsula remains ominously possible – affecting all regional countries if launched.

Will Washington unleash its terrorist foot soldiers at home as a pretext for replacing remaining freedoms with full-blown tyranny – claiming it’s for greater security?

Will it pursue similar tactics in Europe and elsewhere for greater control and abolition of free societies?

Its rage for power leaves nothing off the table in pursuit of its aims.

What’s ongoing should terrify everyone – a nation permanently at war at home and abroad, the risk of catastrophic nuclear war, ordinary people exploited to benefit privileged ones.

Most Americans are none the wiser, brainwashed by media serving imperial and monied interests exclusively.

Western societies already are unsafe and unfit to live in. Is full-blown tyranny in America and Europe another major false flag away?

Are we doomed by the arrogance and hubris of US and other Western leaders, pretending to be democrats?

Will freedom be sacrificed for greater security, losing both? America was never beautiful. Today it’s humanity’s greatest threat.

*

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

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Like most other European countries, coalitions run Italy. It’s too soon to know what parties will comprise the country’s new government.

Two ideologically different ones together got most support – the right-wing/anti-immigration Matteo Salvini-led League and populist Luigi DeMaio-led Five Star Movement.

Together they could form coalition government. Bridging the ideological divide between them may be unattainable.

The Financial Times called March 4 results “the biggest political upheaval in Europe since the Brexit vote in 2016…Italy on course for a hung parliament.”

Analyst Costantino Ceoldo believes “a union between the pseudo-Right and the pseudo-Left” is most likely in a post-election email to me, adding:

“They have always ruled together (for) the past 20 years. Italians are morons under many points of view” – electing governments hostile to their interests.

Italy has been an economic basket case for years – neoliberal harshness exacerbating deplorable conditions, complicated further by disastrous euro policy.

It’s a straightjacket harming economically and financially weak nations like Italy, economic powerhouse Germany benefitting at their expense.

Euro policy forces member states to surrender their monetary and fiscal sovereignty to Brussels, controlled by a czar-like European Central Bank.

Powerful monied interests are empowered at the expense of ordinary people. Italian election result showed voters want change, unlikely to get it from whatever ruling coalition is formed.

League and Five Star leaders are eurosceptic. Clearly the status quo is unacceptable throughout euroland.

Not according to the NYT, slamming the League and Five Star for “want(ing) to abandon the euro…shar(ing) conspiracy theories about bankers, vaccines and the 9/11 attacks.”

There’s nothing conspiratorial about destructive euro policy, banker occupation, harmful vaccines, and 9/11 mother-of-all false flags.

The ruling undemocratic Dem Party (PD) was soundly trounced with only 19% support. The Times reinvented its agenda, saying it was modernizing Italy’s economy, pulling it out of recession – ignoring hard times for most Italians, including high unemployment and low wages for most workers.

At around 32%, youth unemployment in Italy is highest among EU countries. GDP so far failed to match its 2007 level. Around 1.5 million Italians emigrated since 2008.

The nation continues suffering from economic stagnation, deplorable governance and euro bondage responsible, things unlikely to change ahead under whatever new government is formed.

Abandoning the euro would be a good start, regaining Italy’s sovereign independence, the Times and neocon/CIA house organ Washington Post frantic over the possibility, WaPo saying:

“…Italy could join Central European states that have staked out a hostile stance toward the European Union – and liberal values more generally.”

There’s nothing “liberal” about Germany-dominated Brussel policy, ordinary people throughout the eurozone harmed to benefit bankers and other corporate interests.

League and Five Star leaders oppose EU sanctions on Russia. They favor normalized relations over hostile ones, polar opposite US/Brussels policy.

Italian election results reflected majority opposition against neoliberal harshness.

Like earlier elections in Italy and other Western countries, policies pursued by whatever ruling coalition emerges are likely to disappoint disaffected voters.

*

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

Donald Trump said he may attend the opening of a controversial new US embassy in Jerusalem, a fraught prospect designed to underscore close ties with Benjamin Netanyahu, as he hosted the Israeli leader at the White House on Monday.

The embattled US president warmly welcomed the embattled Israeli prime minister, claiming ties between their two countries had “never been better” as he floated a May trip that would be a major security and diplomatic challenge.

In the Oval Office, Netanyahu praised Trump’s highly contentious decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem – which both Israel and the Palestinians claim as their capital.

Asked if he would take part in the planned ceremony, which will coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence, Trump said

“I may, we’ll be talking about that.”

“If I can, I will,” Trump added, “Israel is very special to me, special country, special people.”

Such a visit would risk pouring gasoline on an already inflamed situation and curb US claims to be an independent broker in the peace process.

Trump’s plan to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem this year has brought the two leaders closer together, but it has also infuriated Palestinians and was condemned by 128 states in a United Nations General Assembly vote in December.

But Monday’s meeting was all smiles at the White House as the two leaders – both facing serious legal investigations – put on a joint show of unity.

Hours before Netanyahu arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it was confirmed that an ex-aide agreed to become a state witness in a corruption probe that has imperilled his premiership.

‘Partners in ideology’ 

The Israeli leader has embraced the Trumpian tactic of denouncing corruption allegations as “fake news.”

It is a method that Trump has honed in dealing with an investigation into whether his campaign team colluded with Russia during the 2016 US elections.

Several of Trump campaign aides are facing charges or have pled guilty to lying to FBI investigators.

Netanyahu’s visit while in Washington to the annual conference of the influential lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), will provide a boost for the right-wing Israeli leader as scandals and political turmoil brew at home.

Trump has offered unswerving support for Israel since coming to office, sharing Netanyahu’s determination to challenge Iran’s growing regional influence.

“I think they are partners in ideology, and the ideology is a populist, conservative ideology which says that the old liberal elites are against us,” said Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.

The Middle East peace process grew even more complicated recently after Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and one of his senior advisers, lost his top-secret security clearance.

But Netanyahu is not thought to be overly concerned about any delay in restarting the peace talks.

In his encounters with Trump and at the AIPAC conference, he was expected to focus mainly on Iran as Israel’s greatest enemy, and one he says seeks a permanent military presence in neighbouring Syria.

The prime minister is also expected to call again for changes to, or the cancellation of, the nuclear accord between world powers and Iran, said Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington.

Also speaking at the AIPAC conference on Saturday, Guatemala President Jimmy Morales announced that he would be moving his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on May 16, two days after the America’s planned move.

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)

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the US war on Iraq. The “shock and awe” attack was launched based on “stove-piped” intelligence fed from the CIA and Pentagon through an uncritical and compliant US mainstream media. The US media was a willing accomplice to this crime of aggression committed by the George W. Bush Administration.

Despite the lies we were constantly bombarded with, Iraq never presented a threat to the United States. Iraq never had the weapons of mass destruction that the neocons used to frighten Americans into supporting the war. How many of them knew all along that there were no WMDs? We’ll never know. Attacking Iraq and overthrowing its leader was long a plan in the neocon playbook and they used the 9/11 attack on the US as an excuse to pull the plan off the shelf and put it into action.

The US “regime change” war on Iraq has directly resulted in the death of at least a quarter of a million civilians, and indirectly perhaps a million Iraqis have been killed. The Iraqi infrastructure was destroyed and the country was set back many decades in development. Far from the democratization we were promised, Iraq has been turned into a hell on earth. Due to the US use of depleted uranium and other chemical weapons like white phosphorus, Iraqis will continue to suffer from birth defects and other related illnesses for generations.

How did we get there? War propaganda was essential in paving the way for the Iraq war. Americans are generally skeptical about launching new wars, so it takes a steady media bombardment about the alleged depravities of any targeted regime before public opinion begins to shift in favor of war.

Because the neocons who helped launch the war have never had to face the consequences of their actions, they continue to promote war with impunity. Just this past week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was pushing for a US attack on North Korea in which millions may be killed. He said this weekend,

“All the damage that would come from a war would be worth it in terms of long-term stability and national security.”

That’s just what they said before the US attacked Iraq, and how did that turn out? I find it disgusting that the media continues to give airtime almost exclusively to those who promote more US disasters like Iraq.

The Iraqi parliament did something extraordinary last week. A majority of elected Iraqi representatives voted to demand that their prime minister draw up a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from the country. President Obama had withdrawn US troops from Iraq in 2011, after a status of forces agreement could not be reached with the Iraqi government, but he returned the US military to Iraq under the auspices of fighting ISIS.

We had no business going into Iraq in the first place and we have no business remaining in Iraq. Al-Qaeda and ISIS emerged in Iraq because our attack and occupation of the country 15 years ago created fertile fields for extremism. Nothing will be achieved if we remain. Let’s listen to the Iraqis and just come home!

by Michel Chossudovsky

ISBN Number: 9780973714715

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In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

Mainstream media consistently distributes disinformation to push the war agendas of the very institutions of power that keep them on the air.

Time and again, we have seen how deceptive reports have sent the West headlong into yet another conflict: Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria… the list is long and growing.

Many media portals exist proclaiming to have real, legitimate news, but unless they are 100% independent it becomes difficult to know to what extent their newscasts are imbued with spin.

In battling this onslaught of disinformation, the Global Research website remains completely independent: no funding from governments, foundations or institutions. It exists solely on account of the contribution of its readership.

As Graeme MacQueen writes:

Today, more than ever before, war depends on deception. To oppose war without seeing through the deceptions currently being practiced by governments of the West is to act in vain. I have visited many websites that attempt to offer alternatives to the mainstream media, but I have been disappointed repeatedly by their inability or refusal to challenge these myths and deceptions.

Global Research bravely takes on this task, and that is why it is a vital resource for us all. This is why I have made its website my homepage and why I have taken out a membership. I hope you will do the same. – Prof. Graeme MacQueen (for list of articles, click here), Co-editor, Journal of 9/11 Studies

Please help Global Research continue to deliver the truth, the real news that remains unreported, under-reported or downright manipulated by corporate news media. Scroll down to find out about our different annual and monthly membership options (all of which include free book offers!) and how you can support independent media. You can also make a donation by clicking the button on the right.

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When talking about nuclear weapons, it is necessary to clarify some important points before delving into complicated reasoning.

Nuclear weapons are here to stay, and anyone who believes in a progressive denuclearization of the globe is sadly mistaken. Try asking any Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Russian or American policy-maker what they think about abandoning their nuclear weapons and they will tell you that it will never happen. To believe that a country would be willing to simply abandon its most powerful weapon and means of deterrence is simply unrealistic. Nevertheless, I would like to emphasize in this article how nuclear weapons are crucial to a stable future world order. Any reasonable person possessing a magic wand would wish to make vanish a weapon that is capable of eliminating humanity. The problem is that in the real world, this possibility does not exist and nukes are here to stay.

There is the valid argument that the absence of nuclear weapons would have greatly altered the balance during the Cold War, leading to a massively devastating war between the two superpowers of the time, even if only fought conventionally. In this two-part series I will try to argue how nuclear weapons can, especially in the future, be a guarantor of peace rather than posing the threat of global destruction. One always has to keep in mind the great risk that humanity has placed itself in with the invention of such a destructive weapon: they are a sword of Damocles hanging over the destiny of humanity. For this reason, a balance between great powers is necessary in order to ensure that a nuclear catastrophe can never happen.

In order to be able to advance this analysis in a sensible and realistic way, it is necessary to recall the history of the last century and observe the behaviour of the nations involved. Without focusing too much on the details, it is commonly recognized that the prelude to the First and Second World Wars was characterized by growing clashes between the powers. The composition of the international framework was varied, with countries like Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, the United States and the Russian Empire/Soviet Union in constant competition with each other, stemming from their strong growth at the time combined with their imperialist tendencies. History has shown how a multipolar environment with several powers competing provides the perfect recipe for conflict, resulting in the millions of deaths we saw in the two world wars. In international relations, a multipolar environment is generally held to be unstable and difficult to control and predict by a single power. Not surprisingly, Multipolarity refers to a situation where several powers compete with each other without any one of them being able to dominate one or more of the others. Such an unstable balance has often resulted in one or more of these powers triggering devastating conflicts in an effort to achieve regional or global hegemony.

The conclusion of the Second World War ended the period of Multipolarity, with only two competing global powers remaining on the world stage. The Soviet Union and the United States achieved their maximal aims in terms of post-war influence, fundamentally reorienting international relations. The substantial military and strategic balance between these two powers, leading to a bipolar world order, was characterized by nuclear weapons, a technological innovation that would forever alter the nature of the balance of power between countries.

On August 6, 1945, the world became aware of the destructive power of the atomic bomb when Japan lost about 80 thousand citizens in Hiroshima in a blink of an eye. The second atomic bomb dropped on the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, ushered in a new and delicate reality governing international relations. The balance of power turned decisively in favour of the United States, with all global risks that this entailed. It is now in the public domain that Truman intended to scare Stalin, and impose a new global order favouring the United States, through the practical demonstration of nuclear power visited on Japan. Declassified documents show that the plan for global domination was already in the minds of American military planners before the conclusion of the Second World War. Since the USSR was the only remaining rival power, it should not come as a surprise that the CIA and other policy-makers were contemplating decapitating the Soviet Union with nuclear strikes. The intent was to get rid of the only existing adversary and pave the way for American military, economic, political and cultural domination over the entire globe.

The first part of this analysis leads us to the first counterintuitive conclusion. Although all of humanity is aware of the devastating consequences of nuclear weapons, it was not until August 29, 1949, with the first Soviet nuclear test, that a new balance of power was established. In this context, the term Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was coined, referring to the capacity of nuclear-armed powers to obliterate each other in a nuclear exchange. Therefore, such an exchange would not benefit either party, since it would only bring about a nuclear winter from which no winner could emerge.

The pressing need to balance the United States drove the Soviet Union to develop its own nuclear weapons. This need for deterrence remains valid today, with North Korea recently demonstrating this by developing nuclear weapons to deter aggressive US foreign policy. Since the 1950s, Washington has sought to overthrow North Korea’s political leadership and expand its sphere of influence throughout the country, as it did with South Korea in the years following the Korean War. But thanks to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons, US plans for invasion and conquest have had to be downsized to empty threats and bluster. The frustration evident in the statements of Washington’s hawks derives from the impotence that North Korea’s nuclear deterrent reduces them to. In reality, however, North Korea’s conventional deterrence alone is enough to give pause to the designs of any potential aggressor designs, a subject I have covered.

That nuclear weapons alter the balance of power in international relations remains as valid today as it ever did. It is important to reach another parallel conclusion concerning situations experienced during the Cold War. Historical examples have emerged recently whereby Russian or American military personnel risked unleashing a nuclear apocalypse as a result of electronic malfunctions or incorrect risk perceptions. But it is nevertheless unsurprising that no nuclear exchange resulted from any of these instances. Human reasoning, even among mortal enemies, pauses to consider the consequences of Armageddon, at the critical moment exercising sufficient doubt on the matter to avert resorting to the most destructive weapon ever created by man.

I have previously maintained that a nuclear war would not favour anyone and would therefore be highly unlikely. The counterargument often offered is that of the risk of an accident or miscalculation resulting in nuclear conflagration. Yet even this scenario presented itself several times during the Cold War and failed to result in thermonuclear war. Errors are inherent in technology, but history has shown the propensity for good sense to prevail when the stakes are so high.

The case of the Cuban missile crisis is illustrative. Although the US and the USSR were not on the verge of nuclear war in 1962, the tensions reached during those few months are still remembered as one of the most delicate and dangerous moments in history. The reason is clearly linked to all that we have discussed thus far. A war between powers in a bipolar world order would certainly have seen the attempt of one side to overpower the other in an effort to achieve global hegemony. It is easy to imagine a war between superpowers escalating to nuclear warfare, with disastrous consequences for humanity. Once again, we should not be surprised by a de-escalation of the situation. A clarifying call between JFK and Khrushchev ended the Soviet attempt to mirror the threat posed by the Americans in Europe by deploying its own weapons to Cuba, thereby violating the Monroe Doctrine. (In 1962, Washington deployed in Turkey the famous Jupiter missiles, which Moscow considered an existential threat that threatened the doctrine of MAD by nullifying Moscow’s retaliatory second-strike capability.

Thanks to a balance of power in a bipolar environment and the danger posed by a nuclear exchange, the possibility of direct conflict between the great powers was avoided throughout the Cold War. In the next and final article, I intend to explain why nuclear-armed powers in a Multipolar World Order decrease the likelihood of a nuclear apocalypse, as counterintuitive as it may seem.

*

This article was originally published on Strategic Culture Foundation.

Federico Pieraccini is an independent freelance writer specialized in international affairs, conflicts, politics and strategies.

Featured image is from the author.

Latvia unveiled a controversial legislative proposal that calls for phasing out education in minority languages within a few years’ time, and it’s almost exactly what Ukraine announced that it would begin doing late last year. Both countries have a complex domestic situation owing to their legacies of Imperial and Soviet migrations that saw large numbers of Russian speakers move to their present-day territories over the centuries, essentially making them indigenous inhabitants by this point.

Latvia has an even larger Russian minority than Ukraine at approximately 40% of the population, though many of this demographic are regarded as “non-citizens” since they don’t fluently speak the local language and are therefore ineligible for citizenship per the country’s post-Soviet laws.

Riga regards them as the descendants of “foreign occupiers”, while this community argues that they’ve legally moved to Latvia when it was part of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, thus making their presence there as natural as if an American moved from Illinois to California, for example. The Latvian government doesn’t see the situation that way and is accused of violating the human rights of this minority because of its strict citizenship requirements, though the EU – which is known for being overly sensitive to these sorts of things – ignores the Russians’ plight for political reasons.

Latvia’s strategic geography is much more important to the West than its abidance of humanitarian norms, hence why Brussels turns a blind eye to its “hyper-nationalism” which at times crosses the line of fascist-era glorification, even overtly for example whenever celebrations are held for actual Nazi veterans in its capital.

The EU and Latvia share an ungrounded paranoid fed by the Mainstream Media-manipulated narratives about Crimea and Donbas that ethnic Russians and Russian speakers outside of the Russian Federation are apparently “fifth columnists”. This in turn is why they’re so obsessed with forcibly “assimilating” them into society, whether in Ukraine or Latvia, despite this group having already integrated into the host societies that they’ve been a part of for centuries, or in Ukraine’s case, before the state was even put into being by the German invaders during World War I and afterwards by Lenin himself.

The narrow-minded legislation unfortunately ignores these historical complexities, violates human rights, and amounts to a campaign of state intimidation. When taken together, Latvia and Ukraine’s policies suggest a coordinated effort to suppress the Russian minority in the so-called “borderlands” to the point that they “voluntarily” “cleanse themselves” from this region, with this entire effort representing an actual Hybrid War that’s ironically marketed as a “counter-Hybrid War” measure against Moscow.

*

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.

Every year over 30,000 Americans are killed by gunfire.  Every month, in public schoolyards, dance clubs, concert venues, work places and public gatherings, innocent people are slaughtered by assassins wielding legally purchased high powered semi-automatic weapons.  The National Rifle Association (NRA), a 3 million-member organization, supports and sponsors free and easy access to military-level weaponry.  The vast majority of US legislators, Presidents and judges support the possession of the very weapons responsible for massacres. 

The question is why does the US political system bemoan the frequent occurrence of mass shootings, and yet turn around and endorse the political process that makes these killings possible?  The size, scope and duration of massacres requires that we examine the large-scale, long-term systemic features of the US political economy.

The Politics of Wars: Massacres Abroad as ‘All American’ Heroism

The US government has engaged in multiple bloody wars where it has massacred millions of civilians – including whole families in their homes – representing no conceivable threat to the American people.  The wars feature the success of destruction and death as a means to advance US political programs.  War criminals are honored.  Domestic political conflicts and social problems are resolved by destroying invented adversaries and entire nations.

In a political economy where overseas massacres are perpetrated by democratically elected leaders, who is to question the behavior of ‘a neighborhood sociopath’ who is merely following the practices of his president?  This should surprise no one:  Wholesale massacres abroad, fostered by our leaders, are reflected in the domestic retail massacre unleashed by the local ‘nutcase’.

The Mass Media: Weapons Talk, Killings Resolve and the Media Profit

Everyday, at  every hour, on every media outlet, guns and slaughter dominate the minds, thoughts and fantasies (or nightmares) of viewers, especially the millions who absorb ‘the message’.  Films, TV programs and computer games are saturated with conflicts resolved by guns, killing victims – whether police or civilians.  Problems are solved through violence.

The message of the mass media is that victories come from mass killings.

Wars and killings are portrayed in a wide variety of settings:  Homes, public buildings, public schools, workplaces, streets and plazas.

If wars and massacres are essential in this political system, the mass media ensures that it permeates and normalizes in the minds of the masses.

Economy

Weapons, used in massacres, represent a very lucrative business:  The manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, gun clubs, and police and military institutions all thrive in this free marketplace of murder.  The arms industry thrives on wars and media messages – and mass consumption.  Political leaders rely on the gun economy to finance their election campaigns.  Politicians approve of wars, gun industries and associations. They perpetuate the conditions for massacres.  Big business is protected from massacres at home, school and play.  Why would the CEO’s and political elites worry about public school massacres when their own children are safe in expensive private schools?  After all, votes and profits are at stake.  Only ‘losers’ send their children to dangerous public schools.  The ‘winners’ have safe alternative…

Alternatives

To confront the epidemic numbers of mass shootings, changes in the political economy are essential.

1. Replace the policies of imperial wars with the promotion of diplomacy, negotiations and peaceful resolution of conflicts.
2. Replace the mass media gun culture with cultural values of solidarity and safe, publicly engaged communities.
3. Replace the mania to possess military-level weapons among civilians with a vision of one’s life built around a healthy environment shared among socially engaged neighbors.
4. Outlaw or regulate gun clubs and militias – abolish the sale of military-level weapons used in these massacres. Guns used for marksmanship and hunting are separate from the weapons of war used to slaughter dozens of small children huddled in their classroom.

Fake and Positive Approaches to Massacres

President Trump proposed to arm school teachers as a ‘solution’ to school massacres.  This is a bizarre alternative that will only exacerbate the spread of weapons, encourage more shooting and massacres, undermine the role of teachers as educators and create new ‘role models’ for would-be assassins.  Trump’s proposal also underscores his administration’s profound contempt for the role of public education and public educators in building a healthy society.  His tendency to blame the victims…’if only the teachers were armed…’ shows the grotesque Social Darwinism inherent in his ideology as he seeks to utterly destroy the public sector.  The children of the elite and politicians do not have to attend their French or calculus classes taught by armed teachers.  According to the logic of Trump and the political and business elite, armed shootouts in the public school class rooms merely underscore the need to dissolve the Departments of Education at all levels, as well as all public services in this nation.

Teachers should be able to focus their work on educating students to become productive, competent citizens who prize community and cooperation over weapons and war.  They should graduate students who can critically evaluate the role of the mass media in promoting violence.  They should provide their students with the civic skills to mobilize against political leaders who have accepted bribes (‘donations’) from death cults, like the NRA.

Community organizers can boycott businesses that provide political and material support to the war mongers, militias and other gun-toting extremists to stop the violence.

National legislation should be passed, limiting firearms to very specific areas and events, like shooting clubs or hunting.

Nikolas Cruz, the suspect of Florida shooting

Individual gun owners should be licensed based on strict psychological criteria and renewal of license should be frequent.  The US military must inform local civilian authorities of any criminal violent behavior of its discharged soldiers; they cannot just release a ‘ticking time bomb’ into the civilian population they are sworn to protect.  Mental illness is a public health issue and public funds for hospitals and facilities to identify and treat individuals should be increased.  The mentally ill should not be warehoused in and out of the jails or dumped on the streets.

Gun dealers and gun shows should be regulated and forced to follow procedures or face penalties.

Hunters should use weapons appropriate to the game they are shooting.  Semi-automatic firearms are not appropriate for hunting deer, rabbits or turkey.  Semi-automatic weapons are used for hunting and killing human beings, including unarmed children in their classrooms.

Conclusion

Cultural, political and economic changes can take place over time but require mass sustained struggles.  In the meantime, short term reforms that regulate and reduce the frequency and fatality of local massacres should be implemented.

The scenario where police cordon off the site of a mass shooting , preventing medics and ‘first responders’ from entering quickly to stabilize the wounded, while protecting themselves – a process that may take over an hour and lead to avoidable deaths by treatable blood loss, has to be exposed and rectified.  ‘Golden minutes’, the time when injured victims can be stabilized by routine emergency measures and transferred to higher level facilities for life saving surgery and replacement of lost blood, are being wasted while ‘SWAT Teams’ gear up and ‘secure the perimeter’ through a choreographed series of maneuvers to ensure ‘force protection’ (a euphemism for protecting the police).  The horrendous rate of mortality in these shooting, 100% of the young victims at Sandy Hook Elementary School, is a scandal – especially in view of the silence that followed.  Clearly the local and state coroners and police are covering up information regarding the role that preventing the rapid entry of emergency medics played in such high mortality.  Independent investigation of this deliberate police delay in providing life- saving care should be a priority.

Virtually all school massacres have been committed by individuals known to the police or community for erratic behavior and domestic abuse.  The local police or family knowledge that these demented, homicidal individuals had access to military level firearms and did not act on repeated complaints requires independent investigation at the state and federal level.  Laws and statutes regarding preventative hospitalization or detention of such unstable abusers must be enforced.  There should be a national commission to investigate the state of mental health treatment resources in the US.  It is long overdue.  Rather than demanding that school teachers arm themselves, quality mental health facilities at the state and local level must be established.  It is not enough to merely warehouse the mentally ill in the local jails for misdemeanor offenses and then discharge them back into the streets without support.

Public schools and teachers must be supported.  The decades-long policy of undermining basic public services, like public education, in favor of ‘school choice’ – a euphemism for privatizing education – and making education a privilege for the wealthy rather than a right of free citizens – must be reversed.  Rather than one lone teacher in a classroom (preferably armed – according to President Trump and the NRA) with forty students, each classroom should have three competent teachers working together to ensure that the students are advancing in the various subjects necessary for their future as free and productive citizens.  It is a scandal that the US Department of Education and its Secretary of Education have been absent and silent following the frequent school massacres.  However, it is not surprising, considering the priorities of the upper officials of the Department of Education who come from the elite, and, in the case of current Secretary Betsy DeVos, from the billionaire class.  They have never entered a public educational facility.  Their children are either ‘home-schooled’ with private tutors or attend elite private academies.  Their policies in undermining public education reflect their ideological hostility to the entire notion of public welfare.  Trump’s blaming the school teachers for being unarmed in their class rooms shows most clearly his own contempt for public education and the working and middle class families who entrust their children to the public education systems across the country.

These events occur in the public space, a space once trusted and free to all free citizens – public schools have been the foundation of providing for a free and productive citizenry.  It is no accident that mass school shootings take place exclusively in public schools.  The worthy children of the elite are safe in their fortress-like homes and highly selective private schools.  Their highly qualified teachers are free to teach, unencumbered by concealed weapons or any disruption by any ‘active shooter’ drill.  These children have guaranteed futures.

The situation for the children of the working and middle classes is far more uncertain.  Access to quality education is no longer a right and a duty for free and productive citizens and their families.  At most, youth may have ‘access to educational loans’ at usurious interest rates that fetter them to decades of debt peonage, while the students from the wealthy classes are free to pursue their careers and develop their talents.  As the deterioration of future prospects for the US youth continues, with the massive shifts of national wealth to the elite, these massacres, as well as suicides, deaths from overdose and domestic and overseas wars will only grow.  There is a sociopolitical context in which this occurs: deliberate decisions made at the top spawn horrors and mayhem at the base.

There is a class basis for the nightmares gripping working and middle-class parents, teachers and students across the country.  Security, quality education and quality health care are increasingly the private, exclusive domain of the elite. The elite-driven policies, starting with the reign of President Ronald Reagan, have engineered the breakup of public mental health facilities and the mass release of unstable vulnerable, as well as violent, citizens into unprepared communities.  Those who suffer from the consequences of these policies mean nothing to the elite political classes – except for photo-op funerals.  Elite-driven policies, implemented under the bi-partisan administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush, Jr., Barack Obama and Donald Trump, are furthering the agenda of shredding the public sector and privatizing the wealth and institutions of the nation.

The massive lowering of taxes, under the tax bill passed by Donald Trump represents an over one trillion dollar wind- fall for the investor class (finance elite) at the expense of the public institutions and safety nets serving the working and middle classes.  The increasing incidence and the location and identities of the victims of mass shootings are not random: They are class-defined and reflect the loss of citizen power.  The winners in this class war from the top will shed crocodile tears at media events while privately ridiculing the victims’ families for relying on public institutions.

The decisions, made at the top, which have given birth to this epidemic of mass public school shooting, as well as the parallel epidemics of suicide and overdose among the working and middle classes, have immensely benefited the elite.  The billionaires and the donors to both political parties have no incentive to reverse course and implement reforms or policies designed to bring back citizen rights and the public space.  Only the friends, families and neighbors of the working and middle-class victims, those who are secretly viewed as ‘losers choosing to send their children to public institutions’, can unite to change this and bring back social and economic justice to honor the innocent dead and offer a just and dignified future to their children.  It is not a matter of arming teachers, or of wrapping small pupils in ‘bullet proof blankets’, while the elite blame us for our suffering from the safety of their mansions. Understanding the class basis for this crisis will help form the foundation for real solutions.

“To protect our Country, we must protect American Steel!” Donald J. Trump, Twitter, Mar 5, 2018

As an agent of chaos, US President Donald Trump is keeping busy.  Last week’s announcement that tariffs will be imposed on steel and aluminium imports – 25 percent on the former, 10 percent on the latter – has not gone down well with various trading partners. The Chinese, as ever, are playing a middling game, while Mexico and Canada fume.  The European Union is focusing on specific US products to bruise.  Allies such as Australia have been left scratching for clarity, aggrieved that friendships matter less than populist politics.

To these can be added a smorgasbord of aggressive suggestions waged from the platform of Twitter by the US Commander-in Chief, all having one distinct register: the inequality supposedly inherent in global trade vis-à-vis the US.

“The United States,” he shot on March 3, “has an $800 Billion Dollar Yearly Trade Deficit because of our ‘very stupid’ trade deals and policies.” US “jobs and wealth are being given to other countries that have taken advantage of us for years.”

“What’s been allowed to go on for decades is disgraceful,” reiterated the president to executives gathered in the cabinet room.  “You will have the protection for the first time in a long while and you’re going to regrow your industries.”

“If the EU,” tweeted Trump on March 3, “wants to further increase their already massive tariffs and barriers on US companies doing business there, we will simply apply a Tax on their Cars which freely pour into the US.  They make it impossible for our cars (and more) to sell there.  Big trade imbalance!”

The issue with Mexico and Canada is further complicated by Trump’s insistence on Monday that the tariffs be linked to negotiating a new trade pact that would reshape NAFTA.  Shaped as such, a tariff regime on steel and aluminium would effectively become hammers of persuasive force.

“We’re not backing down… Right now, 100 percent (chance we proceed with tariffs),” threatened Trump from the Oval Office, following up with the suggestion that “it could be a part of NAFTA.”

Unconvincingly, Trump also claimed that “a trade war” was not on the horizon, despite the muscular action that promises a bold reaction.  European Union officials have already considered hitting various American icons of trade: jeans, bourbon, Harleys.  Such points are of no concern to Trump and his chief trade advisor, Peter Navarro of the National Trade Council, who are hoping to call their bluff.  Besides, boasts the inconsistent president,

“trade wars are good, and easy to win.”

The free traders and pushers are the ones who have been left baffled, even if it had been churning in the works from 2016.  Opposition from the market wing within the GOP, one hostile to the populist heartbeat, is trenchant, though these are the same individuals who have failed to sell a palatable vision of economic success to a lost America.

A spokeswoman for Paul D. Ryan, the Republican House speaker, pushed the unmistakable line that Trump was fanning the flames of an inevitable global trade confrontation.

“We are extremely worried about the consequences of a trade war and are urging the White House to not advance with this plan.”

Even the Department of Defense, mindful of how “the systematic use of unfair trade practices to intentionally erode our innovation and manufacturing industrial base” might well pose “a risk to our national security”, is sceptical.  Military requirements for aluminium and steel, it claims in a memorandum for the Secretary of Commerce, “each only represent about three percent of US production.”  To impose such tariffs would have a “negative impact on our key allies regarding the recommended options within the reports.”

Other conservatives have engaged in nail biting exercises of concern.  David Frum, who sees the republic being nibbled and gnawed to death by The Donald, is reminded of previous tariff onslaughts that yielded impoverished returns.  To engage them is to engage in cost raising exercises beyond specific products such as aluminium and steel.  Whether it is vacations, apartment rentals, beer or cars, the unpleasant, monetary knock-on will be felt.

Frum also reminds readers of another parallel: that Trump’s moves echo another form of opportunistic nostalgia, that of the Nixon era when the Bretton Woods agreement was abandoned and a surtax imposed on all imports.  The policy had less to do with economic prudence than electoral object: winning the 1972 election.

“The ‘shock’ disrupted the world economy and profoundly angered formerly trusting friends already uneasy over the war in Vietnam.”

There would be no exceptions.  As Navarro explained,

“As soon as [the President] starts exempting countries, he has to raise the tariff on everybody else.  As soon as he exempts one country, his phone starts ringing with the heads of state of other countries.”

This did not mean, assured Navarro, that certain exemptions on products would not apply.

“There will be an exemption procedure for particular cases where you need to have exemptions so that business can move forward.”

The scramble for seeking favourable treatment is already on.  Merely because Trump has done the unpardonable for free market ideologues does not mean that market players are stuck.  He remains the president of the corporation.  Australia’s own major steel exporter, BlueScope, may well get a kind nod from regulators given its presence in the US, notably California, which receives its product.

Weakly, the political figures of US allies are hoping to draw upon the capital of friendship in winding back Trump’s policies.

“Australia and America have been allies in all sorts of adversity and conflict,” comes the damp observation of Labor opposition leader Bill Shorten.  “I hope at times like this that all of our friendship counts for something.”

For all that unwarranted emoting, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston’s observation from 1848 remains salient:

“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies.  Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”.

Forget, in other words, the immutable construct of friendship and geniality on the international stage.  Revise friendships and alliances.  For policies on tariffs to change from a US perspective domestic, not international concerns, will matter most.

*

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: [email protected]

The withdrawal of Soviet aid in 1990 left Cuba’s economy on a knife-edge. Cubans lost all their markets in sugar. They ceased to receive foodstuffs, fuel, wood, soap, raw materials. Calories and protein intake were reduced by half. Plans for nuclear energy had to be abandoned. The US intensified its blockade, passing the Helms-Burton Act. It was a case of adapt or die.

No one expects Brexit to be like this, but we will need to be more self-reliant – and self-reliance would be good for Britain. For Cuba, it became an absolute necessity. Small parcels of land were set aside for family gardening. City spaces were utilised for the production, hydroponically, of three million tons of vegetables a year.

This gave jobs to 300,000 citizens. Using straw and other agricultural waste and employing drip irrigation or micro-jets, they achieved this without emitting a gram of carbon dioxide.

Marxism-Leninism was the theory which enabled Castro to apply his natural intelligence to any seemingly impossible situation.

“Without these lessons,” he said, “I wouldn’t have been able to play any role at all.”

In a matter of five years, under his leadership, Cuba’s economy was turned around. The world saw a nation unbowed in the face of adversity. The revolution was saved.

With Brexit a new generation will need to learn how to manage and control Britain’s assets. Dependence on EU institutions has severed the pathways of understanding, the chain of knowledge – theory and practice – passed on from generation to generation. The economics of running the country in the interest of our children cannot be left to sclerotic bourgeois old politicians.

New questions have arisen demanding scientific answers: efficiency versus the environment, GM crops and herbicides, for example. In Cuba the answers have been guided by scientific research, not the prejudices of politicians.

After the thinking comes the planning. Castro said of the revolution that it would “establish all necessary controls. We are not a capitalist country, where everything is left to chance”. Planning was the key, and young Cubans were encouraged to become fully involved, as they are to this day. Their Youth Labour Army was crucial to successful agrarian reform, building railways, schools and houses in areas short of labour.

Castro put the young Che Guevara in charge of industry and economics, “not because he had a degree in it, but because he had read a great deal and observed a great deal”. Che argued for voluntary labour. He led by example, in fields and mines, on building sites and in the docks.

At the time of the revolution in 1959 the nation was bankrupt, its assets stolen and sent abroad. The revolution was initially slow to react, with the result that the US was able to freeze millions of dollars that had not been taken out of banks. Nationalising banks, nickel, oil and sugar refineries was essential to develop and protect the nation. But Cuba did not go down the road of forced collectivisation.

Cuban sugar cane farmers had started the first war of independence in 1868 by freeing slaves, who joined with their masters in the war against Spanish colonialism. Descended from farming stock himself, Castro recommended leaving small farmers to run their own businesses, but foreign expropriators were duly expelled. Only the big landowners were nationalised, with compensation.

This approach was sensitive, and not entirely economical, compared with that of the USSR, but Castro’s concern was unity – the avoidance of the trauma of loss, and of bureaucracy and “gigantism”. There was the flexibility for farming co-operatives to emerge out of efficient state enterprises, and for these small independent farmers to provide electrical power, water, schools and health services.

Free to determine its own policies, and led by highly qualified scientists and experts in renewables, Cubans have invested in an Energy Revolution – out of necessity rather than environmental concerns (though they care about the planet too). Hurricanes, a world economic crisis, shortage of imported oil, and outdated power plants have all compelled them to decentralise electricity in favour of smaller distributed units.

Clean energy has been brought to Cuban homes through the free circulation of modern appliances, including fridges. Cuba was the first to transition from incandescent bulbs to fluorescent lamps. And all on the basis of social equity – poorer households pay less, or even nothing.

Solar panels, which are economical to buy and maintain, have brought electricity to rural areas for heating and drying. Cuba is a country of contrasts – relatively temperate in the west, hot and arid in the east. Consideration for the whole country and its varying needs has contributed to unity and mass support for the revolution.

Wind energy is exploited within its limitations. Like in Britain, the traditional burning of fossil fuels still plays the major part in energy supply but only until new technology, carbon capture, or nuclear supply can replace it. The point for both countries is that when that day comes, the people are sufficiently in charge to be able to grasp the opportunities.

Cuba’s fishing industry is a similar mixture, on a smaller scale, of state-owned and independent, all-family concerns, with many communities dependent on shrimp for a livelihood. Trawlers are often past their sell-by date, and the seas have suffered from over-fishing. Some 40 per cent of the big fish have simply gone. But the coral reef is still pristine, and steps are being taken to develop fishery co-operatives to improve food security and biodiversity alongside production.

It is a striking feature of Cuba’s socialist planned economy that out of work fishermen are not simply left to languish, as in Britain – the state takes responsibility for identifying alternative livelihoods for them.

If nothing else, the world knows about Cuba’s great achievements in the sphere of education and medicine – its pioneering work on meningitis, hepatitis, and molecular immunology. Experts in Britain marvel at the success of Cuba’s literacy programme, and lifelong learning delivered free to all.

In recent years the training of computer programmers and designers has been seriously promoted and IT has become an integral part of universities and youth clubs.

Further education is seen as a way out of crime. Courses have been taken into prisons. Public health study centres have been set up in polyclinics, health units and blood banks. Excluding universities, 600,000 Cubans work either as students or teachers. It is an interconnected approach: 100,000 teachers of higher education formerly worked in sugar cane centrales. If for any reason workers have to be laid off their salaries are still paid so they can return to education (this is voluntary).

When it was seen that the children were outstripping their disadvantaged parents from the barrios, grants were provided for the over-45s too.

“They are going to be among the most revolutionary of our citizens, because these programmes represent a rebirth for them,” said Castro.

Art, music, dance, drama and sports all get state support in Cuba.

In Britain by contrast there is an ideological attack on education and on our health service. We import health workers at ridiculous cost to the NHS, while tiny Cuba trains enough of its own and to spare. Within Cuba’s sphere of influence doctors share their skill and knowledge, and students from developing countries can attend training in Cuba free of charge.

Infant mortality stands at 49 per 1,000 live births worldwide: in Cuba (according to the CIA’s World Factbook, no less) it is a mere 4.5 – lower than the USA. Unicef says 700,000 children could be saved annually if the world copied Cuba.

Attempts to destabilise and isolate Cuba continue, but Cuba is safe so long as the people stand by their revolution. We can be sure that if Britain is successful in re-establishing national sovereignty, we and others will be punished for trying.

Our answer must be to stand together, at home and abroad, against the false internationalism of the EU.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to meet U.S. President Donald J. Trump to discuss what has long been in the works, war. A war against Syria, Hezbollah, Lebanon and eventually its main target, Iran. Another issue will be discussed is the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem (which in my mind will lead to the Third Intifada). According to earlier reports by the mainstream media (MSM), in this case CBS News:

For all his talk about brokering the “ultimate deal” between Israelis and Palestinians, Trump’s long-awaited peace plan has yet to arrive, even as Palestinians and other critics insist it will be dead on arrival. And although Israel’s government is overjoyed by Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — with a U.S. embassy set to open in the holy city in May — misgivings are percolating under the surface over Iran, where Israel sees Trump’s efforts to date to crack down on Israel’s arch-enemy as lacking.

One major, growing concern: that the United States is acquiescing to Iran’s growing presence in Syria and influence in Lebanon — two Israeli neighbors

The report also mentioned the upcoming conference of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) with guest speakers which should not surprise anyone, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley:

Netanyahu arrived in the United States over the weekend as Washington was gearing up for the annual conference of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby. He planned to hold a meeting and working lunch with Trump on Monday before speaking at the conference later in the week. Top-ranking U.S. officials including Vice President Mike Pence and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley will also address the conference

Trump and Netanyahu will discuss what actions they will take against Syria since all efforts to remove President Bashar al-Assad has ultimately failed. Israel is looking for the U.S. to restart efforts to remove Assad from power with their rebel factions or what we can call “terrorists.” At this very moment, terrorists are continuing to shell civilians in the East Ghouta section of Syria in hopes of drawing international attention to blame the Assad government. Syria is an important target for Washington and Tel Aviv because a destabilized or a destroyed Syria would clearly open an opportunity to turn their guns on Hezbollah and eventually Lebanon. That is when U.S. and IDF forces will be able to place all of its efforts to defeat Hezbollah. Israel is convinced that their only chance to have their long-awaited war with Iran can happen under the Trump Administration. Most likely, many in the Israeli government fear that the next U.S. President would roll back some of Trump’s policies concerning the Middle East, including the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (trump has not fixed or dismantled the deal as of yet, but he will, sooner or later). CBS News claims that

 “Israel is increasingly worried that Trump is backsliding on a pledge to “fix” or dismantle the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.”

Trust me Israel, Trump will not backslide on Iran’s nuclear deal promise he made to you. The report said:

Of particular concern is that Trump may push new restrictions to prevent Iran from developing intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the U.S., but will allow Iran to keep developing medium-range ballistic missiles that could strike Israel

Remember when Trump spoke at AIPAC’s 2016 Annual Conference when he was a candidate and said the following?

Iran is a problem in Iraq, a problem in Syria, a problem in Lebanon, a problem in Yemen and will be a very, very major problem for Saudi Arabia. Literally every day, Iran provides more and better weapons to support their puppet states. Hezbollah, Lebanon received — and I’ll tell you what, it has received sophisticated anti-ship weapons, anti-aircraft weapons and GPS systems and rockets like very few people anywhere in the world and certainly very few countries have. Now they’re in Syria trying to establish another front against Israel from the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. 

In Gaza, Iran is supporting Hamas and Islamic jihad. And in the West Bank, they’re openly offering Palestinians $7,000 per terror attack and $30,000 for every Palestinian terrorist’s home that’s been destroyed. A deplorable, deplorable situation. Iran is financing military forces throughout the Middle East and it’s absolutely incredible that we handed them over $150 billion to do even more toward the many horrible acts of terror. 

Secondly, we will totally dismantle Iran’s global terror network which is big and powerful, but not powerful like us. Iran has seeded terror groups all over the world. During the last five years, Iran has perpetuated terror attacks in 25 different countries on five continents. They’ve got terror cells everywhere, including in the Western Hemisphere, very close to home. Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism around the world. And we will work to dismantle that reach, believe me, believe me.  

Third, at the very least, we must enforce the terms of the previous deal to hold Iran totally accountable. And we will enforce it like you’ve never seen a contract enforced before, folks, believe me. Iran has already, since the deal is in place, test-fired ballistic missiles three times. Those ballistic missiles, with a range of 1,250 miles, were designed to intimidate not only Israel, which is only 600 miles away, but also intended to frighten Europe and someday maybe hit even the United States. And we’re not going to let that happen. We’re not letting it happen. And we’re not letting it happen to Israel, believe me. Thank you. Thank you. 

Do you want to hear something really shocking? As many of the great people in this room know, painted on those missiles in both Hebrew and Farsi were the words “Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth.” You can forget that

Netanyahu is growing desperate to counter Iran’s growing influence despite protests back in Israel for his corruption scandal. Netanyahu has a chance to convince Trump to become more aggressive in his stance against Syria, Hezbollah, Lebanon and Iran. With that said, Trump will do what the Netanyahu government wants and that is to remain in Syria and continue the war. Since both Democrats and Republicans are in the pockets of AIPAC, they are all on the same page with Trump’s policies concerning Israel’s security including Pro-Israel Senator and warmonger, Lindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina who was on ABC’s ‘This Week’ and said

 “If we don’t come up with a strategy against Iran, we’re going to make Israel go to war here pretty soon.” according to CBS News.

A strategy will be surely discussed, the question is, what will it be? An all-out war against Israel’s neighbors involving the 2,000 U.S. troops already stationed in Syria?

Jerusalem and the Third Intifada?

The highly controversial U.S. Embassy move to Jerusalem is another issue both Netanyahu and Trump will discuss according to the CBS report:

The Trump family has legal problems of its own. Kushner, Trump’s point-man for the Mideast, is under intense scrutiny over his business dealings as special counsel Robert Mueller barrels forward with his Russia probe. Kushner has also been stripped of his top security clearance in another blow to his credibility as an international negotiator.

Kushner’s peace proposal is near completion, U.S. officials have said, but Palestinians have already written off Trump’s administration as a viable mediator following his decision last year to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv. A ribbon-cutting for an interim facility is being planned to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel’s independence

What Trump did was increase the possibility that Israel will be at war in its own backyard with the Palestinians, possibly a Third Intifada. Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri based in Gaza said that

 “moving the American embassy to Jerusalem is a declaration of war against the Arab and Muslim nation, and the US administration must reconsider its move.”

So the U.S. will have to fight a multi-front war not only with Syria, Hezbollah, Lebanon but now with the Palestinians.

The close relationship between the Trump Administration and the Netanyahu government can lead to a regional war that will involve a coordinated US-Israeli attack on Iran, but only, and I repeat, only if they can defeat Syria, Hezbollah, Lebanon and now the Palestinians.  A war against Iran will be long and costly and at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. The U.S. currently holds close to $20 trillion in debt (war will significantly increase the U.S. debt total) and it keeps rising. Another war will only benefit the Military-Industrial Complex and Israel (who also plans to expand its territory to create a Greater Israel) who want total control over the region’s natural resources including water, oil and gas. War is on the agenda and with Trump in the White House, Israel’s security will be top priority. Is the U.S. and Israel that confident that they achieve their geopolitical agenda in a Multi-front war in the Middle East that will include Russia and China? If so, Insanity has completely taken-hold in the Trump White house.

*

This article was originally published on Silent Crow News.

Featured image is from the author.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, senior commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, has allegedly provided the country’s politicians with evidence confirming a cooperation between the US and ISIS.

“When I was at the Foreign Ministry, I had a meeting with General Soleimani. He gave me documents and told me to slap them in the face of the West and the UN,” the Iranian state-run media outlet Press TV quoted Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, a special adviser on international affairs of the Iranian parliament speaker.

Amir-Abdollahian added that the Quds Force’ commander asked him “to tell [Foreign Minister] Zarif not to hold talks with the US about the region alongside the nuclear negotiations, but should the need arise, he can put the documents on the table and tell the Americans this is what you are up to.”

The provided documents reportedly “contained precise information on the geographical position, time and exact details [of the US cooperation with ISIS].”

“When Mosul in Iraq was under the Daesh occupation, an American A330 landed at Mosul Airport, American generals got off the plane and military equipment was unloaded,” the Iranian politican said. “At the airport’s VIP lounge, the American generals talked with Daesh [ISIS] leaders in Mosul for three hours and 23 minutes and then boarded the plane and returned.”

Amir-Abdollahian continued saying that the US provided ISIS with “weapons and equipment it needed and that they had already agreed on.” He added that three helicopters landed and delivered military equipment to senior ISIS figures.

In a separate case, the US allegedly evacuated ISIS commanders arrested by Iraqi security forces. Some of these terrorists were then transferred to Afghanistan.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

In more than seven years of war in Syria, we have seen many times how Western governments and news media shamelessly invert reality.

The same was seen this week over the grim fighting around Eastern Ghouta, the suburb near the capital, Damascus, where 400,000 people are said to be trapped.

But who is trapping who?

US and European media breathlessly claim that Eastern Ghouta is under siege from Syrian “regime forces” allied with Russia. This description is posing things upside down.

The district was taken over nearly six years ago by foreign-backed extremists, like Jaysh al Islam, Ahrar al Sham, and Al Nusra Front. The latter is an internationally outlawed terror group, but they all share the same murderous ideology, as well as the same Western covert sponsors in the American CIA, British MI6, French DGSE, and lavish Gulf Arab funding. It is these illegally armed insurgents who are holding the civilian population under siege in a reign of terror.

The same situation, and Western inversion of reality, has been seen before, most notably regarding Syria’s second city of Aleppo. The Syrian and Russian forces liberated that city at the end of 2016, and since then life for the residents there has fortunately returned to the normal peaceful, pluralist coexistence which prevailed before the foreign-backed terror goons took over.

Yet, Western media and officials continually fabulate about “rebels” and civilians being besieged by Syrian state forces. This inversion of reality is of course necessary in order to push the Western false narrative that has underpinned the covert Western war for regime change in Syria, including the clandestine support for terror groups as proxies.

Further twisting the situation in Eastern Ghouta this week, the Western media blamed the Syrian “regime” and Russia for not implementing a ceasefire plan to enable evacuation of civilians.

Russia proposed a daily five-hour truce, and the Syrian government established humanitarian corridors exiting from the conflict zone. The proposal from Moscow was a reasonable counter to what the US, Britain and France had wanted, which involved a 30-day cessation of all military operations.

The Western powers had tried the same proposal during the liberation of Aleppo. Syria and its legally mandated Russian ally are within their sovereign right to take back remaining territory that has been illegally occupied by foreign-backed militants.

What the Western powers would like to impose is a No-Fly Zone over parts of Syria to enable their residual proxies time and space to regroup. Why should the Syrian government forfeit its sovereign rights by accommodating foreign enemies?

The reason why the Russian humanitarian relief plan proposed this week for Eastern Ghouta did not gain traction was simply because the militants continually shelled the designated corridors for escaping civilians. Video footage clearly showed buses and aid workers organized by the Syrian government waiting to receive the civilians. But none were permitted from the area because of sniper and mortar fire from the militants.

Evidently, the militants are holding the civilian population as hostages and human shields. The same criminal tactics were deployed in Aleppo and other towns and cities where the terrorist gangs ruled with their death-cult barbarity.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, addressing the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva this week, rightly pointed out that the humanitarian relief plan for Eastern Ghouta can only be made to work if the militants commit to upholding a ceasefire. But these foreign-backed mercenaries have done nothing of the sort. They have not only cut off evacuation corridors under fire; they continue to launch rockets and mortars at nearby government-controlled Damascus inflicting dozens of civilian deaths in recent weeks.

Reliable figures cited by the Syrian Free Press network, indicate that some 85 per cent of the Syrian population live in areas under the control of President Bashar Assad’s state forces. Only a small minority – 15 per cent – live in areas controlled by insurgents. And many of those people are being held in these dwindling areas against their will in a state of fear imposed by the so-called jihadists.

The brazen Western media propaganda war – misnamed as “news” – reports totally from the minority areas, which are exalted as “rebel bastions”.

In all the so-called “reporting” by France 24, BBC, CNN, and others, the information is either sourced from the CIA-sponsored and terrorist-affiliated White Helmets media operation; or anonymous “residents” and “activists”; or it is sourced from “a UK-based monitor” who is an exiled Syrian furniture salesman who has not been in Syria for 15 years.

This pathetic Western mainstream media “journalism” has been going on for the past seven years in relation to Syria.

Significantly, when do you ever hear a Syrian government official or diplomat being aired directly and at length in these media? Or Russian officials? Never. It’s all a one-way street of lies and fabrication.

The preposterous inversion of reality that the Western governments and media have perpetrated over Syria can only be sustained through systematic distortion.

Russia’s humanitarian relief plan for Eastern Ghouta has so far been sabotaged by terror groups firing on civilians. But Western officials and media have the brass neck to claim that the long-suffering population is under siege from the very forces who are trying to liberate them from terror.

When Eastern Ghouta is eventually liberated one thing is sure. The Western media will never follow-up to ask residents what their lives were really like. Just as these same vile propaganda outlets did not follow-up on liberated Aleppo.

As if the distortion couldn’t get any worse, this week the New York Times and other Western media reported claims that North Korea had secretly supplied materials for chemical weapons to Syria. The reported claims seemed unconvincing, as usual, and the Syrian government denied the latest allegations.

Alongside that the British government asserted this week that it would order air strikes on the Syrian “regime” if it found proof that chemical weapons were used.

Adding up the Western distortion it is obvious what the objective is: to find a pretext for overt military aggression on Syria. The covert proxy war using terrorist mercenaries has failed. Now the Western terror sponsors need to take the distortion to an even more demonic level.

In truth, there is indeed a siege in Syria. The entire Syrian nation is under siege – by criminal Western regimes and their equally criminal propaganda media, justifying war and aggression.

*

Featured image is from Theirworld.

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It is always refreshing to read Stephen Gowans. He cuts through the official dissimulation, the cant, the hypocrisy, the bullshit to lay bare a cogent and lucid analysis of the subject. He is anécrivain engagé and there is never any doubt where his sympathies lie. However he does his homework and his writing is well-documented and far from the well-intentioned fluff that litter too many websites. He is careful to situate his subject within its context and he has a good eye for discerning what is important and what is of lesser consequence.

These virtues are exemplified by his latest book, starting with the very title, Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Fight for Freedom.

American dignitaries, when visiting South Korea often like to go to the DMZ for a photo opportunity, fearlessly glaring into North Korea, phalanxed by US and South Korean troops. Barack Obama described this as ‘freedom’s frontier’ when he visited in 2012, though the term surely predated him. Donald Trump’s planned visit to the DMZ was cancelled, ostensibly due to bad weather, so we are deprived of his update on the term. Obama’s ‘freedom’s frontier’ had a point, but frontiers face in two directions. He looked over the frontier and, realising that that were no US bases in North Korea, in China, or in Russia, that these were independent countries who managed their affairs without American tutelage, thought “this is where freedom ends”. Others, amongst which we might count George Washington, would conclude from this absence of foreign domination that this is where freedom begins. A ‘free country’ has traditionally been considered one which is not under the domination of another. This is a separate issue to freedom within the country; the United States which declared its freedom from British rule was to a large extent a slave state, in the process of killing off the native population, where many men and all women of the dominant race were excluded from political participation. But with the successful conclusion of the War of Independence America’s ‘fight for freedom’ was achieved. But the two freedoms are connected. Many would argue that you cannot have freedom in a country which is underforeign domination. On the other hand many wars, especially recent ones, have been launched on the pretext of bringing freedom to the people of the conquered nation.

Gowans takes this perspective of national liberation to modern Korea and that is what makes his book so valuable. He puts Korea squarely within the framework of the ‘fight for freedom’ which is one of the enduring themes of history and in which, ironically, the United States itself played such a significant role. His encapsulation of Korean experience is succinct and essentially correct:

Korea has long struggled for freedom, from Japanese control in the first half of the twentieth century, and subsequently from US domination from 1945 to today. This is the story of the patriots who have fought for independence and of the empire-builders and traitors who have opposed them.

However I am uneasy about the word ‘traitor’.  Kim Il Sung took up arms against the Japanese colonizers while Park Chung-hee, at the same period, bore arms for them, even writing a letter of fealty to the Japanese emperor signed with his own blood. After 1945 Kim Il Sung struggled for an independent Korea and Park Chung-hee ended up serving the Americans, both at home and abroad – he sent large contingents of troops to Vietnam. And so on this reckoning Kim Il Sung clearly was a patriot and Park Chung-hee a traitor. Yet Park as dictator/president (his domestic repression and crimes aside) did extract some degree of autonomy from the US. He established diplomatic relations where he could, despite Washington’s disapproval and he went ahead on a development programme (drawing on Japanese example and perhaps Soviet inspiration) despite the ‘advice’ of American economists. He established a clandestine nuclear weapons programme but was forced to shut that down when the Americans discovered it.  He engaged in dialogue with the North and in 1972, on 4 July (was this significant?) his spy chief signed a joint statement in Pyongyang on North-South relations and reunification which had, as its first principle:

Firstly, reunification should be achieved independently, without reliance upon outside force or its interference; [emphasis added]

Words may be just words, of course, and nothing much came of this statement, nor did Park wander too far from US domination, but even so ‘traitor’ seems an inadequate word in face of the contradictions and complexities of Park’s relationship with his second master.

If the past is to serve the present we must ask where does Park’s present successor Moon Jae-in (who is ironically the direct successor of Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye) fit into the patriot-traitor spectrum. At the time of writing President Moon is also dispatching his spy chief to Pyongyang; will he just convey Trump’s demands to Kim Jong Un, or will there be discussion of how to escape these ‘outside forces’ which threaten to devastate the Korean peninsula? So far Moon has been more subservient to Washington than most of his predecessors, including Park Chung-hee. Some argue that he faces huge conservative opposition within South Korea in a way that General Park, as dictator did not, and that in addition he is dealing with Donald Trump and must tread carefully. Will Moon Jae-in be remembered in history as a patriot or a traitor? Probably neither since the words do not capture the ambiguity and difficulties of reality.

This concern about the word ‘traitor’ aside it should be stressed that Stephen Gowans has written a marvelous and incisive study of modern Korea. He has traced the morphing of Japanese colonialism into American neo-colonialism. American control is much lighter – we would not have got K-pop in the Japanese period-  but it is insidious and effective where it counts. South Korea is the only country in the empire where the US has direct, formal control over the local military, as opposed to NATO-style de-facto control.

The Korean peninsula is very much in the news at the moment and Gowans’ book provides an excellent introduction to what it is all about. North Korea, while it has some ability to retaliate has neither the means nor the motive to launch an attack on the United States; a glance at the military statistics makes that obvious. But its existence, and the example it offers, does pose a challenge to US hegemony, both in Northeast Asia and globally. That is the root of the present crisis. The major crime in the lexicon of empire, from which all other crimes, real or constructed by propaganda, flow is independence, and its sister-in-arms, rebellion. This is the key to understanding what is going on, and Stephen Gowans hands it to us in this book.

*

Tim Beal has written extensively on imperialism and the Korean peninsula including two books published by Pluto, ‘North Korea: The Struggle Against American Power’ (2005) and ‘Crisis in Korea: America, China, and the risk of war’ (2011). Recent articles include The Clown and the Rock and A Korean Tragedy . He maintains the website Asian Geopolitics.

This article, first published on GR in August 2015, tells us the trail of media disinformation by US government apparatuses.

It has been verified by a source who claims she was there that then-CIA Director William Casey did in fact say the controversial and often-disputed line “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,” reportedly in 1981.

Despite Casey being under investigation by Congress for being involved in a major disinformation plot involving the overthrow of Libya’s Qaddafi in 1981, and despite Casey arguing on the record that the CIA should have a legal right to spread disinformation via the mainstream news that same year, this quote continues to be argued by people who weren’t there and apparently cannot believe a CIA Director would ever say such a thing.

But spreading disinfo is precisely what the CIA would — and did — do.

This 1975 clip of testimony given during a House Intelligence Committee hearing has the agency admitting on record that the CIA creates and uses disinformation against the American people.

Question: “Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to a major circulation — American journal?”

Answer: “We do have people who submit pieces to American journals.”

Question: “Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?”

Answer: “This I think gets into the kind of uh, getting into the details Mr. Chairman that I’d like to get into in executive session.”

(later)

Question: “Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to the national news services — AP and UPI?”

Answer: “Well again, I think we’re getting into the kind of detail Mr. Chairman that I’d prefer to handle at executive session.”

It’s easy enough to read between the lines on the stuff that was saved for the executive session. Then-CBS President Sig Mickelson goes on to say that the relationships at CBS with the CIA were long established before he ever became president — and that’s just one example. Considering 90% of our media today has been consolidated into six major corporations over the past decade, it’s not hard to see that you shouldn’t readily believe everything you see, hear or read in the “news.”

“I thought that it was a matter of real concern that planted stories intended to serve a national purpose abroad came home and were circulated here and believed here because this would mean that the CIA could manipulate the news in the United States by channeling it through some foreign country,” Democratic Idaho Senator Frank Church said at a press conference surrounding the hearing. Church chaired the Church Committee, a precursor to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was responsible for investigating illegal intelligence gathering by the NSA, CIA and FBI.

This exact tactic — planting disinformation in foreign media outlets so the disinfo would knowingly surface in the United States as a way of circumventing the rules on domestic operations — was specifically argued for as being legal simply because it did not originate on U.S. soil by none other than CIA Director William Casey in 1981.

Former President Harry S. Truman, who oversaw the creation of the CIA in 1947 when he signed the National Security Act, later wrote that he never intended the CIA for more than intelligence gathering. “I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations,” Truman penned in 1963 a year after the disastrous CIA Bay of Pigs operation.

Again, please keep this in mind when you watch the mainstream “news” in this country…

“In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition, supression and rationalization – the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the supression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.”

Aldous Huxley, “Propaganda in a Democratic Society”
Brave New World Revisited

(H/T Daniel LeBlanc)

This incisive Christian Science Monitor 2003 article, crossposted on Global Research in 2007 is of relevance to our deeper understanding of Washington’s foreign policy:

“Neocons” believe that the United States should not be ashamed to use its unrivaled power – forcefully if necessary – to promote its values around the world. Some even speak of the need to cultivate a US empire. Neoconservatives believe modern threats facing the US can no longer be reliably contained and therefore must be prevented, sometimes through preemptive military action.

Most neocons believe that the US has allowed dangers to gather by not spending enough on defense and not confronting threats aggressively enough. One such threat, they contend, was Saddam Hussein and his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Since the 1991 Gulf War, neocons relentlessly advocated Mr. Hussein’s ouster.

Most neocons share unwavering support for Israel, which they see as crucial to US military sufficiency in a volatile region. They also see Israel as a key outpost of democracy in a region ruled by despots. Believing that authoritarianism and theocracy have allowed anti-Americanism to flourish in the Middle East, neocons advocate the democratic transformation of the region, starting with Iraq. They also believe the US is unnecessarily hampered by multilateral institutions, which they do not trust to effectively neutralize threats to global security.

What are the roots of neoconservative beliefs?

The original neocons were a small group of mostly Jewish liberal intellectuals who, in the 1960s and 70s, grew disenchanted with what they saw as the American left’s social excesses and reluctance to spend adequately on defense. Many of these neocons worked in the 1970s for Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a staunch anti-communist. By the 1980s, most neocons had become Republicans, finding in President Ronald Reagan an avenue for their aggressive approach of confronting the Soviet Union with bold rhetoric and steep hikes in military spending. After the Soviet Union’s fall, the neocons decried what they saw as American complacency. In the 1990s, they warned of the dangers of reducing both America’s defense spending and its role in the world.

Unlike their predecessors, most younger neocons never experienced being left of center. They’ve always been “Reagan” Republicans.

What is the difference between a neoconservative and a conservative?

Liberals first applied the “neo” prefix to their comrades who broke ranks to become more conservative in the 1960s and 70s. The defectors remained more liberal on some domestic policy issues. But foreign policy stands have always defined neoconservatism. Where other conservatives favored détente and containment of the Soviet Union, neocons pushed direct confrontation, which became their raison d’etre during the 1970s and 80s.

Today, both conservatives and neocons favor a robust US military. But most conservatives express greater reservations about military intervention and so-called nation building. Neocons share no such reluctance. The post 9/11-campaigns against regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate that the neocons are not afraid to force regime change and reshape hostile states in the American image. Neocons believe the US must do to whatever it takes to end state-supported terrorism. For most, this means an aggressive push for democracy in the Middle East. Even after 9/11, many other conservatives, particularly in the isolationist wing, view this as an overzealous dream with nightmarish consequences.

How have neoconservatives influenced US foreign policy?

Finding a kindred spirit in President Reagan, neocons greatly influenced US foreign policy in the 1980s.

But in the 1990s, neocon cries failed to spur much action. Outside of Reaganite think tanks and Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, their calls for regime change in Iraq were deemed provocative and extremist by the political mainstream. With a few notable exceptions, such as President Bill Clinton’s decision to launch isolated strikes at suspected terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, their talk of preemptive military action was largely dismissed as overkill.

Despite being muted by a president who called for restraint and humility in foreign affairs, neocons used the 1990s to hone their message and craft their blueprint for American power. Their forward thinking and long-time ties to Republican circles helped many neocons win key posts in the Bush administration.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 moved much of the Bush administration closer than ever to neoconservative foreign policy. Only days after 9/11, one of the top neoconservative think tanks in Washington, the Project for a New American Century, wrote an open letter to President Bush calling for regime change in Iraq. Before long, Bush, who campaigned in 2000 against nation building and excessive military intervention overseas, also began calling for regime change in Iraq. In a highly significant nod to neocon influence, Bush chose the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) as the venue for a key February 2003 speech in which he declared that a US victory in Iraq “could begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace.” AEI – the de facto headquarters for neconservative policy – had been calling for democratization of the Arab world for more than a decade.

What does a neoconservative dream world look like?

Neocons envision a world in which the United States is the unchallenged superpower, immune to threats. They believe that the US has a responsibility to act as a “benevolent global hegemon.” In this capacity, the US would maintain an empire of sorts by helping to create democratic, economically liberal governments in place of “failed states” or oppressive regimes they deem threatening to the US or its interests. In the neocon dream world the entire Middle East would be democratized in the belief that this would eliminate a prime breeding ground for terrorists. This approach, they claim, is not only best for the US; it is best for the world. In their view, the world can only achieve peace through strong US leadership backed with credible force, not weak treaties to be disrespected by tyrants.

Any regime that is outwardly hostile to the US and could pose a threat would be confronted aggressively, not “appeased” or merely contained. The US military would be reconfigured around the world to allow for greater flexibility and quicker deployment to hot spots in the Middle East, as well as Central and Southeast Asia. The US would spend more on defense, particularly for high-tech, precision weaponry that could be used in preemptive strikes. It would work through multilateral institutions such as the United Nations when possible, but must never be constrained from acting in its best interests whenever necessary.

Copyright Christian Science Monitor, 2003. First Crossposted on GR in 2007

Relevant article selected from the GR archive, first published on GR in September 2014

Despite vast amounts of imperial data to the contrary, the great majority of writers on imperialism continue to describe and analyze US imperialism strictly in economic terms, as an expansion of “capital accumulation”, “accumulation on a world scale”.

In fact the major and minor US imperial wars have more to do with “capital dis-accumulation”, in the sense that trillion dollar flows have gone out from the US, hundreds of billions of dollars in profits from resource sites have been undermined, markets for exports have been severely weakened and exploitable productive labor has been uprooted.  At the same time US imperialist state ‘dis-accumulates capital’, multi-national corporations, especially in the extractive sector are expanding, “accumulating capital” throughout Latin America.

This new configuration of power, the conflicting and complementary nature of 21^st century US imperialism, requires that we anchor our analysis in the real, existing behavior of imperial state and extractive capitalist policymakers.  The basic premise informing this essay is that there are two increasingly divergent forms of imperialism:  military driven intervention, occupation and domination; and economic expansion and exploitation of resources, markets and labor by invitation of the ‘host country’.

We will proceed by examining the choices of imperial strategy, in a historical – comparative framework and the alternatives which were selected or rejected.  Through an analysis of the practical decisions taken regarding ‘imperial expansion’ we can obtain insights into the real nature of US imperialism.  The study of imperial strategic choices, past and present, state and corporate, requires three levels of analysis: global, national and sectoral.

Global Strategies:  US Imperial State and the MNC

US imperial state invested trillions of dollars in military expenditures, hundreds of thousands of military personnel into wars in theMiddle East (Iraq, Yemen, and Syria), North and East Africa (Libya, Somalia), South Asia (Afghanistan) and imposed sanctions on Iran costing the US hundreds of billions in “capital dis-accumulation”.

The US corporate elite, driven out of Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere where US military imperialism was engaged, chose to invest in manufacturing in China and extractive sectors throughout Latin America.

In other words the US imperial state strategists either chose to expand in relatively backward areas (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen) or imposed under-development by  destroying or sanctioning lucrative extractive economies (Iraq, Libya, Iran).

In contrast the MNC chose the most dynamic expanding zones where militarist imperialism was least engaged – China and Latin America.  In other words “capital did not follow the flag” – it avoided it.

Moreover, the zones where extractive capital was most successful in terms of access, profits and stability were those where their penetration was based on negotiated contracts between sovereign nations and CEO’s – economic imperialism by invitation.

In contrast in the priority areas of expansion chosen by imperial state strategists, entry and domination was by force, leading to the destruction of the means of production and the loss of access to the principle sites of extractive exploitation.  US military driven imperialism undermined  energy companies’ agreements in Iraq and Libya.  Imperial state sanctions in Iran designed to weaken its nuclear and defense capabilities undercut US corporate extractive, public-private contracts with the Iranian state oil corporations. The drop in production and supply in oil in Iraq, Iran and Libya raised energy prices and had a negative impact on the “accumulation of capital on a world scale”.

If imperial state decision-makers had followed the direction of economic rather than military driven policymakers they would have pivoted to Asia and Latin America rather than the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. They would have channeled funds into economic imperialist strategies, including joint ventures, high and medium tech trade agreements, and expanded exports by the high-end manufacturing sector, instead of financing 700 military bases, destabilization campaigns and costly military exercises.

Twentieth century military imperialism stands in stark contrast to late twentieth century economic imperialism.  In the mid 1960’s the US announced a vast new economic program in Latin America – the Alliance for Progress which was designed to finance economic opportunities in Latin America via joint ventures, agrarian reform and investments in the extractive sector.  The imperial state’s military policies and interventionist policies were designed to secure US business control over mines, banks, factories and agro-business. US backing for the coups in Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Peru led to the privatization of key resource sectors and the imposition of the neo-liberal economic model.

US policy in Asia under Nixon was directed first and foremost to opening economic relations with China, expanding trade agreements with Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.  The ‘pivot from war’ to free trade led to a boom in US exports as well as imports, in private investments and lucrative profits.  Military expenditures declined even as the US engaged in covert operations in Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Imperial intervention combined military and economic expansion with the latter dictating policy priorities and the allocation of resources.

The reversal set in with the US military backing of the jihadist extremists in Afghanistan and the demise of the USSR.  The former set the stage for the rise of the Taliban to power and the emergence of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization. The latter led US imperial strategists to pursue wars of conquest with impunity – Yugoslavia and Iraq during the 1990’s.

Easy military conquests and visions of a ‘unipolar’ world dominated by US military supremacy, encouraged and fostered the emergence of a new breed of imperial strategists – the neo-conservative militarists with closer ties to Israel and its military priorities than to the US   extractive petrol capitalists in the Middle East.

Military versus Economic Imperialist at the ‘National Level’

In the post-Cold War period, the competition between the two variants of imperialism was played out in all the nation subject  to US intervention.

During the first Iraq war the balance between militarists and economic imperialists was in play.  The US defeated Iraq but did not shred the state, nor bomb the oil fields.  Sanctions were imposed but did not paralyze oil deals.  The US did not occupy Iraq; it partioned the north –so-called“Kurdish” Iraq but left the secular state intact.  Extractive capital was actively in competition with the militarist neo-conservatives over the future direction of imperial policy.

The launch of the second Iraq war and the invasion of Afghanistan marked a decisive shift toward military imperialism:  the US ignored all economic considerations.  Iraq’s secular state was destroyed; civil society was pulverized; ethno-religious, tribal and clan warfare was encouraged.  US colonial officials ruled by military fiat; top policymakers with links to Israel replaced oil-connected officials. The militarist “war on terror” ideology replaced free market, free trade imperialism. Afghanistan killing fields replaced the China market as the center of US imperial policy.  Billions were spent, chasing evasive guerrillas in the mountains of a backward economy while US lost competitive advantages in the most dynamic Asian markets.

Imperial policymakers chose to align with sectarian warlords in Iraq over extractive technocrats. In Afghanistan they chose loyal ex-pat puppets over influential Taliban leaders capable of pacifying the country.

Extractive versus Military Imperialism in Latin America

Latin American neo-liberalism went from boom to bust in the 1990’s.  By the early 2000’s  crisis enveloped the region.  By the turn of the century US backed rulers were being replaced by popular nationalist leaders.  US policymakers stuck by their neoliberal clients in decline and failed to adapt to the new rulers who pursued modified socially inclusive extractivism.  The US military imperialists longed for a return of the neo-liberal backers of the “war on terrorism”.  In contrast, international multinational extractive corporations were realists – and adapted to the new regimes.

On a global scale, at the beginning of the new millennium, two divergent tendencies emerged.  US military imperialism expandedthroughout the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and the Caucuses, while Latin American regimes turned in the opposite direction – toward moderate nationalism, and populism with a strong emphasis on poverty reduction via economic development in association with imperial extractive capital

In the face of these divergent and conflicting trends, the major US extractive multi-national corporations chose to adapt to the new political realities in Latin America.  While Washington, the imperial state, expressed hostility and dismay toward the new regimes refusal to back the “war on terror” (military imperialism) the major MNCs, robust embrace of economic imperialism, took advantage of the investment opportunities opened by the new regimes’ adoption of a new extractivist model, to pour billions into the mining, energy and agricultural sectors.

The Specificities of Extractive Imperialism in the Era of “Post Neo-Liberalism”

Extractive imperialism in Latin America has several specific characteristics that sharply demark it from earlier forms agro-mineral imperialism.

(1)   Extractive capital is not dominated by a single imperial country-like the Spanish in the 18t century, the British in the 19^thcentury or the US in the 20^th century. Imperial extractive capital is very diverse:  Canadian, US, Chinese, Brazilian, Australian, Spanish, Indian and other MNCs are deeply involved.

(2)   The imperial states of the diverse MNC do not engage in “gun boat diplomacy” (with the exception of the US). The imperial states provide economic financing and diplomatic support but are not actively involved in subverting Latin American regimes.

(3)   The relative weight of US MNCs, in the new imperial extractivism is much less than it was a half century earlier.  The rise of diverse extractive MNC and dynamism of China’s commodity market and deep financial pockets have displaced the US, the IMF and WB and established new terms of trade with Latin America.

(4)   Probably the most significant aspect of the new imperial extractivism is that its entry and expansion is by invitation. The Latin American regimes and the extractive MNCs negotiate contracts – MNC entry is not unilaterally imposed by an imperial state.  Yet the ‘contracts’ may result in unequal returns; they  provide substantial revenues and profits to the MNC; they grant large multi –million acre tracts of land for mining or agriculture exploitation; they  obligate the national state to dispossess local communities and police/repress the displaced. But they also have allowed the post-neo-liberal state to expand their social spending, to increase their foreign reserves, to eschew relations with the IMF, and to diversify their markets and trading partners.

In regional terms extractive imperialism in Latin America has “accumulated capital” by diverging from the military imperialism practiced by the US in other regions of the world political- economy.  Over the past decade and a half, extractive capital has been alliedwith and relyies both on post-neoliberal and neoliberal regimes against petty commodity producers, indigenous communities and other anti-extractive resistance movements. Extractive imperialists do not rely on ‘their’ imperial state to quell resistance- they turn to theirnational political partners.

Extractive imperialism by invitation also diverges from the military imperial state in its view toward regional organizations.  US military imperialism placed all its bets on US centered economic integration which Washington could leverage to political, military and economic advantage.  Extractive capital, in the great diversity of its ‘national identity’, welcomed Latin American centered integration which did not privilege US markets and investors.

The predominance of economic imperialism, in particular the extractive version, however, needs to be qualified by several caveats.

US military imperialism has been present in several forms. The US backed the military coup in Honduras overthrowing the post neo-liberal Zelaya government; likewise it supported an “institutional coup” in Paraguay.

Secondly, even as MNC corporations poured capital into Bolivian mining and energy sectors, the US imperial state fomented destabilization activity to undermine the MAS government. And was defeated and the agencies and operatives were expelled.  The crucial issue in this, as well as other, instances is the unwillingness of the MNC’s to join forces with the military imperialists, via boycotts, trade embargoes or disinvestment. Clearly the stability, profitability and long-term contracts between the Bolivian regime and the extractive MNC counted for more than their ties to the US imperial state.

US military imperialism has expanded its military bases and increased joint military exercises with most Latin American armed forces. Indoctrinated military officials can still become formidable potential allies in any future ‘coup’, if and when the US “pivots” from the Middle East to Latin America.

US military imperialism in its manifest multiple forms, from bankrolling NGO’s engaged in destabilization and street riots in Venezuela, to its political support of financial speculators in Argentina and rightwing parties and personalities in Brazil, has a continuous presence alongside extractive imperialism. The success of the latter and the eclipse of the former are based in part on two contingentcircumstances. The US serial wars in the Middle East divert attention away from Latin America; and the commodity boom fuels the growth of extractive capital.  The economic slowdown in China and the decline of commodity prices may weaken the regimes in opposition to US military imperialism.

Paradoxically the weakening of the ties between the post-neo-liberal regimes and extractive imperialism resulting from the decline of commodity prices is strengthening the  neo-liberal socio-political forces allied with US military imperialism.

Latin America’s Right Turn:  The Co-Habitation of Extractive and Military imperialism?

Throughout Latin America the post-neoliberal regimes which ruled for the better part of a decade and a half face serious challenges – from consequential social opposition at the micro-level and from aggressive political-economic elites at the macro-level.  It is worthwhile to survey the prospects for a return to power of neo-liberal regimes allied with military imperialism in several key countries.

Several factors are working in favor of a return to power of political parties and leaders who seek to reverse the independent and inclusive policies of the post neoliberal power bloc.

First the post-neo-liberal regimes development strategy of depending on foreign extractive capital, perpetuated and strengthened the economic basis of imperialism:  the ‘colonial style’ trade relation, exporting primary commodities and importing finished goods, allowed the agro-mineral elites to occupy key positions in the politico-social structure.  With the decline in commodity prices, some post-neoliberal regimes are experiencing fiscal and balance of payments shortfalls.  Inflation and cuts in social expenditures adversely affect the capacity of the post-neo-liberal regimes to retain popular and middle class electoral support.

The divergences between post-neoliberals and economic imperialism are accentuating with return of the neoliberal right.  The agro-mineral sectors perceive an opportunity to rid themselves of their power and revenue sharing agreements with the state and to secure even more lucrative arrangements with the advance of the neo-liberal right which promises tax and royalty reductions, deregulation and lower wage and pension payments.

Secondly, the post-neo-liberal regimes’ alliances with the building , construction, and other bourgeois sectors, was accompanied by corruption involving  pay-offs, bribes and other illicit financial transactions designed to finance their mass media based electoral campaigns and  patronage system which ensured electoral majorities.  The neo-liberal right is exploiting these corruption scandals to erode the middle class electoral base of the post -neo-liberal regimes.

Thirdly, the post-neo-liberal regimes increased the quantity of social services, but ignored their quality – provoking widespread discontent with the inadequate public educational, transport, and health services.

Fourthly, inflation is eroding the decade long advance of wage, pension and family allowances.  The post-neo-liberal regimes are caught between the pressures to “adjust” –to devalueand impose fiscal ‘austerity’ as proposed by the international bankers and lose mass support, or to engage in deeper structural changes which require among other things, changes in the extractive dependence model and greater public ownership.  The crises of the post-neo-liberal regimes is leading to irresolution and opening political space for the neo-liberal right which is allied to military and economic imperialism.

Military imperialism, which was weakened by the popular uprisings at the turn of 20^th century is never absent.  US military imperialism is first and foremost powerfully entrenched in two major countries:  Mexico and Colombia.  In both countries neo-liberal regimes bought into the militarization of their societies, including the comprehensive and deep presence of US military-police officials in the structures of the state.

In both states, US military and economic imperialism operates in alliance with paramilitary death squads, even as they proclaimed “a war on drugs”.  The ideology of free market imperialism was put into practice with the elimination of trade barriers, widespread privatization of resources and multi-million acre land grants to MNC.

Through its regional clients, US imperialism has a springboard to extend its influence.  Mexican style ‘militarized imperialism’ has spread to Central America; Colombia serves as a launch-pad to subvert Venezuela and Ecuador.

Where dissident regimes emerged in regions claimed by militarized imperialism, Honduras and Paraguay, military and civilian coups were engineered. However because of the regional concentration of US military imperialism in the Middle East it relies heavily on local collaborators, political, military and economic elites as vehicles for “regime change”.

Extractive imperialism is under siege from popular movements in many countries in Latin America.  In some cases, the political elites have increasingly militarized the contested terrain.  Where this is the case, the regimes invite and accept an increased imperial military presence, as advisers, and embrace their militarist ideology, thus fostering a “marriage” between extractive and military imperialism.  This is the case in Peru under President Humala and Santos in Colombia.

In Argentina and Brazil, the moderate reformist policies of the Kirchner and Lula/Rousseff regimes are under siege.  Faltering export earnings, rising deficits, inflationary pressures have fueled a neo-liberal offensive, which takes a new form:  populism at the service of neo-liberal collaboration with military imperialism.  Extractive capital has divided -some sectors retain ties with the regime, others, the majority are allied with rising power of the right.

In Brazil, the Right has promoted a former environmentalist (Silva) to front for the hardline neo-liberal financial sector – which has received full support from local and imperial mass media.  In Argentina, the imperial state and mass media have backed hedge fund speculators and have launched a full scale economic war, claiming default, in order to damage  Buenos Aires’ access to capital markets in order  to increase its investments in the extractive sector.

In contrast Bolivia, the extractive model par excellence, has moved successfully to oust and weaken the military arm of imperialism, ending the presence of US military advisers and DEA officials, while deepening and strengthening its ties with diverse extractive MNCs on the one hand, and on the other consolidating support among the trade unions and peasant-Indian movements.

In Ecuador the extractive regime of Correa has diversified the sources of imperial capital from the US to China, and consolidated his power via effective patronage machinery and socio-economic reforms.

The US-Colombian military threat to Venezuela and Ecuador has diminished, peace negotiations with the FARC are advancing and the regime now faces trade union and Indian-peasant opposition with regard to its extractive strategy and corporatist labor reforms.

In both Ecuador and Bolivia, imperial militarism appears to lack the vital strategic military-civilian allies capable of engineering a regime change.

The case of Venezuela highlights the continuing  importance of imperial militarism in shaping US policy in Latin America.  The  pivot to a military policy, was taken by Washington prior to any basic social reforms or economic nationalist measures.  The coup of 2001 and lockout of 2002 were backed by the US in response to President Chavez forceful rejection of the “War on Terrorism”.  Washington jeopardized its important economic stake, petrol investments,  in order to put in place a regime in conforming to its global military strategy.

And for the next decade and a half, the US imperial strategy totally ignored investment, trade and resource opportunities in this wealthy petrol state; it chose to spend hundreds of millions in financing opposition NGO, terrorists, electoral parties, mass media and military officials to effect a regime change.  The extractive sector in the US simply became a transmission belt for the agencies of the militarized imperial state.  In its place, Russia and China, interested especially extractive sector signed multi-billion dollar  contracts with the Venezuelan state: a case of extractive imperialism by invitation – for economic and security reasons.

Apart from the ideological conflict over US militarist expansion, Venezuela’s promotion of Latin American centered regional integration, weakened US leverage and control in the region.  In its struggle against Latin American centered regional organizations  and  to regain its dominance,  US imperialism has upgraded its economic profile via the Trans-Pacific Alliance, which includes its most loyal neo-liberal allies – Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico.  The global eclipse of  economic – driven imperial expansion in favor of the military has not totally displaced several key economic advances in strategic countries and sectors in Mexico, Colombia and Peru.

The privatization and denationalization of the biggest and most lucrative public petrol company in Latin America, PEMEX, the Mexican giant, opens up enormous profitable opportunities for US MNC.  The rapid appropriation of oil fields by US MNC will enhance and compliment the militarization of Mexico undertaken by the US military-security apparatus.

The Mexican example highlights several features of US imperialism in Latin America.

Imperial militarization does not necessarily preclude economic imperialism if it takes place within an existing stable state structure.  Unlike the imperial wars in Iraq and Libya, the military imperialist policies in Mexico advanced via powerful local political clients willing and able to engage in bloody civil wars costing over 100,000 civilian deaths in over a decade.  Under the aegus and guidance of US imperial rulers, the US and Mexican military devastated civil society, but safeguarded and expanded the huge mining and manufacturing enclaves open to economic imperialist exploitation.  Militarization contributed to weakening the bargaining rights of labor – wages have declined in real terms over the decades and the minimum wage is the lowest in the hemisphere.

Mexico highlights the crucial role that collaborator elites play in imperial capital accumulation. Mexico is an excellent example of ‘imperialism by invitation’ – the political agreements at the top impose ‘acquiescence’ below.  The extraordinary levels of corruptionwhich permeates the entire political class, solidifies the longstanding links between Mexican political-business elite, the MNC and the security apparatus of the imperial state.  Extractive imperialism is the principal beneficiary of this “triple alliance”.

In the case of Mexico, militarized imperialism laid the groundwork for the expansion of economic imperialism.

A similar process, involving ‘triple alliances’ is operative in Colombia.  For the past decade and a half, militarized-imperialism poured over $6 billion in military aid(Plan Colombia) to finance the dispossession, assassination, arrest and torture and of over 4 million Colombians, including the killing of thousands of trade union and social movement leaders.

The scorched earth policy, backed by a substantial US military mission operated through the existing state apparatus and with the active support of the agro-mineral and banking elite ,aided by nearly 40,000 member paramilitary death squads and drug traffickers laid the groundwork for the large scale entry of extractive capital – particularly mining capital.

Military imperialism preceded the long-term, large scale ‘invasion’ by economic imperialism in the form of a free trade agreement and multi-million acre land grants to mining MNC.

This general pattern was repeated in Peru.  The ‘war on terror” under Fujimori and the subsequent liberalization of the economy, under three subsequent Presidents, culminated in the massive primarization of the economy under President Humala – who deepened and extended the expansion of imperial extractive capital.

The economic downturn in some of the post-neo-liberal economies, namely Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela, and the rightward moving political spectrum, has opened a window of opportunity for US economic imperialism to work in tandem with the rising neo-liberal political opposition.  The military option, a military coup or US military intervention is not on the horizon for the present time.  The central focus of imperial state decision makers regarding regime change is a combination of overt electoral and covert ‘street intervention’:  adopting ‘populist’, moralist and technocratic rhetoric to highlight  corruption in high offices, inefficiency in the delivery of social services with claims of bureaucratic interference in the operations of the market.  Business disinvestment, financial speculation on the currency and negative mass media propaganda has coincided strikes and protests against shortages and lag between wage and price increases.

Despite costly and failed imperial wars in the Middle East, despite a decade of military retreat in Latin America, economic imperialism is advancing via the electoral route; it already has established a formidable array of allies among the political regimes in Mexico, Colombia and Peru and is posed to re-establish neo-liberal allies in Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela.

Conclusion

Imperialism as it has evolved over the past quarter of a century cannot be understood as a ‘unified whole’ in which the two basic components, military and economic are always complimentary.  Divergences have been graphically illustrated by the imperial wars in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa.  Convergences are more obvious in Latin America, especially in Mexico, Colombia and Peru, where ‘militarization’ facilitated the expansion of extractive capital.

The theoretical point is that the nature of the political leadership of the imperial state has a high degree of autonomy in shaping the predominance of one or another strand of the imperial expansion.  The capacity for imperial capital to expand is highly contingent on the strength and structure of the collaborator state: militarized imperialism that invades and destroys states and the fabric of civil society has led to disinvestment; in contrast economic imperialism by invitation in neo-liberal collaborator states has been at the center of successful imperial expansion.

The ambiguities and contradictions intrinsic to the post-neo-liberal extractivist based development model have both constrainedthe military component of imperialism while expanding opportunities for economic imperial accumulation.  Accumulation by invitation, and accumulation by dispossession are simply ‘moments’ in a complex process in which political regime changes intervene and establish the locations and timing for refluxes and influxes of capital.

The rise of new economic imperialist powers like China competing with established imperial powers like the US, has led to alternative markets and sources of financing, which erodes the effectiveness political, military and diplomatic instruments of imperial coercion.

Regional variations in political configurations, imperial priorities and choice of instruments of power, have deeply influenced the nature and structure of imperialism.  And as the world historic record seems to argue, military driven empire building in the Middle East has been a disaster while economic driven imperialism shows signs of rapid recovery and successes in Latin America.

Oil magnate turned top United States envoy, Rex Tillerson, is scheduled to drop into a number of African states under the premise of strengthening relations between Washington and the continent.

This mission by the Secretary of State coincides with the announcement on March 1 that President Donald Trump is imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. An already volatile stock market in the U.S. and abroad reacted negatively to the declaration of a possible trade war.

Trade relations with the African Union (AU) member states will undoubtedly be on the agenda during the Tillerson tour. Nonetheless, there is no reason for African states to trust the purported motivations of the Trump administration which has spoken so despairingly about the prospects for immigration to the U.S. from non-European nations.

Over the last four years African energy, minerals and agricultural producing countries have seen a decline in their economies due to the drastic reduction in commodity prices on the international markets. Consequently, there has been the reemergence of the debt crisis which stifled growth and development from the 1980s to the end of the 20th century.

During his trip from March 6-13, Tillerson will meet with leaders from Djibouti, Chad, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Kenya. All of these states have longtime economic and military ties with Washington and Wall Street.

Djibouti is the location of Camp Lemonnier where thousands of Pentagon troops are stationed as part of the U.S. Africa Command’s (AFRICOM) largest base on the continent. The Federal Republic of Nigeria was at one time the largest African exporter of crude oil to the U.S. from the continent, although a shift in American oil policy under the previous administration of President Barack Obama changed these trade dynamics drastically.

Ethiopia and Kenya in East Africa are strategically located in a region where enormous discoveries of oil and natural gas have taken place over the last few years. Addis Ababa, the headquarters of the AU, is a large recipient of military hardware from Washington where Kenya maintains similar ties along with prospects for becoming a major supplier of oil to the world market.

An article published by the Voice of America (VOA) claims:

“Secretary Tillerson’s trip next week is also seen as a good opportunity for the U.S. to reaffirm ties with African nations, particularly after U.S. President Donald Trump referred to the continent and Haiti in a derogatory manner earlier this year. Former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Linda Thomas-Greenfield told VOA on Friday (March 2) that Africans will welcome the top U.S. diplomat with open arms.” (March 4)

However, these “open arms” can only be filled with further efforts by the leading imperialist state to exploit Africa. During the entire post-independence history of the continent Washington has sought to undermine any efforts aimed at achieving genuine liberation, territorial sovereignty and political unity.

Tillerson among African leaders (Source: author)

The current economic plight of most African nations derives from the dominant role of imperialism in the world system. In recent years State Department policy towards Africa has been designed to discourage the growing cooperation between the People’s Republic of China and the AU combined with an intensifying military presence through Pentagon bases, drone stations and the transferal of munitions to allied governments.

What Impact Will U.S. Trade Policy Have on African States?

Trump is attempting to follow-up on his 2016 campaign promises of imposing tariffs on countries such as China which he accused of dumping products into the U.S. market worsening the already huge trade deficit. Nonetheless, official figures indicate that only two percent of steel entering the U.S. comes from China.

Moreover, Canada, which is considered a close ally of Washington, will be seriously impacted through such a policy since it is the largest importer of steel into the U.S. Following Canada, the volumes of steel imports coming into the country are from Brazil, South Korea, Mexico and Russia, in that order.

Canada is also the largest importer of aluminum as well. Other nations following Ottawa in this sector are Russia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and China.

These policies are already having an impact on the Republic of South Africa, the continent’s most industrialized state. Stock prices declined on the Johannesburg exchange on March 2 as fears rose over the sustainability of the country’s emergence from a severe recession during the last two quarters of 2017.

According to a report published by South African Business Live:

“It’s as yet unclear what the global trade war that U.S. President Donald Trump is about to unleash could mean for South Africa. But the trouble with trade wars is they risk hitting the most vulnerable nations hardest. So emerging markets, South Africa included should be afraid, very afraid. Trump’s comments last week have already caused jitters in emerging market stocks, which took a pounding on Friday. While Brazil, South Korea and China are the most exposed to the threat of new tariffs, South African stocks were also affected, dragged down by Arcelor Mittal, which fell 5.5 percent.” (March 5)

Overall U.S. trade with Africa has declined over the recent period. Under the Obama administration, there were significant decreases in trade which disappointed African leaders who felt that since the former president had family ties with the continent he would have sought to enhance economic relations on a positive level.

African immigrants into the U.S. are some of the most educated and skilled therefore Trump’s racist comments during 2017 drew sharp criticisms and resentment. Moreover, Africans in centuries past who were brought to North America as slaves built the economic foundation of the U.S. creating the conditions for the country to establish itself as the ranking capitalist nation during the 20th century.

Counter-terrorism and Imperialist Militarism Guides U.S. Policy in Africa

In actuality, the growing presence of AFRICOM forces on the continent is a major threat to the independence of AU member-states. The existence of large deposits of oil, natural gas, diamonds, gold, uranium along with other strategic minerals and waterways underline the real interests of Washington and Wall Street.

While in Nigeria, Tillerson will surely discuss the status of U.S. trade with the West African state, the most populated on the continent. Also just last year, the Trump administration announced the lifting of a ban on the sale of military equipment including fighter jets which had been imposed by the Obama White House over alleged human rights violations.

The Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast of the country has once again been in the news since the kidnapping of 110 school girls in the town of Gapchi in Yobe state. These students have still not been rescued by the Nigerian military and police.

President Muhammadu Buhari announced on March 2 that the Nigerian security forces would extend the search for the students into contiguous states such as Niger, Cameroon and Chad where there is already a regional joint counter-terrorism taskforce in existence. Although the federal government in Abuja has repeatedly said that it has cleared out Boko Haram from many areas in the northeast, the sect is still able to launch suicide bombings, attacks on military installations and kidnappings at an alarming rate.

Until AU member-states can resolve their own issues related to viable economic growth and development coupled with protecting regional assets, state institutions and the security of the masses of people , the U.S. and other European imperialists will surely continue to interfere in the internal affairs of their governments and societies. At present the character of relations between Africa and the U.S. is not advantageous to the workers, farmers and youth of the continent. This can only be achieved through the reversal of the process of dependency and the enhancement of African sovereignty and unification.

It is has been a very bad week for those claiming Israel has the most moral army in the world. Here’s a small sample of abuses of Palestinians in recent days in which the Israeli army was caught lying.

A child horrifically injured by soldiers was arrested and terrified into signing a false confession that he was hurt in a bicycle accident. A man who, it was claimed, had died of tear-gas inhalation was actually shot at point-blank range, then savagely beaten by a mob of soldiers and left to die. And soldiers threw a tear gas canister at a Palestinian couple, baby in arms, as they fled for safety during a military invasion of their village.

In the early 2000s, at the dawn of the social media revolution, Israelis used to dismiss filmed evidence of brutality by their soldiers as fakery. It was what they called “Pallywood” – a conflation of Palestinian and Hollywood.

In truth, however, it was the Israeli military, not the Palestinians, that needed to manufacture a more convenient version of reality.

Last week, it emerged, Israeli officials had conceded to a military court that the army had beaten and locked up a group of Palestinian reporters as part of an explicit policy of stopping journalists from covering abuses by its soldiers.

Israel’s deceptions have a long history. Back in the 1970s, a young Juliano Meir-Khamis, later to become one of Israel’s most celebrated actors, was assigned the job of carrying a weapons bag on operations in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. When Palestinian women or children were killed, he placed a weapon next to the body.

In one incident, when soldiers playing around with a shoulder-launcher fired a missile at a donkey, and the 12-year-old girl riding it, Meir-Khamis was ordered to put explosives on their remains.

That occurred before the Palestinians’ first mass uprising against the occupation erupted in the late 1980s. Then, the defence minister Yitzhak Rabin – later given a Hollywood-style makeover himself as a peacemaker – urged troops to “break the bones” of Palestinians to stop their liberation struggle.

The desperate, and sometimes self-sabotaging, lengths Israel takes to try to salvage its image were underscored last week when 15-year-old Mohammed Tamimi was grabbed from his bed in a night raid.

Back in December he was shot in the face by soldiers during an invasion of his village of Nabi Saleh. Doctors saved his life, but he was left with a misshapen head and a section of skull missing.

Mohammed’s suffering made headlines because he was a bit-player in a larger drama. Shortly after he was shot, a video recorded his cousin, 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi (image on the right), slapping a soldier nearby after he entered her home.

Ahed, who is in jail awaiting trial, was already a Palestinian resistance icon. Now she has become a symbol too of Israel’s victimisation of children.

So, Israel began work on recrafting the narrative: of Ahed as a terrorist and provocateur.

It emerged that a government minister, Michael Oren, had even set up a secret committee to try to prove that Ahed and her family were really paid actors, not Palestinians, there to “make Israel look bad”. The Pallywood delusion had gone into overdrive.

Last week events took a new turn as Mohammed and other relatives were seized, even though he is still gravely ill. Dragged off to an interrogation cell, he was denied access to a lawyer or parent.

Shortly afterwards, Israel produced a signed confession stating that Mohammed’s horrific injuries were not Israel’s responsibility but wounds inflicted in a bicycle crash.

Yoav Mordechai, the occupation’s top official, trumpeted proof of a Palestinian “culture of lies and incitement”. Mohammed’s injuries were “fake news”, the Israeli media dutifully reported.

Deprived of a justification for slapping an occupation soldier, Ahed can now be locked away by military judges. Except that witnesses, phone records and hospital documentation, including brain scans, all prove that Mohammed was shot.

This was simply another of Israellywood’s endless productions to automatically confer guilt on Palestinians. The hundreds of children on Israel’s incarceration production line each year have to sign confessions – or plea bargains – to win jail-sentence reductions from courts with near-100% conviction rates.

It is more Franz Kafka than Hollywood.

A second army narrative unravelled last week. CCTV showed Yasin Saradih, 35, being shot at point-blank range during an invasion of Jericho, then savagely beaten by soldiers as he lay wounded, and left to bleed to death.

It was an unexceptional incident. A report by Amnesty International last month noted that many of the dozens of Palestinians killed in 2017 appeared to be victims of extra-judicial executions.

Before footage of Saradih’s killing surfaced, the army issued a series of false statements, including that he died from tear-gas inhalation, received first-aid treatment and was armed with a knife. The video disproves all of that.

Over the past two years, dozens of Palestinians, including women and children, have been shot in similarly suspicious circumstances. Invariably the army concludes that they were killed while attacking soldiers with a knife – Israel even named this period of unrest a “knife intifada”.

Are soldiers today carrying a “knife bag”, just as Meir-Khamis once carried a weapons bag?

A half-century of occupation has not only corrupted generations of teenage Israeli soldiers who have been allowed to lord it over Palestinians. It has also needed an industry of lies and self-deceptions to make sure the consciences of Israelis are never clouded by a moment of doubt – that maybe their army is not so moral after all.

*

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

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On February 25, Syrian forces began their offensive to liberate the last major US-supported terrorist enclave in the country.

Impressive progress was made after nine days of fighting, around one-third of East Ghouta liberated, supported by Russian airpower, care taken to minimize civilian casualties.

According to AMN news, Syrian forces nearly split East Ghouta in half, the same strategy used to liberate East Aleppo in 2016.

US-supported terrorists in the enclave are being systematically defeated. Reinforced Syrian forces are heading for the heart of territory they control.

East Ghouta’s liberation is just a matter of time. Washington is frantic, a White House statement saying:

“The United States condemns the ongoing military offensive that (Assad), backed by Russia and Iran, is perpetrating against the people of Eastern Ghouta,” adding:

Russian forces are “kill(ing) innocent civilians under the false auspices of counterterrorism operations” – a bald-faced lie.

Separately, a White House readout of Trump’s March 2 calls to Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron

“called on Russia to stop bombing East Ghouta, to compel (Assad) to halt offensive operations against civilian areas, and to hold Syria accountable for the deteriorating human rights conditions in East Ghouta, caused in part by (Assad’s) continued use of chemical weapons, attacks on civilians, and blocking of humanitarian aid.”

Fact: Unanimously adopted Security Council Resolution 2401 permits continued military operations against ISIS, Al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, and elements connected them during a 30-day ceasefire through late March.

Fact: US-supported terrorists in East Ghouta are killing and brutalizing civilians held captive as human shields. Syria’s campaign aims to liberate them, along with ending their ability to shell Damascus, a noble operation deserving high praise, not condemnation.

Fact: US-supported terrorists alone used CWs numerous times throughout the war, not Syria.

Fact: These elements are preventing humanitarian aid from reaching civilians in need – not Syria or Russia.

The White House statement turned truth on its head – ignoring US-led high crimes against Syria and its people!

East Ghouta could be liberated in weeks or sooner. As always, the wild card is what Washington may do.

Will US forces intervene to prevent East Ghouta’s liberation? Will Israeli terror-bombing try to halt the advance of Syrian troops?

On Sunday, Netanyahu arrived in Washington for a five-day US visit. He’ll meet with Trump and other administration officials on Monday before addressing the annual AIPAC conference.

Last week, the White House put Russia “on notice,” regarding its East Ghouta campaign with Syria.

It’ll continue until the enclave is liberated. It’s unclear what the Trump administration intends next.

If US and/or Israeli warplanes attack Syrian forces in East Ghouta, will Russia defend them or do nothing?

Separately on Sunday, Russian reconciliation center in Syria spokesman General Yuri Zolotukhin said terrorists in East Ghouta announced a curfew for civilians during daily five-hour humanitarian pauses – threatening to punish anyone violating them.

Rallies and other forms of resistance were also prohibited – these actions taken to prevent anyone fleeing for safety to government-controlled areas.

Only two children managed to escape captivity so far. On Sunday, Assad issued a statement saying:

“We will continue to fight terrorism…(T)he Ghouta operation is a continuation of the fight against terrorism. There is no contradiction between a truce and combat operations.”

“The progress achieved yesterday and the day before in Ghouta by the Syrian Arab Army was made during this truce.”

“Therefore we must continue with the operation in parallel with opening the way for civilians to leave. (They) from (freedom) terrorists’ hands.”

He accused Washington and its rogue allies of operating as an air force for ISIS, al-Nusra and other terrorists in the country – on the phony pretext of combating them.

Meeting on Sunday with Iranian Foreign Ministry special assistant for political affairs Hussein Jabri Ansari and his delegation, Assad said Syrians alone will decide their political future, free from foreign interference, adding:

“We have not started from Ghouta. We have started since the first day in combating terrorism in every place.”

“We have started in Aleppo, Homs and Deir Ezzor. The operation in Ghouta is a continuation of combating terrorism in different places.”

It’ll proceed until US-supported terrorists are eliminated and Syrians are again free from their scourge.

*

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

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On geopolitical issues, Hollywood operates as a virtual arm of US policymakers, supporting their imperial agenda.

It was evident Sunday evening during Oscar awards, annual exercises in self-adulation. Movie moguls value profit-making over filmmaking the way it should be. Hollywood-style history is reinvented, not the real thing.

Last year, an al-Qaeda-linked White Helmets propaganda film was honored as the year’s best documentary short. Hollywood disgracefully honored terrorism.

In 2013, the 1979/1980 Iranian hostage crisis was reinvented – Argo propaganda awarded the Academy’s best film of the year.

Last evening, politicized Olympism won top documentary film honors.

The propaganda film Icarus portrayed director/amateur bike racer Bryan Fogel’s sought help from fugitive former Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory/World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) informant Grigory Rodchenkov to use banned substances for an amateur cycling race.

In Moscow, he was indicted in absentia on charges of illegally trafficking potent substances.

He accused at least 15 Russian Olympic winners of using performance-enhancing drugs.

Moscow refuted his state-sponsored doping charge, admitting involvement of some of its athletes in using banned substances. The same practice occurs elsewhere, including in professional sports.

Rodchenkov fled to America, given refuge under the federal witness protection program, his whereabouts unknown.

Yet he appeared in Icarus, claiming Russian agents used sample-swapping tactics to help the nation’s athletes win 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics medals by using performance-enhancing drugs.

Banning Russia’s entire track and field team from the 2016 Rio summer games followed.

The International Olympic Committee suspended the Russian Olympic Committee. It banned Russian athletes from participating under their nation’s flag – disgraceful politicized actions.

The IOC acted despite no credible evidence of Russian state-sponsored doping. Individual athletes representing many countries use banned substances.

Should entire nations and their Olympians be punished for the abuses of some team members?

Should entire US baseball, football and other sports teams be banned from league competition because some of their players used these drugs?

Actions against Russia and its athletes are politicized. Icarus was honored for Russia bashing.

It’s unworthy documentary filmmaking, warranting condemnation for serving US interests.

Fogel called his film “a wakeup call…about Russia,” dedicating Icarus to Rodchenkov, a fugitive from justice, protected by Washington to use against Moscow.

Separately, the Academy chose the Chilean film “A Fantastic Woman” as best foreign language movie of the year over highly acclaimed Russian director Andrey Zvagintsev’s film “Loveless.”

It won last year’s BFI London Film Festival top honors. The Cannes Film Festival awarded it the Jury Prize, second only in importance to its Palme d’Or.

Washington disgracefully considers Russia its leading threat.

Hollywood is complicit with US policymakers, producing propaganda, not truth-telling, in films about its officials, policies and athletes.

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

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US Seeks to Intentionally Prolong Syrian Bloodshed

By Tony Cartalucci, March 05, 2018

From the beginning of Syria’s conflict the United States presented to the world its unyielding ultimatum that the government in Damascus be deposed and replaced by a government headed by the armed militants the US cultivated before the conflict and has armed and funded throughout its now seven year course.

Mass Mobilization Against Trump Military Parade

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, March 05, 2018

President Trump ordered the Pentagon to start planning a military parade on Veteran’s Day this November. Trump wants to outdo the military parade he attended in France on Bastille Day. Estimates are it could cost up to $50 million. The last military parade was after the Gulf War in 1991.

Video: Washington Threatens North-South Korea Dialogue. Demilitarization is a Prerequisite to Peace Negotiations

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Michael Welch, March 05, 2018

Well the 2018 Olympics are over. Much of the media took note of the two Koreas competing as a united team; meanwhile U.S. belligerence continued unabated as witnessed by Vice President Mike Pence’s less-than-diplomatic gestures during the games.

Satire: The Slick and Sick Propaganda Coming From Russia and Muslim Terrorists

By Edward Curtin, March 05, 2018

As anyone even slightly aware knows, Americans are being inundated with endless Russian and Muslim propaganda aimed at convincing the American people that it is the United States that stands in the way of peace around the world.  Sophisticated and crude in turns, what the psychologists call passive aggressive, these efforts at mind-control can be seen all across the internet.

How the U.S. Establishment Lies Through Its Teeth, for War Against Russia

By Eric Zuesse, March 05, 2018

The same people, Republicans and Democrats, who lied through their teeth for an invasion of Iraq in 2003, are doing it again for an invasion of Russia, sometime soon, so as to ‘defend’ ‘democracy’. The U.S. has by now swallowed up virtually all lands surrounding Russia, at least in Europe, the latest being Ukraine, and is placing its missiles now on and near Russia’s borders, which is to Russians like would be to Americans if Russia had swallowed up Canada and were placing its missiles there. 

Hurricane Katrina: US Let Its Citizens Die Rather Than Accept Cuban Aid

By Shane Quinn, March 05, 2018

Of the many stories written about Hurricane Katrina in autumn 2005, and its devastating consequences, one crucial element is virtually overlooked. During the all-important hours after the tropical cyclone laid waste to sections of south-eastern United States, the Bush administration ignored the aid of its Cuban neighbor.

War Propaganda. U.S. Media Portrays Pyongyang as Assisting Damascus in Waging a Chemical Attack against Syrian Civilians

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 05, 2018

While US sponsored Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria acting on behalf of US NATO are provided with money, weapons and training, Washington is now pointing its finger at North Korea’s role in supporting the government of Bashar Al Assad with a view to killing their own people.

A 2012 US policy paper admittedly sought to “bleed” the Syrian government, and with it the Syrian people. Today in Syria, the consequences of America’s depraved foreign policy is being blamed by Western special interests on the very victims it targeted. 

From the beginning of Syria’s conflict the United States presented to the world its unyielding ultimatum that the government in Damascus be deposed and replaced by a government headed by the armed militants the US cultivated before the conflict and has armed and funded throughout its now seven year course.

US demands of regime change in Syria were not exclusive to the current conflict. Syria was upon US President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” announced after the attacks on September 11, 2001 despite Syria playing no role in the attacks and in fact being one of the principal nations waging war on Al Qaeda and its many affiliates – including its predecessor the Muslim Brotherhood – stretching back to the 1980s when the US itself was arming and funding the terrorist organization’s members in Afghanistan.

US Intentionally Fuels Syria’s Conflict

Today, regions in Syria under government control now enjoy peace and security unseen since the conflict broke out in 2011. This includes Syria’s largest city of Aleppo which was invaded by Al Qaeda-linked militant groups crossing over Syria’s border from NATO member Turkey beginning in 2012.

Construction vehicles are replacing tanks in Aleppo. After years of occupation by terrorist groups, Aleppo was finally liberated, with reconstruction now underway. Peace and security was restored to Aleppo not through any initiative led by the United Nations, or Western states like the US, UK, or other NATO members, but instead by joint Syrian-Russian-Iranian military operations conducted in direct defiance of Western demands terrorist enclaves remain intact.

Reflecting the security Syria’s government still is able to offer the Syrian people versus regions still ravaged  by Western-backed militants is the fact that the vast majority of displaced Syrians reside in government-held territory.
This is revealed in a 2017 UN report titled, “UNHCR seeing significant returns of internally displaced amid Syria’s continuing conflict,” which states (emphasis added):

Aid agencies estimate that more than 440,000 internally displaced people have returned to their homes in Syria during the first six months of this year. In parallel, UNHCR has monitored over 31,000 Syrian refugees returning from neighbouring countries so far in 2017. Since 2015, some 260,000 refugees have spontaneously returned to Syria, primarily from Turkey into northern Syria.  

The main factors influencing decisions for refugees to return self-assisted mostly to Aleppo, Hama, Homs, Damascus and to other governorates are primarily linked to seeking out family members, checking on property, and, in some cases, a real or perceived improvement in security conditions in parts of the country.

It should be noted that Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus all fall under the control of the current Syrian government. Regions still occupied by terrorists – particularly Idlib in northern Syria – are omitted from the report.

It’s clear that if the United States’ agenda in Syria was a humanitarian one, it would be assisting the Syrian government in its efforts to improve security conditions across the country. Instead, the US actively works to undermine such efforts – intentionally creating and perpetuating conditions to jeopardize security and induce continued human suffering.

A map of Syria’s current conflict reveals that violence continues solely in areas the West and its regional partners remain committed in. This includes NATO-member Turkey whose ongoing invasion and destruction of Syria’s northern countryside aimed at Afrin goes unmentioned in UN proceedings. It also includes America’s continued, uninvited occupation of eastern Syria.

While the US has claimed its purpose for occupying eastern Syria was to “defeat” the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS), Washington’s own Defense Intelligence Agency revealed in a leaked memo in 2012 that ISIS’ initial creation was specifically desired by the US and its allies as a means of isolating the Syrian government.

The 2012 memo (PDF) would state specifically that:

If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran). 

The DIA memo would also explain who these “supporting powers” are:

The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime.

With ISIS now mostly defeated in both Syria and Iraq, the US has used multiple and increasingly strained narratives to explain why it not only remains in Syria illegally, but why it is seeking to even expand its presence there. This includes claims it must “provide a bulwark against Iranian influence,” according to the Guardian. Such pretexts stand at face value as contradictory, with Iranian influence having played a central role in America’s desire to create ISIS in the first place, and ISIS’ defeat at the hands of a Syrian-Russian-Iranian coalition.

Eastern Ghouta, located east of Damascus, also remains as a pocket of enduring violence owed solely to US efforts to impede Syrian efforts to liberate the area from terrorist occupation and restore the same order the rest of Damascus enjoys. Observers of the Syrian conflict can draw identical parallels between US propaganda aimed at impeding Aleppo’s liberation in 2016 and current efforts to prolong violence in Eastern Ghouta.

US Policy in Syria: Bleed It 

Concluding that Washington’s policy in Syria is to intentionally prolong human suffering for as long as possible is not merely a matter of superficially assessing its current actions – it is stated as US policy throughout policy papers for the last several years.

As early as 2012 when speedy US-backed regime change had clearly failed and a more protracted conflict had begun, prominent US policy think tank, the Brookings Institution, would publish a policy paper titled, “Saving Syria: Assessing Options for Regime Change.”

The paper would state (emphasis added):

The United States might still arm the opposition even knowing they will probably never have sufficient power, on their own, to dislodge the Asad network. Washington might choose to do so simply in the belief that at least providing an oppressed people with some ability to resist their oppressors is better than doing nothing at all, even if the support provided has little chance of turning defeat into victory. 

Alternatively, the United States might calculate that it is still worthwhile to pin down the Asad regime and bleed it, keeping a regional adversary weak, while avoiding the costs of direct intervention.

The paper not only openly admits US intervention in Syria has nothing to do with humanitarian concerns but rather “keeping a regional adversary weak,” it specifically recommends prolonging the conditions under which a humanitarian crisis will only expand, and for as long as possible.

The US intentionally backing an “opposition” that has no chance of overturning the Syrian government equates to intentionally and maliciously prolonging a deadly conflict and all the horrors that accompany it. The Brookings paper specifically suggesting the US “bleed” the Syrian government is done with full knowledge of the cost in human suffering that “bleeding” would undoubtedly incur.

With this poorly hidden reality underpinning America’s true intentions in Syria in mind, the US’ ongoing charade within the halls of the UN posturing as a champion for human dignity amid a catastrophe of its own intentional, premeditated design reveals both US special interests and the “international order” they preside over as a genuine and unparalleled rogue state.

In essence, US policymakers intend to hold the world hostage by threatening enduring bloodshed until their political demands are met – in Syria’s case – the removal of Syria’s government and its replacement by suitable US proxies. By very definition this is terrorism – and terrorism that should come as no surprise considering the US’ predominant role in funding the terrorist organizations currently ravaging Syria.

While the US leads efforts to isolate and undermine a growing list of nations opposing the increasingly depraved nature of American hegemony, it is incumbent upon the rest of the world to isolate and undermine the special interests driving American hegemony. The notion that the current “international order” is predicated upon the rule of law lacks credibility when Washington can openly create a humanitarian catastrophe like that unfolding in Syria, hold the world hostage to it if its demands are not met, all while posing as a champion for the multiple laws and human values it is blatantly violating in the process.

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Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.

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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Featured image: Border wall stretches for miles into the rolling landscape on the outskirts of Nogales, Arizona. This kind of fencing is impassable to most wingless wildlife. Photo by Rebecca Kessler for Mongabay.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in California ruled that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not abuse its authority in waiving dozens of environmental laws to build sections of wall along the border between the U.S. and Mexico. The ruling frees the department to waive laws for future border wall construction projects.

In August and September the department waived more than 30 laws, including key environmental laws, to expedite construction of three border wall projects in California. The projects include the construction of eight wall prototypes, now completed, and the replacement of two sections of existing border fencing.

Judge Gonzalo Curiel consolidated three separate lawsuits against the Department of Homeland Security that were initially filed by the state of California, a consortium of NGOs (Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, and the Animal Legal Defense Fund), and the NGO Center for Biological Diversity. The suits contend that the department exceeded the authority Congress granted it, via legislation dating back to 1996, to waive laws for border infrastructure construction, and that it violated environmental laws and the constitution in the process. Judge Curiel’s 101-page ruling on the consolidated cases threw out those arguments, finding that the department’s actions are valid.

Trump border wall prototypes being built in October, 2017, near the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in San Diego, California. A judge ruled that the U.S. government acted legally in waiving environmental laws to build the prototypes and other wall segments. Photo by Mani Albrecht/U.S. Customs and Border Protection via Flickr.

Currently about one-third of the roughly 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border has fencing. President Trump has pushed to fortify the remainder, saying it is necessary to prevent the flow of drugs and undocumented immigrants over the border. But he has since indicated that he might accept a less complete structure.

Trump responded to the ruling on Twitter on Tuesday:

“Big legal win today. U.S. judge sided with the Trump Administration and rejected the attempt to stop the government from building a great Border Wall on the Southern Border. Now this important project can go forward!”

But the next day he declared that he would delay further wall construction in California until the entire project gains approval. It remains uncertain whether Congress will fund the president’s border wall project. The issue was wrapped up in heated negotiations over broad immigration reforms last month, but the discussions have stalled out after a looming deadline evaporated. Congress now appears to have moved on to other topics.

Brian Segee, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs in the case decided this week, said the group plans to appeal the ruling, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“The Trump administration has completely overreached its authority in its rush to build this destructive, senseless wall,” Segee told the paper. “They’re giving unprecedented, sweeping power to an unelected agency chief to ignore dozens of laws and crash through hundreds of miles of spectacular borderlands. This is unconstitutional and shouldn’t be allowed to stand.”

The President’s border wall proposal has been intensely controversial, with the Mexican government and numerous local governments and civil society groups opposing the wall on practical, humanitarian, and environmental grounds.

Conservationists say the existing border infrastructure, most of it erected under former U.S. President George W. Bush, has disrupted ecosystem connectivity and harmed borderland wildlife populations that rely on habitats in both countries. Low barriers that most species can cross well enough traverse about 300 miles of the border. But tall walls that stop all but the smallest non-flying animals in their tracks run along another 405 miles.

Conservationists have issued dire warnings about the potential impact of a wall traversing the entire border. Numerous species would be negatively affected, including bison, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, bears, foxes, salamanders, and even certain bird species, they say.

“President Trump insists on constructing a wall along the entire border: if he achieves making this a reality this barrier will rewrite the biological history of North America. A history that for millennia allowed animals to travel along the grasslands and forests from Mexico to Canada,” Rurik List, an ecologist at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Lerma in Mexico, wrote in an issue of Jornada Ecologica this summer. “The future of the bison and many other species that the two countries share is at stake at the border.”

The current case drew widespread attention because Trump targeted Curiel in 2016, claiming the Indiana-born judge could not preside fairly over a lawsuit against Trump University because he was “Mexican.”

President Trump ordered the Pentagon to start planning a military parade on Veteran’s Day this November. Trump wants to outdo the military parade he attended in France on Bastille Day. Estimates are it could cost up to $50 million. The last military parade was after the Gulf War in 1991.

A coalition of groups is organizing to oppose the parade, click here to learn more.

Military parade in dangerous times

This display of military power and glorification of war comes when the risks of nuclear conflict and wars are rising. It comes when massive tax cuts have been given to the rich while spending on domestic needs are threatened and a recession is looming.

A military parade is a manifestation of many problems – threats of war and ongoing imperialism, the fading US empire trying to hang on to global hegemony, militarization of our communities and an economy and government that serve the elites’ interests while the rest of the population struggles.

The military parade will try to intimidate other nations by displaying the US’ weapons, but it will actually demonstrate an insecure fading empire trying to show it still has power. In his state of the union this week, President Putin announced Russia’s new weapons system that seem to make US defenses and weaponry obsolete. If true, this increases the risks of damage to the US if it attacks Russia or its allies.

The Pentagon knows the US is losing its position as the major global power, but rather than accept reality, it is being more aggressive, seeking war and regime change in North Korea, Iran and Venezuela. The new National Defense Strategy and Nuclear Posture Review focus on Russia and China as rivals and create a new arms race. State Department officials have been ordered to sell more weapons.

It is time to de-escalate, not escalate. The US has killed more than 20 million people in 37 countries since the end of World War II. But, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress voted nearly unanimously to increase military spending by $40 billion more than requested. It is President Trump who ordered the parade, but US militarism is a product of both major political parties. The military parade will show the United States is marching in the wrong direction.

Uniting against militarism and austerity

When President Trump first mentioned a possible military parade, a number of groups started organizing responses. ANSWER Coalition put out a call for people to come to DC to protest, Roots Action launched a petition opposing the parade, and veteran’s groups started organizing an indigenous-led peace march calling for a return to celebrating Armistice Day. This November is the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I.

When it became more likely that the parade would happen, we heard from people in the United States and around the world asking if protests would be held against it.

Last week, Popular Resistance hosted a conference call to bring anti-war, peace and justice groups together to coordinate actions. There was great enthusiasm, energy and unity among the groups. We agreed to collaborate on actions around Veteran’s Day weekend to organize hundreds of thousands of people to come to Washington, DC to oppose the parade (or whatever city the parade is in if it is moved) and to call for solidarity actions around the world.

We hope the parade will be cancelled. If it is, we will still gather to demand:

1. Stop the glorification and normalization of war.
2. Return Veteran’s Day to Armistice Day, a day to celebrate peace.
3. End US wars and acts of aggression, including regime change.
4. Cut military spending, invest in human needs and protection of the planet.
5. Stop the militarization of schools and communities.
6. Stop repression against dissent.

Since the call, more groups have started signing on to the effort. Your organization can sign on here.

A website was created, No Trump Military Parade. The growing list of organizations that have signed on is included and you can sign on as an individual. As the organizing advances, the website will include specific information on planned events and a map of solidarity actions in the United States and around the world, as well as flyers and other materials for outreach.

Time to end the culture of violence

Elliott Swain argues that militarism at home and abroad are deeply connected. A school shooting by a white man trained to kill by the NRA and Pentagon-supported Jr ROTC program and a school bombing by the US military in Syria have intertwined roots. We must address both or we will fail in ending our culture of violence.

In her new book, “Loaded, A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes the deep roots of the culture of violence and gun laws in the United States. She writes, we have “a history of inherently violent settler-colonialism and chattel slavery” that was made possible by militias.

The violence of settler-colonialism continues today. Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report writes,

“All the sound and fury about gun control is useless because this society demands that the slave patrol never disband. There are even arguments made to expand it.”

She ties violence in the US to white supremacy and racism.

Chris Hedges explains guns are equated with political power,

“Mass culture and most historians do not acknowledge the patterns of violence that have played out over and over since the founding of the nation. This historical amnesia blinds us to the endemic violence that defines our culture and is encoded in our national myth.”

We can take steps to start decolonizing the United States. We discussed that this week on Clearing the FOG with Sherri Mitchell, who describes in depth what can be done in her new book, “Sacred Instructions.”

Militarization infects our communities in many ways. How can we blame people who turn to violence as a solution when that is the knee-jerk response of our nation? If we have a conflict with another country, usually because we want their resources, we make threats, impose sanctions or attack. If a community rises up with legitimate anger against oppressive systems, we send in militarized police and the national guard.

Children are taught from a young age that members of the military are heroes. They are desensitized to violence through video games that target non-whites, television and movies, and are trained to kill through programs like Jr ROTC in their schools. These are all designed to feed them into the insatiable military machine.

This includes economic violence

The statistics on deaths in the United States are staggering. Eric London lays it out:

“Since 2000, there have been 270,000 murders in the US, 600,000 drug overdoses (200,000 involving opioids), 650,000 suicides (130,000 by veterans), and 85,000 workplace deaths. An estimated 700,000 people have died prematurely during this period due to lack of health care. Police killed over 12,000 people from 2000 to 2014, and up to 27,000 immigrants have died attempting to cross the US-Mexico border since 1998. The government has executed roughly 850 prisoners since 2000. Over 2.2 million adults are currently incarcerated in jails and prisons, with another 4.7 million on probation or parole.”

That equals over 2.3 million deaths in the last 17 years, over 140,000 avoidable deaths each year. At the root of these deaths is economic violence that devastates communities in the US and other countries.

Economic violence perpetrated in the US feeds the war machine. Military spending now consumes 57% of federal discretionary spending, leaving only 43% to meet basic needs such as education, housing, transportation and energy.

Harel B. writes that our national security spending is close to $1 trillion a year. He estimates that an actual defense budget, rather than an Empire budget, would cost $100 billion annually. Imagine what could be done with an extra $900 billion in the US where 40% of the people live on the edge of poverty and the social safety net is shrinking.

Imagine the high standard of living we could all attain if social needs were given a blank check, instead of the military. We don’t have to imagine it, other wealthy countries are already living with high quality healthcare systems, excellent public schools and free higher education.

Next Steps

Organizing to oppose the military parade is an opportunity to unite people against war, militarism and violence. It is an opportunity to unite USians with people around the world who oppose US violence. A military parade will be a major error as it will show the United States to be an insecure nation at a time when people realize US empire is fading. Rather than the US recognizing it needs to join the community of nations in a multi-polar world, it will show the US trying to hang on to global dominance.

A critical step is to grow the anti-war movement in the US. There are many upcoming opportunities:

• April 14 and 15, people across the nation will protest the wars at home and abroad.
• July 11 and 12 there will be international actions to demonstrate the desire for peace during the NATO summit.
• October 20 and 21 is a Women’s March on the Pentagon.

And of course, we urge you to join the mass mobilization to stop President Trump’s military parade and show the world that people in the US are ready to end wars. Visit No Trump Military Parade, sign on, and share it with people and organizations who oppose war.

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

All images in this article are from the authors.

The Russian Brass has patiently and ceaselessly argued since almost the inception of the modern Russian state that the United States and NATO missile shield elements, when used in conjunction with a surprise nuclear attack to mop up whatever surviving retaliatory nuclear missiles are launched from Russian territory, have shattered the tenuous peace M.A.D. affords us and has restarted the cold war down an even darker and more dangerous path for all of humanity, future and present. 

This military adventure and scrapping of ballistic missile treaties long past the planning stages as of Bush Jr’s helm suggests reducing Russian territory and cityscapes to infernos of radioactive rubble, and receiving limited but acceptable reprisal attacks, thus in there minds at least shattering the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Some of them believe they can win a Nuclear war, or they must because they have it embedded now in military doctrine including in academies and the battlefield in numerous drills.

Subservient media peddles the war propaganda for the times. I don’t need to watch CNN or likewise to know we are being lied to, but it becomes painfully obvious when people do, no doubt.

US military planners actually believe that they can for decades embargo countries, openly plan for their nuclear destruction, and strangle and encircle them militarily while running threatening drills and developing and fielding so-called defensive weapons on Russia’s doorstep without them upping the anty as they have been forced to, fielding deadlier and more evasive nuclear delivery systems.

Remember, as scary as MSNBC or CNN or whatever criminal syndicate is ranting about how provocative and dangerous Russia is in announcing all these deadly countermeasures, just tell your people that these are bald faced lies and Russia was forced into this position, into having to project power, having to show its hand, and that indeed its these Russian offensive measures that are keeping us hopefully within the realm of a non starter as far as starting a Nuclear war with Russia goes.

The balance of Mutually Assured Destruction is back in full force and its up to the US administration and Military to accept that and abandon there Skitzafrenic plans for defeating Russia militarily.

Here is my letter to the President.

Dear Mr President,

The only way to end human suffering is to make peace with Russia now while we can, and end all the wars and talk of Armageddon; it is all avoidable and unnecessary.

If you are serious about draining the swamp then please get on with it, at least purge PNAC signatories, my god, and if they say your appeasing Russia by making peace and restarting scrapped missile treaties that will keep us safe from being vaporized by nuclear retaliatory strikes from Russia, then so be it, they may thank you later when they realize they actually put our entire civilization and human existence into question.

Every day you wait is another day closer to it being too late.

I am absolutely certain, Russia, as they ended the first cold war, as a first act in a sit down, would take nuclear attack off the table;

Are you willing to do that Mr President, are you willing to take that sword off every man, women, and child’s neck.

I would appreciate it for all of my people to not live on the edge of absolute ruin and despair with a knife to our throats every waking hour when all the avenues for peace leading to Russia are still wide open.

More US Nuclear weapons and space laser weaponry does not make peace, it just furthers the agenda of beating Russia militarily. Please let peace and human life and environmental protection be the real objective.

Blitzkrieg media  propaganda fomenting lies and hatred and turning innocent civilians into pawns in the hands of these monsters holding the purse-strings doesn’t help, but it doesn’t stop you from making the call.

Here’s a suggestion for some quick first steps towards peaceful resolution, from the layman; now I’m sure there are other avenues, but please, do something.

Purge a few notable warhawks, set a date for talks with Russia on restarting all our failed missile reduction and disarmament treaties, within a matter of days you could probably have a formal signed non aggression pact with Russia, and inform NATO commands that Russia will no longer be referred to as an adversary.

This is what Russia wants and presumably still holds onto hope, that America would begin to see her as a partner and not an adversary as madam Clinton had assured them during Obama’s reign of terror.

Make this years Valdai forum “Achieve Peace in our Time” with special guest Vladimir Putin and Mr. Donald Trump, assuring peace and security to all and promising the world disarmament, good will, and peace on Earth!!! Wouldn’t that be something…

There is much to save, and much to rebuild, much to undo, and a century of war to leave in the past as we seek a new and more everlasting future for all of humanity.

A huge step is nuclear disarmament talks, mainly to reduce immediate tensions and arms race with Russia, but all interested countries are welcome to attend and many including DPRK would sign on to disarmament, the end goal and result being Nuclear weapons and the threat of there use can be eliminated from Human Civilization completely on your watch.

That process could at least start, and must start immediately because there is an increasing risk of Nuclear war with talk of so called limited nuclear war that would likely spiral into more strikes and reprisals.

With even just one so called mini-nuke spelling the end of life as we know it by some estimates its just unthinkable that you would sit on your hands.

Having promised the world you had answered the call for peace when we are deploying these nuclear weapons into the field under your watch present day with firing permissions going to field commanders; rectifying this threat demands immediate action.

This is just truly unconscionable and it pains me to have to sit here and watch this thing unfold in slow motion around me when its only going to end all life on Earth. Stop this thing now while you still can. People will gravitate towards peaceful solutions and truth is self evident,

You simply must wake up if you think that this is not the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. I apologize if as many assume that you know all of these things and much much more and you are working on it, for peace, however like you, I’ve been lied to all of my life and I don’t see all those promises you made before you got elected coming true.

War is abhorrent and plain wrong, but Nuclear war is just unthinkable, or at least it should be, but I’m telling you they must be trying to start Armageddon, as crazy as that sounds, it appears to be working, and the Clinton’s, the Bushes,  the Obama’s, the “neocons” they’re all behind this insanity,

Please rout out this evil and this entire notion of nuclear arms making us safer or being forward deployed on hair triggers is not criminal treason putting all of humanity under the threat of annihilation.

Why do you think the media is rabidly accusing Russia of meddling, they’ve even got notables like Tarpley convinced that Russia is acting aggressively and has actually meddled in our politics, its absurd: the USA has entire agencies whose sole purpose is meddling in other countries elections, including Russia’s!!

The point is they risk being outed by the sheer audacity of it however they are so terrified that if they let you talk to the Russians there will be world peace the very next day. Make the call for peace Mr President, No matter that if on the other end there is a phone ringing on a Kremlin desk.

(and now a short prayer for those of faith: God bless America and her many Allies… and her Victims. Thank-you for this reprise from total war, thank you for hope; God willing we will emerge victorious in real lasting peace with the righteousness of truth on our side.)

If you recall – Your choice On the Brink of Nuclear Annihilation was between a Multi-polar World or Nuclear Winter – This holds damn true, and you must choose peace decisively. 

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This article was originally published on blogdog.

Far right Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu will meet Monday with far right white nationalist president Donald J. Trump in an apparent effort to hurry up Trump’s announcement of the “Deal of the Century” between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Arabic press is speculating that Netanyahu, who has faced large anti-corruption rallies at home and whose government may fall over his possible indictment on corruption charges, wants Trump to try to save his political career by making a splash over the Deal of the Century.

If so, it is a forlorn hope, since there is no deal to be had under Trump/Netanyahu terms.

The Palestinian-Israeli “Peace Process” is a charade that has the following sociological and political functions:

1. It provides a fig leaf to the Israeli far right as it daily steals more and more Palestinian land in the West Bank and continues to brutalize the civilian population of Gaza.

2. It allows the US government, which coddles Israeli expansionism on the West Bank, to have a form of deniability over Israeli colonialism and Apartheid, or at least something to tell reporters at press conferences, saying that all the disputes will be resolved in final status negotiations. This is like putting two people at a table with two big pieces of German chocolate cake, having one person dig in with a fork and gobble up not only his own share but begin attacking the other person’s plate as well, while the other dinner guest is tied to his chair with his arms behind his back. And then saying, don’t worry, in a few decades we’ll untie the second person and figure out how to get him back some of his now-disappeared piece of cake.

3. The “peace process” hopes to pacify the Palestinian population, which has been divided up into cantons on the West Bank and intensively policed by jackbooted Israeli troops and is increasingly encroached upon by armed, fanatical, supremacist Israeli squatters on Palestinian land. By continually reassuring this beleaguered and long-suffering population that their Apartheid occupation is temporary and there is hope for a state in the future, US and Israeli officials hope to tamp down the militancy that might ensue if Palestinians lost all hope.

4. It allows the Israeli and US governments to blame the victims, since Palestinians who point out that there is no peace process and the entire operation is a sham can be sidelined publicly as obstructionists and even terrorists.

5. It creates a corrupt Palestinian professional bureaucratic class that lives off the crumbs of the “peace process,” essentially acting as collaborators in helping police the Palestinian population for the Israelis and reassuring them about the future. This bureaucratic class receives substantial European, Arab and even US aid and its representatives can be trotted out as the face of the Palestinians, when in fact almost all Palestinians are invested in resisting Israeli expansionism.

Trump’s harsh rhetoric toward the Palestinians has ripped away some of the facade of the “peace process.” His announcement of a move of the US embassy to Jerusalem is a way of signalling that East Jerusalem will never be the capital of a Palestinian state and that there never will be a Palestinian state.

As a result, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority and primary exemplar of the Palestinian bureaucratic class has said he will refuse to negotiate through the Americans.

Trump’s angry reply, that he will cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority if Abbas defies him, threatens to decimate the Palestinian bureaucratic class that lives off the “peace process.” But without them, the full catastrophe facing the 4.5 million Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation or permanent Israeli blockade will become abundantly clear to that population, leading to substantial unrest.

Netanyahu hopes that Trump will go even further, and simply put the weight of the US government toward full Apartheid and accelerated Israeli squatting, bestowing Washington’s seal of approval on current Israeli policies and so making it harder for the boycott, sanctions and divestment movement in Europe to become ensconced as general European Union policy (about a third of Israel’s trade is with Europe and it receives substantial technology and weapons transfers from that quarter, which are all endangered if BDS spreads there).

That is the so-called “Deal of the Century,” which would whitewash Netanyahu’s fascist expansionism in occupied Palestine, and which he hopes in vain might give him back his political standing in his own cabinet.

It is a desperate ploy and the entire enterprise is likely doomed in the medium to long term, though the rest of us will suffer a substantial degradation in our quality of life and our basic human rights as a result of this desperate quest to prop up the world’s last colonial mini-empire.

In a new attack on free speech, the European Union (EU) is calling on major social media and Internet firms including Facebook, Twitter and Google to automatically and immediately censor online material.

On March 1, the EU Commission called on companies and EU states to ensure “the detection and removal of illegal content through reactive (so called ‘notice and action’) or proactive measures.” It also identified a vast amount of material targeted for censorship. According to the Commission, its recommendations apply to all forms of “content ranging from terrorist content, incitement to hatred and violence, child sexual abuse material, counterfeit products and copyright infringement.”

“Considering that terrorist content is most harmful in the first hours of its appearance online, all companies should remove such content within one hour from its referral as a general rule,” it said.

The measures the EU is discussing would force companies to create programs, answerable to no one, to trawl the Internet and delete users’ content. This would consolidate censorship measures the EU proposed last year via the EU Internet Forum, which called on tech firms to work to develop automatic removal of online content.

The EU hailed moves in this direction that have already taken place. According to the EU,

“Twitter reported that three quarters of the 300,000 accounts removed between January and June 2017 were deleted before posting their first Tweet. According to YouTube, more than 150,000 videos have been removed since June 2017. Once aware of a piece of terrorist content, Facebook removes 83 percent of subsequently uploaded copies within one hour of upload.”

The EU justified its policy with shopworn claims about the fight against terrorism.

“While several platforms have been removing more illegal content than ever before … we still need to react faster against terrorist propaganda and other illegal content which is a serious threat to our citizens’ security, safety and fundamental rights,” said Digital Commissioner Andrus Ansip.

Press accounts of the latest EU demand for censorship cited the need, as the Guardian put it, to fight “extremist content on the web” that “has influenced lone-wolf attackers who have killed people in several European cities after being radicalised.”

The argument that EU censorship is aimed at so-called lone-wolf terrorists is a lie, above all because lone-wolf terrorists are largely a political fiction. The major terror attacks in Europe were carried out not by isolated individuals, but by members of Islamist networks active in NATO’s proxy wars in the Middle East, and who were actively watched and protected for that reason by European intelligence.

The organizers of terrorist attacks in France in 2015 and in Belgium in 2016 were well known to the intelligence services. The Kouachi brothers who led the Charlie Hebdo attack, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the leader of the 13 November 2015 attacks in Paris, and the El Bakraoui brothers who carried out the 22 March 2016 Brussels attacks were all well known to European intelligence. They were allowed to travel freely and prepare their attacks, as their networks were intelligence assets operating under state protection.

Similarly, the links of the Islamic State militia to Berlin Christmas market attacker Anis Amri and Manchester bomber Salman Abedi were well known to German and British intelligence, respectively, before they attacked. These attacks were seized on by the EU powers to intensify police-state measures that shred basic democratic rights, such as the state of emergency in France.

Now, the red herring of the fight against “lone-wolf” terrorists is serving as a pretext for yet further attacks on Internet freedom and freedom of speech.

These attacks are well advanced. The EU wants the same IT companies that work closely on Internet censorship with a wide variety of states, above all Washington and the US intelligence agencies, to use similar methods to trample on freedom of speech and other democratic rights in Europe. This is what emerged from recent remarks by Julian King, the EU Commissioner for Security.

Censorship like that being proposed by the EU, King said, is “not only possible, it’s being done already by a number of the larger platforms.” He called for “proactive measures to identify and remove illegal content, including automated means such as upload filters, where this is appropriate.” He also called on IT firms to cooperate with EU “member States, trusted flaggers and among themselves to work together and benefit from best practices.”

Such remarks are a warning. US politicians and IT firms have openly declared that they are seeking to carry out politically targeted censorship, aiming to promote “trusted” news outlets that function as little more than state propaganda outlets. Above all, these censorship measures are being implemented to restrict access to socialist and antiwar publications, such as the World Socialist Web Site, amid rising opposition to war and austerity among American workers and youth.

Last summer, the WSWS identified that a dramatic decline in its readership, together with that of other socialist, antiwar, and progressive web sites, resulted from Google’s implementation of a new algorithm aiming to promote “authoritative” news sources over “alternative” sources of information.

Now, under the guise of fighting “terrorist content,” the EU is similarly seeking to implement repressive measures to censor the Internet that are squarely aimed at rising social and political discontent internationally. Major European powers are already enacting similar censorship laws at the national level. Since January 1, the German Network Enforcement Law has been in effect, enabling Berlin to regulate and censor the Internet along similar lines as the Trump administration and its attack on net neutrality in the United States.

In the name of fighting “illegal” content, the EU aims to target any oppositional views that challenge its plans to slash social spending to finance remilitarization and wars abroad.

As the German ruling elite prepares a new coalition government between the Social Democrats and Christian democrats, the parties involved in the new government have called for strengthening the German armed forces and German influence worldwide, as well as major increases in military spending.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron has announced €300 billion in military spending over the next 6 years, as well as calling for deep cuts in basic social programs and a return of the draft.

It is in this context—amid deep popular opposition to EU austerity and militarism, amid recent strikes across Europe, from German metalworkers and British rail workers to Romanian autoworkers—that the EU is seeking to set up the censorship of the Internet and social media.

*

Featured image is from Distract The Media.

Well the 2018 Olympics are over. Much of the media took note of the two Koreas competing as a united team; meanwhile U.S. belligerence continued unabated as witnessed by Vice President Mike Pence’s less-than-diplomatic gestures during the games.

There seem to have been significant diplomatic breakthroughs during this period between the two Koreas, with the north-south talks seeming to place South Korea at odds with both the U.S and Japan.

What are the prospects for peace on the Korean Peninsula in the face of these events?

Joining us to discuss this question is  Professor Michel Chossudovsky, an award winning author, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Ottawa, founder and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal and editor of Global Research.

He spoke at a meeting hosted at the Korean parliament (National Assembly) and also participated in events alongside other anti-war, labour, political voices including meetings with the youth movement and the candlelight movement.

Transcript- Michel Chossudovsky Interview, February 27, 2018

Michael Welch, Global Research (GR), Good Morning, Professor Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky: Good morning. Indeed I spent a week in the Republic of Korea. The meeting at the Parliament building was more in fact a discussion group of non governmental organizations, politicians, academics… and a very fruitful discussion in which I presented a procedure which would lead to the so-called demilitarization of the Korean Peninsula, because at this stage, under the combined forces command (CFC) agreement between the United States and the Republic of Korea, all Republic of Korea troops and forces, including 600,000 forces plus reserves, will automatically go under the command of a general appointed by the Pentagon.

That is something which is embedded and which, in effect, prevents progress of the so-called inter-Korean dialogue between North and South. Because any kind of U.S. military threat or aggression directed against North Korea would automatically harness the Republic of Korea armed forces. In other words, the preamble to any kind of meaningful peace negotiations would require the repeal of this agreement.

GR:  when you were speaking with all of these other groups I imagine there was a solid understanding that the United States and their role in this is not so much to advance the prospects for the South Korean people as to maintain their own force presence there, maintain their own grip on the country.

MC: Well there’s certainly an understanding of U.S. objectives to prevail in the Republic of Korea in terms of its occupation forces, 28,500 troops, its military cooperation agreements, and so on; but I must say that public opinion in South Korea is heavily divided, and it’s only recently with the inter-Korean dialogue that there’s a shift, because if you ask people in the street “Well, what do you think of the United States, well they’ll say, well the United States are our allies, they’re our friends, they’re helping us and guaranteeing our security.

So there is evidently propaganda, both emanating from successive governments, as well as from the South Korean media, that ultimately North Korea is a threat to their security. And… but that perception is changing, and there are powerful voices within South Korea particularly within the government of President Moon, which understands that in fact the United States is intent on undermining the north-south dialogue.

In fact, Washington is even threatening South Korea with sanctions for having pursued dialogue with North Korean officials. And, of course, we saw what happened with Mike Pence. At the same time, and I think that’s very important, is that coinciding with the Olympic Games and the announcement of the inter-Korean dialogue, Washington has come up with its so-called bloody nose option of attacking North Korea either with conventional or so-called low-yield tactical nuclear weapons, which inevitably would lead to escalation.

It’s, you know, “bloody nose” is a military concept which ultimately is based on the understanding that a tactical nuclear weapon is harmless to civilians: you just get a bloody nose and there’s minimal amount of collateral damage. But that is also what I call a bloody lie, rather than a bloody nose.

It’s… these tactical nuclear weapons have an explosive capacity going between 1/3 and 12 times the Hiroshima bomb, and consequently the use of a tactical nuclear bomb are more usable as defined in the Nuclear Posture Review, which inevitably lead to warfare on a large scale.

So we discussed some of these concepts. The negotiations procedures between North and South are somewhat… I mean there are certain things on which the public is informed, what’s going on. But, in fact, the intelligent agencies are also involved. The U.S. intelligence is in touch with their counterparts in the Republic of Korea, the so-called KCIA, and in turn the intelligence community in South Korea is in touch with North Korea.

So there’s still a certain dialogue taking place both at the official level, but also what of course is occurring is unannounced contacts and discussions. But at the same time, I think we must understand that we are at a very dangerous crossroads… a foreign policy miscalculation on the part of the United States could lead to the unthinkable: a nuclear war which could eventually lead to a third world war, and mistakes are often what determines the course of world history.

The Statements of President Trump not only confirm his misunderstanding as to the consequences of a nuclear attack using the so-called mini nukes, but also the fact that he doesn’t really have an understanding or commitment of any sort to human life, as I would say, because inevitably if this course of action were taken– and there are elements inside the Pentagon which are pushing for the so-called bloody nose solution– this would lead to tens of thousands of deaths in the first day of conflict.

Bear in mind that the Hiroshima bomb led to a hundred thousand deaths within the first 7 seconds. And we’re dealing with weaponry today which is exceedingly more sophisticated than in 1945.

GR: Professor Chossudovsky, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about… I mean, the president, Moon jae-in, he seems to be really championing this denuclearization, and he seems to be much more at odds with, you would think, the U.S. strategic aims, and of course he’s fully supportive of this north-south initiative.

Of course, that’s coming after this impeachment. He came into power after the previous president had extended the CFC that you mentioned, this combined forces command, till 2025 I think it was, and so we have this new, this different kind of leader.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about his personal popularity and the whether there’s any… the fact that he seems to be championing these sorts of initiatives of peace and North-South unity talks, if that is to his benefit or detriment as far as the public is concerned.

MC: He is an extremely careful diplomat. He has championed the issue of repeal of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, but at the same time, he’s having discussions with the north, and what is on the drawing board now is a summit to be held in Pyongyang at some future date – a meeting between the two leaders.

There are important implications going back and forth, and there is for the first time in several years, actual contact, and debate, and discussion, and concern. And also, I would say that the notion that there’s only one Korean Nation – that is something which is gaining impetus In the Republic of Korea. And because there’s only one Korean Nation, the issue of the combined forces command which puts South Korean Armed Forces under the command of the U.S. general – this is also a very important dimension. People realize that ultimately the Republic of Korea has to remain sovereign.

But I think that President Moon is a very smooth operator. He does not necessarily reveal everything. He is maintaining a dialogue with the United States, he is very much also taking into account that his government is divided: people in the military on the one hand and in intelligence… there’s a situation of conflict within the South Korean government, and he is attempting to reconcile conflicting allegiances, and the fact that the whole Korean decision-making apparatus is permeated with U.S. military advisors – so that is something to bear in mind.

GR: Now…sorry go ahead

MC: But the positive dimension is that diplomatic channels have been, in a sense, restored. There’s dialogue, and as I mentioned earlier, the United States has visibly shown the fact that they are against the north-south dialogue. They’re not supporting it, although Trump at the beginning said, “Yes, I support it” – they’re not supporting it, and in fact they’re now threatening South Korea with economic sanctions, including trade, and the irony is now they’re saying, well if you continue we’ll withdraw General Motors from South Korea.

The irony is that General Motors was never in South Korea. General Motors took over at Daewoo, which was the third largest automobile company in South Korea, based on the fraudulent takeover agreement back in the early 2000s, and which had been imposed following the Asian crisis by the international monetary bonders and the Wall Street creditors.

But again, some of these threats exerted particularly by Donald Trump border on ridicule. The South Koreans, in general, are very smart people. They don’t necessarily engage in strong rhetoric, but they debate and discuss, very often behind closed doors.

I should say, they are not, they don’t have the same awareness that we do as to the dangers of a global nuclear conflict. They don’t necessarily see the nuclear issue as something which could lead to open warfare affecting South Korea. And that has to do with the fact that this thing has been persistent over and over the years. For the last 67 years, North Korea has been threatened with a nuclear attack, there are war games every year, and the South Korean public does not take this issue as seriously as we do in seeing the escalation occurring, but none the less I think we are at a very dangerous Crossroads because there’s been…let’s say at the global level there has been a breakdown of diplomatic channels, particularly between Russia and the United States, and if we recall the circumstances of the Cuban Missile Crisis we can certainly say that this is a far more dangerous situation because at the time at least the leaders, both JFK as well as Nikita Khrushchev, were acutely aware of the dangers of a nuclear war.

And, I think, we are not in that kind of situation today the ideology is different, and somehow Donald Trump, well he’s very much misinformed, but he thinks that nuclear weapons are harmless to civilians, and okay there may be some collateral damage but they can be used. And I think that that breakdown in diplomacy between east-west, U.S. and Russia, has a bearing on the north-south relationship here in Korea.

GR: Professor Chossudovsky, I know in the past we’ve discussed that there are, that the United States has motives that really are not so much concerned about the nuclear capacity of North Korea so much as the fact that a united Korea would be a major economic and industrial power house, as well as the fact that it borders both Russia and China.

So my understanding then, is that there would be no unification without some strings, like we gotta maintain a U.S. force presence. Based on what you’re hearing from other people that you’ve been working with, and maybe anti-war human rights organizations in South Korea, is there any sense that a united Korea would allow for continued U.S. force presence, or would be looking at U.S. forces being evicted from the peninsula?

MC: Well certainly the United States, actually back in the year 2000 in the project for The New American Century, already intimated what would be a plan B. It would consist in actually stationing U.S. forces in North Korea. So the first objective is to hinder the process of unification, but if that is not possible, they would want for the United States to impose the terms of that reunification and station troops in North Korea. That won’t happen. That won’t happen.

I think the other dimension that you raised is the fact that, first of all, yes, a United Korean Nation would be a country of 80 million people with scientific, technological, economic, industrial, as well as military capabilities. And indeed, it would become, de facto, a regional power in Northeast Asia. That’s certainly understandable.

On the other hand, it should be noted that, in effect, North Korea is considered by the United States as a buffer state because the real target of U.S. global warfare is ultimately Russia and China. It’s not North Korea.

And what United States wants to do is to ensure its hegemony, its geopolitical hegemony, in Northeast Asia against China and Russia. I should mention that the position of China is somewhat ambiguous because China has sided with the U.S. in many regards despite their differences. I should also mention what’s very important is that the THAAD missiles which are stationed on the Korean Peninsula are ultimately intended for China, not for the DPRK.

And then, you have this process of militarization of the Korean Peninsula. Ultimately, it is part of a broader agenda of encirclement of the People’s Republic of China. The militarization of both the North and South China Sea, the militarization of the Korean peninsula, the stationing of U.S. facilities in different parts of Asia, and the militarization of the waterways. So that… and in fact, there’s a double agenda.

There’s an agenda directed against the Korean Nation on the one hand, but there’s also the broader agenda against the great powers which are targeted by the United States, namely, Russia and China, and I would say probably more at this juncture more Russia than China, in view of the fact that concurrently, there’s a process of militarization of Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, and the Balkans directed against the Russian Federation.

GR: Professor Chossudovsky, I’m thinking that Moon Jae-in’s initiatives, his resistance to the THAAD missiles and so on, I’m wondering if he is in some sense not unlike a Salvador Allende or a Hugo Chavez: an inconvenient leader that could be replaced by someone more congenial to U.S. concerns. In your time there, did you see any opposition, anybody in the opposition that might be situated to replace Mr. Moon Jae-in, or is there any effort to undermine him?

MC: I don’t think that he’s playing a role that is in any way comparable to Salvador Allende or Hugo Chavez. He is part of the main, well it’s now the government party. It’s a two party system like in the United States. You have the conservatives on the one hand, of which the outgoing president was impeached, and then you have the Democratic Party. He was the candidate of his party. And there’s a whole party apparatus behind him which in a sense, it retains a certain element of stability with regard to U.S.-Republic of Korea relations.

President Moon hasn’t freed the political prisoners which were imprisoned by the former president. He’s very cautious in his statements, and I think he’s a very astute diplomat and politician. He’s not a major progressive figure compared to Allende or Hugo Chavez. He’s not questioning the legitimacy. let’s say. of the Korean capitalist establishment the so-called chaebols, the conglomerates which are pro-american and still very much dominant as far as political influence is concerned.

GR: I was wondering if you could comment on the role of Japan in this whole situation, because I know that Japan has been very closely aligned with the United States and they’ve been as intense of their condemnation of the North Koreans as the U.S…. Shinzo Abe. How have you seen Japan’s involvement, their interference in this north-south initiative, if any?

MC: Well, Prime Minister Abe has played pretty much the same role as Mike Pence in terms of appearing at the opening ceremonies, and then ultimately refusing to shake hands with the North Korean officials, and Mike Pence and Abe have had one-on-one discussions.

I think there are several elements behind this. One is that Korea is a former Japanese colony, and they are expressing that sort of disdain for their former colony, and on the other hand, of course, the government of Prime Minister Abe is very firmly aligned with the United States with regard to defense and military engagements in the region, not to mention their own Joint Defense agreements, their military cooperation in Jeju Island, which is a South Korean Island just south of the peninsula.

I think that the Japanese government views the north-south inter-Korean dialogue as a threat to their own hegemonic role in North East Asia. The fact that Japan is a former Imperial power, but it’s still there exercising a role as a regional level and it is a firm ally of the United States. What is occurring is a geopolitical shift which in some regards is characterized by the possible reunification of the two Koreas but also an expanded role of China and Russia in the region.

If you look at the map, you essentially see four or five countries. Of course Japan, the Republic of Korea, the DPRK North Korea, China, and Russia, and the distances between these four or five powers, depending on how you count, is very limited, where, you know, you go from Seoul to North Korea it’s 50 something kilometers to the border. Vladivostok is about 100 km to the North Korean border. China has borders with North Korea and it’s virtually within 100 to 200 km from the South Korean peninsula.

So that’s the background. I think it’s a very tense situation. The reunification of Korea would not only weaken the United States and east Asia, it would also weaken Japan. There’s no question about that.

And then, we have to address the bilateral relationship between the United States and Japan, which is the former colonial power which is played a historical role in Korea, and bear in mind that all what is unfolding now is a whole series of military cooperation agreements, including in the European Union where the command structures, the national command structures are being put in the hands of the United States or NATO. There’s a big debate in Italy at this moment because the Italian government, in advance of the elections, has actually signed an agreement with NATO which puts the entire Italian forces under the command of NATO, which essentially means, under the command of the United States.

And so the situation I described with regard to South Korea’s links to the United States, and the fact that ROK forces are under U.S. command, it’s happening in other countries, and all the member states of NATO, in fact, most of them now, are virtually de-facto obeying orders which come from the Pentagon via NATO. That leads to a situation where the individual nation-states are not even in a position to veto a war which is led by the United States but uses the military forces of U.S. allies to do the dirty work, so to speak.

So it’s a very, very dangerous situation, and what is unfolding in North Korea could potentially lead to a third world war, although at this particular juncture I would think that if these tactical nuclear weapons were to be tested, they would be first tested in the Middle East in the context of U.S. threats directed against now both Lebanon and Iran, with of course, Israel playing a key role in that project.

GR: Well Professor Chossudovsky,  I want to thank you very much for your insights into the situation, and I look forward to speaking to you again when you get back to Canada. Thanks again for your analysis. I’ve been speaking with Professor Michel Chossudovsky, the award-winning author, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, and founder and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Note to our readers: This article is a satire.

“It is difficult not to write satire.”  Juvenal, Roman poet author of the collection of satirical poems known as the Satires.

As anyone even slightly aware knows, Americans are being inundated with endless Russian and Muslim propaganda aimed at convincing the American people that it is the United States that stands in the way of peace around the world.  Sophisticated and crude in turns, what the psychologists call passive aggressive, these efforts at mind-control can be seen all across the internet.

For years, The Washington Post, always somehow attuned to the latest intelligence, has been sounding the alarm about hundreds of Russian-linked websites aimed at gulling the American public into complacency.  These efforts are about far more than creating fake news, hacking emails, and manipulating our elections.  Everyone knows these have happened as overwhelming evidence has piled up and been repetitively reported by our finest media such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, etc. They have made it clear that our democracy is at stake from without, ably and seditiously supported from within.  We are under attack.

But the propaganda campaign aimed at Americans of good will has taken a far more sinister turn.  Giving speeches – ostensibly to their own people but really aimed at a U.S. audience – that sound sweet and reasonable is part of their game.  Americans should beware.

Recently we heard from Vladimir Putin, a statement surely meant to soften the resistance to Russian aggression among well-meaning but easily deluded liberal Americans.  You wouldn’t have heard such cultivated, smooth talk coming from communist leaders in the days of the U.S.S.R. with their blunt desk-thumping threats and ideological frontal assaults lacking in all reason.

Words such as these are meant to appeal to reason and melt the human heart:

Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland.

Today, should total war ever break out again – no matter how – our two countries will be the primary target. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. And even in the Cold War, which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this nation’s closest allies – our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other, and new weapons begetting counter-weapons.[i]

But as we all know, Putin has recently told us that Russia has enough nuclear weapons to repel any attack and to destroy the United States many times over.  The strategy: First sweet talk, then the hammer.  Convince us to renounce our weapons and decrease our defense spending, and then – you can guess.

And if there is any further doubt about the Muslim terrorists and their religious fanaticism that would murder women and children, rape and pillage in their maniacal quest for world domination, this religious extract (with excisions for brevity sake) from a so-called holy book should be enough to remind readers that we in the West are the bearers of a sacred responsibility to preserve civilization no matter what the cost against barbaric people who would religiously countenance what follows:

[So, at God’s command] they waged the campaign….put every male to death….took the women captive with their young children, and plundered all their cattle, all their flocks and all their goods.  They set fire to the towns where they lived and all their encampments.  Then, taking all their booty, all that they had captured, man and beast, they took the captives, spoil and booty [to their leader who said] ‘Why have you spared the life of all the women? …. So kill all the male children.  Kill also all the women who have slept with a man.  Spare the lives only of the young girls who have not slept with a man, and take them for yourselves.[ii]

Of course they don’t publicly announce such filth that is written in their scriptures, for to do so would undermine their rhetoric about only defending themselves from attack from outside enemies who are always deemed the aggressors.  For how could they justify such sick talk?

Unless we in the West don’t wake up soon, our enemies from Russia and the Muslim world will gull us asleep, and in our naïve innocence, all we hold sacred will be lost.  It is time to follow the lead of the CIA and their motto engraved on CIA Headquarters: “The Truth Shall Set You Free.”  Our liberty is at stake.

Wake up America!

Postscript: “It is difficult not to write satire.”  Juvenal*

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely.  He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/

Notes

[i] These are the words of President John F. Kennedy in his profound American University speech of June 10, 1963 in which he called for the end of the Cold War, the abolishment of nuclear weapons, and reconciliation with the Soviet Union.  It is a speech that led to his execution by the U.S. National Security State.  In that speech JFK said, “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet.  We all breathe the same air.  We all cherish our children’s future.  And we are all mortal.”  In his recent, enlightened speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin used a fine metaphor to say those who are provoking a nuclear war should “stop rocking the boat we are all in and which is called the earth.”

 [ii] The holy book here referenced is the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Numbers 31, where Moses, following Yahweh’s command, instructs the Jews to finish their military operation against the Midianites and kill all the boys and women and take the girls as their reward.

The same people, Republicans and Democrats, who lied through their teeth for an invasion of Iraq in 2003, are doing it again for an invasion of Russia, sometime soon, so as to ‘defend’ ‘democracy’. The U.S. has by now swallowed up virtually all lands surrounding Russia, at least in Europe, the latest being Ukraine, and is placing its missiles now on and near Russia’s borders, which is to Russians like would be to Americans if Russia had swallowed up Canada and were placing its missiles there. But the lying holier-than-thou U.S. Establishment accuses Russia of being ‘aggressive’ when Russia holds war-games on and near its borders in order to prepare for a U.S.-NATO invasion, which actually looks increasingly likely to them every day — and not because of ‘Russian propaganda’, but because of the U.S. Government’s actions. 

Hillary Clinton clearly hated Russians and wanted to start a war against Russia by establishing a no-fly zone in Russia’s ally Syria (which Russia defends while the U.S. invades and occupies Syria) so as to shoot down Russia’s planes there, and then, when Russia shoots down U.S. planes in retaliation, America would have its pretext for invading Russia itself ‘so as to defend democracy against Russian aggression’ — but instead, Donald Trump became elected, and he has now turned out to be almost as much of a neoconservative as she was. This displays how extreme the grip is that the neocons, the Establishment and its many minions who dominate both of the two Parties and the press, now have.

An example of the Establishment’s holier-than-thou lies, is an article that appeared on February 22nd at the magazine, The National Interest, whose article-title is itself a marvelous deception, “Averting the U.S.-Russia Warpath” (while the subliminal message there is: reasons why we’ll probably have to invade Russia), and whose authors are three ‘defense’ hawks, including James Northey Miller, of Harvard. He had been an Under Secretary of Defense during the Administration of the merely moderately neoconservative President Barack Obama — the President who in 2014 grabbed Ukraine, and who used Al Qaeda in Syria to lead ’the rebels’ there in order to try to grab Syria. (Ukraine had been friendly toward Russia and is now rabid against Russia; and Syria was and is allied with Russia; so, both of these two lands were American grabs, and the neocon Trump continues both.) Anyone who trusts the U.S. Government to represent in international affairs the interests of America’s public, instead of the interests of America’s billionaires, has been deceived by the Establishment’s (the billionaires’ and their agents’) virtually all-pervasive propaganda in America, and therefore needs a lot of re-learning about U.S. history before understanding anything about U.S. foreign policies. There is very good and sound reason why around the world the United States is considered, by far, to be “the biggest threat to peace” — because it is. (The Peter Kuznick book and Oliver Stone documentary Untold History of the United States, are the best cleaner-away of ‘historical’ lies about U.S. history from 1912 to 2012 that I know of — and the seeing or reading of that, will expose to anyone the mockery of historical truth which is represented in articles such as “Averting the U.S.-Russia Warpath.”)

This ordinary, and profoundly deceptive, article starts:

FOR NEARLY twenty years following the end of the Cold War, military confrontation between the United States and the Russian Federation seemed implausible. Even during periods of tension, as during the Kosovo crisis in the late 1990s, few believed that disagreement between Washington and Moscow could lead to a serious crisis, no less war. Before the first decade of the new century had passed, however, Russian officials were accusing the United States of working to isolate Russia. Such apprehensions have mounted steadily in Russia in the years since. At the same time, Russian behavior, including interventions in Ukraine and Syria, military posturing and harassment in Europe, and interference in Western elections, has led many in the United States to conclude that, while a U.S.-Russian conflict is by no means inevitable, the risk of such a confrontation is growing.

The “Russian officials were accusing the United States,” while there was supposedly actual “Russian behavior, including interventions in Ukraine and Syria, military posturing and harassment in Europe, and interference in Western elections,” which pretexts the Establishment is now debating with itself whether that will be sufficient to ‘justify’ an American and NATO invasion, as response. This holier-than-thou and upside-down presumption, of Russian-government guilt and American-government innocence, is reeking throughout that pompous article; but what’s even worse is that the reality is exactly the opposite of the story-line that’s portrayed in it. The actual reality is: Ever since 24 February 1990, the U.S. and its NATO allies have been pursuing secretly a continuation of the Cold War after the termination in 1991 of the Soviet Union, and of its communism, and of its counter-NATO military alliance, the Warsaw Pact; and the U.S. plan has been to swallow up, first the former Warsaw Pact nations, and then the former nations (such as Ukraine itself) that were inside the Soviet Union itself, and then, any other foreign allies that Russia might still have (such as Syria); and, then, finally, to invade and conquer Russia itself. And, instead of helping those countries, the U.S. Government has been destroying them.

The ‘news’media lie about Ukraine, they lie about Syria, they lie about Crimea, and they lie about the entire historical background. America’s ‘news’media are basically stenographers for the lies by the regime.

Neoconservative, holier-than-thou, lying is so widespread in America’s ‘news’media, there’s practically nothing else than such deceptions about Russia, that’s “Fit to Print” (or broadcast) in today’s United States, and this is true in the media of both Parties, not merely the Republican media, or the Democratic media. This neoconservative consensus — the bipartisan ceaseless warmongering — is driven by the military-industrial complex (MIC) profiteers, whose companies’ main market is the American and allied governments (so that in order to increase their sales, more and costlier weapons must be purchased by those governments). It’s the MIC-sick current style of capitalism: capitalism that’s of, by, and for, the billionaires: a fascism that’s merely called ‘democracy’. (By contrast, one area of commerce that Russia refused to privatize was its weapons-manufacturers — there aren’t any stockholders who pay politicians to increase the ‘defense’ budget: instead, the Government itself is in control over that.)

America’s billionaires, and their many agents, are giving hypocrisy a bad name.

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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

While the bibliophile and aphorist Samuel Johnson claimed that people of appropriate mental discipline could avoid talking about the weather, the British have found weather an irresistible topic of conversation.  Storms are recalled with  nostalgic exaggeration; accounts are rendered colourful after the fact. 

The Beast from the East, as this latest cold freeze has been termed, stands as a form of climactic terror, storming its way through life without care or favour. Even the language is laden with suggestiveness, a Siberian nightmare forcing its way into the lives of Europeans with refrigerating potential.  Ominously, it has been working in tandem with a storm innocuously named Emma.

Such is the mythological fear of unruly weather, intemperate and beyond placation.  Omens are sought, fear noted.  The Great Storm of 1703, as it was termed, led Queen Anne to call it

“a Calamity so Dreadful and Astonishing, that the like hath not been Seen or Felt, in the Memory of any Person Living in this Our Kingdom.”

Some 6,000 sailors lost their lives, a costly toll given British participation in the Spanish War of Succession.  It also inspired novelist Daniel Defoe to compile The Storm the following year, a work considered a work of masterful journalistic assemblage.

Meteorologists in the UK have released their predictions suggesting that the freeze of March 2018 is the worst since 1962.  Schools across the country have been closed – 330 in Kent alone.  Irritation at having idle children at home has been expressed, a point similarly made last December when closures affected 2,300 schools across the country.  “We’re breeding,” exclaimed one Howard Webster in The Daily Mail with eugenic fury, “a generation of wimps governed by a generation scared shitless by health and safety regulation.”

The snow fall has also had a freezing delay on transport services.  Serious cases of gridlock on the M80, seeing the stranding of hundreds of drivers between the cities of Glasgow and Sterling, have been registered.

The army has been deployed to supply various services, including the transport of 200 NHS clinical and support staff.  This, in a statement released on March 2, would “enable staff to change over their shifts while the amber weather warning remains for most of Scotland until 10am tomorrow.”

Weather and environmental disruptions have an unmasking effect.  They induce patriotic insensibilities on climate and condition.  With a degree of derision, various public responses from countries more accustomed to dealing with heavy snow have done the rounds.  Canada and the Scandinavian countries have been heavily represented in that regard.

 “I knew it was snowing in the UK,” came a caustic Becca McDonald, “but didn’t know it was so full of Snowflakes.”

Such weather disturbances also expose the reprehensible limits of government policy, laying bare chronic inequalities and shoddy administrative decisions.  For Eve Livingstone, while a certain

“lack of readiness can probably best be explained by a combination of factors, the hard truth is that almost all of these are ultimately ideological.”

Austerity, budget depletions and slashings normalised by Tory governments, have all done their bit to cripple what might have been better managed efforts to combat extreme weather.  The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the body charged with the associated tasks of combating such phenomena, has been a sitting target for the razor gangs.  In 2016, its staff received the ominous news that funding would be cut by 15 percent over four years.  This gutting effort came on top of the previous year’s raiding, which saw a quarter of its budget cut.

As Parliament’s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee stated,

“The challenges facing Defra are, first, whether the reduced budget available to it is sufficient for its task, and second how to make the correct policy choices so as to allocate smaller funds effectively.”

The National Grid also found itself in a pessimistic mood, warning that gas supply might be disrupted in responding to the cold.  The deficit warning, the first in eight years, was subsequently withdrawn, though it did encourage Ken Cronin, chief executive officer of UK Onshore Oil and Gas to claim that Britain was “worryingly dependent on gas imports”, one set to  “increase to 80 percent by 2035.”

The social response to such weather patterns is also a mirror of ritual and practices.  Heavy snow and freezing conditions did their bit to bring out the parlous state of employment in various parts of the country.  Conditions where zero-hour contracts prevail necessitate a braving of conditions when, in other jobs, employees might be able to work from home.

This has prompted movements to take hold with a certain moral bite, such as the Better than Zero campaign in Scotland.  That particular outfit has attempted to enlist employers to resist punitive action against employees who prefer safety over a dash to the workplace.

“No one,” goes one post to the organisation’s Facebook profile, “should be penalised or disciplined for following the advice not to travel to work for their own safety.”

Scotland’s Transport Minister, Humza Yousaf, has spent time discouraging and even scolding such actions.

“Frankly I’d be extremely disappointed if employers chose to dock wages for somebody because they couldn’t travel during the red weather warning.”

As with any such collective response, variations abound.  British media have been scouring for the tinsel moments, the necessary distractions that lessen the seriousness of the event. But the entertainment remains fluff to the gloom unleased by the Beast from the East, working in league with Storm Emma.  A depleted, and freezing Britannia, awaits the thaw.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: [email protected]

Jeffrey Sterling, the case officer for the CIA’s covert “Operation Merlin,” who was convicted in May 2015 for allegedly revealing details of that operation to James Risen of the New York Times, was released from prison in January after serving more than two years of a 42-month sentence. He had been tried and convicted on the premise that the revelation of the operation had harmed U.S. security.

The entire case against him assumed a solid intelligence case that Iran had indeed been working on a nuclear weapon that justified that covert operation.

But the accumulate evidence shows that the intelligence not only did not support the need for Operation Merlin, but that the existence of the CIA’s planned covert operation itself had a profound distorting impact on intelligence assessment of the issue. The very first U.S. national intelligence estimate on the subject in 2001 that Iran had a nuclear weapons program was the result of a heavy-handed intervention by Deputy Director for Operations James L. Pavitt that was arguably more serious than the efforts by Vice-President Dick Cheney to influence the CIA’s 2002 estimate on WMD in Iraq.

The full story the interaction between the CIA operation and intelligence analysis, shows, moreover, that Pavitt had previously fabricated an alarmist intelligence analysis for the Clinton White House on Iran’s nuclear program in late 1999 in order to get Clinton’s approval for Operation Merlin.

Pavitt Plans Operation Merlin

The story of Operation Merlin and the suppression of crucial intelligence on Iran’s nuclear intentions cannot be understood apart from the close friendship between T Pavitt and CIA Director George Tenet. Pavitt’s rise in the Operations Directorate had been so closely linked to his friendship with Tenet that the day after Tenet announced his retirement from the CIA on June 3, 2004, Pavitt announced his own retirement.

Soon after he was assigned to the CIA’s Non-Proliferation Center (NPC) in 1993 Pavitt got the idea of creating a new component within the Directorate of Operations to work solely on proliferation, as former CIA officials recounted for Valerie Plame Wilson’s memoir, Fair Game.  Pavitt proposed that the new proliferation division would have the authority not only to collect intelligence but also to carry out covert operations related to proliferation, using its own clandestine case officers working under non-official cover.

Image on the right is Jeffrey Sterling 

Immediately after Tenet was named Deputy Director of the CIA in 1995, Pavitt got the new organization within the operations directorate called the Counter-Proliferation Division, or CPD. Pavitt immediately began the planning for a major operation targeting Iran. According to a CIA cable declassified for the Sterling trial, as early as March 1996 CPD’s “Office of Special Projects” had already devised a scheme to convey to the Iranians a copy of the Russian TBA-486 “fireset” – a system for multiple simultaneous high explosive detonations to set off a nuclear explosion.  The trick was that it had built-in flaws that would make it unworkable.

A January 1997 declassified cable described a plan for using a Russian émigré’ former Soviet nuclear weapons engineer recruited in 1996 to gain “operational access” to an Iranian “target.”  The cable suggested that it would be for the purpose of intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program, in the light of the fact that the agency had not issued a finding that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.

But in mid-March 1997 the language used by CPD to describe its proposed covert operation suddenly changed.  Another declassified CPD cable from May 1997 said the ultimate goal was “to plant this substantial piece of deception information on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”  That shift in language apparently reflected Tenet’s realization that the CIA would need justify the proposed covert operation to the White House, as required by legislation.

With his ambitious plan for a covert operation against Iran in his pocket, Pavitt was promoted to Associate Deputy Director of Operations in July 1997.  On February 2, 1998, CPD announced to other CIA offices, according to the declassified cable, to announce that a technical team from one of the national laboratories had finished building the detonation device that would include “multiple nested flaws,” including a “final fatal flaw” ensuring “that it will not detonate a nuclear weapon.”

An official statement from the national lab certifying that fact was a legal requirement for the CIA to obtain the official Presidential “finding” for any covert operation required by legislation passed in the wake of the Iran-Contra affair.

Pavitt obtained the letter from the national laboratory in mid-1999 a few weeks after it was announced he would be named Deputy Director of the CIA for Operations.

But that left a final political obstacle to a presidential finding: the official position of the CIA’ s Intelligence Directorate remained that Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program.  The language of the CIA’s report to Congress for the first half of 1999, which was delivered to Congress in early 2000, contained formulations that showed signs of having been negotiated between those who believed Iran just have a nuclear weapons program and those who did not.

The report referred to nuclear-related projects that “will help Iran augment its nuclear technology infrastructure, which in turn would be useful in supporting nuclear weapons research and development.” The shift from “will” to “would” clearly suggested that nuclear weapons work was not yet an established fact.

A second sentence said,

“expertise and technology gained, along with the commercial channels and contacts established-even from cooperation that appears strictly civilian in nature-could be used to advance Iran’s nuclear weapons research and developmental program.”

That seemed to hint that maybe Iran already had such a nuclear weapons program.

That was not sufficient for Tenet and Pavitt to justify a covert nuclear weapons program involving handing over a fake nuclear detonation device.  So the dynamic duo came up with another way around that obstacle. A new intelligence assessment, reported in a front page article by James Risen and Judith Miller in the New York Times on January 17, 2000, said the CIA could no longer rule out the possibility that Iran now had the capability to build a bomb – or even that it may have actually succeeded in building one.

Risen and Miller reported that Tenet had begun briefings for Clinton administration officials on the new CIA assessment in December 1999 shortly after the document was completed, citing “several U.S. officials” familiar with it.  The Tenet briefings made no mention of any evidence of a bomb-making program, according to the sources cited by the Times.  It was based instead on the alleged inability of U.S. intelligence to track adequately Iran’s acquisition of nuclear technology and materials from the black market.

But the new assessment had evidently not come from the Intelligence Directorate. John McLaughlin, then Deputy Director for Intelligence, said in e-mail response to a query that he did not recall the assessment.  And when this writer asked him whether it was possible that he would not remember or would not have known about an intelligence assessment on such a high profile issue, McLaughlin did not respond. Pavitt and Tenet had obviously gone outside the normal procedure for an intelligence assessment in order to get around the problem of lack of support for their thesis from the analysts.

A declassified CIA cable dated November 18, 1999 instructed the Russian émigré to prepare for a possible trip to Vienna in early 2000, indicating that Tenet hoped to get the finding within a few weeks. Clinton apparently did give the necessary finding in early 2000; in the first days of March 2000 the Russian émigré dropped the falsified fireset plans into the mail chute of the Iranian mission to the United Nations in Vienna.

Pavitt Suppresses Unwelcome Iran Nuclear Intelligence

Pavitt’s CPD was also managing a group of covert operatives who recruited spies to provide information on weapons of mass destruction in Iran and Iraq.  CPD not only controlled the targeting of the operatives working on those accounts but the distribution of their reports.  CPD’s dual role thus represented a serious conflict of interest, because the CPD had a vested interest in an intelligence estimate that showed Iran had an active nuclear weapons program, and it could prevent intelligence analysts from getting information that conflicted with that interest.

That is exactly what happened in 2001. One especially valuable CPD operative, who was fluent in both Farsi and Arabic, had begun recruiting agents to provide intelligence on both Iran and Iraq since 1995. His talents had been recognized by the CPD and by higher levels of the Operations Directorate:  by 2001 he had been promised an intelligence medal and a promotion to GS14 – the second highest grade level in the civil service.

But that same year the operative reported very important intelligence on the Iran nuclear issue that would have caused serious problems for Pavitt and CPD and led ultimately to his being taken out of the field and being fired.

In a November 2005 court filing in a lawsuit against Pavitt, the unnamed head of CPD and then CIA Director Porter Goss, the operative, identified only as “Doe” in court records, said that one of his most highly valued “human assets” – the CIA term for recruited spies – had given him very important intelligence in 2001. That information was the subject of three crucial lines of the key paragraph in the operative’s complaint that were redacted at the demand of the CIA. For years “Doe” sought to declassify the language of that had been redacted, but the CIA had fought it.

It was assumed in press accounts at the time that the redacted lines were related to Iraq.  But the lawyer who handled the lawsuit for “Doe,” Roy Krieger, revealed to this writer in interviews that the redacted lines revealed that the CIA “human asset” in question was an Iranian, and that he had told “Doe” that the Iranian government had no intention of “weaponizing” the uranium that it was planning to enrich.

It was the first intelligence from a “highly-valued” U.S. spy – one who was known to be in a position to know he claimed to know – on Iran’s intentions regarding nuclear weapons to become available to the U.S. intelligence community. “Doe” reported what the spy had said to his supervisor at CPD, according to the court filing, and the supervisor immediately met with Pavitt and the head of CPD. After that meeting the CPD supervisor ordered “Doe” not to prepare any written report on the matter and assured him that Pavitt and the head of the CPD would personally brief President Bush on the intelligence.

But “Doe” soon learned from his own contacts at CIA headquarters that no such briefing ever took place. And “Doe” was soon instructed to terminate his relationship with the asset.  After another incident involving intelligence he had reported on WMD in Iraq that had also conflicted with the line desired by the Bush administration, CIA management took “Doe” out of the field, put him in a headquarters job and denied him the intelligence medal and promotion to GS-14 that he had been promised, according to his court filing. The CIA fired “Doe” without specifying a reason in 2005.

Pavitt did not respond to requests for an interview for this story both at the Scowcroft Group and, after he retired, at his home in McLean, Virginia.

The intervention by Pavitt to prevent the intelligence from Doe’s Iranian asset from circulating within the U.S. government came as the intelligence community was working on the 2001 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear program. That NIE concluded that Iran was working on a nuclear weapon, but the finding was far from being clear-cut. Paul Pillar, the CIA’s National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and North Africa, who was involved in the 2001 NIE, recalled that the intelligence community had no direct evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. “We’re talking about things that are a matter of inference, not direct evidence,” Pillar said in an interview with this writer.

Furthermore he recalls that there was a deep divide in the intelligence community between the technical analysts, who tended to believe that evidence of uranium enrichment was evidence of a weapons program, and the Iran specialists, including Pillar himself, who believed Iran had adopted a “hedging strategy” and had made no decision in favor or a nuclear weapon. The technical analysts at the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control (WINPAC), were given the advantage of writing the first draft not only on Iranian technical capabilities but on Iranian intentions – a subject on which it had no real expertise – as well, according to Pillar.

The introduction of the intelligence from a highly credible Iranian intelligence asset indicating no intention to convert its enriched uranium into nuclear weapons would arguably have changed the dynamic of the estimate dramatically.  It would have meant that one side could cite hard intelligence from a valued source in support of its position, while the other side could cite only their own predisposition.

Pillar confirmed that no such intelligence report was made available to the analysts for the 2001 NIE. He noted just how rarely the kind of intelligence that had been obtained by “Doe” was available for an intelligence estimate.

“Analysts deal with a range of stuff,” he said, “from a tidbit from technical intelligence to the goldmine well-placed source with an absolutely credible account,“ but the latter kind of intelligence “almost never comes up.”

After reading this account of the intelligence obtained by the CPD operative, Pillar said he is not in a position to judge the value of the intelligence from the Iranian asset, but that the information from the CPD Iranian asset “should have been considered by the NIE team in conjunction with other sources of information.”

That lead to a series of estimates that assumed Iran had a nuclear weapons program.

In 2004, a large cache of purported Iranian documents showing alleged Iranian research related to nuclear weapons was turned over to German intelligence, which the Bush administration claimed came from the laptop of an Iranian scientist or engineer. But former senior German Foreign Official Karsten Voigt later revealed to this writer that the whole story was a fabrication, because the documents had been given those documents by the Mujahedin-E Khalq, the Iranian opposition group that was known to have publicized anti-Iran information fed to it by Israel’s Mossad.

Those documents led directly to another CIA estimate in 2005 asserting the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, which in turn paved the way for all the subsequent estimates – all of which were adopted despite the absence of new evidence of such a program.  The CIA swallowed the ruse repeatedly, because it had already been manipulated by Pavitt.

Operation Merlin is the perfect example of powerful bureaucratic interests running amok and creating the intelligence necessary to justify their operations. The net result is that Jeffrey Sterling was unjustly imprisoned and that the United States has gone down a path of Iran policy that poses serious – and unnecessary – threats to American security.

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Gareth Porter is an independent journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of numerous books, including Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Just World Books, 2014). 

Of the many stories written about Hurricane Katrina in autumn 2005, and its devastating consequences, one crucial element is virtually overlooked. During the all-important hours after the tropical cyclone laid waste to sections of south-eastern United States, the Bush administration ignored the aid of its Cuban neighbor.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro offered to ship over 1,600 doctors and dozens of tons of medical supplies to the US’s affected areas. Considering the decades-long terrorist attacks perpetrated against Cuba by US governments, in addition to a crippling embargo, it was a noble gesture by the Castro government.

A gesture largely erased from the record too – it wouldn’t do for the powers-that-be to raise Cuba’s profile while questioning the leader of the free world. Castro’s remarkable offer was not altogether surprising if one looks at the record.

Scant coverage is given to the fact that since the early 1960s Castro sent thousands of Cuban doctors to some of the earth’s most neglected areas – from Pakistan to Ethiopia to Guatemala. By 2007, Cuba had shipped more medical personnel to the developing world than the US, Canada, Britain, Germany and France combined. That tells something about the global priorities of the Western powers.

After the 2005 Kashmir earthquake that mostly affected Pakistan, killing tens of thousands of people, Cuba sent over 2,400 doctors and medical staff to the region. This horrific natural disaster occurred just six weeks after Hurricane Katrina, incidentally. Following the Kashmir earthquake Cuban medical personnel treated over a million people in the damaged areas, conducting hundreds of life-saving operations.

Pakistan’s Major-General Abdul Qadir Usmani, overseeing the medical situation in the region, said

“the Cuban doctors have won the hearts of the Pakistani nation… We have no words to describe your services for the earthquake victims, but we will remember it for a long time to come”.

Unsurprisingly, such humanitarianism has led to close Pakistani-Cuban relations. In 2016, with Cuba enduring its worst drought in over a century, Pakistan shipped 15,000 tons of rice to Cuba. Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said of the crucial lifeline,

“We recognize Cuba as a proven friend that has stayed by our side in tough times”,

and reflecting on Cuba’s assistance during the earthquake, Sharif continued,

“that example of sincerity, care and friendship towards Pakistan has few parallels in modern history”.

Screengrab from teleSUR website

Surely Cuba’s vital aid to Pakistan (and others) in its hour of need did not go unnoticed by US President George W. Bush. However, it had already been deemed more important by his administration to preserve the superpower’s prestige rather than protect its own citizens. Over 1,800 Americans died from the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, with New Orleans suffering widespread devastation, but many would surely have been saved with Cuban assistance.

Cuba has one of the finest health care systems in the world, with the lowest infant mortality rate in the Western hemisphere. The average Cuban life expectancy is 79 years, one of the highest in the region and greater than that of the US, the most powerful nation on earth.

In the affected areas in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the greatest problem was a lack of medical needs – “only a small portion of those seeking medical assistance were receiving care due to a shortage of medical personnel and supplies”. The world’s richest country did not have enough doctors when it mattered most.

Later, a bemused Castro responded to the rejection of his offer by saying that,

“the American government’s pride dictated that their own citizens had to die on the roofs of their houses, or on the roofs of hospitals from which no-one evacuated them, or in stadiums, or in nursing homes where some of them were given euthanasia in order to prevent a horrible death by drowning. That’s the country that portrays itself as ‘a defender of human rights’.”

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by President Bush’s rejection of badly needed foreign assistance, especially when examining his own record on human rights – not just in far-flung places like Afghanistan and Iraq, but within the borders of the US.

At the end of Bush’s second term, the number of poor in the US increased by 8.2 million people, much of this decline in living standards occurring before the 2008 economic meltdown. The number of children living in poverty rose by over 20% during the Bush years (to 14.1 million), while the total of medically uninsured Americans stood at 46.3 million people, again a more than 20% rise. The list goes on.

Hurricane Katrina was a signal to everyone in the US that climate change was an issue no longer to be ignored. Still, the Bush administration didn’t lift a finger to tackle one of the great problems of our time – the US, along with China, is the main contributor to rising carbon emissions.

In fact Bush and company made efforts to, “manipulate the work of federal climate scientists and exercise strict control over which scientists are allowed to talk to the media, and which scientific results are communicated to the public”.

In August 2017, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey was another reminder to Americans of the frightening effects of climate change. This follows on from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which inflicted enormous damage on Cuba and much of North America – and was by diameter the largest Atlantic hurricane on record.

Harvey, meanwhile, was the strongest storm to hit Texas in over half a century, killing dozens of people – a year’s worth of rain fell in just a few days over the vulnerable city of Houston, breaking previous rainfall records. Texas Governor Greg Abbott estimated the damage at up to $180 billion, far more costly than the infrastructural outlay following either Hurricane Katrina or Sandy.

The US’s inertia in curbing climate change is being greatly felt. Yet the Republican Party continues to do nothing – rather, they want to further aggravate the problem by increasing the burning of fossil fuels like coal. As the US is the world’s second largest contributor to greenhouse emissions, these policies are having serious implications for the rest of the planet.

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

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

In December, 2002, President George W. Bush proclaimed that the US would unilaterally pull out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that had curtailed the development of nuclear missiles and anti-missile systems to defeat them.

The arrogant, dim-witted Bush believed that US space technology was advancing so rapidly that it would neutralize Russia’s force of ICBM missiles.  Bush was just a puppet.  The real power behind him was Vice President Dick Cheney, the leading neocon who sneered at Russia, dismissed it as a mere ‘gas-station,’ and was determined to see the US achieve global dominance.

In Cheney’s view, the ABM Treaty was holding the US back from this goal.  Bankrupt Moscow would never be able to stand up to the mighty USA.  Moscow warned that reneging on the ABM Treaty would re-ignite a ruinous arms race.  A then little known politician, Vladimir Putin, vowed that Russia would never bend its knee to the US nuclear colossus.

This week, President Putin stunned the world by revealing a new arsenal of nuclear-armed weapons that have stolen a march on Washington and left the warlike President Donald Trump looking foolish.

Russia’s new arms include the RS-28 heavy ICBM, called ‘Satan 2’ by NATO.  This big brute of a liquid fueled missile can carry up to ten nuclear warheads over 10,000 km (6,000 miles).  What makes it very different from other ICBM’s is its ability (Russia claims) to carry nuclear-armed hypersonic vehicles through low earth orbit that can attack North America from multiple directions unseen by the radars of anti-missile systems.

President Putin also revealed a new nuclear-armed cruise missile propelled by a miniature nuclear engine that can stay aloft for very long periods and fly over Latin America and the South Pole to attack North America from the south.  The US has been trying to develop such a nuclear engine since the late 1950’s, but with no success.  During the corrupt Yeltsin era, the Kremlin accepted huge amounts of cash bribes to sell a miniaturized reactor to the Americans designed to power ocean surveillance satellites.

This miniature reactor will also power Russia’s new unmanned submarine which can carry a very large nuclear explosive – even up to 25 megatons – to the North American coasts or US aircraft carrier groups.

Putin also unveiled a new hypersonic glider deployed from space (the US and China have been working on one, so far unsuccessfully), and an aircraft launched Mach-10 missile called ‘Kinzhal’ after the deadly dagger carried by Caucasian mountaineers.  And, on top of this, a combat laser system that is being deployed.  The US has been working on one since the Vietnam War.

All this is a bombshell.  Maybe Putin was boasting and exaggerating, but he usually tells the truth, unlike our politicians, and rarely embellishes.   As he said in his speech, ‘nobody wanted to listen to us,’ referring to Moscow’s failed attempted to restore a strategic arms agreement, cut nuclear forces and lower tensions with the West. ‘Now,’ said Putin, ‘you listen.’

But will Washington listen? Trump has just announced a huge modernization of America’s nuclear forces and a big increase in the military budget from $634 billion to $716 billion, with an additional $69 billion to fund ‘foreign wars.’   The real US military budget is close to $1 trillion (that’s 1,000 billion), not including the US intelligence budget which is larger that of Russia’s entire annual defense budget, a meager $42.3 billion.

Washington’s war party has convinced itself that Russia can be intimidated and once again spent into the ground.  But Vladimir Putin is too smart and deft to allow this to happen.  He has neatly trumped Trump’s arms buildup and shown up Trump’s empty bullying.  So, for that matter, has North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.

One hopes Washington’s deep government that has been promoting a run-up to war with Russia in the Mideast, Ukraine, Baltic and Black Sea will be sufficiently sobered by Putin’s show this week.  They should be.  The multiple warheads on one new RS-28 missile could destroy Texas or France.  Russia’s new missiles and space gliders can outflank America’s anti-missile radars in Alaska and Romania, rendering them as useless as France’s Maginot Line.

War must never ever be allowed to occur with Russia and China and the United States.  Will we risk the life of the planet over a stupid quarrel over some one-tractor town in Ukraine or a Syrian village no one has ever heard of?  Yes, if the neocons have their way.

*

This article was originally published on Eric Margolis.

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

Relevant article selected from the GR archive, first published on GR in April 2017.

People speak of Afghanistan as “our generation’s” Vietnam, a quagmire, a war that goes on simply because it has been going on.

The Afghan war is dragging into being our generation’s, and soon the next generation’s Vietnam as well, over a decade and a half old. There are troops deploying now that were two years old when the conflict started. There are fathers and sons deploying together. Bin Laden’s been dead for years.

With a slight break, the current war in Iraq has been ongoing for some 14 years. If you want to think of it in a longer view, Trump is now the fifth consecutive president to make war on that country. Saddam’s been dead for years.

And though of more recent vintage, the war in Syria appears both open-ended in duration and ramping up in U.S. involvement. If Assad died tomorrow, the war would likely only intensify, as the multiple parties in the fight vie to take over after him.

The reason we’re fighting all of these places and more can’t still be “terrorism,” can it? That has sort of been the reason for the past 16 years so you’d think we would have settled that. Regime change? A lot of that has also happened, without much end game, and nobody seems to know if that does or ever did apply in Syria to begin with. America can’t be under threat after all these years, right? I mean, world’s most powerful military and all that.

So maybe it’s time for the current president to tell us why we’re still fighting in all of these wars. Because previous presidents’ track records on explaining to the ever-bloodthirsty American public why we are fighting is poor. Perhaps history has a lesson for us?

• When I was a kid, successive presidents told us we had to fight in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, because if we didn’t fight them over there, we’d have to fight them on the beaches of California. We believed. It was a lie.
• I was a teenager during the Cold War, several presidents told us we needed to create massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons, garrison the world, maybe invade Cuba, fight covert wars and use the CIA to overthrow democratically elected governments and replace them with dictators, or the Russians would destroy us. We believed. It was a lie.
• When I was in college our president told us that we needed to fight in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua or the Sandinistas would come to the United States. He told us Managua was closer to Washington DC than LA was. He told us we needed to fight in Lebanon, Grenada and Libya to protect ourselves. We believed. It was a lie.
• When I was a little older our president told us how evil Saddam Hussein was, how his soldiers bayoneted babies in Kuwait. He told us Saddam was a threat to America. He told us we needed to invade Panama to oust a dictator to protect America. We believed. It was a lie.
• Another president told us we had to fight terrorists in Somalia, as well as bomb Iraq, to protect ourselves. We believed. It was a lie.
• The one after him told us that because a bunch of Saudis from a group loosely tied to Afghanistan attacked us on 9/11, we needed to occupy that country and destroy the Taliban, who had not attacked us. The Taliban are still there 15 years later, ISIS now too, and so is the American military. We believed. It was a lie.
• After that the same President told us Saddam Hussein threatened every one of our children with weapons of mass destruction, that the smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud, that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda. We believed. It was a lie.
• In 2011 the president and his secretary of state told us we needed regime change in Libya, to protect us from an evil dictator. We believed. It was a lie.
• In August 2014 the same president told us we needed to intervene again in Iraq, on a humanitarian mission to save the Yazidis. No boots on the ground, a simple, limited act only the United States could conduct, and then we’d leave. We believed. It was a lie.
• That same president later told us Americans will need to fight and die in Syria. He says this is necessary to protect us, because if we do not defeat Islamic State over there, they will come here, to what we now call without shame or irony The Homeland. We believed. It was a lie.

So with a new guy in the White House, maybe it’s time to renew the question. Perhaps the media can take a day off from what borders on sexual pleasure gushing over the latest super bomb and ask the president a few simple questions: why are we fighting, what is the goal, when will we get there? Someone should have asked a long time ago, but since no one did, this is as good a time as any.

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. Reprinted from the his blog with permission.

Relevant article selected from the GR archive, first published on GR in December 2015.

“Butcher”; “thug”; “dictator”; “murderer”; “savage”; “tyrant”; “oppressor”; “despot”. These are just some of the words that many in the Western world associate with the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, after six years of incessant and hypnotic war propaganda. Democratically elected leader of a sovereign country however, is not a narrative the propagandists want to be circulated.

The 2014 election in Syria is an event that the ‘Ministry of Truth’ in the West desperately wants to be memory-holed, as it runs in stark contrast to the narrative they are still trying to inculcate in the minds of the public.

In June 2014, Assad won Syria’s Presidential election with 88.7 percent of the vote, in the country’s first multi-candidate election in almost five decades. In a country which had a population of 17,064,854 in July 2014 (according to an estimate from CIA World Factbook), over 10 million people voted for Assad. 73.42 percent of the Syrian population voted in the election, with voting only taking place in government controlled areas.

A group of international observers emphasized that the election was a valid and democratic expression of the views of the Syrian people. Predictably, Western nations denounced the election as a sham and a fraud, with US Secretary of State, John Kerry, calling the election a farce a few months prior to the vote.

Despite the efforts of the Western establishment to delegitimize the election, it is obvious that Assad has popular support in Syria. The Western narrative – which claims that Assad is an insane dictator who butchers his own people – is illogical, as if this was true, Assad would have been ousted years ago. 

How can a man stay in power for so long if the majority of the Syrian population is fervently against his rule? Considering the fact that the entire Western world has been obsessively trying to overthrow him for years, in addition to many governments in the Middle East – the Gulf States, Turkey, Israel, Jordon… – there is absolutely no way Assad could survive without having a large support base in Syria.

As Assad explained in an interview with RT in 2012, it’s “not logical” that the entire Syrian population is against him, yet he still remains the President:

“The problem is not between me and the people; I don’t have a problem with the people. The United States is against me, the West is against me, many Arab countries including Turkey – which is not Arab of course – [are] against me, and if the Syrian people are against me, how can I be here? If the whole world, or let’s say [a] big part of the world, including your people [are] against you, are you superman? No, you’re just a human being – so this is not logical…It’s not about reconciliation between the Syrian and the Syrian; we don’t have [a] civil war. It’s about terrorism and support coming from abroad, to support terrorists and destabilize Syria.”

A large section of the Syrian population understands that if Assad is ousted from power at the present moment in time, and the government is destroyed, Syria will cease to exist as a sovereign, cohesive state, and will be Balkanized into feuding rump states.

The Real Criminals Reside in the West

Lost in the incessant demonization of the latest bogeyman of the mainstream media however, are the crimes of Western leaders. Comparative to the plethora of imperial butchers in the Western world, who still manage to escape prosecution for their crimes, the Syrian President really is an angel.

Tony Blair and George Bush launched a war of aggression in Iraq that has killed and maimed millions of innocent people, an invasion that was denounced by the former United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, as “illegal”. In 2011, a Malaysian tribunal which applied the Nuremberg Principles to the 2003 war found that both Bush and Blair were guilty of war crimes.

The illegal war in Iraq is just one example of the abhorrent crimes of the West and the flagrant hypocrisy of its leaders. Unfortunately, there is no accountability for the criminal class in the Western world, only a conveyer belt of future Machiavellian leaders.

Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of  The Analyst Report, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

While US sponsored Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria acting on behalf of US NATO are provided with money, weapons and training, Washington is now pointing its finger at North Korea’s role in supporting the government of Bashar Al Assad with a view to killing their own people.

Here is a recent New York Times (Feb 27) “authoritative” analysis on how North Korea is helping the Syrian government to wage a chemical war against the Syrian people. Nice and not fake, timely and of course “carefully documented”  by the Newspaper of Record.

Screenshot, NYT, Feb 27, 2018

 The underlying thrust of these reports is to convey the illusion that there is somehow an alliance of “rogue enemies” against the West, with North Korea playing a strategic role in channelling weapons to “rogue governments” with the object of killing civilians. (Lest we forget, barely reported by the MSM North Korea lost 30% of its population as a result of US-led bombings during the Korea War, 1950-53).

Another NYT report dated March 3, 2018  with front page coverage, titled Missiles sent from Pyongyang sold in Cairo. Conveniently the report is adjacent to a front page cover image entitled Numbingly familiar. Fleeing another airstrike in Syria, which tacitly conveys the message to readers of the right column article on North Korean missiles that Pyongyang is (indirectly) contributing to civilian deaths in Syria. The fact of the matter, amply documented, is that Damascus is waging a counter-terrorism campaign against US-NATO-Israel sponsored mercenaries including ISIS-Daesh and Al Qaeda. These mercenaries are the foot soldiers of the Western military alliance.

This article was originally published on GR in March 2015.

“If justice and truth take place,

If he is rewarded according to his just desert,

His name will stink to all generations.” (William Wesley, 1703-1791.)

On the evening of 19^th November 2014, the charity Save the Children (STC), with a gala event in New York, “recognized” Tony Blair – whose government enjoined in the ending of the fledgling lives of children on an industrial scale in Afghanistan and Iraq – with their “Global Legacy Award.”

Children of Iraq

In Iraq’s decimation of course, Blair’s regime was responsible for the dodgy dossier alleging Saddam Hussein’s ability to annihilate in “forty five minutes”, thus persuading for war, but had also enjoined with the US between 1997 and 2003 in ensuring, via the United Nations Sanction Committee that Iraq’s infants and children were denied all normality from the womb to their young deaths at an average of 6,000 a month.

Blocked were scanners to check the developing foetus, incubators for the frail newly arrived, paediatric oxygen, paediatric syringes, tracheal suction tubes to clear airway obstructions and all needed to combat a challenging start to life in order to become a healthy toddler and enter happy childhood.

For those who survived to childhood, reading and exercise books, paper, pens, pencils, blackboards, toys, tricycles, bicycles, scooters, all juvenile joys and normality were vetoed. When they suffered what are normally relatively simply treated ailments, infections, asthma, the antibiotics, inhalers needed were invariably also vetoed or fatally delayed. All policies endorsed by Blair’s government.

Then Iraq’s deprived, traumatized children were bombed and invaded in an action largely publicly justified by his government’s documented lies.

Yet Save the Children honoured Blair – to immediate condemnation. In the UK a petition on site “38 Degrees” quickly garnered nearly 125,000 signatures in protest (UK only, world wide it would certainly have been in orders of magnitude more.)

Judging by the uproar on blogs, Twitter, social media sites, it has been a spectacular own goal for Save the Children with countless supporters cancelling their subscriptions or donations.

At a meeting with Brendan Cox, the charity’s Director of Policy and Advocacy, a small delegation with Robin Priestley of 38 Degrees, handed in the petition and in a meeting: “ … all had to agree that it was impossible to remove the Award from Tony Blair now …” (1) Given the damage caused by this insane honour, Mr Cox should surely have committed to moving heaven and earth to doing exactly that.

However, now he has a chance. Justin Forsyth, Save the Children’s UK Chief Executive, who personally delivered the invitation to Tony Blair and was a former aide to him as Prime Minister, apologized on 3^rd March (sort of) on BBC Radio 4’s flagship “Today” programme.

He was sorry for the offence caused and that it had become an “unnecessary distraction” (2) from the organization’s work. Given Blair’s record in endorsing child deaths and resultant uproar the Award caused and the redesign of their logo to “Kill the Children” found across social media, it was not a “distraction” but an outrage.

Upsetting people, said Mr Forsyth: “ … is not really what we do at Save the Children.” Really? After this so close to home, can their judgment in differing global cultures possibly be trusted?

There was some verbal footwork about the Award being for Blair’s work in Africa, however this is defined as a “Global Legacy Award.” The former Prime Minister’s “legacy” is mass graves of dead children from Kandahar to Fallujah.

Moreover, according to Blair’s Faith Foundation website:

“Mr. Blair was recognised for his work … in 2005 to pledge to double aid to Africa and provide 100 per cent debt relief to eligible countries, as well as his work in partnership with African governments through the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI).”

It might be worth trawling the potentially “double aided” and “100 per cent debt relief” countries to see if and how many of the beneficiaries he might have one of his many lucrative advisory roles with. Politics is hardly known for lack of back scratching.

The Daily Mail on line also quotes Mr. Forsyth as stating:

“I know that many of our supporters and volunteers were very upset and our staff, several of our staff too, and I’m very sorry for that.”

Another verbal sleight of hand and it was not “several staff.”  By 28^th November, The  Guardian reported:

“An internal petition circulated among Save the Children employees around the word is to be presented to head office.”

Describing the award as “morally reprehensible” and calling for it to be rescinded, the petition has gathered more than 500 staff signatures.”(3)

The letter accused Save the Children of “a betrayal to Save the Children’s founding principles and values.”

Their ”Vision, Mission and Values” (4) include:

• “We aspire to live to the highest standards of personal honesty and behaviour; we never compromise our reputation and always act in the best interests of children.” Tell that to Iraq’s five million orphans and their uncounted counterparts in Afghanistan, to the bombed, orphaned, traumatized children of Gaza who the “Middle East Peace Envoy” has ignored.
• ”A world in which every child attains the right to survival, protection, development and participation.” Think about it, Save the Children. Were words ever more hollow after the honouring of a man mired in the destruction of every aspiration in that sentence.
• “To inspire breakthroughs in the way the world treats children and to achieve immediate and lasting change in their lives.”  Endorsed is seemingly one to whom “breakthrough” and “immediate and lasting change” is deprival of life, childhood, parents, home, healing, freedom from fear and all semblance of normality. “Lasting change” indeed.

On 5^th December 2014, a letter (5) was sent to Save the Children by Inder Comar of the legal firm Comar Law, San Francisco. outlining starkly the enormity of the illegality of the attack on Iraq in which Mr Blair had been so integral. It pointed out that Save the Children’s hero’s name is entered at the International Criminal Court at the Hague in its “Register of War Criminals.”

The correspondence, in which I declare an interest, was sent on behalf of Denis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary General, Professor Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization and myself included:

‘As you may be aware, in March 2003, Mr. Blair, while Prime Minister, likely participated with several high-ranking United States leaders in committing the crime of aggression against Iraq. The crime of aggression is the “supreme international crime,” as declared by the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946. In addition to being prohibited by international law, the crime of aggression is a crime also defined by the International Criminal Court in the Hague, over which it may have the opportunity to exercise jurisdiction in the coming years. “Resort to a war of aggression is not merely illegal, but is criminal.” United States v. Hermann Goering, et al., 41 AM. J. INT’L L. 172, 186, 218-220 (1946); see also Charter Int’l Military Tribunal, art. 6(a), Aug. 8, 1945, 59 Stat. 1546, 82 U.N.T.S. 279.

‘As you may also be aware, in 2004, Secretary General Kofi Annan declared the Iraq War illegal and in contravention of the United Nations Charter.1

‘In 2006, a former prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, Benjamin Ferencz, stated that the Iraq War was a “clear breach of law.”2 “There’s no such thing as a war without atrocities, but war-making is the biggest atrocity of law.”

‘In 2010, a Dutch inquiry concluded that the Iraq War had no basis in international law.3

‘In 2010, Hans Blix, the former chief weapons inspector for the United Nations, stated that it was his “firm view” that the Iraq War was illegal.4

‘In 2012, judges empanelled before the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, an independent commission headed by former judges and involving input from several international law scholars, concluded that a prima facie case existed that Mr. Blair committed the crime of aggression against Iraq. The tribunal reported its findings to the International Criminal Court in the Hague and entered the name of Mr. Blair in its “Register of War Criminals.” ‘

It concludes:

“Was there any consideration to the optics of giving this Award to Mr. Blair in light of the fact that many of Save the Children’s current management – including Jonathan Forsyth, Jonathan Powell, Sam Sharpe and Fergus Drake – have intimate ties with Mr. Blair and his government? Was there any consideration to the moral paradox of providing this Award to a person whose destitute victims are concurrently succored by Save the Children staff?”

It demands: “Please confirm that Save the Children will rescind the Global Legacy Award forthwith.”

There has been no reply. That action however, would a gesture of, albeit belated, tangible apology and might be a start at repairing Save the Children’s tattered image.

If State Honours, Knighthoods and Peerages can be withdrawn from those subsequently deemed unworthy of their bestowal, surely so can Save the Children’s woefully misplaced Global Award.

Notes

1. https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-save-the-children-charity-from-giving-tony-blair-their-annual-global-legacy-award

2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31707195

3. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/nov/28/save-the-children-tony-blair-award-row

4. https://www.savethechildren.net/about-us/our-vision-mission-and-values

5. http://www.globalresearch.ca/lawyers-letter-to-save-the-children-stc-rescind-the-global-legacy-award-to-war-criminal-tony-blair/5418469 

Il piano fu preannunciato tre anni fa, durante l’amministrazone Obama, quando funzionari del Pentagono dichiararono che «di fronte all’aggressione russa, gli Stati uniti stanno considerando lo spiegamento in Europa di missili da crociera con base a terra» (il manifesto, 9 giugno 2015).

(EN/FR/IT/PT/RO/SP/CHI/DE)

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Western media reacted as expected to Putin’s state of the nation address, explaining new Russian super-weapons.

The NYT headlined “Putin’s ‘Invincible’ Missile Is Aimed at US Vulnerabilities,” saying:

Putin “threatened the West with a new generation of nuclear weapons Thursday…sharply escalat(ing) the military invective in the tense relationship between the United States and Russia.”

Fact: Putin threatened no one, stressing Russia’s military capabilities are solely for defense, not offense – polar opposite how Washington, NATO, Israel and their rogue allies operate.

Fact: Washington bears full responsibility for hostile bilateral relations, not Russia. Its imperial agenda threatens global nuclear war.

The Times:

“Mr. Putin’s announcement…seemed intended chiefly to stir the patriotic passions of Russians at a moment when he is heading into a re-election campaign, even though his victory is assured in what amounts to a one-candidate race.”

Fact: In contrast to Trump, Putin is overwhelmingly popular for good reason. Indeed he’ll easily be re-elected for another six-year term – facing seven other candidates.

Russian military spending is a small fraction of America’s so-called defense budget, devoted heavily to encircling the globe with military bases, used as launching pads for naked aggression. In contrast, Russia champions world peace and stability – polar opposite Washington’s imperial agenda.

The neocon/CIA house organ Washington Post headlined “Putin speech adds to freeze in US-Russia Relations,” mocking Moscow’s new super-weapons, saying:

“Few experts…believe that the new weapons, assuming they actually exist and are ever deployed, would change the balance of power between two nations that already have the ability to destroy each other many times over.”

They’re vital deterrents against possible US aggression targeting its territory. They’re not for warmaking, the way Washington operates.

WaPo:

“US defense officials have consistently cited Russia as the most significant strategic threat to the United States, and the primary reason to build up its defense budget.”

Fact: “US defense (and intelligence community) officials have consistently” lied about Russia. Washington and its rogue allies threaten world peace, not Moscow, threatening no one.

America needs enemies to justify its out-of-control military spending and naked aggression against one country after another.

None exist so they’re invented. Russia tops the list because of its sovereign independence and opposition to Washington’s imperial agenda, mostly its endless wars of aggression against nations threatening no one.

Cold War 2.0 rages, threatening to get hot, solely because of US rage for unchallenged global dominance.

Sino/Russian unity for multi-world polarity is the most effective deterrent against US imperial ambitions.

Here’s a sampling of other headlines, responding to Putin’s state of the nation address:

Wall Street Journal: “Putin Unveils Nuclear Weapons He Claims Could Breach US Defenses…intensifying (an) arms race with the US.”

Reuters: “Putin, before vote, unveils ‘invincible’ nuclear weapons to counter West”

AP News: “Putin boasts of new Russian nuclear weapons

Los Angeles Times: “ ‘Now you will listen’: Putin claims new nuclear weapons can bypass any missile defense system”

Chicago Tribune: “Pentagon dismisses Putin’s boasts about new nuclear weapons”

Fox News: “Russia unveils nuclear weapons Putin claims are immune to interception”

CNN: “Russia’s ‘invincible’ missile is chilling everyone”

San Francisco CBS News affiliate station: “Putin Shows Off New Russian Doomsday Weapons in State-of-the-Nation Speech:”

US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS): “Pentagon dismisses Putin’s boasts about new nuclear weapons”

BBC: “Russia’s Putin unveils ‘invincible’ nuclear weapons”

London Guardian: “Putin threatens US arms race with new missiles declaration”

Financial Times: “Russia to deploy ‘unstoppable’ nuclear weapons”

Al Jazeera: “Vladimir Putin unveils new nuclear weapons systems”

Sky News: “US Condemns Russia’s development of new super nuclear weapons”

Pentagon commanders are likely frantic about how to match Russia’s advanced military technology – developed with a small fraction of US military spending, shifting the balance of power in Moscow’s favor.

How about that turn of events, reducing the risk of nuclear war.

Washington attacks weaker countries, not ones more formidable than itself – how all bullies operate!

*

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

The situation around Eastern Ghouta continuous to be intense due to the regular mortar shells of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham and Faylaq Al-Rahman militants. At the same time, snipers to prevent the civilians from fleeing Eastern Ghouta to Damascus daily fire the humanitarian corridors.

However, the Syrian army units continue to initiate new assaults on the positions of terrorists to recapture the area and liberate the local population. Tonight, the government forces stormed terrorists’ positions after the several-hour-long daily truce in Eastern Ghouta and managed to cut off one of the main supply routes of the militants in the region.

Moreover, for the second time in the past two days, the jihadist of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham and Faylaq Al-Rahman attempted to return the ground they lost to the Syrian Arab Army in the Harasta suburb.

According to a local source, this assault was unsuccessful, and the militants suffered heavy losses. Tens of jihadists were killed and several military vehicles were destroyed.

Commenting on the situation in Eastern Ghouta, Iranian permanent representative to the UN Mohsen Qanei strongly criticized the western media for launching the propaganda campaign against the Syrian government forces.

He also stated that the brutalities of illegal armed groups, which are directly supported by some Western countries against civilians over the past seven years, have reached its critical point.

“These actions are posing a serious threat to world peace and security”, the Iranian diplomat added.

At the same time, during the press conference on March 3, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova stated that the large-scale military operation against various terrorist organizations in Eastern Ghouta had become necessary and inevitable step as the jihadists continued to shell Damascus outskirts. These attacks daily cause numerous civilian casualties.

She underlined that the allegations against the Syrian authorities on the use of the chemical weapons in Eastern Ghouta by the Western states are groundless, false and fabricated.

In conclusion, she highly appreciated the efforts of Russia, Iran, Turkey, and the UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura at Astana peace talks and the Syrian National Dialogue Congress in Sochi. According to Zakharova, these platforms are providing the political settlement process in Syria, and actually pushing for peace based on UN Security Council Resolution 2254.

Despite all the attempts of the Western countries to hinder the political process in Syria, and blame the official government for the use of chemical weapons against civilians, the region of Eastern Ghouta will soon be totally liberated.

*

Featured image is from the author.

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