Global Research

When I look at news reports from whichever country, I see no awareness of the two most ominous developments in US history. One is the conspiracy between US security agencies, the US Department of Justice, the Democratic Party and the American print and TV media to overthrow the democratically elected president of the United States.  With “Russiagate” we have been experiencing a coup against President Trump and American democracy. Although the Democrats’ Identity Politics cannot conceive of it, it is possible to be opposed to President Trump without believing that a police state coup against him is desirable. 

The other ominous development is the just released US Nuclear Posture Review, which calls nuclear weapons “usable,” legitimizes their first use, and sets the stage for spending trillions of dollars acquiring more nuclear weapons when massive public needs go unmet and 10 percent of the existing US arsenal is sufficient to destroy all life on earth.

I have written about these extraordinary developments. See this, for example, and this.

As for the effect it has had, I might as well not have bothered. No government and no news organization of which I am aware has sounded the alarm that the CIA, FBI, DOJ, Democratic Party, and the entirety of the American print and TV media have been caught red-handed in a coup to overthrow the President of the United States, and nothing is being done about it. The coup cannot even be exposed, because the security agencies, media, and Democrats shout down the hard evidence.  Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi were murdered on the basis of total lies, and now the President of the United States faces the same fate.

If the coup against Trump succeeds, the US will have made the full transition into a Gestapo Police State. America will have become the Fourth Reich.

As horrible as this prospect—courtesy of the CIA, FBI, Obama Department of Justice, Democratic Party, and presstitute media—is, the nuclear posture review is many times worse.  During the long decades of the Cold War, no US government would have released a nuclear posture review that legitimized the first use of nuclear weapons against any opponent. The US did have some crazed generals, such as Lemnitzer and Curtis LeMay who were Dr. Strangelove figures, and there was a James Bond movie about an equally crazed, but fictional, Soviet general.  

Even 55 years ago crazed generals such as Lemnitzer were too powerful to be fired. President John F. Kennedy was limited to reassigning Lemnitzer, who pressed JFK to adopt a 9/11-type false flag operation known as Operation Northwoods and to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.  It unnerved President Kennedy when he realized that he had an insane Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but Kennedy stood up to him. President Trump failed to stand up to the neoconized Dr. Strangeloves of our time when Trump endorsed the Pentagon’s new nuclear posture review. Compared to JFK, Trump is milktoast.

The new American nuclear posture review is a neoconservative document that has within it the destruction of all life on earth.  The insane people responsible for this document are those in the policy positions to implement it. It gives us the paradox that an American president elected in part by his professed intent to normalize relations with Russia has signed off on a posture review that tells Russia and China that Washington has a policy that permits a first strike against them. Clearly, this is not normalizing relations.

Already Russia has experienced a quarter century of American deceit and duplicity. President Gorbachev was promised in exchange for Soviet agreement to the unification of Germany that Washington would not move NATO one inch to the East. But the Clinton Regime moved NATO to Russia’s very border. The George W. Bush Regime withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty. The Obama Regime placed ABM missiles on Russia’s border.  And now the Trump Regime tells Russia and China that they are subject to surprise nuclear attack.

Never in the history of mankind has a more reckless, irresponsible, destabilizing act, one that threatens the entirely of humanity, been committed. It is difficult to imagine a government, even one as criminally insane as the US government, telling nuclear powers such as Russia and China that they are subject to US surprise nuclear attack.

Yet the American media is cheering. USA Today declares: “Trump’s plan for nuclear weapons makes sense.”   

The Hill, a Washington publication, thinks that threatening Russia and China with a first strike is a reasonable step:  

Presstitute CNBC, completely ignoring Washington’s provocative nuclear posture and provocative pursuit of even more nuclear weapons and delivery capabilities, focuses attention on North Korea as the real threat. 

When a country intent on world hegemony, as the US clearly is, has a media so compliant with its war intention, the rest of the world had better be on guard. There is no internal check whatsoever on Washington’s aggression toward the world.

Where are the protest voices of the Europeans, the Canadians, the British, the Australians, the Japanese, the South Americans, the Africans, India and Asia? Where are even the voices of Russia and China?  If they exist at all they are hidden behind Russian pretensions of “our Western partners,” and Chinese greed for more profits.

The voices do not exist. 

Truth is not good news.  It doesn’t reassure people or make them feel good. People who don’t feel safe don’t go into debt in order to be able to spend money and make profits for the capitalists who own the news and the governments and the businesses.

Armageddon will bring debt forgiveness, thus reviving an economy that will no longer exist, as no one will be here to pay or to collect the debts.

*

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

Featured image is from Netivist.

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

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In the beginning, nobody paid much attention. Two activists, ex-members of the Movement of Independent Citizens, which was created back in 2011 following an appeal by Mikis Theodorakis, took the initiative to call for a protest meeting in Salonica. The aim was to protest the intention of the Greek government to conclude, under pressure from Washington, an agreement with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), better known internationally as the “Republic of Macedonia”, terminating the dispute with the latter over its name that has been ongoing since the breakup of Yugoslavia.

After the capitulation, the defeat and the humiliation of 2015, Greeks have seemed unable to mobilize about anything. They were licking their wounds. They were looking more or less passively at the continuing destruction of their country and at its neocolonial plundering, by Germany and other EU countries, under the general direction of the IMF and with the green light of the USA. They had neither the courage nor the will to think through their problems. They did not have leaders or ideas or political subjects to lead a new revolt against the colonialist Troika. Many believed Tsipras and SYRIZA’s dire warnings about the cost and the uncertain outcome of any revolt against the creditors. They tried to forget and survive. This assassination of Hope has inflicted an unprecedented national depression on nearly all the people of the country of Apollo, the God of Sun.

So no one expected any more than five or ten thousand people at the Salonica meeting. But something seemed to emerge from the very depth of the national, collective subconscious. It was the same thing that had happened three days before the referendum of July 5^th,, 2015 and conditioned its result.

There were not five or ten thousand in Salonica, they were probably around five hundred thousand, nobody knows exactly. It was not a simple demonstration, it was a revolt, even if peaceful, for the time being. And today, everybody waits a much larger crowd in and around the Constitution Square in the center of Athens, named after the 1843 Revolution which obliged the first King of the Country, the Bavarian Otto, imposed on Greece by the Holy Alliance, to accept constitutional rule.

A demonstration about Macedonia but a cry about Greece

It will be a demonstration about Macedonia, against what many Greeks understand as one more usurpation of their history, their national symbols and their cultural heritage. But behind it, one clearly discerns the desperate cry of a historic European nation that has been insulted and offended, destroyed and plundered, by its own supposed Allies and Partners and by the Union it has adhered to. A nation which has contributed as very few to the defeat of Nazism, only to see now “democratic Germany” destroying it, with help from Brussels bureaucracy, the US and Goldman Sachs.

What Greeks will say to their government today will be essentially: Stop conceding the country to foreign powers. Give us back our country.

For ten years Greeks have witnessed their “allies and partners” destroying their country, pretending they are helping it.

Protesters in front of the parliament building during a demonstration of the country’s biggest public sector union ADEDY against planned pension reforms in Athens, Greece.

They took and they are taking everything, the banks, the airports, the ports, the railways, the communications and the energy infrastructure. They confiscate even homes of ordinary people. Parents cannot bequeath their homes to their children because of confiscatory taxation, necessary for paying a “highly unsustainable debt” (according to the IMF). They have cut pensions 24 times. They have imposed on a member of the EU neocolonial terms not imposed to any Third World country. Greek mothers used to be the most overprotective of their sons, in all Europe: they wanted their children to live next door all their lives if possible. (Probably, because of what they had suffered under Ottoman occupation, when the Turks were rounding up male children of Christians). Now their dream is to see their children migrating to Australia, Africa or the Emirates to find a job. Greek hospitals are crumbling under German-EU draconian cuts to their expenses, but at the same time Greek doctors, for the education of whom Greeks have paid, are stuffing German or British hospitals.  72% of young people in Greece say to the polls they want to leave the country, if they will find a job somewhere.

As a result of a program that is supposed to help Greece, the country lost 27% of its GDP, something comparable to what happened to US during the Great Depression, or to the Weimar Republic before the rise of Hitler. It is a bigger percentage than the material losses of Germany or France during the First World War. This is not a program of neoliberal “reforms”, it is a program designed to destroy a European nation and its democracy and to transform its state into an instrument of International Finance, with the long term prospect of creating a “Greece (and Cyprus) without Greeks”.

No one can understand reality by taking for real what he believes its actors want or do not want to do. Attention must be paid to what is happening, to what the actors are doing, not what they are pretending to do or any the intentions that can be attributed to them.

Under the cruel light of the available statistics, not beginning from any prefabricated theory or ideological or political or national preference, the program they imposed on Greece is clearly a program of destruction of a nation. If it was a mistake, they would long ago have found a way to correct it. Since they have not, it is because the “Greek experiment” is an important experiment in the advent of a new European totalitarian order. European governments and EU bureaucrats may or may not be conscious of that. But somebody has enough influence on them to impose it.

If somebody has some other serious explanation or theory about what has happened or is happening to Greece, explaining better than the above description what is going on, let him advance it. By the way, I believe the Empire of Finance was right in choosing Greece as its main target for a variety of reasons. I find very symmetrical and quite justified to organize such a crime against the country in the language of which humans, for the first time in history, wrote the word freedom (Eleftheria), in the 8^th century B.C. in Homer’ s Iliad).

German newspapers were right in their comments about modern and also ancient Greece in 2009-10. Greeks have always been anarchists. Not only did they write the word Freedom in their language, they have dared to discover Logos, a word which means analogy, reason, motivation, cause, purpose, logic, all at once, and to oppose it to the divine order. In Athens they decided to write off the Debts of the poor people and then, based on that experience, they dared to spell, first in History, the word Democracy.

This is one of the reasons I strongly believe the choice of Greece as the first target of the Financial Totalitarianism was correct. Symbols are always important. They help shape thinking and emotions.

In 2015, the Troika was able to deal a devastating moral and psychological blow to the Greek people by transforming its supposed Left into its instrument. The blow was even more important as partisans of the Greek Left had shed oceans of blood to defend their country, its democracy and the social rights of its people. That was why it was a blow to the sense of dignity of the Greek nation. No nation, especially no nation living in this geographical location, in the intersection of the Slavic, the Middle Eastern and the Western European worlds, no nation bearing the tradition of such a History, can exist without its dignity.

This is why the capacity of the Greek people to project any kind of social resistance was near to zero, after 2015.

But this unequal duel between the Empire and the Greek “national DNA” was not over in 2015. Neither side was satisfied. The empire was not satisfied by simply transforming Greece into a “debt colony”. It wanted more, it wanted the geopolitical and cultural “capital” of the country (and of Cyprus), which is also the main remaining arms of the Greek people, if it will wish one day to reclaim the control of its state. It wants to get from the Greeks their legitimate rights to exercise sovereingty over its country, and in particular in the Aegean, in Cyprus, in Crete, in Northern Greece. Because Greece and Cyprus control the access of Russia to the Warm Seas, they are located between the Middle East and Western Europe.

The Empire deems necessary to control Greece (and Cyrpus) in the strictest possible way, because since 1200 their control is absolutely essential to launch the Crusades against the East, the Islamic or the Russian one.

On the other side, the national feeling and pride of the Greek nation was not dead, in spite of the terrible 2015 defeat. This is pushing now to a new revolt, but, unfortunately, it is a revolt without any leadership, any clear political and social aims or ideas. The Empire was able to “decapitate” the Greek nation, as it has largely achieved with nearly all European nations and to control all its politics and potential representatives.

Greeks will cry today for Macedonia because, as they understand it, somebody wants to take from them their symbols and their cultural heritage, to usurp their History. They will also demonstrate today because they believe all the main political parties of their country are sold to foreign powers and these foreign powers are destroying their country. And they will do it because they have not, for the time being, any tool to challenge, for a second time, the economic and political Imperialism of Germany and the EU.

But behind their slogans about Macedonia, they will cry essentially “give us back our country”. And nobody can now really predict where all this will lead. As the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, the father of Dialectics, put it, two and a half thousand years before Ilia Priygozin and his Chaos theories, “Time is a child playing dice. To the child belongs the Kingdom”

The dispute over Macedonia

Since the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Greece has refused to recognize any “Republic of Macedonia” on the grounds that such a name may reflect territorial claims on Greece. Most geographers and historians worldwide define Macedonia as a wider multinational region, following the administrative delineation of the Ottoman Empire, where Macedonia once belonged. More than half of Macedonia, as defined above, belongs today to Greece, about a third is FYROM, most of the remaining is the Bulgarian Pirin Macedonia and a tiny part, about 1%, belongs to Albania.  Because of Greek opposition to the recognition of this new state, produced out of the destruction of Yugoslavia, as “Republic of Macedonia”, it was admitted in the UN as Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, until Athens and Skopje agree to a name commonly accepted by both sides.

But Greeks do not define Macedonia in such a way. They identify it with ancient Macedonia which is now Greek Macedonia. And this is an important part of the Greek national ideology.  This is one reason they cannot easily accept a Republic of Macedonia suddenly appearing in their northern frontiers. When Greeks say Macedonia is Greek, which may seem offending to foreigners, they mean Greek Macedonia is Greek. The nature of today’s Greek nationalism is essentially defensive.

The bloody destruction of Yugoslavia, by Western forces using nationalisms (in the name of combating them!) has created a legitimate fear among Greeks that their country may come next, in the context of the “new world order”. Some of President Clinton declarations about Balkans could also be interpreted as an indirect threat.

Those fears are also fuelled by FYROM’s official ideology, which presents all of Macedonia as one country with one legitimate, so to say, nation, the Macedonians. It represents a late mutation of the Komintern slogan of a “United and Independent Macedonia”, “United and Independent Thrace”, which crated a lot of huge problems, at its time, to the Greek communist movement. By the way the use of the word Macedonians to describe the dominant nationality in FYROM (our personal opinion is that the name Macedonian Slavs would be more clear), creates also serious problems, because it is implying that Greek, or Bulgarian, or Albanian Macedonians are not genuine Macedonians. But Macedonia in the wider sense was always a multinational region and it was for that reason French have named their famous salad Macedonian. They did it because it is made of many nationalities, exactly as Macedonia was inhabited by many nationalities.

The first leader of FYROM, Kiro Gligorov, was a serious guy, member of the Yugoslav League of Communists. But later, forces controlled directly by US, the CIA and various “globalisation” think tanks have gradually taken complete control of the state and its political elite. It is widely believed that CIA has played a huge role in bringing the new government in Skopje, in order to use it to “close” this question hindering NATO expansion and undermine any relation between FYROM and Russia.

These forces have begun to construct a completely fake national ideology and history, pretending Macedonian Slavs are heirs of Alexander the Great and his Kingdom. The whole thing is ridiculous, as the first Slavs have come to the Balkans one thousand years after the death of Alexander.

That way they try to refuse to the Greeks the use of their national cultural heritage, a part of which is Alexander’s saga, a heritage which is a strong ideological component of the Greek nation-state, the state chosen as the No1 target of the Empire of Finance in Europe. Indirectly, all that could lead into undermining the cohesion of Greece itself. This is happening also in many other regions of Europe, where nation-states are pressed from above (Globalisation and EU) and from below (“Europe of Regions”). We cannot consider the destruction of the nation-states progressive in any way, because it practically means the destruction of the sole level where there is still some degree of democratic control and social protection. The debate about a European federation is in reality misleading, as long as in reality we are not speaking of any kind of federation but of uniting European under the power of the Finance and of NATO.

This kind of ridiculous ideological “ethnomechanics”, applied in FYROM has another consequence also, it is entrapping Slav Macedonians into defending a completely fake and ridiculous national ideology, thus making them more than ever dependent upon the empire.

It is true that FYROM is too tiny to threaten Greece, but not if it would act as a strategic ally of Turkey or any other power threatening Greece.

But the main wars now are not military, they are economic, political and ideological. The empire needs to destroy historical nations and their states, because they represent objectively a source of potential challenge to itself.

Many British or American intellectuals do not grasp well the fundamental importance of the notion of the nation, an importance which Lenin understood very well and this was one of the secrets of the success of the October and subsequent Communist revolutions. Maybe they don’t grasp it because they come from nations which they believe or believed that all the world belongs to them. They don’t think in terms of Nations, they think in terms of Empires.

By adopting the ideology of Globalization, that is of the World Dictatorship of the Finance, important sections of the Left legitimize imperialism and they inherit all its contradictions regarding nations and nationalisms. Because you cannot dismiss Nations and Nationalisms in general, criticize Serbs, Greeks or Russians for “nationalism”, and then use Croatian, Albanian or Ukrainian nationalisms. You cannot accuse Serbs as nationalists and then use other nationalism to destroy a multinational structure like Yugoslavia.

Greek political parties were caught between their desire to satisfy Western powers, on whom they remain dependent and their own public. As a result, the official position of the country has oscillated from “no Macedonia, no derivatives” (1992) to “composite name with geographical connotation for all uses” (2008). But no Greek nowadays believes his parties are going to defend any position if subjected to western pressure. This is one of the reasons they felt they had to demonstrate.

In 2008 they were believing their government was defending Greek national interests. Only 5.000 people participated in a demonstration similar to those taking place today about Macedonia.

US and NATO come into the equation

This dispute has been ongoing for 25 years now, without creating any particular problem for bilateral relations between the two countries. Nobody really cared very much about solving this problem, except one player, the United States of America. A peace loving power, USA is not confining itself to its peace building activities in the Middle East, the Korean peninsula or Latin America. It is also very interested in promoting prosperity in South Eastern Europe!

FYROM is situated in the center of Balkans, between Greece and Serbia, Bulgaria and Albania. Who controls FYROM, controls the Balkans. Who controls the Balkans can wage war against Russia. It is as simple as that.

Hitler was of the same opinion. This is why he devoted precious time and he lost his best elite paratroopers divisions in 1941 to smash the formidable resistance of the Greeks to the Fascist Axis before attacking Soviet Russia, probably losing the war because of the prior expenditure of effort in his Serbian and Greek campaigns. Germans do not seem to have forgiven Serbs and Greeks for that.

This is the main, strategic reason US administration asked from the SYRIZA-An.Ell. government in Athens to conclude an agreement over the name quickly so that FYROM can become a member of NATO (and in the future of the EU). Berlin and Brussels are also pressing Athens in the same direction.

The Athens government has some very dangerous traits. It does not understand Greek national feelings, it doesn’t have much understanding of foreign, military and international policy or, for that matter, of Greek History. They only want to satisfy the US, Germany, NATO, Israel etc., without even understanding the consequences for themselves and the country. Tsipras is a kind of Gorbachev in Athens, who makes any concession possible, without really realizing what he is doing. Of course this is not valid for all his government. Some of its members, like the Foreign Affairs Minister, Mr. Kotzias, realize too well what they are doing.

Plan A of the Empire is clear: Solve the dispute between Greece and FYROM, dealing one more blow to the strength of the Greek national feeling, a historically un-parallel anti-imperialist force in the Balkans, along with Serb national feeling. Include FYROM in NATO, encircle and discipline Serbia, forcing it to accept the loss of Kosovo, extirpate the last remains of Russian influence in the Balkans and conclude the transformation of the region from the Mediterranean and the Adriatic to the frontier of the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics into a zone of strictly controlled protectorates, ready to go to war against the Russia.

By the way, Balkans is also an alternative possible route of attack against Iran, through Greece, Bulgaria, Black Sea and Transcaucasia.

A secondary aim is the inclusion of this region, or large parts of it in the EU, which will help finish any last potential of a united, independent, democratic Europe, leaving two main alternatives for the EU: to complete its transformation into a totalitarian imperial structure, under the control of international Finance and NATO, or to provoke its destruction in a catastrophic way.

But what if the Plan A fails? Empires have always fall back plans. Besides, it is more than obvious that this one is divided between its “Bolshevics” (Huntington, Netanyahu, Trump, Le Pen…) and its “Menshevics” (Fukuyama, Obama, Merkel, Macron, Soros…). The failures of the latter and the general dissatisfaction they provoke, lay the grounds for the others to try making their reckless Chaos strategies dominant western strategies.

One particular characteristic of the “Bolshevic” imperial faction is that it is using the methods of Entryism to put Neocons in all important positions of the western establishment. Another one is that they don’t present clearly their own program as such, they try to use the forces of dissent unleashed by the crisis of the mainstream western strategy, in order to radicalise it.They are producing fake revolts, color revolutions of different kinds, or they prove able to manipulate genuine ones. SYRIZA in Greece, Trump in the USA, Kurds in the Middle East are some of the examples one could cite. Last year, the Masters were debating in Davos about “post-Truth” and “post-Democracy”. The introduction of such terms is reflecting the extent of use of deception methods in contemporary politics.

We cannot explore analytically here what can be at stake in the Balkans if the plan A fails. This is why we limit ourselves to some ideas circulating around, from time to time, like dismemberment of FYROM between Albania and Bulgaria, or trying to create “fake” and pro-imperialist in the last analysis nationalisms in Serbia and Greece, or the open destruction of democratic rule in Greece. In the long run, in case of a crisis of the EU leading to its destruction, one of the ideas and scenarios circulating is to incorporate all Southern Europe and Northern Africa into a kind of Meditarranean Union under the aegis of France and Israel.

The only Plan which we cruelly lack is a Plan of cooperation of the Balkan nations and, beyond them, of Moldova and even Ukraine probably, if it gets rid from its present day dictatorship. All this region is now in ruins, as a result of Western military, political and economic inteventions, the object of a clear neo-colonialist policy. Such a Plan for South Eastern Europe could also be part of a Plan for a new, democratic, united, social and independent Europe, which we also cruelly lack.

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This article was originally published by Defend Democracy Press.

Dimitris Konstantakopoulos is a Journalist and writer. He has served as an advisor in the office of Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, specialized in arms control and East-West relations. He has worked as correspondent of the Athens Press Agency in Moscow. Former Secretary of the Movement of Independent Citizens, Former Member of the Secretariat of the C.C. and of the Committee on Foreign and Defense Policy of SYRIZA.

The United States Department of Defense released its latest ‘Nuclear Posture Review 2018’ (NPR) on 2 February, updating the last one issued in 2010 during the previous administration. See ‘Nuclear Posture Review 2018’.

The Executive Summary of the NPR is also available, if you prefer. See ‘Nuclear Posture Review 2018 Executive Summary’.

Several authors have already thoughtfully exposed a phenomenal variety of obvious lies, invented threats, strategic misconceptions and flaws – such as the fallacious thinking behind ‘deterrence’ and significantly increased risk of nuclear war given the delusional ‘thinking’ in the document – as well as the political fear-mongering in the NPR. For example, eminent scholar Professor Paul Rogers has pointed out:

‘The risk now is that we are on a slippery slope towards “small nuclear wars in far-off places”, which themselves could either escalate or at the very least break the 70+ year taboo on treating nuclear weapons as usable.’ See ‘Nuclear Posture Review: Sliding Towards Nuclear War?’

Stephen Lendman has reminded us that US ‘defense spending far exceeds what Russia, China, Iran and other independent countries spend combined’ and that the US ‘nuclear arsenal and delivery systems can destroy planet earth multiple times over’ with the document suggesting ‘preparation for nuclear war’. Moreover, the NPR ‘falsely claims the nation must address “an unprecedented range and mix of threats” posed by Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and other countries’ and this despite the incontrovertible fact that no nation has threatened US security since World War II and none threatens it now.

He further points out that the NPR’s claim that there is ‘an unprecedented range and mix of threats, including major conventional, chemical, biological, nuclear, space, and cyber threats, and violent nonstate actors’ is ‘utter rubbish’ and that ‘America’s rage for endless wars of aggression, along with its rogue allies, poses the only serious threat to world peace and stability.’ See ‘Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review’.

Even Andrew C. Weber, an assistant defense secretary during the Obama administration, has warned that

‘Almost everything about this radical new policy will blur the line between nuclear and conventional’ and ‘will make nuclear war a lot more likely.’ See ‘Pentagon Suggests Countering Devastating Cyberattacks With Nuclear Arms’.

Despite the obvious belligerence in the document, we are supposed to believe, according to words in the NPR, that ‘The United States remains committed to its efforts in support of the ultimate global elimination of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons’ despite the US denunciation of the ‘UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons’ negotiated by 122 countries just a few months ago in mid-2017. See ‘U.S., UK and France Denounce Nuclear Ban Treaty’.

UN Convention on Nuclear Ban (Source: ICAN)

Presumably, we are supposed to have shorter memories than members of the US administration or to be even more terrified and unintelligent than are they. This would be difficult.

Rather than further critique the document, which several authors have done admirably, I would like to explain my observation immediately above.

Let me start by explaining why those who formulated the current US nuclear strategy, wrote the Nuclear Posture Review, now promote it and are responsible for implementing it, are utterly terrified and quite delusional, and constitute a threat to human civilization.

The NPR is full of language such as this: ‘There now exists an unprecedented range and mix of threats, including major conventional, chemical, biological, nuclear, space, and cyber threats, and violent nonstate actors. These developments have produced increased uncertainty and risk.’

Are these individuals, notably including Donald Trump, Secretary of Defense General Jim ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, Chief of Staff Marine General John Kelly and National Security Adviser General H. R. McMaster, really frightened of countries such as Iran (with its non-existent nuclear arsenal) or North Korea (with its handful of ‘primitive’ nuclear weapons and inadequate delivery systems)? Or are they really frightened of countries such as Russia and China, whose nuclear arsenals pale in comparison to that of the United States and whose strategic posture in any case is decidedly non-aggressive (particularly towards the United States) despite its ongoing provocations of them?

Are US government leaders really so terrified of possible conventional, chemical, biological, space and cyber attacks that they need to threaten nuclear annihilation should it occur?

Well, the answer to each of these questions is that Trump, Mattis, Kelly, McMaster and other US political and military leaders are, indeed, terrified.

However, they are projecting their obvious terroraway from its original source and onto a ‘safe’ and ‘approved’ target so that they can behave in accordance with their terror. They do this because the original cause of their terror – their parents and/or other significant adults in their childhood – never allowed them to feel their terror and to direct and express it safely and appropriately. For a full explanation of why this happens, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

Unfortunately, and in this case potentially catastrophically, this dysfunctional behavioural response to deeply suppressed terror cannot ‘work’ either personally or politically for the individuals concerned. Let me explain why.

Evolution devised an extraordinarily powerful response to threats: it gave many organisms, including human beings, the emotion of fear to detect threats as well as other tools that can be used in conjunction with fear to respond powerfully to threats. Hence, in response to a threat, humans are meant to feel their fear and, while doing so, engage other feelings, conscience and intelligence so that the source of the threat can be accurately identified and the most powerful and effective behavioural response to that threat can be devised and implemented. In simple language: We need our fear to tell us we are under threat and to play a part in defending ourselves. In evolutionary terms, this was highly functional.

If, however, during childhood, the fear is suppressed because the individual is too frightened to feel it (usually because their parents deny them a safe opportunity to do so), then they will be unconsciously compelled to project their fear onto those who pose no threat (precisely because these people do not immobilize them with terror) and to endlessly seek to control these people (during childhood this usually means their younger siblings and/or friends, and during adulthood it usually means people of another sex, race, class, religion or nation) so that they can gain relief from experiencing their suppressed (childhood)fear.

The relief, of course, is delusionary. But once someone is terrified, it is not possible for them to behave functionally or powerfully. They will live in a world of delusion and projection, endlessly blaming those who they (unconsciously) project to be a threat precisely because these people are not frightening and not a threat and seem more likely to be able to be ‘controlled’.

This projection and behaviour happen all of the time, both in personal interactions and geopolitically, but it doesn’t usually threaten imminent annihilation, even if, to choose another example, it endlessly and perhaps disastrously impedes efforts to tackle the environmental and other assaults on our biosphere.

It is because parents are frightened to feel and experience their own fear that they also fear their child’s fear and they act (consciously or unconsciously, depending on the context) to prevent the child from feeling this fear, perhaps by doing something as simple as reassuring them.

However, parents also use a variety of methods to distract their child from feeling their feelings. They might offer the child a toy or food to distract them. But another important way in which fear is suppressed is by teaching children to use play as a distraction from having their feelings. This fear might then remanifest in the form of the child wanting others to play with them but particularly by doing so in a game of their choosing and over which they have control (so that they can ensure that their fear is not raised).

Once the child has learned to use gaining control over play to distract themselves from their terror, it might well become a lifetime addiction, subsequently manifesting as a dysfunctional desire for control within a family or perhaps even economically, politically or militarily.

Unfortunately, as some of these children grow up and the nature of their ‘game’ changes, the outcome can have deadly consequences. This is simply because there is never any guarantee that others will submit willingly to control by others. And, if they do not, this can trigger the original person’s (unconscious) terror ‘necessitating’ action – a higher-risk strategy in an attempt to secure this higher degree of control over others – to resuppress their terror.

However, for example, even if the terrified person ends up owning a major corporation and exercising a great degree of control over employees, markets and possibly countries, the terror driving their delusional need for control can never be satisfied. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’. But the same principle applies in other domains as well, including the political and military.

And in the most dangerous collective manifestation of this major psychological disorder, the current US political/military leadership, which has been effectively merged by Trump’s appointment of military generals to his political staff, we now have the situation where a collection of individuals who are terrified and also project their dysfunctional desire for control onto other nations, are willing to threaten (and use) nuclear weapons in a delusionary attempt to feel (personally) ‘in control’.

It is little wonder that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight! See ‘It is now two minutes to midnight: 2018 Doomsday Clock Statement.’

So what can we do?

Well, I would tackle the problem at several levels and I invite you to consider participating in one or more of these.

To help prevent this problem from emerging at its source, you are welcome to consider making ‘My Promise to Children’. This will play a vital role in ensuring that children do not grow up suppressing their fear.

Given the extraordinary emotional and other damage inflicted by school, you might consider educational opportunities for your child(ren) outside that framework. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

If you suspect that you are not as powerful as you would like, you might consider ‘Putting Feelings First’ so that you can learn to behave with awareness – a synthesis of all of the feedback that your various mental functions give you and the judgments that arise, in an integrated way, from this feedback. This will enable you to love yourself truly and always courageously act out your own self-will, whatever the consequences.

If you wish to work against the many threats, including military threats, to our environment simultaneously, you are welcome to join those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

And if you wish to be part of efforts to end violence and war, including the threat of nuclear annihilation, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’and/or using sound nonviolent strategy for your campaign or liberation struggle. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

Our world is poised perilously on the brink of catastrophic nuclear war. This has happened because we have given responsibility for holding the nuclear trigger to a handful of men who, emotionally speaking, are terrified little boys cowering from the imaginary threat of the bogeyman under their bed.

There is no easy way back from this brink. But you can help, both now and in the future, by doing one or more of the suggestions above.

*

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

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(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

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Both countries pursue regime change, wanting pro-Western puppet governance replacing Assad.

Endless war rages despite all-out Russian efforts for diplomatic conflict resolution.

It’s nowhere in sight, war likely to continue as long as Assad remains Syrian president – even if he’s reelected in an internationally monitored open, free and fair election like in June 2014, Washington, Israel and their rogue allies not likely to accept results as valid.

For the second time since last November, the third time since 2013, Israel reportedly terror-bombed Syria’s Jamraya Research and Information Center north of Damascus – its warplanes operating from Lebanese airspace.

A brief Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) statement said

“(t)he army air defense on Wednesday dawn confronted a new attack by the Israeli occupation entity on one of the sites in Damascus Countryside.”

No further elaboration was given, no information on damage or possible casualties, no confirmation from Israel about the attack. Reported explosions were heard in the area.

An unnamed source said Syria’s air defense system “dealt with these missiles and destroyed a number of them before reaching their targets.”

On Tuesday, Netanyahu and members of his security cabinet toured the Israeli/Syrian Golan border. He was quoted saying “we we are prepared for any scenario, and I do not suggest anyone test us.”

Claiming Israel “seeks peace” is bald-faced lie. Throughout the war, Israel terror-bombed Syrian targets numerous times, seeking an excuse to escalate conflict, daring Damascus to respond cross-border.

Netanyahu warned that if Iranian forces establish bases in the country or use Syrian ones, Israel will attack Syrian army positions and other military sites – a virtual declaration of war if happens.

A Tuesday article discussed phony US accusations of Syrian CW attacks – escalating tensions more than already, perhaps ahead of terror-bombing Syrian military targets.

An unnamed Trump administration official said all options are on the table.

“Using military force is something that is still considered.”

A second unnamed US official falsely accused Assad of intending new ways of using CWs, saying

“(i)t is incredibly important to stop that before it gets off the ground.”

The source ludicrously claimed these weapons “will spread to US shores if we cannot stop it,” ominously suggesting the Trump administration may escalate war on Syria – a serious development if occurs, risking confrontation with Russia.

During his Hoover Institution address in mid-January, Rex Tillerson ominously said

“(f)or nearly 50 years, the Syrian people have suffered under the dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad,” adding:

“The nature of the Assad regime, like that of its sponsor Iran, is malignant. It has promoted state terror. It has empowered groups that kill American soldiers, such as al-Qaida.”

“It has backed Hezbollah and Hamas. And it has violently suppressed political opposition” – disturbing rhetoric suggesting possible stepped up US efforts for regime change coming.

Tillerson called it crucial for Pentagon forces to remain indefinitely in Syria to protect US national security – for continued war and regime change, he failed to explain, the same strategy in all US imperial wars.

“(A) total withdrawal of American personnel at this time would restore Assad and continue his brutal treatment against his own people,” he roared, adding:

“A murderer of his own people cannot generate the trust required for long-term stability” – Tillerson’s rhetoric an utter perversion of truth, echoes of how Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were vilified ahead of US aggression, a pretext for pursuing Washington’s imperial agenda.

Washington’s rage for dominance represents humanity’s greatest threat, risking possible nuclear war, a doomsday scenario if launched.

*

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

Like the proverbial calm before the storm, war scares on the Korean peninsula have temporarily gone quiet while its two governments make nice over the 2018 Winter Olympics. But when the games end, count on the Trump administration reviving its ultimatum to North Korea: Stop all nuclear and missile testing and begin to denuclearize, or face a devastating, preemptive attack.

Given the sheer number of leaks from the Trump White House, we would almost certainly know by now if the President were simply bluffing about his intent to pursue a “military option”—otherwise known as war—to stop North Korea’s nuclear program. Instead, we’ve heard nothing but confirmation from his senior advisers, within and without the administration, about Trump’s commitment to use deadly force if Pyongyang does not yield.

Millions may die if the White House launches such a war. Given the huge stakes, Americans should be protesting in the streets, and members of Congress should be threatening to shut down the government, until the administration commits to peaceful resolution of the Korea issue. Instead, like anesthetized animals awaiting slaughter, most of us seem to be passively accepting our fate.

The U.S. military is certainly preparing to carry out a presidential order for war. Besides undertaking a host of war games with South Koreaover the past year, it has moved long-range B-52, B-1, and “stealth” B-2 bombers to Guam, from which they can strike North Korea with nuclear or conventional bombs. The Defense Department has also been testing the world’s most powerful non-nuclear bomb, the 30,000-pound GBU-57, which has the capacity to plow through hundreds of feet of earth to destroy “hardened” weapons silos.

As George W. Bush did in the run-up to his invasion of Iraq, Trump has also been building a public case for bringing “fire and fury” to North Korea, most recently in his State of the Union Address.

Echoing Bush’s rhetoric about not waiting for a “mushroom cloud,” Trump warned that

“North Korea’s reckless pursuit of nuclear missiles could very soon threaten our homeland.”

Without mentioning the power of America’s vast nuclear deterrent to keep us safe, he again echoed Bush’s rhetoric about Saddam’s regime:

“We need only look at the depraved character of the North Korean regime to understand the nature of the nuclear threat it could pose to America and to our allies.”

Staying on message to prevent the Olympics from diminishing Americans’ fear and loathing of Pyongyang, Trump is sending Vice President Pence to the games with the father of Otto Warmbier, an American college student who died after being imprisoned in North Korea.

The Cost of ‘Preventive’ War

Another recent signal of the White House’s intent was its decision to rescind its planned nomination of Victor Cha, a Georgetown University scholar who served in the George W. Bush administration, to be ambassador to South Korea. That position remains embarrassingly vacant more than a year into the Trump presidency.

Despite Cha’s hardline stance against North Korea’s nuclear program, he raised questions within the administration about the wisdom of a preventive military strike. Even a small attack, meant to give North Korea a “bloody nose” without escalating to all-out war, “would likely kill tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Americans,” he wrote in an op-ed column published after his nomination was dropped.

Cha added that even a large-scale attack “would only delay North Korea’s missile-building and nuclear programs, which are buried in deep, unknown places impenetrable to bunker-busting bombs. A strike also would not stem the threat of proliferation but rather exacerbate it, [creating] a vengeful effort intended to equip other bad actors against us.”

Meanwhile, a third of a million Americans resident in South Korea and Japan—not to mention millions of Koreans and Japanese—would be vulnerable to North Korean counterattack by artillery, missiles, and biochemical weapons, not to mention any remaining nukes.

“To be clear,” Cha wrote, “the president would be putting at risk an American population the size of a medium-size U.S. city—Pittsburgh, say, or Cincinnati.”

Cha’s casualty estimates aren’t seriously in question. Even Defense Secretary James Mattis said last summer that a war with North Korea would be “catastrophic.”

What’s more significant is the fact that, having spoken in confidence with all the relevant administration insiders, Cha evidently believes they remain committed to the option of preventive war. Trump has long vowed that he will never permit North Korea to develop nuclear missiles capable of reaching the United States—a feat that U.S. intelligence analysts say may be only months away.

The greatest immediate threat to U.S. national security, however, is not North Korean missiles per se, but the fact that the Trump White House faces so little push-back from outside the administration to its fast-approaching “military option.”

Indeed, the president’s golfing partner and foreign policy adviser Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, has been whispering in his ear for nearly a year about the pressing need to wipe out North Korea’s nuclear forces before they can reach the United States.

And just last week, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the temptation to launch a preemptive attack on North Korea is “strong and the argument rational.”

No wonder, then, the respected International Crisis Group warned recently that

“The threat of nightmarish war on the Korean peninsula is higher than at any time in recent history.”

A national poll released in mid-January found 71 percent Americans surveyed were concerned about war breaking out with North Korea.

Where is the Peace Movement—and Congress?

Yet the public has been strangely quiescent. Besides a handful of demonstrations around the country, the peace movement, such as it is, has been largely AWOL on the issue. Current campaigns of antiwar groups focus on “divestment from the war machine” and protests against the U.S. base in Guantanamo, but few have Korea as their focus.

The grassroots organization Peace Action is, however, helping to organize individual and group support for an “Olympic Truce” to promote a nonviolent settlement of issues on the Korean peninsula.

“The peace movement somewhat mirrors the public in concern regarding tensions with North Korea, but not being clear on what to do about it,” Peace Action’s President Kevin Martin told me. “That is beginning to change with our campaign around the Olympic Truce, which 128 organizations, including many Korean-American groups, have now endorsed.”

A few members of Congress have spoken out strongly about the need to “avoid a costly and catastrophic war on the Korean Peninsula,” as Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine put it recently. Two bills introduced in Congress, H.R. 4837 and S. 2016, call for “no unconstitutional strike against North Korea” without explicit authorization from Congress. But they have little Republican support and no immediate chance of passage.

In a letter sent to President Trump on Monday, 18 Democratic senators said they are “deeply concerned about the potential consequences of a preemptive military strike on North Korea and the risks of miscalculation and retaliation.”

But even they seem to accept the administration’s framing of the issue. Warning that “it would be extremely irresponsible to instigate military conflict prior to exhausting every diplomatic option” (my emphasis), they ignore the success the United States has had deterring every other hostile nuclear power, including Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China. CIA intelligence analysts have concluded that Kim Jong-un’s regime is both rational and deterrable, meaning that there is no cause for preemptive war, whatever the outcome of diplomacy.

Time is fast running out for Americans and their representatives in Congress to wake up and put handcuffs on the Trump administration before it triggers mass murder in North Asia, and possibly much closer to home. It will take an Olympic-sized campaign, but the stakes could not be higher.

*

Jonathan Marshall is author or co-author of five books on international relations and history. His articles on Korea include “America Isn’t on the Brink of Nuclear War—It Just Looks That Way,” “What’s Wrong with Talking to North Korea?,”  “Trump’s North Korea Delusions,” “The New Trump: War President,” “Hurtling Toward Fire and Fury,” “Risk to US from War on North Korea,” “North Korea Fears ‘Regime Change’ Strike,” “The Negotiation Option With North Korea,” and “Behind the North Korean Nuke Crisis.”

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

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You only had to see him goggle eyed and enthusiastic beside France’s President Emmanuel Macron last Bastille Day.  The tricolours were fluttering, the jets booming above in the manner usual for a lapsed empire, and the President of the United States was thrilled to bits, delighted at the spectacle. 

“It was one of the greatest parades I’ve ever seen.  We’re going to have to try and top it.”

Donald Trump wetting himself over a military parade in another country was one thing. That he is now attempting to bring that experience back to the United States has local policy figures in a fix.  According to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, the

president “has asked the Department of Defense to explore a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation.”

The good citizens of the United States have tended to associate such military affairs with the goosestepping types, eyes glazed and bayonets erect with purpose before authoritarian clowns.  Only foreign types, unmoved by the impulse of American liberty, engage in that sort of thing.

In some ways, having such a parade would be a natural order for a power that remains in denial about its imperial pedigree, bastard or otherwise.  There is a near pathological preference to live in the bright delusional light of free world defender of peace.

“As distinct from other peoples,” wrote the late Chalmers Johnson, that keen student of US empire and its consequences, “most Americans do not recognize – or do not want to recognize – that the United States dominates the world through its military power.”

An orgiastic display of US military symbolism would be a direct, if discomforting change from the usual pattern.  States often tend to have military shows that are inversely proportionate to their economic and social success.  More guns do not necessarily imply more butter in the home.  The Soviet Union, and the current Russian incarnation, insisted on military parades as matters of pride, though such shows are as revealing as they are concealing.  As Moscow terrified with its military prowess and gritty warriors parading before the greys and browns of the politburo, the state was unravelling in sickness, awaiting ultimate implosion.

North Korea similarly insists on the star studded show, the pantomime of military hardware and vocal troops captivated by supreme leader, Kim Jong-un.  To take such an aggressive stance serves to also conceal weakness and internal fragility.  Besides, such displays provide epic distractions for troubled populaces, a sort of cinematic release packaged in military grandeur.

To that end, a US military parade would reverse the order of things.  To have such a parade could be likened to a coming out ceremony, a grand confession to the globe.  The United States, through dozens of military bases webbing the entire globe like Arachne’s thread, prefers the rhetoric of restraint and order while waging a series of conflicts that result in an order of permanent war for permanent peace.

It was the coming of the Cold War, and the emergence of the United States as the pre-eminent power after the Second World War, that prompted the remark by the sharp Charles Beard that the foreign policy of both Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman could be classed as the waging of “perpetual war for perpetual peace”.  That assessment duly stuck, though the US public, for the most part, went into a state of permanent amnesia.

One symptom of empire common to all entities which have undertaken this venture is the illusion of some lingering order without disturbance, the civilizing effects of the Pax Romana delivered through soldiers bearing the gift of peace or the more recent Pax Americana.  This supplies the nursery story, widely disseminated, that international peace is maintained in such circumstances while swords are turned to ploughshares.

Quite the opposite is true.  Such states of affairs ensure a constant demand for conflict, the need for police operations and bloody corrections, the deployment of auxiliaries and allies, and the necessity for a hardened military industrial complex.

A mild acquaintance with those blood thirsty deliverers of peace, the Romans, provides the surest precedent by which subsequent empires supposedly interested in peace thrive upon.  The parallels between US narratives of power, and those of Rome, are striking.  True, the Roman empire incorporated local power elites and spread citizenship.

“It was generosity,” notes classicist Mary Beard, “even if sprung from self-interest.”

But it was Tacitus in his inimitable account of Agricola, his father-in-law’s exploits as governor of Britain in the late first century AD, that left a superb critique of empire that remains as pertinent to the US as any other.

Tacitus takes note of the Caledonian resistance figure Calgacus, whose speech does not merely attack the imperial predations of Rome, but the euphemising nature of power and its concealments.

“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

There is nothing to suggest that Calcagus ever said anything of the sort in the name of liberty to rouse his troops – Tacitus was a despairing critic of empire and its consequences, being both recorder and analyst.

From matters of conspiracy to an emphasis on the fake news complex; to the suspicions of suited establish doyens who have long steered empire in the shadows while proclaiming the virtues of liberty, Trump’s opportunity for another show is here.  It is time to put the US empire on display.

As he has done before, the current president overturns convention and confronts the deep seated psychic disturbances of the US state.  Forget the clichés and deceptions about delivering peace. Ignore the alarm from the imperial closeted types.  (We, claimed Representative Jackie Speier, “have a Napoleon in the making here.”)  Put stock, instead, in matters of belligerence, of making deserts.  Place that weaponry on show in lusty, persuasive fashion.  And most importantly of all, make Little Rocket Man green with envy.

*

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

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

Following the highly acclaimed 2012 release of the latest book by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, “Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War“.  

Click here to order directly from Global Research.

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Trump escalated Obama’s war on Syria, continuing to use ISIS and other terrorists as imperial foot soldiers he vowed to combat – instead supporting them like his predecessor.

Syria destroyed its CW arsenal. Elimination began in September 2013, the operation completed in late June 2014 – confirmed by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

No evidence shows any CWs remain in the hands of its government or military. Claims otherwise are false. No evidence supports them.

US-supported terrorists alone continue using toxic agents, largely against civilians, incidents falsely blamed on Damascus, a likely sinister Trump administration plot to justify attacking its forces, putting conflict resolution further out of reach – risking confrontation with Russia.

The objectives of both countries are world’s apart on Syria and other geopolitical issues. Russia supports diplomatic resolution of all conflicts. Washington wants them continued – in Syria for regime change, aiming for another imperial trophy, along with isolating Iran ahead of targeting its government for regime change.

In late January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their doomsday clock closer to midnight – reflecting an increased risk of nuclear war or ecocide since Trump took office.

A ticking time bomb reflects world conditions – hugely dangerous flashpoints on the Korean peninsula, in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere.

Washington’s endless wars, its rage for transforming all sovereign independent countries into US vassal states, no matter the risks or human toll, bears full responsibility for what’s going on – a combustible situation risking nuclear war.

The Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s phrase “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad” applies to US administrations and bipartisan lawmakers – especially today with neocons infesting Washington.

The NYT, CIA-connected Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN, and other US media scoundrels continue publishing false reports of Syrian CW use – every time an incident allegedly involving these weapons surfaces, repeating claims by Trump administration officials without due diligence checking.

On Monday, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert cited unverified “allegations of the use of chlorine gas by (Damascus) to terrorize innocent civilians, this time in Idlib Province near Saraqib.”

She called it “the sixth such reported instance in the past 30 days,” adding:

“…Russia ultimately bears responsibility (for these attacks) since (it) became involved in Syria. By shielding (its government) from accountability, Russia has not lived up to its commitments.”

The above remarks lack credibility – a disgraceful attempt to blame Syria and Russia for alleged and real CW attacks by US-supported terrorists, Pentagon contractors training these elements in their use.

On the same day, neocon Trump administration UN envoy Nikki Haley ranted irresponsibly about nonexistent Syrian use of CWs during a Security Council session on Syria, saying:

“The news out of Syria this morning is following a troubling pattern. There are reports of yet another chemical weapons attack on Sunday.”

Haley disgracefully blamed Assad for the alleged incident, falsely claiming he’s used chlorine gas “multiple times in recent weeks” against civilians – an absurd accusation.

Syria forces have been defending their people for seven years against US-supported terrorists. Washington and its rogue allies alone benefit from CW incidents, why so many are staged by ISIS, al-Nusra and other terrorists they support.

Haley accused “Russia (of) sen(ding) us back to square one in the effort to end chemical weapons use in Syria.”

Russia’s UN envoy Vasily Nebenzya said his

government “cannot accept…unconfirmed references to the use of chemical weapons (in Syria) until a reliable investigation is carried out, and we cannot accept a threat to a sovereign state for unproven actions.”

He slammed Washington and Britain for using the Security Council “to slander Russia,” adding:

“It is absolutely clear for us why. The success of the Syrian National Dialogue Congress in Sochi and prospects for giving an impetus to the political process in Syria seem to be a pain in the neck for someone.”

“So, a strong slander attack on Russia is needed to try once again to call to question its role in political settlement.”

Washington and its rogue allies want endless war and regime change in Syria, not diplomatic conflict resolution.

They’re going all-out to prevent it, including by terrorists they support launching CW attacks, falsely blamed on Damascus.

*

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

The House Intelligence Committee Memo on possible FBI and Justice Department malfeasance relating mostly to the investigation of Donald Trump associate Carter Page is in some ways a bewildering document. As a former intelligence officer, the first thing I noticed was that the claim by Democrats on the Committee that the memo’s release amounted to “treason” and would compromise classified information does not hold water. I could identify nothing in the memo that was even plausibly damaging to national security, though it might be argued that writing down anything about the activity and operation of the FISA court is ipso facto a compromise of secrets. It is a view that I would dispute because the memo does not actually expose any ongoing investigations or place in danger law enforcement officials. It is one of those fake security arguments that go something like “It is secret because it is secret.”

The document is generally being referred to as the “Nunes Memo” after the name of the head of the House Intelligence Community, Devin Nunes, who ordered it drafted and who has been promoting its release. Having read the text through a number of times, it would appear to me that, in spite of Republican claims, it is somewhat less than a bombshell. It will need considerable elaboration to allow one to come to any real conclusions regarding whether sometimes sloppy FBI and DOJ procedures were either deliberate or driven by malice. It suggests that the Bureau may have been less than forthcoming in seeking a FISC ruling on Carter Page, who was at the time of the warrant not any longer a low-level associate of the Trump campaign, but there is no real hard evidence that the omission was deliberate and no compelling revelation of motive apart from the evidence that some senior officials and the author of the Steele Dossier did not like Donald Trump.

Even the evidence about the critically important Steele Dossier provided by the memo is somewhat ambiguous, particularly as the document suggests that Steele was a paid and fully controlled “intelligence source” of the Bureau and must have been acting under FBI direction. His meeting with a Legatt Officer in Rome at the insistence of the Bureau also suggests that he was cooperating without authorization from his former employer MI6, which could mean trouble down the road for Steele.

Beyond that there is some confusion. One source, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, said, but has since recanted, that the dossier was essential to the FISC request while another Assistant FBI Director Bill Priestap saying its allegations were in their “infancy” of being corroborated. That would seem to suggest that the Bureau deliberately used an unvetted Steele report of questionable provenance to make a case to surveil an American citizen under FISA, but is that really true? Indeed, it appears that the Democrats will concede that the dossier was used but it was only a “small and insignificant” part of the case. But if that was not so and the Republican allegation is basically correct, it would be devastating as the dossier was, in FBI Director James Comey’s judgment, “salacious.” And we do not know, of course, what the Bureau had developed on Page independently, which is no doubt what its counter-offensive and that of the Democrats will also focus on, a response which, incidentally, could reveal actual secrets relating to intelligence sources and methods.

And then there is FISA itself and its court. It is a peculiar structure intended to protect the civil liberties of suspects suspected of being “foreign agents” by requiring the government to show cause for a surveillance, but it has morphed into a rubber stamp for investigation of anyone and nearly everyone who can plausibly be suspected of nearly anything. It has replaced the civil court standard of “probable cause” to initiate surveillance with nothing more than suspicion. It only hears one side of an argument, that provided by the FBI, and it approves over 99% of requests. The investigations that it authorizes are far more intrusive than in normal civil or criminal cases, to include nearly everything connected with an individual.

So, we are left with a bowl of porridge – the FBI might have, and probably did, frontload its request to the court to favor the action that it wanted to take, but isn’t that normal procedure anyway? Is anyone expecting a police agency charged with finding and arresting bad guys and promoting its people on that basis to be objective? If one looks at the terrorism related convictions since 2001, it is clear that the Bureau will do whatever it takes to get a conviction, up to an including inserting informants who actually instigate the criminal activity, a practice known as entrapment. Even the FISA court is aware of FBI inventiveness. In 2002 it identified 75 false or misleading claims made by Bureau officers and some officials have been blocked from testifying before the court due to their having provided false witness.

FBI procedures and ambiguities aside, this is nevertheless serious business. If it can be determined that the omissions in submissions to the FISC were deliberate and calculated, the astute blogger Publius Tacitus has correctly observed that some senior FBI and DOJ officials who signed off on misleading or fraudulent applications concealing the antecedents of the so-called Steele Dossier to the FISC are now facing possible contempt-of-court charges that would include prison sentences. They include James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rob Rosenstein.

So there is likely considerably more controversy to come, whether or not the Bureau can or cannot provide backstory that credibly challenges the Republican Intelligence Committee memo. But it is also intriguing to consider what is missing from the document. As it is focused on the FBI and DOJ, there is no speculation about the possible role of senior intelligence officials CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Michael Isikoff reported in September 2016 that the two men were involved in obtaining information on Page and it has also been suggested that Brennan sought and obtained raw intelligence from British, Polish, Dutch and Estonian intelligence services, which apparently was then passed on to the Bureau and might have motivated James Comey to proceed with his investigation of the Trump associates. One has to consider that Brennan and Clapper, drawing on intelligence resources and connections, might have helped the FBI build a fabricated case against Trump.

Senator John McCain, a highly vocal critic of Trump, might have also become involved, wittingly or unwittingly, in the project to feed derogatory information on the GOP president-elect and his associates to the FBI. He reportedly obtained a copy of the Steele Dossier in December 2017 and passed it on to Comey, clearly intending that the FBI Director should take some action regarding it.

Indeed, there were many prominent voices raised demanding that something be done about Donald Trump. Eleven months ago, shortly after Trump took office, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, speculated on how he had been “…led to believe that maybe even the Democratic Party, whatever element of it, approached John Brennan at the CIA, maybe even the former president of the United States. And John Brennan, not wanting his fingerprints to be on anything, went to his colleague in London GCHQ, MI-6 and essentially said, ‘Give me anything you’ve got.’ And he got something and he turned it over to the DNC or someone like that. And what he got was GCHQ MI-6s tapes of conversations of the Trump administration perhaps, even the President himself. It’s really kind of strange, at least to me, they let the head of that organization go, fired him about the same this was brewing up. So I’m not one to defend Trump, but in this case he might be right.”

Wilkerson is referring to the highly unusual abrupt resignation of Robert Hannigan, the Director of Britain’s version of the National Security Agency (NSA), referred to by the acronym GCHQ, which took place on January 23^rd of last year. The British Official Secrets Act has meant that there was at that time little speculation in the U.K. media about the move, but some observers have wondered if it is somehow connected to possible collaboration with U.S. intelligence officers over Donald Trump. That remains an area of inquiry that has hardly been looked at, perhaps because the thought that the country’s top national security agencies were involved in a something like a grand conspiracy to subvert an election is still something that Congress would prefer not to consider.

One truly very interesting aspect of the Republican memo that has been scarcely commented upon is that even though the mainstream media is continuing to exercise its dangerous obsession with Russia by demanding that the Russiagate inquiry should continue full speed in spite of the concerns raised by the Republicans, there is absolutely nothing in the memo itself that indicates that Moscow tried to recruit any Trump associate as an agent or interfere in the U.S. election. The raison d’etre for the Congressional and Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigations appears to be lacking. Perhaps it is all sound and fury signifying nothing, but Russia might in reality have done little beyond the usual probing and nosing around that intelligence agencies routinely do. If the alleged Russiagate conspiracy is never actually demonstrated, which looks increasingly likely, it would certainly disappoint the many American talking heads and media “experts” who have been making a living off of bashing Moscow 24/7.

*

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

Featured image is from the author.

Amid the media frenzy surrounding the Nunes-Trump memo, the Pentagon officially released its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) last week. The NPR calls for the development of leaner, meaner nuclear weapons and lowers the threshold for the use of nukes. Donald Trump must be thrilled. During the presidential campaign, he questioned a senior foreign policy adviser about nuclear weapons three times during a briefing, asking, “If we had them why can’t we use them?”

The NPR calls for “low-yield” nuclear weapons on submarine-launched ballistic missiles — weapons that could cause as much damage as the bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For the first time, the new NPR states that the United States could use nuclear weapons in response to non-nuclear attacks, including cyberattacks, in “extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States, its allies and partners.” This new strategy opens the door to first-use of nuclear weapons, which is prohibited under international law.

In its 1996 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded that while the use of nuclear weapons might be lawful when used in self-defense if the survival of the nation were at stake, a first-strike use would not be.

The ICJ held in its “Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons” case that “the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law.”

“However,” the IJC continued, “the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”

Framing Russia and China as Nuclear Threats

Russia, China and North Korea are singled out as potential nuclear threats in the NPR. The document “erroneously states that the United States needs new nuclear weapons because ‘China is expanding and modernizing its considerable nuclear forces’ and is pursuing ‘entirely new nuclear capabilities,'” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

Gregory Kulacki, China project manager at the UCS Global Security Program and author of the UCS’s newly released white paper, said,

“There is no evidence that nuclear weapons are becoming more prominent in China’s military strategy or that China has changed its longstanding no-first-use policy.”

The NPR has alarmed foreign leaders. Mohammad Javad Zarif, foreign minister of Iran, tweeted that the NPR brings “humankind closer to annihilation.” The United States is “shamelessly threatening Russia with a new atomic weapon,” Iranian president Hassan Rouhani stated.

“The same people who supposedly believe that using weapons of mass destruction is a crime against humanity are talking about new weapons to threaten or use against rivals,” he added.

Ren Guoqiang, a spokesman for the Chinese defense ministry, said in a statement,

“We hope the US side will discard its ‘cold-war mentality,’ [and] shoulder its own special and primary responsibility for nuclear disarmament.”

Both Beijing and Moscow reaffirmed that nuclear weapons are not “first strike” weapons. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stressed that nuclear weapons are only a defensive deterrent. He listed the following “entirely defensive scenarios” for the threshold use of nuclear weapons: “in response to an act of aggression against Russia and (or) against our allies if nuclear or other types of mass destruction weapons are used, and also … with use of conventional arms but only in case our state’s very existence would be in danger.”

Where Is This Coming From?

Keith Payne, president of the National Institute for Public Policy, was one of the key drafters of the NPR. In 1980, Payne astoundingly claimed in Foreign Policy that the United States could win a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. US casualties, Payne argued, could be limited to “approximately 20 million people,” which, he called, “a level compatible with national survival and recovery.”

Derek Johnson, executive director of Global Zero, the international movement for the elimination of nuclear weapons, said in a statement that the

NPR is “a radical plan written by extreme elements and nuclear ideologues in Trump’s inner circle who believe nuclear weapons are a wonder drug that can solve our national security challenges. They aren’t and they can’t.”

Indeed, a retired senior Army officer told The American Conservative that the lower-yield warheads give Trump “a kind of gateway drug for nuclear war.”

“This plan would be troubling under any Administration,” Johnson observed, “but given this President’s consistent and unabashed displays of ignorance, ballistic tendencies and dehumanizing world views, we should all be on red alert.”

Johnson expressed support for legislation that would restrict the first use of nuclear weapons.

Sixteen senators wrote in a letter to Trump on January 29,

“[Y]our NPR would undermine decades of U.S. leadership on efforts to reduce and eventually eliminate the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons.”

The senators noted that the NPR fails to mention Article VI of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which enshrines a commitment “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” The United States is a party to the NPT.

A “senior nuclear thinker and NPR critic” explained how the document’s recommendations were developed.

“[T]he story you won’t hear is how this really came about,” he told The American Conservative. “One day, Sean Hannity got on television and talked about how we need more nuclear weapons and Donald Trump heard this and went over to the Pentagon and presto, we got Keith Payne and his crew. That’s the truth, and that’s what got us to where we are.”

Apparently, Hannity, whose hype on Fox News about the Nunes-Trump memo continues to poison the national debate, is becoming Trump’s main foreign policy guru.

Sixty percent of Americans don’t trust Trump with nuclear weapons, according to a recent NBC News/Washington Post poll.

*

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

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

Featured image is from rudall30 / Shutterstock.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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Today, February 5, 2018 the main US stock market, the DOW, fell another 1,175 points, the largest drop in its history. That followed a major decline of 665 points the preceding Friday. The total two day decline amounts to 7.5%.  The other major US stock markets, the Nasdaq and S&P 500 also registered significant declines of similar percentages. Markets in Japan and Europe followed suit over the weekend in response to Friday’s US drop; and are expected to fall comparably to the US when they open for Tuesday, February 6.  What’s going on?  More important still, what will go on—in the next few days and in the weeks to come?

The business press and media trotted out all the experts today. The ‘spin’ and message was “don’t panic” folks.  This is to be expected, they say, given the bubble price run-up through 2017, and especially since last November 2017, after which the bubble accelerated still faster.  In the month of January alone, the DOW rose nearly 7%. That’s considered a good ‘year’s gain’ in ordinary times.  Yet mainstream economists say it hasn’t been a bubble, while they give no definition of what a bubble exactly is—because they don’t know.  But certainly a DOW run-up from around 16,000 lows in 2016 to more than 26,000 in little more than a year constitutes as a bubble.

But the media talking heads parading in front of cameras today sing the same song, “don’t panic”. It comes in various keys: “It’s a welcome pullback”, a “constructive sell off”, an “opportunity to buy on the dip” and other such nonsense. But when asked why now the collapse, they have nothing to add.

What it represents, however, is professional institutional investors decided to ‘take their money and run’, leaving the small investors to take the losses. And more are coming. The professionals realize that the central bank, the Fed, is going to raise interest rates 3-4 times this year. That has already begun to send the bond markets into a tailspin. And now stocks are following suit. The stock markets have risen to bubble territory for several reasons:

One is the 9 year massive injection of free money by the Fed and other central banks. More than necessary to invest in real production, so it flows into financial markets in the US and worldwide. Corporate profits since 2010 have nearly tripled, and capital gains taxes have been steadily reduced by trillions of dollars since 2010 as well. Corporations have kept a steady flow of money capital to their shareholders with 7 years of stock buybacks and dividend payouts—averaging a trillion dollars a year for seven years! Profits, dividends, buybacks, capital gains tax cuts resulted in trillions flowing into financial markets.  Add to that record levels of margin buying of stocks by small investors (always a sign of bubbles) and that’s the source of the record price appreciation of stock markets. And, of course, let’s not forget the Trump business-investor tax cuts of more than $4 trillion (not $1.5) that are coming on top of it all—that will subsidize profits with an immediate 10%-31% profits boost, on top of the record profits that US corporations had already attained. Massive money capital injections surging into stock and other financial markets. That’s why the bubble.

But what of the bust? Why now—not before or later? It’s because of changes in the markets themselves: the advent of what’s called ‘momentum trading’ by big institutions like quant hedge funds and others; by the shift to passive investing and what’s called index funds; by derivatives like ETFs driving stock prices as well.  All the above result in rising prices sucking in more money capital just because prices are rising….which results in still more prices rising.

Until of course the central bank convinces them that the ‘punchbowl of free money’ is being drained. Then the professionals take their money and run, leaving the ‘herd’ of small investors holding the empty bag.

What’s most interesting is that the Fed’s interest rates haven’t even reached 2% and the system has cracked. In 2007, Fed rates had to exceed 5% before the credit crash was set in slow motion.  But this writer predicted that would be the case, i.e. that the Fed rates could not rise above 2-2.25% (and the 10 year Treasury bond much above 3%) without precipitating another credit crisis.

But the stock crash of February 2 and 5 is not the beginning nor the end of what’s coming. There may be a further decline in coming days but it will stabilize. There will be a recovery or sorts. But it will be a ‘dead cat bounce’, as is always the case in such events. Some weeks, or even months later, the real contraction will begin. And that will be the real one.

To recall events of 2008, it was the collapse of Countrywide Mortgage and Bear Stearns investment bank in early 2008 that were the warning signs. Recovery temporarily followed, until Fannie Mae and then Lehman Brothers set the real forces in motion. The precipitating events may not even originate in the US but outside. Japan and Emerging Market economy stock markets are especially vulnerable. But financial markets are global and tightly integrated in today’s capitalist system. Contagion is built into the system globally. And investors move their money around worldwide in an instant. They will eventually pull back, wait and see, and the markets temporarily restabilize.  Is it an opportunity to scoop up the losses of the smaller herd investors that will have lost trillions this week? That’s what the professional investors, the big institutional investors, the hedge funds, private equity, the big capitalists will now be asking themselves. Or is it the real contraction that will drive the markets down at least 20% in coming days and weeks? They will also ask themselves will the Fed hold to its plan to continue to raise rates? If it does, the they’ll decide the  great stock bull run of 2010-18 and its bubble is over and they’ll move to the sidelines for the foreseeable future, not temporarily. They’ll take their trillions of dollars and run. And when they do, the real contraction will begin….and the road to the next recession.

In the meantime, watch the dead cat as it bounces. How high. And when it lands will it flop over dead or get up and run again?

*

Dr. Jack Rasmus is author of the 2017 book, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression’, Clarity Press, August 2017, and Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy, Clarity Press, 2016

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Global Research has endorsed the initiative of the World Socialist Web Site to create a Worldwide coalition to fight internet censorship.

The United States government, in the closest collaboration with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other powerful information technology corporations, is implementing massive restrictions on Internet access to socialist, antiwar and progressive websites. Similar repressive policies are being enacted by capitalist governments in Europe and throughout the world.

The new regime of censorship is being combined with an intensification of surveillance operations, aimed at monitoring what people read, write and think while on the Internet. The actions of this alliance of the state, military-intelligence agencies and oligopolistic technology corporations are a dangerous threat to freedom of speech and other core democratic rights.

Under the fraudulent cover of eliminating “fake news” and “Russian meddling,” the technological scaffolding of a 21st century capitalist police state is being erected.

In the summer of 2017, the World Socialist Web Site published information exposing Google’s manipulation of search results, beginning in April, to limit traffic to left-wing sites. The WSWS reported a nearly 70 percent decline in readers resulting from Google searches. Of the 150 top Google search terms that, until April 2017, had generated traffic to the WSWS, 145 no longer produced even a single search result for our website. The WSWS investigation also showed that other oppositional websites, like globalresearch.ca, consortiumnews.com, counterpunch.org, alternet.com, wikileaks.com and truthdig.org, had experienced substantial declines in Google search-generated readership.

In an Open Letter to Google’s principal executives, dated August 25, 2017, David North, the chairperson of the WSWS International Editorial Board, wrote:

Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting. The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree. Political blacklisting is not a legitimate exercise of whatever may be Google’s prerogatives as a commercial enterprise. It is a gross abuse of monopolistic power. What you are doing is an attack on freedom of speech.

We therefore call on you and Google to stop blacklisting the WSWS and renounce the censorship of all the left-wing, socialist, antiwar and progressive websites that have been affected adversely by your new discriminatory search policies.

Google did not answer this letter. But an article reporting the findings of the WSWS, which appeared in The New York Times on September 26, 2017, cited Google’s claim “that its search algorithm undergoes a rigorous testing process to ensure that its results do not reflect political, gender, racial or ethnic bias.”

This was an out-and-out lie. Since the initial WSWS exposure, the Government-Military-Intelligence-Corporate Technology Complex is making no secret of the fact that it is intensifying its censorship efforts on a global scale. In December 2017, the Trump administration repealed net neutrality, while governments in Germany, France and elsewhere also have begun crackdowns on Internet free speech. In January 2018, Facebook implemented changes to its newsfeed to block access to news, specifically targeting left-wing sites, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg claiming, in duplicitous corporate newspeak, that this change was to make users “feel more connected and less lonely.”

The threat to democratic rights is far-reaching and immediate. The development of the Internet in the 1990s created possibilities for a vast expansion in information sharing and world communications. But in response to exploding social inequality, growing popular discontent and heightened international tensions, the capitalist states and billionaire oligarchs who own and control information, artificial intelligence and communications technologies are transforming the Internet into a tool for state surveillance, dictatorship, private profit and war.

In a statement sent to the World Socialist Web Site’s January 16 Webinar Organizing Resistance to Internet Censorship, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange correctly warned:

While the Internet has brought about a revolution in people’s ability to educate themselves and others, the resulting democratic phenomena has shaken existing establishments to their core. Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are socially, logistically and financially integrated with existing elites have moved to re-establish discourse control.

Activist and filmmaker John Pilger, in another message to the WSWS webinar, condemned the manipulation of search results and algorithms as “rank censorship,” adding,

“With independent journalists ejected from the mainstream, the world wide web remains the vital source of serious disclosure and evidence-based analysis: true journalism.”

The ruling class has identified the Internet as a mortal threat to its monopolization of information and its ability to promote propaganda to wage war and legitimize the obscene concentration of wealth and extreme social inequality. Democracy and the free flow of information are incompatible with contemporary capitalism. Eight billionaires possess the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population, some 3.6 billion people. The oligarchy, in total control of the world economy, fears the Internet as an arena for discussion, information sharing, and political organization of the worldwide struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperialist wars.

In 2017, 3.8 billion people used the Internet worldwide, some 52 percent of the total population, up from 1.0 billion, or 16 percent of the population, in 2005. Over 70 percent of young people are now online, a total of 830 million people, including 320 million in China and India alone. Mobile broadband subscriptions rose from roughly 1.7 billion in 2012 to over 5 billion in 2017, with the largest increases in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The world working class, larger, more connected and more internationally integrated than ever before, possesses tremendous potential political power.

The arguments used by the Democratic and Republican parties and corporate media to justify Internet censorship, information control and police-state surveillance are a pack of lies. Their aim is to create an atmosphere of paranoiac fear to eliminate democratic rights and legal due process.

Former US Army and FBI agent Clint Watts told the US Senate on January 17,

“Lesser-educated populations around the world predominately arriving in cyberspace via mobile phones will be particularly vulnerable to the social media manipulation of terrorists and authoritarians.”

Facebook attorney Monika Bickert employed Orwellian language when she told the Senate,

“We are increasingly finding new ways to disrupt false news and help people connect with authentic news—we know that’s what they want to do.”

The invocation of “fake news” no less than “Russian meddling” is fraudulent. The Democrats, Republicans and the corporate media propagandists of The New York Times and Washington Post (which is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos) accuse oppositional websites of engaging in what is, in fact, the specialty of these capitalist publications, i.e., promulgating fake news.

There is no better example of this than the false claims of “weapons of mass destruction,” which preceded the 2003 invasion of Iraq and led to the deaths of over 1 million people. Totally unproven claims of “Russian meddling” are now being made by a government that is engaged in permanent war, has conducted regime change operations on every continent, and has troops stationed all over the world. The ruling class is using these concocted allegations to criminalize dissent and label the publication of critical opinions the equivalent of treason.

Imperialist wars are always accompanied by political repression. Weeks after US entry into World War I, Congress passed the Espionage Act, and used it to jail socialists and deport radical immigrants. During World War II, the government blocked socialists from mailing their newspapers, prosecuted Trotskyists under the Smith Act, and interned over 100,000 Japanese in concentration camps. Facing mass opposition to the Vietnam War, the Johnson and Nixon administrations implemented the infamous COINTELPRO program to spy on innumerable civil rights and left-wing political activists. Since 2001, the Democrats and Republicans have established mass surveillance programs through the PATRIOT and FISA Acts, created a network of black site prisons, and protected CIA torturers under the guise of combating “terrorism.”

The US military views the democratic potential of social media as a major threat to its operations. In a December 21, 2016 strategy document, the US Army War College wrote,

“The implications of social media and the rapid spread of information (and disinformation) in a highly digital city can be profound … Here in the United States, the release of videos showing killings by police has led to significant protests and political movements.”

In another document, published in April 2017, the War College voiced its fear that

“A population equipped with smartphones and willing to communicate to others about the events taking place in their area is able to generate a picture of ongoing events in real time across the span of that population.”

The scale of the danger must not be underestimated. As independent journalist Chris Hedges, who participated with David North in the WSWS webinar, has explained:

This censorship is global. The German government’s Network Enforcement Act fines social media companies for allegedly objectionable content. French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to remove “fake news” from the internet. Facebook and Instagram erased the accounts of Ramzan Kadyrov, the dictator of the Chechen Republic, because he is on a U.S. sanctions list. Kadyrov is certainly repugnant, but this ban, as the American Civil Liberties Union points out, empowers the U.S. government to effectively censor content. Facebook, working with the Israeli government, has removed over 100 accounts of Palestinian activists. This is an ominous march to an Orwellian world of Thought Police, “Newspeak” and “thought-crime” or, as Facebook likes to call it, “de-ranking” and “counterspeech.” [Truthdig.com, January 21, 2018]

The mounting threat to the survival of basic democratic rights must be resisted. This requires the organization and coordination of a broad coalition against Internet censorship and surveillance. Toward this end, the World Socialist Web Site is sponsoring the formation of the International Coalition of Socialist, Antiwar and Progressive Websites.  We welcome the participation of socialist, antiwar and progressive websites and organizations, as well as individual activists and journalists, who are willing and prepared to form a coalition for the specific purpose of opposing Internet censorship.

However, for the International Coalition of Socialist, Antiwar and Progressive Websites to be effective, there must be an agreement on a specific set of principles, which should include:

• Safeguarding the Internet as a platform for political organization and the free exchange of information, culture and diverse viewpoints, guided by the principle that access to the Internet is a right and must be free and equally available for all.
• Uncompromising insistence on the complete independence of the Internet from control by governments and private corporations.
• Unconditional defense of net neutrality and free, unfettered and equal access to the Internet.
• The banning and illegalization of government and corporate manipulation of search algorithms and procedures, including the use of human evaluators, that restrict and block public visibility of websites.
• Irreconcilable opposition to the use of the Internet and artificial intelligence technologies to carry out surveillance of web users.
• Demanding the end to the persecution of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and the complete restoration of their personal freedom.
• Advocating the transformation of the corporate Internet monopolies into public utilities, under internationally coordinated democratic control, to provide the highest quality service, not private profit.
• The fight against Internet censorship and the defense of democratic rights cannot be conducted through appeals to capitalist governments and the parties and politicians who serve their interests, but only in uncompromising struggle against them. Moreover, this struggle is international in scope and totally opposed to every form and manifestation of national chauvinism, racism and imperialist militarism. Therefore, those who are truly committed to the defense of democratic rights must direct their efforts to the mobilization of the working class of all countries.

In accordance with these principles, the international coalition should undertake the following essential tasks:

•  Develop a systematic campaign of written exposés to be posted on the Internet and transmitted widely through all available forms of social media as well as through the distribution of printed leaflets, brochures and pamphlets to expose Government and corporate censorship.
• Amplify awareness of the threat to Internet free speech by aiding one another in the sharing of articles, videos, interviews, graphics, and other content.
• Organize meetings and establish discussion groups on the fight against Internet censorship in work places, neighborhoods, and schools.
• Mobilize combined resources to defend and publicize websites, groups, and individuals who are targeted by the censors and the state.

Agreement on the principles and tasks of the coalition will be an effective starting point for the development of an international counter-offensive against the conspiracy of governments and corporations to censor the Internet and destroy democratic rights.

In the International Coalition of Socialist, Antiwar and Progressive Websites, there will inevitably be a wide range of opinions and conflicting views on many political questions. Participation does not require the acceptance of a single political line. The participating websites and organizations will be free to continue their own independent work.

The World Socialist Web Site does not seek to dictate to other organizations what their politics should be, nor will we accept any restraints on our socialist political perspective in the interest of an unprincipled unity.

However, the World Socialist Web Site, as the Internet presence of the International Committee of the Fourth International, will continue to advance its Marxist and socialist program, policies and analysis. We will seek to rally support for the expropriation of the technology monopolies, and the establishment of international and democratic control of the Internet. The WSWS will fight for the understanding that the effective defense of free speech and all democratic rights requires a struggle against imperialist war, the ending of the capitalist system, and the establishment of a socialist society.

The WSWS will emphasize that Internet censorship, carried out by powerful capitalist states and immense transnational corporations, can be successfully opposed only to the extent that the great power of the international working class is brought to bear in this fight. It is critical to establish an understanding in the working class of the inseparable connection between the defense of their class interests—their living standards, working conditions, wages, etc.—and the fight for democratic rights. Without access to alternative news and social media, workers in different countries will not be able to effectively coordinate their common struggles. Unfettered access to the Internet will facilitate the international unity of the working class in the global fight for socialism, democracy and equality. The World Socialist Web Site is convinced that the struggle against Internet censorship, as a critical component of the defense of democratic rights, will be enthusiastically supported by the working class. This is their fight. It is not simply that the involvement of the working class is important in order to defend free speech. Rather, the fight to defend free speech is important for the working class.

During coalition work and discussions, we will seek to persuade others of this program and the revolutionary socialist approach to the fight against government-corporate control and censorship of the Internet.

The World Socialist Web Site urges and welcomes the participation of all socialist, antiwar and progressive websites, organizations and activists to collaborate in the work of the International Coalition of Socialist, Antiwar and Progressive Websites.

Representatives of websites or organizations interested in joining the coalition should direct inquires to [email protected]. Individuals who want to participate in the work of the coalition should submit this form.

*

This article was originally published by World Socialist Web Site on January 23, 2018.

For clarity, the nation is made up of its people, the state is made up of those who manage it. Today, more than ever, there are tangible signs that the two are diverging as the state views the nation as little more than criminal suspects who are now to be treated as if they were exactly that.

In 2015, the High Court in London ruled that core parts of the government Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act or DRIPA were unlawful due to the lack of safeguards governing access to huge amounts of people’s personal data. The Government then took the case to the Court of Appeal – which referred it to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for clarification.

In December 2016, the ECJ backed the original High Court ruling and decided that before citizens’ personal data is accessed there should be prior approval from a judge or independent body. It also ruled that retention of data was only acceptable for the purposes of dealing with serious crime, that people whose data had been obtained were entitled to be notified and that the data needed to be retained within the EU.

DRIPA expired at the end of 2016 – so the Government replicated and vastly expanded the same powers in the Investigatory Powers Act, which started to come into force in 2017. In other words, the government ignored the High Court and ECJ over DRIPA and reinvented the same surveillance activities, doing the same things that had been ruled illegal and carried on as if nothing had happened.

Ministers aren’t supposed to be above the law. However, what actually happens appears to say differently. They are not supposed to pick and choose which rights violations they address and they shouldn’t haggle with the courts to avoid properly protecting people’s freedoms, and even then, when they fail, just doing it anyway under a different name is still illegal.

The result is as we at TruePublica have written many times before; hundreds of organisations and government related agencies, from police forces to HMRC, were able to grant themselves access to highly personal and revealing data for a huge range of reasons that had nothing to do with investigating serious crime. Don’t forget it is the private corporations that build the software for all this data gathering and storage.

Under the new Snoopers’ Charter, the UK intelligence agencies now have the ability to gather, store and access (any) records on the entire population whether you or the courts like it or not.

So, lets have a look at how this works in practice in just one part of the surveillance state we live in today. You might agree that undocumented immigrants in Britain have no rights to access say, the NHS or to have their children educated at schools or to have the protection of the police. They are, after all classed by many of the mainstream media – ‘illegal immigrants’.

A year ago, a Freedom of Information request by the BBC exposed a secret agreement between the Home Office, the Department of Health and NHS Digital. It revealed that NHS Digital was sharing confidential patient information collected by frontline services with the Home Office on an industrial scale to help it locate and deport undocumented people.

Liberty, the civil liberties and human rights charity wrote about how people who had experienced years of sexual violence but had never set foot in a GP surgery for fear that the Home Office would find them there. There were plenty of other examples such as a woman turning up at a charity clinic in labour because she did not believe the hospital could provide her with safe care. Of a person who had been held in domestic servitude and abused. She survived the injuries inflicted when her employer poured boiling water over her – but she died after contracting an unrelated illness for which she never sought medical attention because her immigration papers weren’t in order.

Liberty described this as “the Government’s insertion of border controls into health services is a masterstroke in calculated cruelty.”

And, as Immigration Minister Caroline Nokes boasted, sharing patient records with the Home Office is only “part of the suite of products that make up the compliant [formerly ‘hostile’] environment”.

The Government does in fact charge undocumented people for several categories of healthcare, effectively pricing them out of their (right to) healthcare. Again, you may agree that they should pay – they are illegal immigrants and not contributing to society by way of tax, even if they are by the nature of the work they do – but think of the implications of what is happening here.

A second data sharing scheme that allows the Home Office to use pupils’ school records for immigration enforcement is targeting hundreds of migrant children and families each month. The Government has even used charity data to locate, arrest and deport homeless migrants. You still might think that’s OK until…

The government is now spying on everyone’s bank accounts to search out undocumented migrants. When did anyone grant any government agency the ability to spy on the private banks accounts of lawful citizens – and who gave the banks permission to give out that data to government agencies?

Liberty goes on to say that “the Government is contemplating destroying (NHS) patient confidentiality in the name of border control.”

At the moment, NHS guidance advises that patient information should only be shared without consent on crime grounds when the crime is serious – like rape or murder – causing serious harm to the victim.

Yet in the name of ministers’ obsession with cutting immigration, the Government simply downgraded patient privacy protections following a review of NHS guidance to make it easier for NHS Digital to share patient data without consent for purposes related to even low-level crime.

From the Home Office’s perspective, the benefit of such sharing programmes isn’t just the data it obtains on individuals. Running mass data sharing schemes in secret allows it to refine the technical capability to build profiles and link information on many thousands of people across government departments and data sets.

Liberty says- “Right now, this sinister architecture may be confined to the surveillance and targeting of undocumented migrants – and that in itself is deeply worrying. But once sufficiently developed, the Government could apply it to any other group it wishes, having already untethered itself from the principles of consent and confidentiality.”

One can imagine a government who feels it need not adhere to the law, that it will use this surveillance architecture to excavate data leading directly to political dissenters or groups organising protests such as NHS marches. The violations of people’s privacy is worrying at best.

If one looks at the Government’s track record of illegally spying on its own citizens after creating a state surveillance system the east German Stasi would have been proud of, you would have thought that the citizens of Britain would have called time on the MP’s who champion such authoritarian tendencies.

However, the Government has already marched down this road of authoritarianism. By introducing new exemptions in the Data Protection Bill, MPs have made it even easier to secretly use and share everyone’s data – including that of lawful migrants and British citizens – for immigration enforcement purposes. Liberty reacted:

“Quiet battles in Parliament and the courts aren’t enough to abolish these repressive measures for good. We urgently need a public conversation about whether we are willing to sacrifice people’s lives, our privacy, and the foundational principles of our public services and democracy on the altar of building a border between “us” and “them”.

Sadly, Britain is now one of the world’s foremost surveillance states, allowing its police and intelligence agencies to spy on its own people to such a degree, which is unprecedented for a democracy at any time in history. The UN’s privacy chief has called the situation “worse than scary.” Edward Snowden says it’s simply “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.”

Special United Nations rapporteur Joseph Cannataci said Britain should be outlawing this type of data collection rather than legitimising it as he aired concerns that Britain was setting the worst example possible to the rest of the world.

These people who say these things have been saying so for a some years now, and yet, the people of Britain have said nothing. Not a murmur.

This mission creep by Britain’s government is unprecedented. It is as if government now views the citizens of the entire country as the enemy within. No citizen is to be trusted. No citizen is innocent – all citizens are suspects. Nation and state have not always coexisted so well, but today this fragile understanding is clearly at its worst moment for generations.

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Featured image is from TruePublica.

Il Governo, che nel periodo elettorale resta in carica per il «disbrigo degli affari correnti», sta per assumere altri vincolanti impegni nella Nato per conto dell’Italia.

Brainwashed Americans believe that Kim Jong-un is responsible for the confrontation between Pyongyang and Washington, but nothing could be further from the truth. The real problem is not Kim’s nuclear weapons but Washington’s 65 year-long military occupation that continues to reinforce a political solution that was arbitrarily imposed on a sovereign nation in order to split the country in two, install a puppet regime in the south, establish a permanent military presence to defend US commercial interests, and maintain control of a strategically-located territory that is a critical part of Washington’s plan to encircle Russia and China to remain the dominant global power throughout the century.  Simply put, Washington is 100 percent responsible for the current confrontation just as it has been responsible for every flare-up for the last 7 decades.

Even so, fighting back against the relentless outpouring of US-backed state propaganda is no easy task. So allow me to defend the position of the DPRK with just one, brief analogy that will help to put things into perspective:

Imagine if the Korean army decided to deploy tens of thousands of combat troops to fight on the side of the South during the Civil War. And let’s say, that these forces were so successful that they were able to kill 3 million Americans while reducing every business and factory, every home and hospital, every church and university, to smoldering rubble. As a result of Korean meddling, the North was unable to win the war, but was forced to settle for an armistice that permanently split the US into North and South allowing Korea to install its stooges in the capitol of Richmond while it established military bases in every southern state from Virginia to Louisiana.

Let’s say this arrangement worked for over 6 decades due mainly to the efforts of Korean propagandists who derided any attempt at reconciliation, dialogue or reunification. Let’s say, activists and politicians in the North pushed for a “Sunshine Policy” that would foster communication and better relations between the two sides, but their efforts were constantly sabotaged by self-serving imperial overlords who saw any move towards dialogue as a threat to their continued presence in the South, so they engaged in the same illicit practices the US engages in today, that is, sowing dissension, discord and division between the two sides, always provoking more trouble, more disharmony, more acrimony. Always and everywhere pushing forward the imperial agenda by turning the bulk of the world’s population into Shia and Sunni.

Isn’t that the Grand Plan; divide and conquer, pit one brother against the other, keep all of us at each others throats in order to justify the ongoing occupation, in order to justify the ongoing meddling, in order to justify the ongoing economic exploitation?

Of course, it is. The United States has never lifted its sanctions on North Korea, never treated their leaders with anything except contempt and brutality, and never made any sincere attempt to end the hostilities. Washington will not even sit down with a delegation from the DPRK to air their differences or discuss a path forward.

Why?

Is it because the DPRK is a Communist state? Is that it?

Heck, no. The US has open trade relations with China and Vietnam both of who share a similar Marxist ideology. Even more shocking, the US now employs an openly “Utopian” Marxist militia (the Kurdish YPG) in East Syria as its proxy-army in its fight to topple the government in Damascus. Think about that for a minute: Washington’s shock troops in Syria are basically “a bunch of commies”.  I don’t say that to criticize the Kurds (who share a similar ideology to my own) but to illustrate the contemptible lack of principle and utter hypocrisy of everything Washington says or does. Washington doesn’t care what one’s personal philosophy is. Washington cares about power. And anything that helps to enhance Washington’s grip on global power, is the supreme good.

The United States refuses to sign a treaty with the North ending the war, refuses to sit down with delegates from the North, and refuses to provide any security assurances that they won’t attack the North at anytime for any reason. This is Washington’s policy towards the North, and yet we continue to read almost daily in the New York Times and Washington Post and the other “trusted” elite media, that the North is “threatening the US”, that the North is impulsive and violent, and that the North must be punished for its defiance.

Baloney! The North is NOT responsible for the crisis on the peninsula. The US is responsible. 100 percent responsible! Check out this excerpt from an article by David William Pear:

“Fearing that peace might break out with the two Koreas talking to each other, Washington instructed South Korean President Moon Jae-in to keep the message about anything but peace….It is not just Trump. A former top official for the Obama administration warned Moon that South Korea was not going to get anywhere with the North Koreans unless they have the “US behind them”…… The official went on to say, “If South Koreans are viewed as running off the leash, it will exacerbate tension within the alliance”.” (U.S. Humiliates South Korea, Threatens North Korea, The Unz Review)

So South Korea is “off the lash” like a pathetic little poodle? Is that what he’s saying?

This flippant quote deserves careful consideration mainly because it is not just a “one-off”, but rather summarizes the fundamental master-slave relationship between leaders in the South and their colonial Bossman in Washington.

It’s Washington that’s calling the shots in the south, Washington that controls the Korean military and Washington that sets the policy.  This is essentially how the system works. Conversely, countries that defend their own sovereignty  (like Russia, Iran, North Korea, or Venezuela) remain outside the US-run system, making them Washington’s de facto enemies to be demonized and threatened. But it’s not ideology that Washington cares about, it’s independence. That’s the big no-no. Check out this excerpt from an article at Liberation News:

“U.S. military occupation following World War II was more hostile and brutal than the Japanese colonial government. In fact from 1945 to 1948, the U.S. military continued to employ Japanese colonists, and Japanese law remained in effect. The prostitution of Korean women was official government policy for the purpose of now entertaining U.S. soldiers.

Meanwhile, in North Korea, the Soviet Civil Authority supported the peasant organizations and workers’ councils. In March 1946, land reform was instituted in which land owned by Japanese colonizers and their Korean collaborators was divided and handed over to poor formers. The rule of the land-owning class was broken, and landlords were allowed to keep only the same amount of land as their former tenants. Soviet forces left the peninsula in 1948…….

U.S. occupation troops remain in South Korea to this day. Washington continues to falsely claim that North Korea is to blame for the continued division of Korea. However, U.S. imperialism and the 32,000 U.S. troops that are stationed in South Korea to enforce the border between the North and South remain the predominant obstacle to reunification of the Korean Peninsula…. U.S. imperialism, from the beginning of Japanese colonization to today, has never had the interests of the Korean people in mind.” (“U.S. ‘liberators’ turned South Korea into a neo-colony”, Liberation News)

For years the US kept the same savage colonial system in place in order to partition the country and to prevent the Korean people from deciding their own future. That basic system is still in place today thanks largely to Washington’s oppressive military presence. Check out this excerpt from North Korean state news blasting the sovereignty-eviscerating Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that allows Washington to control the South Korean military:

“The National Peace Committee of Korea blasted the 64-year-old South Korea-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) as an “aggressive and traitorous war document” that has allowed U.S. forces to control the South Korean army and to continue joint military operations, according to the KCNA.

The committee called SOFA the “symbol of the U.S. military occupation of South Korea” and said that “the defense treaty has reduced South Korea into advanced base for a nuclear war” among other things, the KCNA said.

The South Korean people cannot evade the tragedy of a nuclear war as long as the U.S. military occupation of South Korea continues, given that the three-year Korean War ended in a ceasefire in 1953, not a peace treaty, it said.” (“N. Korean committee calls for end to U.S. domination in S.K.”, Yonhap News)

(Note: Do I have more confidence in North Korean state news than the “filthy fishwrap” Washington Post?  You’re damn right, I do!)

There are of course, peaceful remedies to the current stand-off, the most reasonable of which is the Moon-Putin Plan named after South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Here’s a brief summary of the plan:

“The Moon-Putin plan …is a plan to bring South and North Korea together through physical infrastructure and trade mechanisms, involving the neighboring countries of Russia and China.  Bridges of cooperation linking South Korea to Russia via North Korea: gas, railroads, ports, electricity, a northern sea route, shipbuilding, jobs, agriculture, and fisheries. Siberian oil and gas pipelines would be extended to Korea, both North and South, as well as to Japan. Both Koreas would be linked up with the vast rail networks of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, including high-speed rail, and the Eurasian Economic Union, which includes the Trans-Siberian Railway. According to Gavan McCormack, “North Korea would accept the security guarantee of the five (Japan included), refrain from any further nuclear or missile testing, shelve (‘freeze’) its existing programs and gain its longed for ‘normalization’ in the form of incorporation in regional groupings, the lifting of sanctions and normalized relations with its neighbor states, without surrender.” (“North Korea War Plan: Chrystia Freeland is more dangerous than Tony Blair”, Off-Guardian)

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?  What better way to reduce the chance of another bloody war than economic integration, which is why the Trump administration not only opposes the idea, but it’s also why the entire western media have made sure that no one even hears about it.  Coverage of The Moon-Putin plan has been completely blacked out in our vaunted “free media”. As it happens, policy options that don’t jibe with Washington’s chronic warmongering never see the light of day.

Finally, the Trump administration opposes any plan that involves open dialogue, economic integration, reunification or a peaceful resolution to the crisis.  What Washington wants is to preserve the status quo, they want Korea that is divided, occupied, powerless and languishing in a “permanent state of colonial dependency.”

Trump is ready to go to war to preserve the existing state of affairs. God help us all.

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Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image is from thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0.

After the extraordinary sudden loss in equity values, today (February 6, 2018) brought gains back to the stock indices.

What happened? Did the market sneeze, cough, or was something misread and today perceived in a different light?

In my opinion this is what happened:

The Plunge Protection Team, as they have done on previous equity market drops, or the Federal Reserve operating for the Working Group on Financial Markets, sent a purchase order for S&P futures to the trading floor. The hedge funds, seeing the incoming bid, front-ran the bid by stepping in and buying S&P futures. This pushed the market back up, ended the correction, and prevented financial panic.

The Plunge Protection Team was created in 1987, approaching the end of the Reagan administration, in order to prevent a market correction from costing George H. W. Bush the presidential election as Reagan’s successor. The Republican Establishment was desperate to reestablish its control over the party. The Republican Establishment, convinced by Wall Street that the Reagan tax cut would result in high inflation, found themselves instead confronted with a long economic expansion. In those days that meant that the expansion could be nearing its end, and a stock market correction could deny the presidency to George H.W. Bush.

To prevent any such correction, the US Treasury and Federal Reserve created a “working group” to intervene in the stock market in order to support values. Whenever the market starts to drop, the team purchases S&P futures which halts the market decline.

We have witnessed this on several occasions. And, most likely, again today.

Pundits who speak about “market forces” are speaking about something that doesn’t exist. “Market forces” are the interventions that support existing values with money infusions.

How long can the fraudulent valuation of equities continue? My sometimes co-author Dave Kranzler and I think it can continue until the dollar as reserve currency comes under attack. Neither of us believed that the fraud could be perpetrated this long. The two other world powers, Russia and China, are moving away from use of the US dollar, but the consequence for the dollar could still be in the future. In the meantime, liquidity supplied by central banks and the interventions of the Plunge Protection Team could send equity prices higher.

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

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

With considerable media help, the Clinton campaign cooked the books for her to win, losing for failing to cook them enough.

She and the DNC hired former MI6 spy Christopher Steele to produce his dodgy dossier on Trump – filled with unverified accusations and allegations, an effort with no credibility.

It was part of a continuing anti-Trump smear campaign, calling him a Putin puppet, claiming he “encourages espionage against our people,” along with falsely accusing Russia of US election hacking to elect him over Hillary.

As president, Trump has much to answer for. Alleging his team may have colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary is a bald-faced lie. Not a shred of evidence suggests it, nothing that would hold up in a fair and impartial tribunal.

No Russiagate investigation was warranted. No special counsel should have been appointed. The whole ugly business should be terminated with bipartisan consent.

Not a chance with undemocratic Dems wanting the witch hunt continued, disgraceful Adam Schiff one of their lead instigators. Maybe a Schiffgate investigation is warranted.

What’s ongoing is more evidence of the hugely corrupted Washington swamp. Deep state long knives killed Jack Kennedy for transforming himself into a peacemaker, threatening dirty business as usual.

RFK and MLK were eliminated for the same reason. Trump is vilified for defeating Hillary instead of losing as expected, the Russiagate scam cooked up to discredit him – the end game to remove him from office by impeachment or more sinister means.

The New York Times, CIA-connected Washington Post, CNN and other media scoundrels support the coup d’etat scheme to remove Trump from office.

Removing a sitting president from office is how banana republics operate, gangsterism posing as legitimate governance, tyranny heading toward becoming full-blown, most Americans none the wiser about what’s going on.

Love or hate him, Trump was elected president. He’s vilified for the wrong reasons, not the most important right ones, a disturbing indictment of a debauched system.

He’s wrong about major policy issues, right saying “(n)o politician in (US) history…has been treated worse and more unfairly” than himself.

The witch-hunt investigation into possible improper or illegal dealings by him or his campaign team with Russia is an embarrassment to legitimate governance.

So is falsely accusing Moscow of US election hacking, no evidence suggesting any of these accusations are true.

On Monday, RT reported that Steele wrote a memo along with his dodgy dossier – based on information fed him by Hillary’s associates, according to a heavily redacted January 4 Senate Judiciary Committee document (included in the RT report), addressed to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI director Christopher Wray.

It reveals coordination between Hillary’s team and the Obama administration to smear Trump during the presidential campaign.

Dated October 19, 2016, it says unnamed foreign sources provided information to an unnamed Bill and Hillary Clinton associate, passing it on to an unnamed Obama State Department official, in turn handing it to Steele.

“It is troubling enough that the Clinton Campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility,” the Senate committee report said, adding:

“It appears that either Steele lied to the FBI and the British court, or that the classified documents reviewed by the Committee contain materially false statements.”

GOP Senators Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham called for an FBI investigation of Steele. The Senate Judiciary Committee document conflicts with his sworn court statements.

Grassley called for declassifying relevant documents to reveal hard truths about what’s been going on – a conspiracy to remove Trump from office.

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

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

What goes up exponentially, comes down harder and faster.

It’s too soon to know if Monday’s near 5% Dow Jones decline, following Friday’s sharp selloff, was the beginning of the end for bull market gains since early 2009.

After last week’s selloffs, notably Friday’s 666 DJA drop, Monday’s Dow lost 1,175 points, the largest decline in six-and-a-half years, volatility soaring.

Trading volume almost doubled the 30-day average. Monday’s drop was relatively minor compared to much greater declines earlier.

On October 19, 1987, the DJA shed 22.61% of its value, dropping 508 points to 1,738.74.

The 1929 stock market crash began on October 24, Black Thursday, one of many headlines saying “Wall St. in Panic as Stocks Crash.”

Variety published its memorable headline: “Wall Street Lays an Egg.” Huge declines followed on October 28 and 29, the beginning of much more to come.

Before it ended, the Dow lost 89% of its value. After the crash, the Chicago Tribune headlined “Roaring Twenties grind to a halt and a new era of hard times begins.”

Variety said “Broadway T(ook) the Slap” and New York “nite clubs, speaks & dives (echoed) market cataclysm.” The broadsheet quipped: “Only Sodom and Gomorrah remain(ed) to be heard from.”

Before stepping down as Fed chairman on February 3, Janet Yellen was calm about high equity valuations, saying “it’s very hard to tell (if there’s a) bubble.”

Fed policy under her, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan caused hugely overvalued equity prices.

The 1990s dot.com bubble burst in March 2000, causing major Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq declines. Beginning in late 2007, a financial crisis shocked equity markets until March 2009.

Yellen’s complacency was reminiscent of Irving Fisher in 1929, perhaps the most noted economist of his time.

On October 17, 1929, a week before the crash and onset of the Great Depression, he notoriously said stock prices “reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”

He made the call in a climate like today – a period of GDP-reflected economic growth and easy credit, producing speculative excess, bubbles, and the belief that good times would continue.

They never do forever, a lesson learned best in hindsight. In 1929, the US economy was a house of cards, eventual collapse inevitable, the same scenario true today – years of easy money as bad or worse than the 20s.

What’s likely after an 1,841 Friday and Monday selloff, a 7.5% drop? The fullness of time will tell.

The break in momentum trading may be short-term like earlier or signal the onset of a bear market, perhaps a major one, given extraordinary gains since early 2009.

The S&P 500, Nasdaq and world markets followed the Dow’s decline.

Markets don’t move up and down uninterrupted by counter-moves. During the late 2007 – early 2009 bear market, equities recovered much of their losses before hitting new lows – so-called dead cat bounces.

If a new bear market began last week, accelerating on Monday, expect sharp upswings along the way before a bottom is reached.

The 2008 – 2009 period saw six of the 10 largest single-day Dow point advances up to that time:

• 2008-10-13: +936.42
• 2008-10-28: +889.35
• 2008-11-13: +552.59
• 2009-03-23: +497.48
• 2008-11-21: +494.13
• 2008-09-30: +485.21

Bull and bear markets take time to unfold. They don’t happen overnight. In October 1929 after the crash, no one knew for sure what would follow.

Sharp upswings confused things. The same scenario is likely ahead. Negative market action so far alone isn’t indicative of what’s likely to follow.

If a long overdue bear market hasn’t begun, it’s surely coming when large investors cash in because of dangerous overvaluations, leaving ordinary people with modest holdings to take the fall.

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

By Jonathan Power

We are soon going to have a clash between President Donald Trump and international law. This is predicable when one examines the presidential discourse over what to do about North Korea and its possession of nuclear-tipped rockets.

He has threatened “fire and fury” which doesn’t sound like the opening words of the UN’s Charter:

“We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…..and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained……and for these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours.”

There should be no question that if the Charter is followed that Trump cannot legally make a pre-emptive strike, either one nuclear or conventional, unless war is imminent because of threatening moves by the antagonist.

He could only do it legally, as a self-defensive move, if North Korea was seen actually preparing for an attack – which can be judged from ultra-aggressive troop movements or the loading (which takes some time) of liquid fuel into rockets.

For Trump’s part he should stop doing things that provoke North Korea and make them feel that the US is practising for a preventive strike, such as holding military exercises close to its borders. That is not, as the Charter says, taking “effective measures for the prevention and removal of the threats to peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression.”

Up until the end of the nineteenth century politicians were convinced that every state had the customary right to embark upon war whenever it pleased. Statesman would recite a host of justifications for war: to retrieve unpaid debts, territorial incursion, dynastic disputes, regional destabilization, the pacification and “civilizing” of colonies-to-be, honour etc.

Wars in this period were given legitimacy in political not legal terms.

Few go along with this today. War can only be for ‘self-defence’.

The US managed to persuade the member nations of the UN Security Council to approve the going to war with Iraq when it seized Kuwait to grab its oil fields. Legality was important to President George H. W. Bush.

On the eve of the Second Gulf War his son, George W. Bush, brushed aside legality, refusing to accept calls to wait until the UN’s arms inspector, Hans Blix, had ascertained whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. After the US/UK invasion when it became certain that Bush and the UK’s prime minister, Tony Blair, had bent the evidence and Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction there was no effort by the UK/US to admit to wrongdoing.

With the UN’s Anti-Torture Convention – which two previous conservative leaders of the US and UK, Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher, decided to ratify – there was a legal dance by Bush and Blair to avoid its restrictions. Bush and Blair did not refute the Convention. They simply argued that torture was not torture as practised. Waterboarding and other forms of what most of us would describe as torture were no more than “enhanced interrogation”.

Later, Bush junior and President Barack Obama extended the ‘self-defence’ argument to the use of drones to pick off leaders of Al Qaeda. The Charter is clear: self-defence is only allowed in emergencies before the Security Council has had time to consider the crisis. Then, if the Security Council deems that a country has been attacked, it can use all the resources of itself and its allies to repel the invader.

North Korea is not creating such an emergency.

In an impressive and balanced new book, “How To Do Things With International Law” the American legal scholar, Ian Hurd, writes that the US and UK interpretation of ‘self-defence’ can “make the ban on war look more like an authorization of the use of force than a constraint upon it”.

This interpretation, writes Hurd, has evolved “under the influence of strong states”.

Nevertheless, the Charter’s power and standing is still acknowledged in principle by the big powers and thus it is “more difficult for states to engage in wars of aggression, profit, the ‘defence’ of democracy, and humanitarianism.”  At least we can say that these days certain categories of war are not acceptable, even by the big powers.

Bush rode over the UN Charter on one of its central points. So did President Bill Clinton when he invaded ex-Yugoslavia and later Kosovo in an attempt to end the murderous civil war and to roll back Serbian influence. So did President Vladimir Putin with his invasion of Crimea.

Bush, Blair, Clinton, Obama and Putin were all in the wrong. They didn’t understand that international law is a necessary contribution to a stable and peaceful world.

Tragically, it is becoming obvious that Trump might well give it the hardest knock of all.

***

Comments from Jan Oberg

This is a very important argument – that international law is law and should be respected by every and each actor. Also that the UN Charter is absolutely essential in both letter and spirit. Also that war can only be conducted in self-defence and that the criteria for that are also precise and limited.

It’s a pity, therefore, that the author makes a couple of much too simplifying references to what is actually quite complex issues.

It can certainly be discussed why Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait but it can’t be explained by arguing that it was to “grab its oil fields”.

Clinton did not invade Yugoslavia (not ex-Yugoslavia) and Kosovo (Kosovo was part of Serbia which was a republic in Yugoslavia). He was the main responsible for bombing Bosnia-Herzegovina and the main supporter of the proportionately largest ethnic cleansing anywhere, namely of Serbs (who had lived there for 400 years) out of the Krajina-regions in Croatia. And as NATO’s leader, he bombed Serbia’s Kosovo province and Serbia itself, including Belgrade and Novi Sad. And saying that it was “to roll back Serbian influence” reveals a quite deficient understanding of these places and the overall Yugoslavia conflict formation.

Finally, the word “invasion” about Crimea is a bit of an exaggeration, particular given the history, the lease Russia had on the base complex there and the follow-up referendum. However, there is no doubt that Putin – and the other mentioned – were wrong. But we must know the right – precise – reasons why they were wrong. And they were certainly not equally wrong.

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Featured image is from The Intercept.

During the early 1960s, apartheid South African diplomats were increasingly concerned their country’s plummeting reputation would affect relations with America. In one notorious incident, of March 1960, South African police shot dead 69 black protesters in Sharpeville, a township about 40 miles from Johannesburg.

Such atrocities sparked protests against the racist regime on the streets of England, America’s great ally, which surely did not go unnoticed in Washington. Aware of the changing climate, South Africa’s dignitaries pleaded with their American counterparts for continued assistance. They need not have worried that the earth’s dominant power would desert them.

As long as the United States provided support, it mattered little if the rest of the world looked on disapprovingly. Indeed, successive US governments backed the apartheid regime, both financially and militarily – peaking during the Ronald Reagan years (1981-89). The Reagan administration listed Nelson Mandela‘s African National Congress (ANC) party as, “one of the more notorious terrorist groups”.

Mandela himself remained on America’s terrorist watch list until 2008, and even then, it took special legislation in Congress to have his name removed. Upon closer inspection, perhaps the mistrust in which Mandela was held by US elites is not surprising. In 1990, among the first words Mandela spoke following his release from a disgraceful 27-year jail term, was to praise Cuba for being “an inspiration” and that Fidel Castro was “a tower of strength”.

Mandela was highlighting Cuba’s pivotal role in liberating southern Africa from the plague of apartheid. During the 1970s and 1980s, Castro sent tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers to fight against the white South African-backed mercenaries – in Angola, Namibia and Mozambique. The Castro government also provided Africa with significant numbers of medical personnel, academics, teachers, engineers, and so on.

Meanwhile, in March 1976, Cuban-led forces drove South Africa’s terrorist armies out of oil rich Angola – a country about 900 miles north of the South African border. In doing so Mandela said Cuba had,

“destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor”.

In the late 1980s, the Cuban-African coalition again defeated apartheid-backed terrorists in renewed fighting in southern Angola. This decisive victory further impelled South Africa to end its illegitimate occupation of neighboring Namibia.

The apartheid regime – a classic Nazi-style outfit – was attempting to spread its rule to nearby countries, committing atrocities on an astonishing scale. A 1989 UN report outlines that South Africa killed 1.5 million people from 1980 to 1988, while also inflicting tens of billions of dollars worth of infrastructural damage.

South Africa’s murderous onslaughts were backed to the end by Reagan – and also by Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister for over a decade. As the 1980s advanced, and with international boycotts increasing, even the US Congress was compelled to pass sanctions on South Africa, which Reagan vetoed.

There are quite a few similarities between the South Africa of that era, and the Israel of today. The Israelis, with virtually the entire world against them, are propped up by the US’s massive, long-standing support.

America and Israel are joined at the hip militarily. In 2016 Barack Obama, allegedly an “anti-Israel” president, signed “the single largest” 10-year military deal between the two states. The agreement, worth $38 billion, was a considerable increase on the previous deal signed by George W. Bush in 2007.

Israel has for decades performed an invaluable service to the US in the Middle East, one of the earth’s key regions. In June 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel destroyed the main origin of Arab secular nationalism: Gamal Abdel Nasser‘s Egypt. In doing so, Israel captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. It proved a definitive victory whose repercussions stand to today.

This stunning rout was richly celebrated among first world nations. Following 1967, relations between the US and Israel – cordial up to that year – became irrevocably intertwined. Nasser’s Egypt, a major enemy of the West, was also considered a serious threat to nearby Saudi Arabia. At the time, the Egyptians and Saudis were fighting a proxy war against each other in Yemen – called the North Yemen Civil War, which ended in a Saudi-led victory in 1970.

The Saudis themselves have long been an extreme fundamentalist dictatorship, with among the world’s worst human rights records. Such unpleasant realities have been of little concern to Western governments.

Successive Saudi regimes have been supported for decades by America and Britain – primarily due to their massive oil reserves. Had Saudi Arabia fallen under the influence of Nasser’s Egypt, it would have proved an unmitigated disaster for Western planners. As Israel wiped out the Nasser government, it largely ended the threat of popular Arab uprisings.

In the early 1970s, the Israelis made another fateful decision. They rejected out of hand a full peace treaty offered by Egypt’s new president Anwar Sadat – which would have guaranteed complete security for Israel, along with normalization of relations. Indeed, Egypt was the only Arab state that possessed anything resembling a military force at the time. During the past five decades, Israel has instead continued its policies of annexation and settlements over peace and diplomacy.

As a result, they have become further and further isolated on the international scene, again like apartheid South Africa before her. Crucially, the Israelis enjoy the huge support of the US, with a renewed boost in relations provided by the Donald Trump administration. Or so it would seem.

Ironically, Trump’s decision in December to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, has led to a renewed slump in Israel’s reputation. Trump’s resolution may do nothing but harm Israel itself – and could even prove a turning point against the expansionist regime.

Trump’s announcement was hardly a surprise. A sharp-nosed businessman, he would surely have noticed comments made by figures like Warren Buffet – a long-time leading American magnate. In 2013, Buffet approvingly described Israel as,

“The leading, largest and most promising investment hub outside the United States”.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, have little power, wealth or influence. Furthermore, they are not culturally tied to America in the manner that Israel are, through the vast Zionist base of the Evangelical movement. The support from Evangelicals comprises much of the backing for the Republican Party.

Major Western corporations, such as Barclays, Nestle and Intel, are conducting widescale business operations in Israel. Last year Intel’s American CEO, Brian Krzanich, said while visiting Jerusalem,

“We think of ourselves as an Israeli company as much as a US company”.

It seems of little consequence that less than 100km from Jerusalem, in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, 1.5 million Palestinians are crammed into a territory smaller than Andorra. The Gaza Strip, 140 square miles in size, is in reality an open air prison. It is also under blockade by sea and air – with its Palestinian inhabitants subjected to various deprivations, along with random acts of terror and punishment.

The almost complete absence of criticism within Israel itself toward its destructive policies, is as a result of the country shifting greatly to the right. A generation ago and more, there was once a vibrant left-wing movement in Israel. However, many disillusioned opponents of the regime have long since left, or become marginalized and scattered. It has reached a point whereby simply referring to any criticism of Israel is now labeled “anti-Semitism”.

Senior American politicians have not even been spared such charges. In 2014, the then US Secretary of State John Kerry said,

“There’s an increasing delegitimization campaign that’s been building up [against Israel]”.

Kerry was referring to “boycotts and other kinds of things” occurring in Europe. He was subsequently reprimanded in public by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for endorsing “anti-Semitic” attitudes.

The fact is, Netanyahu and colleagues are genuinely fearful of the increasing international boycotts and delegitimization against their state. America may be continuing in its near unconditional support, yet there are no guarantees that Israel can continue indefinitely with its current policies.

*

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

Why does nobody dare to pronounce the term “Genocide” in connection with the Washington committed atrocities around the globe? – If there is one nation that is guilty of mass-murder it is the United States of America and her Zionist handlers. But nobody seems to pay attention. Or, rather, nobody dares to say so. It has become the new normal. Enshrined in people’s brains. The exceptional nation can do whatever she wants, whenever she wants and wherever she wants – sowing wars and conflicts, killing millions and millions of people, blaming Russia and China – and of course, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, North Korea and the list of disobedient countries goes on.

When Mr. Tillerson is openly calling for a military coup in Venezuela, he is inciting genocide in this peaceful southern neighbor. This means, for those who are listening, like the Capriles and Co., that they can count on US support, which of course they knew all along. But now its official, when the US Secretary of State openly calls for a military intervention – he calls for blood – he is provoking a blood bath. That’s genocide. By definition, he is a murderer. Yet, he goes free.

You imagine, anybody else who would do that throughout the globe – any other politician of Tillerson’s ranking, who is not bending to Washington’s rules, will be on Washington’s hit list, and might expect a deadly drone, or poison potion – or whatever else the CIA does best to ‘neutralize’ inconvenient people. Yet, nobody dares even thinking of putting Tillerson before an international tribunal, let alone of neutralizing him.

In the totally illegal US bases at the north-eastern triangle of Syria, bordering Iraq and Turkey, near Raqqa, at Tabqa, where the US forces have taken over a Syrian airbase and at al-Tanf, Rex Tillerson calls for increasing the current contingent of about 2,000 US soldiers by 30,000 – recruited mostly from Kurds. This sounds and probably is like an expansion of the Kurdish YPG ‘rebel’ army, or rather US-sponsored terrorist army, fully financed, armed and trained by the US. They actually support the also newly US-trained ISIS with the goal of eventually achieving “Regime Change”, ousting the legitimate and democratically elected President Bashar al-Assad.

One may also ask, how come President Assad tolerates these illegal bases in his country. He could call on the UN Security Council to have them expelled. It would, of course not happen, since the US has a veto, but it would make plenty of publicity and would let the world know that the US is occupying any country it wants – illegally of course.

“Regime Change” by whatever means – this is the name of the game – that’s the end goal of the Masters of Genocide – before a country is dumped into chaos, eternal war, eternal occupation for eternal usurpation. –  Why do those peace-loving ‘progressive’ – westerners not see this? Why do they not cry out against such crimes? Because their media tells them differently? – Perhaps so. But it is humanly impossible that humans have brains so weak that they can no longer distinguish what is morally, ethically correct – and what is just sheer falsehood and criminal.

It’s the western “comfort zone” – stupid! – Sitting in our armchairs, watching sports and dumb and degrading Hollywood-made sitcoms and comedy shows, while sipping beer, is easier than questioning ourselves – what are we allowing to happen to totally innocent people? – Does it occur to anyone that those who do not stand up and protest against these massive killings, including this latest threat by Tillerson of “Regime Change” in Venezuela by a foreign induced military coup, are complicit by association, by doing nothing, by letting this US imposed genocide happen? How much does it take for the comfort zone to be broken? – Maybe, when we are hit ourselves, in Europe, in the US in the western armchair-MSM-news-consumption world – will we wake up then? By then it may be too late.

It is our obligation towards humanity to stop this onslaught of genocides around the globe, always by the same perpetrator and his puppets and mercenaries – The United States, her vassal, Europe and NATO.

Be sure of one thing, the US will never let go. They have a target and they pursue it to the end – and the end can only be Full Spectrum Dominance, or, else, the end of empire. The dark commandeering forces behind the US and allied military have no scruples whatsoever to commit gigantic genocide in order to reach their objective. They have been demonstrating it for the past 20 years with the endless ‘war on terror’, devastating the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria – and many more – millions of people were killed or maimed, or made refugees, homeless, nameless, sick and dying of disease and famine – no roof over their head for years – being expulsed from the very countries that destroyed their homes and livelihood in the first place … and the world is too timid to call this genocide in biblical proportions?

Now Tillerson, the arrogant multi-billionaire, ex-Exxon chief and oil tycoon, become diplomat for the Donald – or the long arm of the Anglo-Zion-Dark State, is calling for nothing less than genocide in Venezuela. Just a few days ago, this inhuman monster has expressed pleasure and satisfaction at North Koreans suffering and dying from famine, because the ‘sanctions’ are working. Can you imagine – to what level humanity has sunk? – Nobody even blinks with an eye at such atrocities pronounced by the evil-emperors front-man, let alone people going on the barricades. Killing and pleasure of killing and suffering – and, not to forget, corporate maximized profit from it all, has become the new normal. Its genocide incorporate – and most in the west live quite comfortably with it.

World wake up! – Its High Noon! – Even if Tillerson doesn’t pull the trigger himself, he is a mass-murderer by association, by ordering others to do it. People like Tillerson and all his predecessors, Pentagon and CIA chiefs and of course the chief executioners, Trump himself, and his predecessors, belong to be put before a Nuremberg type Tribunal, where the same type of justice is dished out as was the case by the allied forces which directed the Nazi trials after WWII.

In fact, many of the Nazi crimes pale when compared to what the United States and NATO forces, plus its European vassals are doing – and have been doing even without NATO during the past centuries –  throughout the world, in Africa, Asia, South America – genocide in over-drive. Trump saber-rattles with “fire and fury” over North Korea; Tillerson incites to military coup in Venezuela, and over-throwing the legitimate and democratically elected Syrian Government – and of course, Iran is always in the cross-hairs, no matter the nuclear deal signed and sealed by the 5+1 on 14 July 2015 in Vienna. No agreement, no contract, no promise is honored ever by Washington. Who is next? Maybe Bolivia, and of course, Cuba, where the newly established diplomatic relations with the revamped US embassy in Havana is but a faintly veiled Trojan Horse?

Take the endless insults and provocations by Washington on Russia, with US and NATO forces along the Baltic, Eastern Europe and the Black Sea borders with Russia. If it wouldn’t be for President Putin and his equally wise and savvy Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, a hot and bloody US-Russian clash may have already erupted.

When Nikki Haley called openly to overthrow the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas, a senior Palestinian official at the United Nations called her to “shut up”. Well said. It is time that the world musters its guts and tells war-monger-criminals like Tillerson to shut up, when they call for military coups in countries they want to subjugate, like Venezuela and Cuba, the only true democracies in the western Hemisphere. The only true democracies – these are not my words, though I fully subscribe to them – those are the words of intellectual prominence, nobody less than Professor Noam Chomsky.

If anybody would care to understand what the sophisticated process of people’s representation democracy in Venezuela involves, surely it would hit them that our one-person, one-vote western style democracy which has become totally corruptible and is categorically being manipulated, is a long-past gimmick from fairytales. Similar articulate and clean processes are commanding Cuban elections.

The CIA in tandem with Mossad and other secret forces, plus NATO, recruit, train, fund and arm terrorist mercenaries to do Washington’s dirty job. The Pentagon, CIA, State Department and NATO will not stop before ‘regime change’ in Syria is achieved, and before Venezuela succumbs to the constant slander, blackmail, currency manipulations and myriad other pressures from outside; and before Russia and China are subdued – unless this ever-weakening empire is stopped in its tracks. And it eventually will. But how many more people will have to die before the monster bites the dust and lets life and nature evolve and develop to bring equality and peace to the globe?

Let’s call it out again – the only country in the world that commits constant genocide and gets away with it, is the self-styled exceptional nation, the United States of America. We, the People, must and still can stop this.

*

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

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

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This article by Professor James Petras first published by GR in August 2016 brings to the forefront the ongoing conflict between the US and China. 

China and the United States are moving in polar opposite directions: Beijing is rapidly becoming the center of overseas investments in high tech industries, including robotics, nuclear energy and advanced machinery with collaboration from centers of technological excellence, like Germany.

In contrast, Washington is pursuing a predatory military pivot to the least productive regions with collaboration from its most barbaric allies, like Saudi Arabia.

China is advancing to global economic superiority by borrowing and innovating the most advance methods of production, while the US degrades and debases its past immense productive achievements to promote wars of destruction.

China’s growing prominence is the result of a cumulative process that advanced in a systematic way, combining step-by-step growth of productivity and innovation with sudden jumps up the ladder of cutting edge technology.

China’s Stages of Growth and Success

China has moved from a country, highly dependent on foreign investment in consumer industries for exports, to an economy, based on joint public-private investments in higher value exports.

China’s early growth was based on cheap labor, low taxes and few regulations on multi-national capital.  Foreign capital and local billionaires stimulated growth, based on high rates of profit.  As the economy grew, China’s economy shifted toward increasing its indigenous technological expertise and demanding greater ‘local content’ for manufactured goods.

By the beginning of the new millennium China was developing high-end industries, based on local patents and engineering skills, channeling a high percentage of investments into civilian infrastructure, transportation and education.

Massive apprenticeship programs created a skilled labor force that raised productive capacity.  Massive enrollment in science, math, computer science and engineering universities provided a large influx of high-end innovators, many of whom had gained expertise in the advanced technology of overseas competitors.

China’s strategy has been based on the practice of borrowing, learning, upgrading and competing with the most advanced economics of Europe and the US.

By the end of the last decade of the 20^th century, China was in a position to move overseas. The accumulation process provided China with the financial resources to capture dynamic overseas enterprises.

China was no longer confined to investing in overseas minerals and agriculture in Third World countries.  China is looking to conquer high-end technological sectors in advanced economics.

By the second decade of the 21^st century Chinese investors moved into Germany, Europe’s most advanced industrial giant.  During the first 6 months of 2016 Chinese investors acquired 37 German companies, compared with 39 in all of 2015.  China’s total investments in Germany for 2016 may double to over $22 billion dollars.

In 2016, China successfully bought out KOKA, Germany’s most innovative engineering company.  China’s strategy is to gain superiority in the digital future of industry.

China is rapidly moving to automate its industries, with plans to double the robot density of the US by the year 2020.

Chinese and Austrian scientists successfully launched the first quantum-enabled satellite communication system which is reportedly ‘hack proof’, ensuring China’s communications security.

While China’s global investments proceed to dominate world markets, the US, England and Australia have been trying to impose investment barriers. By relying on phony ‘security threats’, Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May blocked a multi-billion dollar Chinese investment-heavy nuclear plant (Hinckley Point C). The pretext was the spurious claim that China would use its stake to “engage in energy blackmail, threatening to turn off the power in the event of international crises”.

The US Committee on Foreign Investment has blocked several multi-billion dollar Chinese investments in high tech industries.

In August 2016 Australia blocked an $8 billion-dollar purchase of a controlling stake in its biggest electricity distribution network on specious claims of ‘national security’.

The Anglo-American and German empires are on the defensive.  They increasingly cannot compete economically with China, even in defending their own innovative industries.

In large part this is the result of their failed policies.  Western economic elite have increasingly relied on short-term speculation in finance, real estate and insurance, while neglecting their industrial base.

Led by the US, their reliance on military conquests (militaristic empire-building) absorb public resources, while China has directed its domestic resources toward innovative and advanced technology.

To counter China’s economic advance, the Obama regime has implemented a policy of building economic walls at home, trade restrictions abroad and military confrontation in the South China Seas – China’s strategic trade routes.

US officials have ratcheted up their restrictions on Chinese investments in high tech US enterprises including a $3.8 billion investment in Western Digital and Philips attempt to sell its lighting business.  The US blocked ‘Chen China’s planned $44 billion takeover of Swiss chemical group ‘Syngenta’.

US officials are doing everything possible to stop innovative billion dollar deals that include China as a strategic partner.

Accompanying its domestic wall, the US has been mobilizing an overseas blockade of China via its Trans-Pacific-Partnership, which proposes to exclude Beijing from participating in the ‘free trade zone’ with a dozen North America, Latin American and Asian members.  Nevertheless, not a single member-nation of the TPP has cut back its trade with China.  On the contrary, they are increasing ties with China – an eloquent comment on Obama’s skill at ‘pivoting’.

While the ‘domestic economic wall’ has had some negative impacts on particular Chinese investors, Washington has failed to dent China’s exports to US markets.  Washington’s failure to block China’s trade has been even more damaging to Washington’s effort to encircle China in Asia and Latin America, Oceana and Asia.

Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Chile, Taiwan, Cambodia and South Korea depend on Chinese markets far more than on the US to survive and grow.

While Germany, faced with China’s dynamic growth, has chosen to ‘partner’ and share, up-scale productive investments, Washington has opted to form military alliances to confront China.

The US bellicose military alliance with Japan has not intimidated China.  Rather it has downgraded their domestic economies and economic influence in Asia.

Moreover, Washington’s “military pivot” has deepened and expanded China’s strategic links to Russia’s energy sources and military technology.

While the US spends hundreds of billions in military alliances with the backward Baltic client-regimes and the parasitical Middle Eastern states, (Saudi Arabia, Israel), China accumulates strategic expertise from its economic ties with Germany, resources from Russia and market shares among Washington’s ‘partners’ in Asia and Latin America.

There is no question that China, following the technological and productive path of Germany, will win out over the US’s economic isolationist and global militarist strategy.

If the US has failed to learn from the successful economic strategy of China, the same failure can explain the demise of the progressive regimes in Latin America.

China’s Success and the Latin American Retreat

After more than a decade of growth and stability, Latin America’s progressive regimes have retreated and declined.  Why has China continued on the path of stability and growth while their Latin American partners retreated and suffered defeats?

Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Ecuador, for over a decade, served as Latin America’s center-left success story.  Their economies grew, social spending increased, poverty and unemployment were reduced and worker incomes expanded.

Subsequently their economies went into crisis, social discontent grew and the center-left regimes fell.

In contrast to China, the Latin American center-left regimes did not diversify their economies:  they remained heavily dependent on the commodity boom for growth and stability.

The Latin American elites borrowed and depended on foreign investment, and financial capital, while China engaged in public investments in industry, infrastructure, technology and education.

Latin American progressives joined with foreign capitalist and local speculators in non-productive real estate speculation and consumption, while China invested in innovative industries at home and abroad.  While China consolidated political rulership, the Latin American progressives “allied” with strategic domestic and overseas multi-national adversaries to ‘share power’, which were, in fact, eagerly prepared to oust their “left” allies.

When the Latin commodity based economy collapsed, so did the political links with their elite partners.  In contrast, China’s industries benefited from the lower global commodity prices, while Latin America’s left suffered.  Faced with widespread corruption, China launched a major campaign purging over 200,000 officials.  In Latin America, the Left ignored corrupt officials, allowing the opposition to exploit the scandals to oust center-left officials.

While Latin America imported machinery and parts from the West; China bought the entire Western companies producing the machines and their technology – and then implemented Chinese technological improvements.

China successfully outgrew the crisis, defeated its adversaries and proceeded to expand local consumption and stabilized rulership.

Latin America’s center-left suffered political defeats in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, lost elections in Venezuela and Bolivia and retreated in Uruguay.

Conclusion

China’s political economic model has outperformed the imperialist West and leftist Latin America.   While the US has spent billions in the Middle East for wars on behalf of Israel, China has invested similar amounts in Germany for advanced technology, robotics and digital innovations.

While President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “pivot to Asia” has been largely a wasteful military strategy to encircle and intimidate China, Beijing’s “pivot to markets” has successfully enhanced its economic competitiveness.  As a result, over the past decade, China’s growth rate is three times that of the US; and in the next decade China will double the US in ‘robotizing’ its productive economy.

The US ‘pivot to Asia’, with its heavy dependence on military threats and intimidation has cost billions of dollars in lost markets and investments.  China’s ‘pivot to advanced technology’ demonstrates that the future lies in Asia not the West. China’s experience offers lessons for future Latin American leftist governments.

First and foremost, China emphasizes the necessity of balanced economic growth, over and above short-term benefits resulting from commodity booms and consumerist strategies.

Secondly, China demonstrates the importance of professional and worker technical education for technological innovation, over and above  business school and non-productive ‘speculative’ education so heavily emphasized in the US.

Thirdly, China balances its social spending with investment in core productive activity; competitiveness and social services are combined.

China’s enhanced growth and social stability, its commitment to learning and surpassing advanced economies has important limitations, especially in the areas of social equality and popular power.  Here China can learn from the experience of Latin America’s Left.  The social gains under Venezuela’s President Chavez are worthy of study and emulation; the popular movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina, which ousted neo-liberals from power, could enhance efforts in China to overcome the business- state nexus of pillage and capital flight.

China, despite its socio-political and economic limitations, has successfully resisted US military pressures and even ‘turned the tables’ by advancing on the West.

In the final analysis, China’s model of growth and stability certainly offers an approach that is far superior to the recent debacle of the Latin American Left and the political chaos resulting from Washington’s quest for global military supremacy.

Introduction. The World Bank Methodology

The World Bank methodology regarding to measurement of poverty is described in the World Development Report 1990: Poverty?  In this “authoritative” study on global poverty published in 1990, the “upper poverty line” is arbitrarily set at a per capita income of US$ 1 a day corresponding to an annual per capita income of US$ 370 per annum. This criterion subsequently led to the formulation of the one dollar a day International Poverty Line (IPL)

Population groups in individual countries with per capita incomes in excess of US$ 1 a day (1985 constant dollars) are arbitrarily identified by the World Bank as “non-poor”. Through the gross manipulation of income statistics, the World Bank figures serve the “useful purpose” of representing the poor in developing countries as a minority group. For purposes of “measurement”, the World Bank adopted arbitrarily a poverty line at $370 per annum at 1985 constant prices. An extreme poverty line was established at $270 per annum.

The $370 annual threshold was subsequently upheld as the one dollar a day per capita international poverty line (IPL) which has been applied widely by developing countries for “measuring poverty” at a national level.

“one dollar a day keeps poverty away”

It should be understood that the one dollar a day (1985 PPP) is an arbitrary figure recommended by the World Bank to the governments of developing countries. It does not require the measurement of poverty in terms of basic human needs including nutrition, health, education, housing. Its unspoken objective is to falsify the national figures on poverty as well as obfuscate the process of global impoverishment initiated since the onslaught of the debt crisis of the early 1980s.

The WB on a regular basis has issued statistics based on the one dollar day International Poverty Line with a view to upholding the illusion that global poverty has declined dramatically since the 1990s. These figures are based on the dollar a day per capita methodology.

The initial “measurement” of country level poverty figures based on the one dollar a day per capita criterion was applied by the World Bank using 1985 as the base period. During a period of twenty years (1985-2005) the one dollar a day was applied. The base period for the arbitrary one dollar a day per capita criterion was in 1985 constant prices.

In 2005, with a view to accounting for inflation of basic consumer goods since the 1985 base period, the World Bank redefined arbitrarily the upper poverty criterion at $1.25 PPP. i.e. a 25 percent increase in the poverty criterion to account for the increase of consumer prices over a 20 year period (i.e. in relation to the 1985 base period).

This figure of $1.25 pertaining to 2005 was set arbitrarily by the World Bank. It was not based on relevant estimates of inflation over a 20 year period (i.e. since 1985).

In 2011, the one dollar a day upper poverty criterion by the World Bank was set at $1.90 PPP (2011) (indicating that the prices of consumer essentials had increased by 90 % in relation to the 1985 base period):

In October 2015, the World Bank announced that it had updated its international poverty line (IPL) and its estimate of the number of people living in extreme poverty globally. The IPL, which came to prominence with the dollar-a-day figure devised by the Bank in 1990, is revised periodically in line with new data from the independent International Comparison Program (ICP), which is hosted by the World Bank. The new figure of $1.90 is based on ICP purchasing power parity (PPP) calculations and represent the international equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US in 2011. The new IPL replaces the $1.25 per day figure, which used 2005 data.( World Bank, April 5, 2016)

In the World Bank framework, the “estimation” of poverty indicators has become a numerical exercise, which usefully serves to conceal the incidence of poverty. No need to analyse household expenditures on food, shelter and social services; no need to observe concrete conditions in impoverished rural barangay or urban slum areas. The estimates are totally removed from real life situations.

The Measurement of Poverty in the Philippines

How are the estimates of “poverty incidence” in the Philippines calculated? According to the PSA “Poverty incidence among Filipinos is the proportion of people below the poverty line to the total population.” 

The Philippines Statistics Authority (PSA) distinguishes between “poverty incidence” and “extreme or subsistence poverty incidence”

In this section we examine poverty “estimates” respectively for 2012 and 2015. The poverty estimates are said to based on the Annual Poverty Indicators Survey (APIS) as well as the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES).

While the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) claims that the poverty estimates are based on the household expenditures survey, an examination of the figures suggests that the incidence of poverty is determined arbitrarily. The household expenditure surveys confirm the levels of spending by income group. Yet the poverty threshold is set arbitrarily (in a similar way to the procedure pertaining to the World Bank’s International Poverty Line). The calculus of PI is as follows

PI = Q/n where

• Q is the the number of families/individuals less than the per capita poverty threshold divided by
• n total population (families/individuals)

The PSA does not define the per capita poverty threshold. There is no evidence that it is related to an actual measurement of poverty (nutrition, health, education, housing) based on the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES).

The 2012 Estimates of Poverty

The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) provided estimates of poverty incidence in 2012 as follows:

These estimates border on ridicule. On what are they based? Daily minimum Calories and protein requirements?

Where are the estimates?

Where is the manipulation?

The WB one dollar a day pertains to the base period of 1985. As mentioned above, the WB  redefined the international poverty line (IPL) at $1.25 at 2005  constant prices (PPP). Moreover, for the year 2011, the poverty frontier was once again modified. It was defined by the World Bank at $1.90 PPP.

What this suggests is that the PSA “estimate” of the poverty line at $1.25 for 2012 in current prices is equivalent to that WB’s $1.25 for 2005. i.e. It does not account for inflation over a period of seven years (since 2005). the PSA measurement therefore yield a substantially lower “estimate” of poverty when compared to that of the World Bank.

The correct assessment following the WB criterion would have been to apply the $1.90 PPP criterion for 2011, accounting for inflation in 2012. At a threshold of $1.90+ this “estimate” would have led, had it been applied, to a significantly larger percentage of the Philippines population below the poverty line. It should be noted that neither the WB IPL nor the Philippines $1.25 criterion are valid measurements of poverty. They do not include an assessment of the purchasing power required (in PhP) to meet basic human needs (nutrition, health, education, housing)

The 2015 Estimates of Poverty

The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) describes the process of estimating the poverty incidence in 2015 (based on 2015 current prices):

How were these 2015 figures computed?

Again following the logic of the WB one dollar a day per capita criterion, the monthly PhP 9,140 to meet both basic food and non-food needs for a family of five translates into PhP61.00 per capita per day (9140 divided by 30 days to convert this amount into a daily requirement, then divided by five to account for family size)

At the average 2015 dollar PhP exchange rate (PhP44.5= 1$), the per capita PhP 61.00 per day translates into $1.35.

The WB one dollar a day pertains to the base period of 1985. As mentioned above, the WB  redefined the poverty frontier at $1.90 PPP in 2011.

While it appears that the PSA Authority has adopted the one dollar a day World Bank criterion, it has failed to account for inflation in both the 2012 and 2015 estimates. In 2015, the poverty threshold in dollars (and current pesos) was well in excess of $1.90 PPP for 2011.

On 18 January 2018, the United Kingdom and France held a Defense Summit at Sandhurst revolving around Prime Minister Theresa May and President Emmanuel Macron.

It is noteworthy that these two states have decided to cooperate on two major issues: against Russia in the Baltic countries and terrorism in the Sahel. They have also decided to continue with the merger of their expeditionary forces that began at the time of the war against Libya [1].

A few days later, on 22 January, the head of the British Chief of Staff, General Sir Nicholas Carter, delivered a conference at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) [2].

General Carter’s position is that the West is continuing to develop and will not delay in acquiring genuine technological superiority over the rest of the world. Shocked by this approach, Russia which has powerfully rearmed herself, is now ready to try to unleash a new world war.

These words of the British Chief of Staff are in total contradiction with the US National Security Strategy. The latter, in contrast, highlights that there has been a steep decline in the scientific and technical level in the US. Furthermore, the White House has named Russia as a rival that is trying to break up the Atlantic Alliance and not as a threatening power.

The following day, on 23 January, the British National Security Council decided to equip the country with a new national unit tasked with fighting “disinformation” coming from foreign states in general, and Russia in particular. The spokesperson for the Prime Minister declared:

“We are living in an age of fake news and conflicting accounts (…) The government is going to respond to them by making better and more important use of national security communications to address these interconnected and complex challenges”.

Three months ago, Theresa May had denounced the Russian danger during a speech to the Lord Mayor [3]. It is worth highlighting that Mrs May had declared:

“Russia is seeking to make news into weapon, by deploying its medias, which are state-controlled, to spread false information and fabricated images in order to sow discord in the West and rock the foundations of our institutions”.

On this same day, within the European Union, the French President Emmanuel Macron announced the next initiative against Russian propaganda, while the Czech government has established a “Centre against Terrorism and Hybrid Threats”, under the authority of the Minister for Homeland Affairs. The product of an initiative of the Social Democrat Milan Chovanec, this Centre has been conceived to fight the media of the Czech opposition (Parlamentní listy, AE News, Lajkit.cz, Protiproud) which has been accused, without a scrap of evidence, of being fuelled by Russia.

Translated by Anoosha Boralessa

*

Notes

[1] “United Kingdom-France Summit Communiqué”, Voltaire Network, 19 January 2018.

[2] “Dynamic Security Threats and the British Army”, by General Sir Nick Carter, Voltaire Network, 22 January 2018.

[3] “Theresa May speech to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet 2017”, by Theresa May, Voltaire Network, 13 November 2017.

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Trump Considers “Bloody Nose” Strike on North Korea

By Peter Symonds, February 06, 2018

The Trump administration, or a powerful military-intelligence faction within it, is pushing for a pre-emptive military strike on North Korea, in the wake of, or possibly even during, the Winter Olympics due to start in South Korea on Friday.

North Korea: Genocide Denial

By Prof. John McMurtry, February 06, 2018

With the people and society of North Korea, the same operations of denial have gone into play as endlessly before in the wider context of US-led world power in Indonesia, Vietnam, Latin America, Iraq, Palestine arguably throughout, and so on.  Since the North Korean people have already suffered the death of an estimated third of their population by US-led armed forces in previous years, non-stop and imminent nuclear threats against them, and life-destructive embargo, where does it end?

Secret Meeting on the Privatization of Nuclear War Held on Hiroshima Day 2003

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, February 05, 2018

What seems to have escaped the numerous media reports on the 2018 NPR is that the development of “more usable nuclear weapons” had already been put forth in George W. Bush’s 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, which was adopted by the US Senate in late 2002. In this regard, Senator Edward Kennedy had accused the Bush Administration for having developed “a generation of more useable nuclear weapons.” namely tactical nuclear weapons (B61-11 mini-nukes) with an explosive capacity between one third and 6 times times a Hiroshima bomb.

‘Duck and Cover’ Nuclear Attack Warning Drills Exacerbate Fears of North Korea War

By Colonel Ann Wright, February 06, 2018

Successive administrations have lied our country into wars – from Vietnam to Iraq. We do not agree for the need for war with North Korea and refuse to accept the attempted U.S. intimidation of the DPRK, which could lead to war. The sirens, much like the steady barrage of “orange alert” terror warnings in 2002-2003 that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq, normalize the potential for war.

‘Bringing Humankind Closer to Annihilation’: World Leaders Denounce Trump’s New Nuclear Posture

By Jon Queally, February 05, 2018

As the Chinese government on Sunday urged the U.S. government to drop its “Cold War mentality” and criticized the Trump administration’s new nuclear weapons posture, released Friday, other world leaders also expressed alarm that the new policy for expanded development of “smaller” atomic weapons and reduced restrictions on their use was leading “humankind closer to annihilation.”

New Defense Strategy: War with Great Nations and Arms Race

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, February 05, 2018

This week, following the recent announcement of a new National Defense Strategy that focuses on conflicts with great powers and a new arms race, the Pentagon announced an escalation of nuclear weapons development. The United States’ military is spread across the world, including several dangerous conflict areas that could develop into an all-out war, possibly in conflict with China or Russia.

During the election period the Italian Government remains in charge only for the «handling of current affairs». Nevertheless it is about to take on other binding commitments in NATO on behalf of Italy.

These commitments will be officialized in the North Atlantic Council, taking place in Brussels on February14-15 at a defense ministers’ level. (Roberta Pinotti for Italy).

The agenda has not yet been communicated. But it is already written in the «National Defense Strategy 2018», that the US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis released on January 19. The Pentagon report is top secret this year, unlike the previous ones. Only a summary has been published, enough to make us understand what is going to prepare in Europe.

Accusing Russia of “violating the borders of nearby nations” and “ insisting on the veto power over the decisions of its neighbors», the US report states: «The surest way to prevent war is to be prepared to win one». Therefore it is a call on the European allies to «fulfill their commitments to increase defense spending to bolster NATO». Italy has already committed in NATO to bring military spending from the current approximately 70 million euro a day to about 100 million euro a day.

No one, however, talks about it in the electoral debate. As they do not mention the Italian contingent deployed in Latvia near the Russian territory, nor the Italian fighters, Eurofighter Typhoon, deployed in Estonia since January 10, a ten minute flight from St. Petersburg. The motivation is to protect the Baltic countries from «Russian aggression».

Silence shades the fact that Italy took over the command of the land component of NATO Response Force, projectable anywhere in the world «under the command of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe» on January 10, always appointed by the President of the United States.

The news of the Italian Navy receiving the first short takeoff and vertical landing fighter, F-35B, on January 26 is ignored. The F-35B personnel will be trained at the Beaufort base of the Marines in South Carolina.

All this and more is kept silenced in the electoral debate. The debate focuses on the economic implications of Italy’s membership in the European Union, but consequently ignores the political and military and economic implications of Italy’s NATO membership, the Alliance under US command, to which belong 21 (after Brexit) over the 27 EU States.

In this framework the question of the new B61-12 nuclear bombs is not raised. The Pentagon will start to deploy the bombs on the Italian territory in 2020 replacing the current B-61. The Pentagon will set our country on the front line in the increasingly dangerous nuclear confrontation with Russia.

In order to break the cloak of silence on these fundamental issues we should ask the candidates in the parliamentary elections at public meetings, social media and radio-television programs two precise questions (as proposed by the No-War No-Nato Committee): «Are you in favor of Italy’s exit from NATO? Are you in favor of the immediate removal of US nuclear weapons from Italy? Answer Yes or No, possibly motivating the reason of your choice».

A third question should be asked to the 243 members of Parliament (among whom the candidate prime minister Luigi Di Maio stands out), signatories of the Ican commitment to have Italy join the UN Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons: «In accordance with the commitment you signed, will you commit yourself, in the next legislature, to the immediate removal from Italy of US B-61 nuclear bombs, which already violate the Non-proliferation Treaty, and to the non-installation of the B61-12 and other nuclear weapons?».

Article in italian :

Nato e nukes non sono temi elettorali

Syrians are living the horror brought to them by the criminal West.  They can not afford the complacency of shrugging their shoulders in indecision, not when their lives and their ancient civilization is being threatened by Western-paid terrorist mercenaries of the worst kind.

“Our” proxies, slit throats, chop heads, and take no prisoners as we waffle in indecision, ignore empirical evidence, and take the comfortable easy road of believing the labyrinth of lies  promulgated by Western media messaging.

As countries are destroyed, and its peoples are slaughtered — think Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and others — by abhorrent Western proxies — public institutions are contaminated, and ultimately replaced by parasitical “privatized” facsimiles.  Public banking is looted and destroyed in favour of transnational banksterism, World Bank funding, and IMF usury.  Food security is destroyed and replaced by biotech tentacles and engineered dependencies on cash crops and unhealthy food.  Currencies are destroyed, sanctions are imposed, and the unknown, unseen hand of totalitarian control imposes itself, amidst the cloud of diversions and confusions, aided by comprador regimes, oligarch interests, and shrugging domestic populations.

Syria refuses to submit.  That is why the West is taught to hate her, and the rest of the world learns to love and respect her. (Mark Taliano)

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Reviews:

Voices from Syria is a powerful account of a message from the Syrian people telling the West to stop killing innocent civilians in pursuit of their fake “war on terrorism”

–Prof James Petras, Bartle Emeritus Professor, University of Binghampton, New York

Mark Taliano exposes the barbarity of Washington’s latest regime change aspirations. The West’s political spin is laid bare in the words of the Syrian people.

–Felicity Arbuthnot, Veteran Middle East War Correspondent

Taliano brilliantly and poignantly explains what everyone needs to know – an antidote to disgraceful anti-Syria propaganda,

–Stephen Lendman, Award-winning Author and Progressive News Radio Host

Canadian Mark Taliano has brought together an excellent mix of anecdotes and analysis to create a very accessible short book on the terrible Syrian conflict. It should serve as a primer for all those who feel curious, dissatisfied or cheated by the near monolithic war chorus of the western corporate media.

–Tim Anderson, Distinguished Author and Senior Lecturer of Political Economy, University of Sydney, Australia

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Mark Taliano’s book provides a convincing testimony to the bravery and resilience of the Syrian people, who have been fighting against an alliance of Western aggressors and Islamic terrorists for over six years. The fact that one of the oldest cultural nations of the world is bombed back to the Middle Ages by the West and its Arab allies is not only a colossal war crime but also a crime against humanity. The book corrects a large part of Western propaganda claims on Syria. Very readable and revealing.

-Dr. Ludwig Watzal, Journalist & Editor, Bonn, Germany

Mark Taliano is not arguing over details and he is right. After reading his beautiful and invigorating book, you will never forget those “Voices from Syria” that the West has refused so obstinately to listen to.

The writer’s honesty, his frankness, his refusal of any intellectual game at the expenses of the suffering Syrian People are such that his pleading can’t be contested. Through the authenticity of his “Voices from Syria” and the accuracy of these genuine testimonies, he shuts the door on the miserable and shameless lies and false flags of Western and Islamist [Wahhabi] propaganda.

–Michel Raimbaud is a former French ambassador particularly in the Arab world, in Africa and Latin America

Voices from Syria is a small book with a big message. It would be perfect to use in a group of concerned activists meeting to discuss and disseminate the truth about US or NATO foreign policy in Syria. . It could be used in a classroom or in a library reading club.

-Heather Cottin, Sociology Professor, LaGuardia Community College

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Il Governo, che nel periodo elettorale resta in carica per il «disbrigo degli affari correnti», sta per assumere altri vincolanti impegni nella Nato per conto dell’Italia. Saranno ufficializzati nel Consiglio Nord Atlantico, che si svolge il 14-15 febbraio a Bruxelles a livello di ministri della difesa (per l’Italia Roberta Pinotti).

L’agenda non è stata ancora comunicata. È però già scritta nella «National Defense Strategy 2018», che il segretario Usa alla Difesa Jim Mattis ha rilasciato il 19 gennaio. A differenza dei precedenti, il rapporto del Pentagono è quest’anno top secret. Ne è stato pubblicato solo un riassunto, sufficienre comunque a farci capire che cosa si prepara in Europa.

Accusando la Russia di «violare i confini di nazioni limitrofe ed esercitare potere di veto sulle decisioni dei suoi vicini», il rapporto dichiara: «Il modo più sicuro di prevenire la guerra è essere preparati a vincerne una».

Chiede quindi agli alleati europei di «mantenere l’impegno ad aumentare la spesa per potenziare la Nato». L’Italia si è già impegnata nella Nato a portare la propria spesa militare dagli attuali circa 70 milioni di euro al giorno a circa 100 milioni di euro al giorno.

Praticamente nessuno, però, ne parla nel dibattito elettorale. Come non si parla del contingente italiano schierato in Lettonia a ridosso del territorio russo, né dei caccia italiani Eurofighter Typhoon schierati il 10 gennaio in Estonia, a una decina di minuti di volo da San Pietroburgo, con la motivazione di proteggere i paesi baltici dalla «aggressione russa».

Silenzio sul fatto che l’Italia ha assunto il 10 gennaio il comando della componente terrestre della Nato Response Force, proiettabile in qualsiasi parte del mondo «alle dipendenze del Comandante supremo delle forze alleate in Europa», sempre nominato dal presidente degli Stati uniti.

Ignorata la notizia che la Marina italiana ha ricevuto il 26 gennaio il primo caccia F-35B a decollo corto e atterraggio verticale, il cui personale verrà addestrato nella base dei Marines di Beaufort in Carolina del Sud.

Questo e altro viene taciuto nel dibattito elettorale. Esso si concentra sulle implicazioni economiche dell’appartenenza dell’Italia all’Unione europea, ma ignora quelle politiche e militari, e di conseguenza anche economiche, dell’appartenenza dell’Italia alla Nato sotto comando Usa, di cui fanno parte (dopo la Brexit) 21 dei 27 stati della Ue.

In tale quadro non viene sollevata la questione delle nuove bombe nucleari B61-12, che tra circa due anni il Pentagono comincerà a schierare in Italia al posto delle attuali B-61, spingendo il nostro paese in prima fila nel sempre più pericoloso confronto nucleare con la Russia.

Per rompere la cappa di silenzio su tali questioni fondamentali dovremmo porre ai candidati e alle candidate alle elezioni politiche (come propone il Comitato No Guerra No Nato) due precise domande in incontri pubblici, social e trasmissioni radio-televisive: «Lei è favorevole o no all’uscita dell’Italia dalla Nato? Lei è favorevole o no alla immediata rimozione dall’Italia delle armi nucleari Usa? Risponda Sì o No, motivando eventualmente il perché della sua scelta».

Ai 243 parlamentari (tra cui spicca il candidato premier Luigi Di Maio), firmatari dell’impegno Ican a far aderire l’Italia al Trattato Onu sulla proibizione delle armi nucleari, dovremmo porre una terza domanda: «In base all’impegno sottoscritto, Lei si impegnerà, nella prossima legislatura, per la immediata rimozione dall’Italia delle bombe nucleari Usa B-61, che già violano il Trattato di non-proliferazione, e per la non-installazione delle B61-12 e di altre armi nucleari?».

Manlio Dinucci

Wall Street stocks plunged yesterday amid a global market sell-off. At the end of the day, the Dow was down by 1,175 points, its biggest one-day point fall in history, after a day of violent moves.

Including the fall last Friday, the Dow has dropped by more than 1,800 points in two days, erasing all the gains it had made this year.

One of the most significant features of yesterday’s decline was its speed. In the space of about 11 minutes just after 3 pm, the Dow went from minus 700 points to 1,600 points down, in what was described as an “avalanche” of selling, before recovering somewhat. However, selling resumed and the index finished 4.6 percent lower for the day.

Other indexes were also down sharply in the biggest market fall since 2011. The S&P 500 fell by 4.1 percent, the Nasdaq, 3.78 percent, and the Russell 2000 by 3.63 percent. Tech stocks recorded big falls, with Apple and Alphabet (the Google parent company) down by more than 10 percent.

Every sector of the broad-based S&P 500 index was down. Financial stocks fell 4.7 percent, health care 4.6 percent, industrial stocks 4.5 percent and energy 4.3 percent.

The turbulence in the market was reflected in the rapid spike in the so-called Vix, or volatility index, which rose by 117 percent, its largest one-day percentage increase. This marked a major break from the situation last year, when the Vix recorded its lowest ever average annual rate.

In its report on the market plunge, the Wall Street Journal noted that “traders described a growing sense of anxiety” when the fall in the Dow reached 1,600 points, citing one investment manager who said it was “the first time in a while I’d say it feels like borderline panic-type selling,” as yelling broke out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

The rapid plunge raised fears that it could have been the result of a “flash crash”—a sudden fall produced by a so-called “fat finger” trade or some other malfunction. But nothing like that appears to have taken place. The fall was precipitated by large computer model-generated trades.

The Wall Street plunge followed significant declines in global markets, as trading opened following the fall in US markets last Friday. The Hong Kong market fell by as much as 2.7 percent at one point, while Japan’s Topix index slid by 2.2 percent.

As the trading day began in Europe, markets were also down. London’s FTSE index fell by 1.5 percent, while the Stoxx Europe 600 index lost 1.6 percent.

Market analysts and commentators were divided on the reasons for the sell-off. Some have maintained that it is a necessary correction and that the economic fundamentals remain sound, with improved prospects for higher growth. Others have pointed to the moves by central banks to wind back quantitative easing and start to end the low-interest rate regime that has played such a key role in sustaining the market surge since the financial crisis of 2008.

While it is impossible to predict the short-term course of the markets, there are clearly significant shifts taking place. The sell-off that began on Friday was triggered by the report that average wages in the US had risen by 2.9 percent over the past year, the largest increase since 2009. This drove an increase in the interest rate on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury bond to 2.85 percent, sparking fears that the rate was on its way to the critical level of 3 percent.

The significance of the wage rise was not so much the number itself, a relatively small increase coming in just over market expectations of a 2.7 percent rise, but what it signified. The markets are above all fearful of a resurgence of wages militancy in the working class in the US and internationally, the signs of which are growing. This would force an end to what has been a central aspect of US monetary policy going all the way back to the stock market crash of October 1987.

At that time, the incoming chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan (image on the right), announced that the financial spigots of the central bank would be opened to sustain the market, and in every period of market turbulence since then what became known as the “Greenspan put” has been set in motion.

But with the working class seeking to push back against the continuous wage cutting of the past four decades, that policy may have to be dropped as the Fed lifts rates to counter such an offensive.

While the Fed rate is still relatively low, between 1.25 and 1.5 percent, the move of bond market rates toward 3 percent is regarded with trepidation because of its impact on US firms and its ramifications globally.

According to the findings of a report by London’s Longview Economics, the results of which were cited in the Financial Times, if interest rates in the US rapidly move above 3 percent, the impact will be far-reaching. This is because some 12 percent of US companies are “zombies.” That is, their earnings do not cover their interest payments, and a sudden rise in rates would send them into bankruptcy, so dependent have they become on the continuous supply of ultra-cheap money.

According to a report published by CNBC on research carried out by the Bank of America Merrill Lynch, there is a similar situation in Europe, with a significant number of “zombie” firms there dependent on cheap credit. The bank report found that 9 percent of companies in Europe were “zombies” with “very weak interest coverage metrics.” This compares to 6 percent in the period before the crash of 2008 and 5 percent in late 2013.

“The plethora of monetary support in Europe over the last five years has allowed companies with weak profitability to continue to refinance their debt and stave off defaults,” the report noted.

Whatever the immediate future of the markets, yesterday’s sell-off has already had a political impact by deepening the crisis of the Trump administration. Just ten days ago in his address to the summit of the global elites in Davos, Switzerland, Trump cited the rise of the stock market, “smashing one record after another,” as proof of the virtues of his economic policies.

In an address at a Cincinnati-area manufacturing company yesterday afternoon, he hailed a “tidal wave of good news,” while television coverage of his speech tracked a further plunge in the Dow toward minus 1,600 points in a corner of the screen.

The Trump administration, or a powerful military-intelligence faction within it, is pushing for a pre-emptive military strike on North Korea, in the wake of, or possibly even during, the Winter Olympics due to start in South Korea on Friday.

The “bloody nose” option—a limited attack on the North Korean nuclear missile arsenal and infrastructure—is supposed to overawe the Pyongyang regime and bully it into surrendering to Washington’s demands to denuclearise.

Unprovoked US aggression, however, would almost certainly trigger retaliation, rather than submission, with incalculable consequences. Even if nuclear weapons were not immediately used, the death toll in South Korea alone is estimated in the tens of thousands on the first day, in a conflict that could rapidly draw in nuclear-armed powers such as China and Russia.

Yet, such an act of recklessness and savagery is precisely what is being discussed, debated and prepared in the upper echelons of the White House and the US security-intelligence apparatus. Within top military-foreign policy circles, the advanced nature of the plans is so well known that it is generating fears and opposition.

Last week, the Trump administration abruptly dumped its appointee for US ambassador to South Korea, Victor Cha, after he voiced opposition to a pre-emptive strike on North Korea. Cha subsequently went public, penning a comment in the Washington Post in which he warned that a US attack would put 230,000 Americans in South Korea at risk—equivalent to a medium-sized city like Pittsburgh or Cincinnati.

A letter to Trump last Friday signed by 18 Democratic senators, including Martin Heinrich, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, expressed concern that Cha had been passed over. It declared that to take military action before exhausting diplomatic options would be not only “extremely irresponsible” but would lack “either a Constitutional basis or legal authority.”

The letter warned that

“it is an enormous gamble to believe that a particular type of limited, pre-emptive strike will not be met with an escalatory response from [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-un.”

It pointed out that each of the expert witnesses to a January 30 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee “believed that a ‘bloody nose’ strategy carried extreme risks.”

The Democrats’ letter, far from expressing genuine opposition to war, is part of the intense debate raging within the US political establishment over whether Russia or China represents the greater immediate danger. The escalating campaign against Trump over alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential race is aimed at placing Moscow first in the cross-hairs, rather than North Korea and China.

The bitter political infighting over foreign policy is compounding the instability of the Trump administration, which is confronting a worsening economic crisis, share market volatility and mounting working class resistance to deteriorating living standards. Far from this making war less likely, Trump could launch a military attack on North Korea in a desperate attempt to turn these acute political and social tensions outward against an external enemy.

Trump has warned repeatedly that time is running out to resolve the confrontation with North Korea peacefully. As he met with North Korean defectors in the White House last Friday—itself a provocation that undermines a peaceful resolution—Trump again blamed previous administrations for failing to confront North Korea and bluntly declared: “We have no road left.”

Vice-President Mike Pence is currently heading to South Korea for the Winter Olympics, but will use his trip to tour US anti-ballistic missile bases in Alaska and hold talks with Japanese and South Korean leaders. A White House official made clear that Pence’s brief was to ensure there would be no easing of the US campaign of “maximum pressure” on North Korea.

“We’ve seen it all before,” the official said, “charm offensives by the North that lead to a period of fruitless talks that bought more time for the North.”

Following the Olympics, the US and South Korea will proceed with massive joint war games known as Foal Eagle and Key Resolve, which were temporarily delayed. Last year’s exercises involved more than 300,000 troops, along with a substantial naval presence and the most advanced American warplanes, in a thinly disguised rehearsal for war with North Korea. The Pentagon also recently stationed nuclear-capable B-52 and B-2 strategic bombers on Guam within easy striking distance of the Korean Peninsula.

As Victor Cha hinted in his Washington Post comment, a “bloody nose” strike is not the only military option under consideration.

“There is a forceful military option available that can address the [North Korean] threat without escalating into a war that would likely kill tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Americans,” he wrote.

The only military alternative to a limited attack is an all-out assault with nuclear and/or conventional weapons that would obliterate North Korea’s capacity to retaliate.

While couched in defensive terms, the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, released last Friday, foreshadows exactly such an attack. Any North Korean nuclear attack on the US or its allies, it states, “is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime. There is no scenario in which the Kim regime could employ nuclear weapons and survive.”

The danger that a mistake or miscalculation could lead to Trump ordering the “total destruction” of North Korea is underscored by last month’s false alarm on Hawaii of an incoming nuclear missile. Moreover, US imperialism has a long history of concocting events to justify war—such as the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that was used as the pretext for direct American military intervention in Vietnam.

Any pre-emptive US military strike on North Korea would send shock waves around the world and provoke an outpouring of anti-war sentiment. But opposition to war, which is already widespread, must be galvanised into a unified movement of the international working class on the basis of a socialist program directed against the root cause of war—the capitalist system.

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

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Separatists just liberated South Yemen.

Clashes broke out in the country’s interim capital of Aden, which was also the seat of government for the formerly independent country of South Yemen, over the weekend after President Hadi banned the “Southern Transitional Council” (STC) and its supporters from protesting him. The STC had given the Yemeni leader an ultimatum set to expire on Sunday to replace his allegedly corrupt government or face a revolt, and they claim that he ordered his soldiers to shoot at activists who defied his anti-protest decree and tried to assemble in the city regardless. The fast-moving situation saw the party’s armed wing, the “Southern Resistance Forces” (SRF), take over Aden in a move that Hadi’s government decried as a “coup’, which will undoubtedly have profound domestic and international implications.

The country’s internationally recognized government was already expelled from the former territory of North Yemen following the success of the Houthi insurgency in early 2015 and the militants’ subsequent alliance with former President Saleh’s General People’s Congress, and the authorities’ eviction from South Yemen essentially means that it no longer has any formal representation in the nominally unified state, thereby setting the stage for its re-division into its two previously independent constituent halves. This unfolding scenario could pit coalition allies Saudi Arabia and the UAE against one another since Riyadh is said to be in favor of preserving the country’s unity while Abu Dhabi is allegedly backing the STC and wants to restore South Yemeni independence. A further wrinkle in all of this is that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is supposedly mentored by his older Abu Dhabi counterpart Mohammed Bin Zayed, so any split between the two would be deeply personal.

That said, the two Gulf allies will probably resolve whatever disagreements they may have about Yemen’s post-war political future behind closed doors, and the UAE would be wise to present a “face-saving” method for MBS to change his presumed position and accept South Yemen’s secession if the STC is successful with its struggle. Riyadh might have ultimately backed the wrong horse by supporting the unpopular Hadi, who is visibly despised in both parts of the country, so this “inconvenient” fact alone might be enough to get it to reconsider its backing for this failed politician and come to grips with the reality that neither Northerners nor Southerners want him ruling over their country. Getting rid of him, however, would nullify the official reason for the Saudi-led War on Yemen in the first place, but that in and of itself might be the pretext that Riyadh needs to downscale its disastrous and highly expensive participation in this conflict.

All told, the seemingly unexpected rebellion of Yemen’s Southern secessionists might represent the final phase of the War on Yemen if the STC is able to oust Hadi’s government from Aden once and for all, and a prospectively Russian-brokered “solution” might see the country either “decentralize” along the Bosnian model of broadly independent “Identity Federal” halves or outright return to its pre-1990 division into two de-jure independent states.

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This article was originally published by Oriental Review.

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.

As Science for Peace members continue to discuss the Open Letter to the International Criminal Court on the Genocide Conspiracy against North Korea, it is important to overcome the denial of genocide itself which proceeds in many guises and has been promoted for a long time by dominant US-led states, media and their followers across the world.  We must remember we are named Science for Peace, and such denial undermines science and reason at the roots. 

With the people and society of North Korea, the same operations of denial have gone into play as endlessly before in the wider context of US-led world power in Indonesia, Vietnam, Latin America, Iraq, Palestine arguably throughout, and so on.  Since the North Korean people have already suffered the death of an estimated third of their population by US-led armed forces in previous years, non-stop and imminent nuclear threats against them, and life-destructive embargo, where does it end?

As long as genocide denial governs the dominant discourse beneath recognition, it can go on from one people to the next whose social order does not conform to the US-enforced geopolitical agenda. The major operation is to deny there is an issue at all, that genocide is only a political term or that the leader of the people suffering genocide is evil. There is no end of this operation even today, as we see in from the lead denial camp within Science for Peace.

Denial is backed up by a more commonplace diversion from ever mentioning genocide at all, and directing of all attention instead, at best, to the evils of war and nuclear weapons in general, or to the US-designated Enemy who is passionately blamed for evils that, while even true, are incomparably less life-threatening and mass murderous than the US-led forces of genocide which are in operation yet again with the same modus operandi.

This reverse projection operation seems never to be named except to elicit the circle of genocidal denial all over again. “Do you support the corrupt and evil brute Saddam Hussein?” goes to “Kim is the most corrupt despot and brute in the world”. In this way, the society and its people – usually with better public health care than the US accuser – are once again ground into permanent destitution and dependent helplessness.

Is this the real objective that genocide denial assists in implementing without knowing it?

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John McMurtry Ph.D (University College London) is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Professor (emeritus) of Philosophy.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

Following the highly acclaimed 2012 release of the latest book by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, “Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War“, this title is now available for purchase through the Amazon Kindle program! Now you can take this bestselling title wherever you go and access it through your portable reader.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3

Year: 2012

Pages: 102

List Price: $15.95

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Click here to order.

The news of a U.S. “internet task force” to increase internet access in Cuba surely wins the prize for this year’s “interference in a sovereign nation’s internal affairs” category.

Following up on the fake news of “sonic attacks,” which can only be described as an absurd attempt by the U.S. State Department to dissuade Americans from traveling to Cuba; following up on Cuba’s win as the world’s safest travel destination at FITUR Spain, we get the story that the U.S. will form an internet task force.  It’s not difficult to imagine what’s behind this.  Trump jumped off the toilet, lifted his head out of the Twitter feed and shouted, “BINGO! I’m going to give the Cubans the internet!”

Like so many of the other “bright” ideas he’s had such as the Paris agreement affair, North Korea, the prostitutes scandal, the wall, travel bans, the U.S.-Cuba relationship, healthcare, tax cuts for the rich followed by the grande “faux pas,” “shithole countries,”… the internet task force project will join this “series of unfortunate events.”  One can sense another “Big Fail;” and conclude, this will be his legacy.

What he is actually doing though, is showing the world that America is, yet again, the stupid, big bully of the playground.  Could that be the real definition of his campaign slogan, “make America great again?”

Again, the U.S. is interfering in a sovereign nation’s internal affairs. Not the best plan. Not now, not ever.

So the news that the U.S. would form the “Cuba internet task force,” is unbelievably shocking.  It becomes more and more evident, the big bully of the playground is interfering in another country’s sovereignty. Yet again.

The June 7, 2017 Presidential National Security Memorandum announced,“relevant departments and agencies, including the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and appropriate non-governmental organizations and private-sector entities,”would be formed, with the purpose to,“encourage freedom of expression through independent media and internet freedom so that the Cuban people can enjoy the free and unregulated flow of information.”

Yes, Cubans like the rest of us, would love free internet.  But the U.S. plot to interfere is doomed to failure.  It’s hardly likely most Cubans will be visiting the websites the task force wants.

What this so-called internet task force is hoping is that more internet access in Cuba will bring about “regime change.”  Plan A didn’t work.  Plan B failed. Now we’re at Plan E, F, or G,  or God-knows-what plan now.  What is certain is that it’s another “subversive, interventionist and illegal action against Cuba.”  Another attempt, like the 2014 ZunZuneo project, to destabilize the Island.

What is not taken into account is that most Cubans, like the rest of us, will probably end up surfing the web for the regular, ordinary things that most people do.  Facebook, news, dating, fashion, cars, music, medical advice, sports, weather, flight prices, and hotels are what immediately come to mind.

Apparently, according to the website Siegemedia, the most popular searches are, “Gmail”, “Craigslist”, “Amazon”, “Yahoo”, and “Porn.”  Most Cubans, or “the average Cuban” is not going to be searching what this task force actually wants.  People are people.

Cuba has low connectivity to the internet, but there’s been progress to increase access throughout the country.

ETECSA, the telecommunications company, reduced the price for an internet connection.  Recently, the company announced that smartphones would have the internet on phones this year.  There are now 500 hotspots throughout the Island.  Internet access has increased by 37% since 2010.  Progress.

In 2015, the Cuban government promised all Cubans would have the internet by 2020.  Cuba has been doing just that – moving forward with its internet strategy with the help of Chinese technology.

Cuba’s official news media site Granma slammed the news of the Cuba internet task force, declaring it was, “destined to subvert Cuba’s internal order.”  Well, of course it is.

Granma also stated,

“In the past, phrases such as ‘working for freedom of expression’ and ‘expanding Internet access in Cuba’ have been used by Washington to mask destabilizing plans with the use of new technologies.”

There are suggestions from analysts and experts in the U.S. that the Cuba internet task force might actually have a negative impact.

If Trump however, really wants to help the Cubans, he should start the process to lift the embargo/blockade.  He should remove the travel ban against Americans traveling to Cuba. His latest Cuba policy has only hurt the entrepreneurs and the people.

How has he helped the people of Cuba?  He hasn’t.  Let the truth out.

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T.K. Hernández is a journalist, publisher and editor at the Cuba Business Report.  Her work has appeared on the Cuba Business Report, Telesur, Buzzfeed and Medium.

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”  –  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

The American people do not realize the seriousness of the Russiagate conspiracy against them and President Trump.

Polls indicate that a large majority of the public do not believe that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the presidential election, and they are tired of hearing the media repeat the absurd story day after day.

On its face the story makes no sense whatsoever.  Moreover, the leaked emails are real, not fabricated.  The emails show exactly what Hillary and the DNC did.  The public knows that these transgressions were pushed out of news sight by the false story of a Trump/Putin conspiracy.

The fact that the entirety of the US print and TV media served in a highly partisan political way to bury a true and disturbing story with a fake news story—Russiagate—is one reason some polls show that only 6% of Americans trust the mainstream media.  All polls show that large majorities of independents, Republicans, and youth distrust the mainstream media.  In some polls about half of Democrats trust the media, and that is because the media is servant to Democratic Party interests.

Russiagate is a dagger aimed at the heart of American governmental institutions.  A conspiracy involving top officials of the Obama Department of Justice, FBI, and other security agencies was formed together with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, the purpose of which was to defeat Trump in the presidential election and, failing that, to remove Trump from office or to discredit him to the point that he would be reduced to a mere figurehead.  This conspiracy has the full backing of the entirety of the mainstream media with the partial exception of Fox News.  

In other words, it was a coup not only against Donald Trump but also against American democracy and the outcome of a presidential election.

There is no doubt whatsoever about this. 

The facts are publicly available in the declassified Top Secret Memorandum Opinion and Order of the FISA Court— see this — and in the declassified report from the House Intelligence Committee—given by the presstitutes the misleading name of the “Nunes Memo,” as if it is Nunes’ personal opinion and not the findings of months of work by an oversight committee of Congress— see this. 

All of this information has been posted on my website for some time.  If you have difficulty following my explanation, former US Attorney Joe DiGenova explains the felony actions by the FBI and Obama Justice (sic) Department here. 

Briefly, the National Security Agency discovered that the FBI and DOJ were abusing the surveillance system. As a favor of one security agency to another, NSA Director Adm. Rogers permitted the FBI and DOJ to rush to the FISA Court and confess their transgressions before the NSA informed the Court. The FBI and DOJ pretended that their deception of the Court in order to obtain surveillance warrants for highly partisan political purposes was not due to their intent but to procedural mistakes.  The FBI and DOJ told the Court that they were tightening up procedures so that this would not happen again.  The FISA Court Memorandum and Order clearly states:

“On October 24, 2016, the government orally apprised the Court of significant non-compliance with the NSA’s minimization procedures involving queries of data acquired under Section 702 using U.S. person identifiers. The full scope of non-compliant querying practices had not been previously disclosed to the Court.”  

What this legalese jargon is saying is that the FBI and DOJ confessed to obtaining warrants under false pretexts.  These are felonies. 

The FISA Court Memorandum and Order is about resolving these deficiencies and returning the FBI and DOJ to legal practices.  For example, the Court Memorandum and Order says:

“On January 3, 2017, the government made a further submission describing its efforts to ascertain the scope and causes of those compliance problems and discussing potential solutions to them. See January 3, 2017, Supplemental Notice of Compliance Incidents Regarding the Querying of Section 701-Acquired Data (“January 3, 2017 Notice”). The Court was not satisfied that the government had sufficiently ascertained the scope of the compliance problems or developed and implemented adequate solutions for them and communicated a number of questions and concerns to the government.”

In other words, the FBI and DOJ were attempting to make corrections to their “compliance problems” in ways that would allow them to continue to mislead the FISA Court, and the Court wasn’t letting them.

The FISA Court Memorandum and Order was released prior to the House Intelligence Committee report and has been completely ignored by the utterly corrupt press prostitutes.  The FISA Court Memorandum and Order, relying on the confessions of the FBI and DOJ, verifies the House Intelligence Committee report that the FBI and DOJ illegally obtained spy warrants for partisan political purposes.

Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat who is a disgrace to the voters of his California district, to the Democratic Party, and to the House of Representatives, knows full well that the FBI and DOJ deceived the FISA Court.  Schiff is so partisan that he lies to the hilt in the face of hard documented evidence from both the FISA Court and his own House committee.  Schiff is so totally devoid of all honesty and integrity that he is the perfect leader for a shithole country, something that he and his ilk are turning the United States into.

The honest left—not the Identity Politics left, —does not believe a word of the concocted Russiagate conspiracy against Trump.  They object to the Russiagate conspiracy not because they like Trump, which they most certainly do not, but because they understand that it is a lie directed against truth.  They understand that the American mainstream media has deserted factual, truthful reporting and serves as a propaganda ministry for the war/police state that American is becoming.

For example, Eric Zuesse holds The Atlantic and its presstitute writer, David A. Graham, to account for lying about the House Intelligence Report.

Andre Damon writes on the World Socialist Web Site:

“The Democratic Party was thrown into disarray Friday after the publication of a classified memo exposing as a factionally-motivated witch hunt the investigation by leading intelligence agencies into the Trump administration’s alleged collusion with Russia. . . . The release of the memo once again underscores the fact that the US intelligence agencies have massively intervened in US politics.” 

The real left, as opposed to the fake left, understands that the people have no chance when the highest officials of the Department of Justice and the security agencies join in a conspiracy against a democratic outcome.  When the justice and police authorities have no respect for the truth, as the Russiagate conspiracy proves, the people are doomed.  If the FBI-DOJ-DNC-presstitute conspiracy goes unpunished, The Lie will have prevailed over The Truth and all of us will be endangered.

The important question before us is: will the treasonous criminals in the FBI, DOJ, and DNC be indicted and held responsible?  Or do high government officials get a pass as do the police who rob and murder citizens and never face justice for their crimes?  

From the sound of things, it looks like they will get a pass.  Rep. Nunes felt compelled to say on TV how much he likes Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is a party to the deception of the FISA Court.

President Trump says he will not fire the conspirator against him, Robert Mueller, even though both Trump and Mueller know that the Russiagate investigation headed by Mueller is a concocted conspiracy against American democracy and the President of the United States.  It seems that high government officials, like state and local police, are above the law.

What about the FISA Court, readers ask, why did the FISA Court let the FBI and DOJ get away with their illegal acquisition of spy warrants?  Once the Court knew about it, the Court did not let them get away with it, as the Memorandum and Order makes clear.  The FISA Court does not have prosecutorial power to indict and bring a case against the FBI and DOJ criminals.  That has to be done by the DOJ, and the DOJ is not going to indict itself.  

Former US Attorney Joe DiGenova believes that continuing investigations will result in high officials being indicted, convicted, and sent to prison.  If the US is to have any future as a country in which government is accountable to law, it is essential that DiGenova be correct.  However, I will believe it when I see it.

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

A continuum of oppression is pervasive in Palestinian society, ranging from the matrix of control the Jewish state has imposed on Palestine to the oppression of cultural norms, such as those having to do with patriarchy, gender and class that are common to all societies to one degree or another.

Because of the degradation, humiliation and devaluation Palestinians encounter daily, even those in exile, simply following the stream of horrific news coming out of Palestine, or those trapped in refugee camps, it’s fair to say, as James Baldwin famously stated about blacks in the United States, Palestinians are in a constant state of rage.

Identifying as the victim of oppression is a first and necessary step in the political awakening of any oppressed person. Part of this process involves correctly identifying your oppressor, so that your rage is focused at the correct target — (in the case of Israel, unfortunately, the political picture includes multiple and varied targets).

At one very visceral level, the target of rage generated by the trauma of oppression is the people most proximate to you who are oppressing you collectively as a community or individually.

If you are what we call a ’48 Palestinian Arab within the Green Line, you have no problem identifying your enemy as the colonial structure of violence and power that is the Jewish state of which you are a reluctant citizen, but your experience also includes your fellow Jewish citizens, who have usurped your homeland and embraced the Apartheid of the Jewish state.

If you are Ahed Tamimi in Nabi Saleh on the West Bank, you know the Jews who are “settling” or rather squatting on your land and dispossessing you are your enemy, and you have a repellent reaction against them as Jews, especially if they are using their religion to taunt you with and claim supremacy over you.

The question then arises, what kind of Jew are we dealing with in Palestine? Some Jewish citizens of Israel whose eyes are open to the oppression the Jewish state metes out, have asked this question, but they are often still more anguished about their own Jewish identity than with the Palestinians suffering under oppression— as if a kinder, gentler “Israeliness” would do the trick.

For example, Haaretz contributor Yossi Klein asks,

“What kind of Jews are we? Have we not eyes, hands, senses, affections, passions? Do we not cry at movies? Does the immigration police officer not have a heart? Does the pilot who bombs Gaza not have children? Does the cry of a small child not pierce their hearts? Of course it does, and still we deport, bomb and imprison. How do we do this with such a big heart? Judaism would not do this, but Israeli Judaism does… Israeliness is an insular religion that flaunts being “a people that stands alone” like a badge of honor. A Judaism that fights its children’s leaving, that annuls everyone else. Secular people are a nuisance, the Arabs are drugged cockroaches and the refugees are a cancer. It’s easier to trample on others when the refugee is cancer and the disabled person is an exploiter, the Arab inferior and the poor man lazy.It’s not Jews who expel, oppress and abuse, it’s Israelis. Judaism is not to blame, Israeli Judaism is. We are the Israelis, and this is our Judaism.”

What is not questioned in such critiques is the original sin in Palestine, the claims Jewish thinkers have made to appropriate Palestine to the Jews.

“Israeliness” among Jews, and by that Klein means Zionism, has today spread far beyond Israel, as is clearly manifested by a cursory overview of the American Zionist Movement and Jewish organizations all over the world working for Israel.

Israel’s legitimacy remains unquestioned among many Jews, and the “security” charade of the Jewish state as cover for its oppression continues to have standing and legitimacy in world opinion.

One obstacle to addressing Jewish supremacy in Palestine is Jewish identification historically as victims (which Israel continues to exploit shamelessly for its own ends). This mind-set prevents many who are complicit in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians (including non-Jews) from recognizing their own oppressor roles.

Palestinians defend themselves as much against a pervasive culture of Jewish supremacy as they do against bodily harm and loss of property and land. Our self-defense aims to undermine existing social hierarchies, ideologies, and identities – including Jewish identity.

For Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, the most difficult-to-confront Zionist claim has to do with Jewish identity. It is an identity expressed by Halachah (“Jewish law”) and social norms in Jewish communities, which hold that Jewish identity is conveyed from mother to child — i.e., religious criteria by itself does not define what it is to be “Jewish”. From there is derived the Zionist claim for Jewish self-determination in Palestine.

Christians who believe that God commands them to stand with the Jewish state also base this belief on their understanding of Jews as being descendants of Abraham (literally)— never mind that Muslims believe they, too, are the spiritual descendants of Abraham.

Jews both within and outside Israel who speak up against Jewish identity as defined by Jewish Zionist thinkers such as Max Nordau and Vladimir Jabotinsky support Palestinians in fighting this pervasive culture of Jewish supremacy in Palestine, and directing Palestinian rage where it belongs, at racists and bigots. For that reason, they are the ones who can most help us effect social and political change in Palestine.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.

Featured image is from IMEMC.

We bring to the attention of our readers the recently release controversial Nunes Memo.

Below is the letter sent to Rep. Devin Nunes, Chairman of the House Select Committee by Donald F. McGahn II, Counsel to President requesting the release of the Nunes Memo.

The complete text of Nunes Memo dated January 18, 2018 (see below) is entitled Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the FBI

This article was originally published by GR in March 2017.

Dearest and Esteemed People of Greece,

You are being slaughtered right in front of the world’s eyes and nobody says beep. Least the Greek elite. Your Government. A few, but a few too many, allow the slaughter because it doesn’t concern them. They are blinded by the false glamour of the euro and of belonging to the ‘elite class’ of the noble Europeans (sic!).

They apparently live well enough, including the caviar socialists of Syriza. They let their country bleed to death literally, morally, socially and psychologically. Medical care is no longer available or privatized and unaffordable. Pensions were reduced five times. They were never more than a survival kit. By now they have been slashed in some cases by over 50%. Hordes of people live on food handouts. Most social services, including to a large extent education have been sold out, privatized. Gone with a flicker. Gone, by order of Germany – and the holy troika – the criminal gang of three, IMF, European Central Bank (EIB) and the European Commission (EU); the latter a mere bunch of unelected corrupt puppets, deciding the fate of some 800 million Europeans – with YOU, the Greek people, accepting carrying the brunt end of the stick.

In September 2016, the unelected European Commission sent Greece a Brussels-drafted legislation of over 2,000 pages, in English, to be ratified by the Greek Parliament within a few days – or else. – Nobody asked: ‘What is else’?

Brussels didn’t even bother translating this unreadable legalistic heap of paper into Greek, nor did they allow the Parliament enough time to read, digest and debate the new fiscal legislation. Most parliamentarians could not read them, either because of language or due to the imposed time limit. The Parliament ratified the legislation anyway.

Under this new law, Greece is transferring all public assets (public infrastructure, airports, ports even public beaches, natural resources, etc.), unconditionally, for 99 years, to the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) which is free to sell (privatize) them at fire sales prices to whomever is interested – supposedly to pay back the Greek debt. The fund was originally estimated, certainly under-estimated – at about 50 billion euros. In the meantime, the value of the Greek assets has been further downgraded by the troika to between 5 and 15 billion euros, as compared to Greece’s debt of more than 350 billion euros. The ESM is a supranational undemocratic apparatus, accountable to no one.

With this legislation, the Greek Parliament – YOUR Parliament, Esteemed People of Greece! – has annulled itself. It is no longer allowed to pass any budget or fiscal (tax) legislation. Everything is decided in Brussels in connivance with the IMF and the ECB. The last time a similar situation happened was in 1933, when the German “Reichstag” (Parliament) transferred all of its legislative power to Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

This, Dear People of Greece – is sheer economic fascism, right in front of your eyes, the world’s eyes, but nobody wants to see it. The worst blind is the one who doesn’t want to see.

This asset seizure was confirmed when the last hope for at least some debt relief was dashed at the end of February this year. Even the IMF initially recommended and today still privately recommends debt relief. However, Germany without mercy announced the final pillage of Greece, requesting Greece to surrender gold, utilities and real estate to the ESM – largely managed by Germany. The next ‘bailout’ amount, if Greece goes to her knees and surrenders everything, might be 86 billion euros, meaning NEW DEBT. In exchange of what? More interest, a higher debt service (interest and debt amortization) — and an even bleaker outlook to ever, and I mean ever, getting out of this US-European fascism imposed process of killing of a nation.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is reported to have said, “Berlin’s stance on Greece’s bailout program remained unchanged”, after she met with IMF chief Christine Lagarde a few days ago (http://russia-insider.com/en/greece-surrender-gold-public-utilities-and-real-estate-exchange-pieces-paper-printed-brussels).

Some facts about Greece’s debt, as of 9 March 2017:

Population 10.8 million.

Debt: 352 billion euros (interest per second: 617 euros; debt per citizen: 32,580 euros).

Interest per year: 19.5 billion euros.

Total Greek bailout funds from 2010 to end 2016: in excess of 250 billion euros – none of which went to Greece for the benefit of the people, but to pay debt service to the troika and pay off mostly German and French private banks.

Debt as a percentage of GDP: 181% (GDP 195 billion euros);
2008 Debt to GDP: 109% (less than today’s US debt to GDP ratio of 109.63%).

Greece’s GDP amounts to less than 2% of EU’s GDP.

Greek GDP has collapsed by more than 25% since 2008.

Unemployment is rampant – with an average of 26% – and close to 50% for young people (18 to 35).

Greece’s debt in 2008 would have been totally manageable internally, without outside interference, or so-called ‘bailouts’ – which are really not bailouts but forced debt accumulation.

Greece’s debt was NEVER a threat to the European Union, as the FED / ECB / WS bankster propaganda made you believe. The Greek and subsequent “European Crisis” was entirely fabricated by the banksters for their benefit, at the detriment of Greece and Europe. It had nothing to do with the Greek or European debt. But nobody questioned it. Those European and international top economists and politicians who knew, didn’t dare to speak out. The voices of those who did dare to speak the truth were muffled. The people of Europe were lied to, including the Greek, as usual by the presstitute media.

Let’s put the Greek debt in perspective.

In September 2011, without warning, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) devalued the Swiss franc by about 12% against the euro to protect its economy. This was an unfair move – to say the least, since none of the euro-zone bound countries has the liberty to re-or devalue its currency, as deemed necessary by their economy, i.e. Greece. While Switzerland is not a direct member of the EU, Switzerland is nevertheless bound to the EU by more than 120 bilateral contracts, thereby de facto a EU member.

During the 3 ¼ years of locking the exchange rate into a fixed rate of at least CHF 1.20 per euro, the SNB amassed more than 500 billion francs in extra foreign currency, mostly in euro. This is about 150% of Greece’s current debt.

Switzerland, a country of 8 million people, in theory, could bail out Greece’s full debt, say, at no interest, by a 50-year loan (World Bank IDA terms) – in solidarity; and to compensate a bit for the SNB’s questionable ethics vis-à-vis EU members. Switzerland would not suffer. To the contrary, such a move would help stem the risk of a Swiss currency inflation, due to the huge amounts of Swiss francs that needed to be ‘printed’ to maintain the artificial exchange rate against the euro. Would Switzerland be prepared to engage in such a solidary rescue action? –Probably not.

People of Greece! – Wake up.

Take things in your own hands! Don’t believe you politicians, your media! Get out of this criminal organization called the European Union, and this fraudulent western monetary system that is strangling you to death. Take back your sovereignty, your own currency. Default on your debt – the west can do nothing about it. Not if you run your country with your own public banks, and your own money, gradually but surely rebuilding a destroyed economy. Debt repayment is negotiable. Cases abound around the world. Argentina is one of the more recent ones. Even Germany renegotiated its foreign debt in 1952 (see London Agreement of German External Debt).

Germany, the leader of this economic massacre of Greece, owes Greece huge WWII reparation payments. On 8 February 2015, PM Tsipras requested Germany to pay up her full reparation debt to Greece of an equivalent of 279 billion euros, in today’s terms. Germany replied in April 2015 that the reparation issue was resolved in 1990 – which, of course, it wasn’t. It cannot be excluded that much of the German pressure on Greece today is a means of deviating the world’s attention of the reparation debt Germany owes to Greece.

People of Greece, be aware of what is going on. Do NOT ACCEPT what your government, Brussels and the troika are doing to YOU and YOUR country. To the contrary, request the full reparation payment from Germany – and demand GREXIT, as a fully legitimate follow-up to YOUR July 2015 overwhelming NO vote to more austerity-imposing troika ‘rescue’ packages.

If you do, you will soon see the light at the end of the tunnel — a light that has been blacked-out for too long by Germany and the gangsters of the troika and your own government.

Threats of Expulsion from the Euro Zone

German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble still is attempting bluffing the Greeks and impressing the rest of the world by threatening Greece with expulsion from the Euro. Any sane government would turn that threat into its own initiative and abandon this putrefied monster called European Union, along with its fake and fraudulent common currency, called euro. But that’s the problem, Greece is reigned by insanity.

So, the Greek Government responds to insanity (from the troika) with insane submissiveness, namely with meek compliance – to the detriment of millions of their already deprived and enslaved compatriots.
Among those (still) influential Greek highflyers is Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis; the legendary and charming, ‘radical’, Motorcycle Minister. Though he resigned in apparent protest of the Syriza compliance with the troika’s requests despite the NO vote, today he is nothing more than a conformist, who is seeking few nominal ‘reforms’ in Brussels, but by no means wants Grexit, let alone the collapse of the EU – which, by the way, is fortunately imminent. As Greek Minister of Finance, Varoufakis never even had the ‘Option Grexit’ as a Plan ‘B’

(http://www.defenddemocracy.press/greece-disaster-capitulation/).

Nobody screams, yells, revolts, takes to the streets, blocks streets, bridges, railways, for days, weeks, interrupts the still ongoing commerce of the foreign owners of what’s left of YOUR country’s public assets. Nobody. This is not to blame the Greek who have to fight for sheer survival, who have to find ways to feed their kids and families, but the j’accuse goes to the Tsipras- Syriza clan and all those Greek elitists, the media (are they all bought like in Germany by the CIA?) and parliamentarians, who just watch in awe – but stand by. No action. Watching Greece – YOUR country, People of Greece! – bleeding to death.

Be aware, this is in fact not about debt and bailouts. If they tell you that the European ‘debt crisis’ is Greece’s fault, and that a new crisis is brewing, depending on how well Greece will conform to the rules of the next bail out – it is an outrageous lie. This crisis is manufactured by the very European, their elite, the FED-led Goldman Sachse’s of this world, who run the European Central Bank through Mario Draghi, a former GS executive – who de facto runs the European economy.

Why do they want Greece under their boots? – They, the scum of Brussels and ‘swamp’ of Washington (as President Trump used to call the Washington Deep State ‘establishment’), want a submissive Greece. Because Greece is in a highly strategic geographic location, at the cross-roads of west and east. Greece is a NATO country. Maybe the second most important NATO country (after Turkey), because of its strategic position. They don’t want Greece to be run by a ‘left-wing’ government. Syriza, of course, is everything but left-wing. It is as neoliberal as they come. The masters of the universe want ‘Regime Change’ – the good old regime change that threatens all those who do not bend to the rules of the west. Right now, the Syriza government is bending backwards over to please the money masters and to let her people be miserably humiliated and ruined.

Were Greece to hold new elections and let a right-wing party and Prime Minister win, à la New Democracy or even the fascist Golden Dawn, or a coalition of the two – the debt problem would go away, almost overnight. What Washington wants, and Brussels by (puppet) extension, is a compliant Greece that will never ever question its role in NATO, never question the EU, never question its shackles to the euro, and never question the US access to the Mediterranean Sea – rich in deep off-shore minerals and hydrocarbons. The same applies, by the way, also to Italy, Spain and Portugal – also riparian states of the Mediterranean Sea. Their governments have already been changed by outside (US / EU) interference to right-wing neoliberal compliant stooges.

The Greek elite and government inaction is inexcusable. This is Stockholm syndrome at its worst. Submissive to their hangman, until death do us part. And death in the form of total destruction, total pillage, total slavery, is not far away.

Do you, People of Greece, want to continue this path to slavery by a predatory empire, that will eventually call the shots on every move you make?

Or do you want to get your sovereignty back, your own currency – and be unshackled from the dictate of Brussels – and start afresh – as the noble and wise Greek people, who brought Democracy to the world some 2500 years ago? – Surely, Greece still has visionaries and the wisdom to remake Democracy. Remember, while we cannot change our geographic location – the future is irrefutably in the EAST.

Let’s live again Greece!

Long live the People of Greece!

*

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The 4th Media, TeleSUR, TruePublica, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

Are you ready for nuclear attack warning sirens in your community?  I live in the State of Hawaii, which decided in December 2107 to begin monthly nuclear attack warning siren drills, similar to the monthly tsunami warning sirens that are tested each month.

You know what happened – an employee of the State of Hawaii Emergency Management Department pushed the wrong button, setting off the siren, and no one alerted the public for nearly 49 minutes that it was a drill. Cell phone alerts to everyone in the 808 area code flashed “Nuclear attack warning-take cover,” with residents and tourists alike going into crisis mode.

Three days prior to the false alarm, 20 of us attempted to call to the attention of the state government that the sirens are being used for political advancement of a hysteria for war with North Korea, or DPRK – the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. We do not believe the North Korean government is going to attack the United States and suspect that the nuclear sirens and “duck and cover” drills are purposeful and dangerous fear-mongering.

The sirens heighten the anxiety and stress of impending conflict and devastation, making citizens afraid – and in their fear, more likely to accept whatever line the government feeds them on threats and counter-measures.

Successive administrations have lied our country into wars – from Vietnam to Iraq. We do not agree for the need for war with North Korea and refuse to accept the attempted U.S. intimidation of the DPRK, which could lead to war. The sirens, much like the steady barrage of “orange alert” terror warnings in 2002-2003 that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq, normalize the potential for war.

Certainly, if the U.S. initiates military action against North Korea, militarized Hawaii with its four major military bases on Oahu – the headquarters of the U.S. military Pacific Command that covers half the world, the Army’s 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, Marine Expeditionary Force at Kaneohe, Hickam Air Force Base and Pearl Harbor Navy Base, the huge NSA underground listening station near Wahaiwa, the massive practice bombing area called Pohakuloa, on the Big Island and the Pacific Missile Range on Kauai – would be a likely retaliatory target for North Korea or any other nation threatened by the United States.

Therefore, it is in Hawaii’s survival interest that we demand that the U.S. government resolve issues with North Korea in a nonviolent manner.

The national government in Washington, DC, does not feel the need to have nuclear warning sirens, so why should Hawaii? One would think the politicians who make the decisions for war and the Pentagon would be bigger targets than Hawaii.

We held our protest outside the State Capitol and got media coverage, but the siren program continued – until the false alert siren went off. However, after the mistaken alert fiasco, the governor has suspended the siren warnings.

Women’s delegation to Civil Society Round Table in Canada. (Photo: Patricia Talbot)

As this was going on in Hawaii, I joined a 16-woman delegation from five countries who participated in a Civil Society Round Table held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada sponsored by the government of Canada and in a public forum on security and stability on the Korean peninsula in conjunction with the meeting of the foreign ministers of twenty countries of the U.S.- led Korean command.

Some of our delegates had long collective experience engaging with North Koreans through citizen diplomacy and humanitarian initiatives and others had expertise on militarism, nuclear disarmament, economic sanctions and the human cost of the unresolved Korean War.

Instead of approving of the warmongering of the Trump administration, our delegation’s recommendations to the meeting of foreign ministers appealed for sanity in dealing with the North Korean government:

• Immediately engage all relevant parties in dialogue, without preconditions, to work toward achieving a nuclear-free Korean peninsula;
• Abandon the strategy of maximum pressure, lift sanctions which have deleterious effects on the North Korean people, work toward the normalization of diplomatic relations, remove barriers to citizen –to-citizen engagement and strengthen humanitarian cooperation;
• Extend the spirit of the Olympic truce and affirm the resumption for inter-Korean dialogue by supporting:

1) Negotiations for the continued suspension of joint U.S.-Republic of Korea (South Korea) military exercises in the south, and the continued suspension of nuclear and missile tests in the north,

2) A pledge not to conduct a first strike, nuclear or conventional, and

3) A process to replace the Armistice Agreement with a Korea Peace Agreement;

• Adhere to all the Security Council recommendations on Women, Peace and Security.  In particular urge the foreign ministers to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which acknowledges that the meaningful participation of women in all stages of conflict resolution and peacebuilding strengthens peace and security for all.

Despite our best efforts at the Civil Society Round Table and individual meeting with the U.S. and Canadian delegations, the foreign ministers chose to continue the “maximum pressure” strategy on the DPRK through rigorous enforcement of UN sanctions and a underscoring that a nuclear-armed North Korea would never be accepted.

Anti-North Korean war demonstration. (Photo: Ann Wright

Our delegation responded that the foreign ministers had chosen to further isolate and threaten Pyongyang, a strategy that had utterly failed to halt North Korea’s nuclear and missile program and had only furthered the DPRK’s resolve to develop its nuclear arsenal.  We know that the sanctions that have been imposed have cruel and punishing effects on ordinary North Koreans and are considered by North Korea as warfare-economic warfare, just as military war preparations (games) are considered as pre-invasion and regime overthrow warfare.

We are profoundly disappointed by the foreign ministers who represent countries with a commitment to peaceful diplomacy and feminist foreign policies.  At a time of great global instability, we looked to them for leadership for true global peace and security, but found instead continuation of threats, isolation and economic and military warfare.

At the state level, we hope that the government of Hawaii will discontinue its monthly (and accidental?) siren and cell phone fear-mongering and requiring schools to show “duck and cover” videos that are conditioning the public for war and increased military spending, instead of the less expensive and more successful strategy – dialogue!

*

Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army-Army Reserve and retired as an Army Reserve Colonel. She served 16 years as a U.S. diplomat in U.S. Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia.  She was on the first team to reopen the US Embassy in Afghanistan in December 2001.  She resigned from the U.S. government in March 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She lives in Honolulu.

Humanity has, for millennia, been led down the road of an entirely false agenda. So much so, that every aspect of society is almost the precise reverse of what it should be.

Just a glimmer of awareness reveals that the true potential of the majority of mankind remains locked away, unable to exert any influence on the course of events on our planet.

Given the scale of this imprisonment, it becomes apparent that the world has been moving on a trajectory invented and directed by a false intelligence, whose interests are diametrically opposed to the intelligence of natural planetary consciousness.

I use the word ‘intelligence’ because it’s hard to find the right word to describe that which is very clever, but lacks the ability to feel love or compassion; and is often ruthless without ever showing emotion. Intelligence should have a more human ring to it, but the word has been hijacked by the spying networks: the CIA, FBI, MI5 for example, all call themselves ‘intelligence agencies’. Not exactly warm blooded institutions!

Within the hierarchies of banks, corporations, the military, governments, the media and various global trading organizations, one will find a plethora of quasi-humans in line to get their hands onto the levers of the central control system. The top-down pyramid which steers the daily agenda for millions of mortals caught-up in the 9 to 5 treadmill.  Yet, those climbing the employment ladder within these same institutions, more often than not lack any awareness of what is going on above their heads.

We should consider the following question: at exactly what point within this typical corporate pyramid, does the ordinary mortal metamorphose into the ranks of the subhuman control master? Which floor serves as the subtle switch-point where the 9 to 5 worker ‘just doing a job’ shifts into a dedicated trainee in the art of ‘power over the people’ management?

I am not proposing to answer this, as it is a largely hypothetical question; but I suggest that the process whereby the false agenda for humanity is able to be maintained, year in year out, relies heavily on the unquestioning cooperation of those who, at some point, change their identity – or have their identity changed –  from just ordinary workers to corporate clones. In other words those who see the world entirely through the lens of the corporation they work for.

The renowned social psychiatrist/psychologist Dr Erich Fromm, in his last major thesis ‘The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness’ traces the decline of the sentient human at the hands of a ‘corporate intelligence’ which is specifically designed to dehumanize those climbing up its ranks. So that by the time they reach the top, such people have become robotic, in virtually every action they undertake.

Here lies the mechanism whereby the human becomes less than human; the less than human becomes inhuman; and the inhuman becomes a biological robotic clone and proponent of Transhumanist Artificial Intelligence – which takes the false agenda for humanity ever nearer to its ultimate goal.

Perhaps not ultimate, but far enough to ensure that humanity as we know it, is superseded by another form of ‘intelligence’ that has nothing to do with nature or the exigence expressed in natural human emotions of love, joy, pain and sorrow.

Cyborgian artificial intelligence is just that: artificial. Art put in reverse so as to eliminate the godly, the beautiful, the spontaneous – all that which gives expression to what it really means to be human.

But consider the fact that it is people suffering these type of symptoms who are in the driving seat of world affairs; running governments, banks and technocratic institutions like the European Union. The mentality is that of a corporate trained control freak – and the greater the power on hand, the greater the ego fueled top-down control manipulation becomes.

The structural design of the neoliberal/neoconservative capitalist Leviathan is not an accident. It is a deliberate formula for the entrapment of mankind. One which puts into reverse – and thereby completely distorts – the true hierarchical themes of nature and the cosmos. In just the same way as Hitler inverted and reversed the design of the original swastika, an ancient peace symbol from Southern India, into a twisted symbol of war.

The symbols that adorn all top-end corporate chains and industries, follow this same pattern. They are nearly all based upon ancient archetypal forms. Forms that symbolized man’s desire to give  expression to the powers of nature, as well as the cosmic influences that were mythologized into gods and pantheistic forces of power and influence. Symbols that expressed higher aspirations of bygone civilisations.

The big-chiefs of corporate globalization adorn their high-rise totems and plush office suites with the very same symbols, but what do they stand for now?

Quite simply, a crassly materialistic paradigm which has usurped the nature gods of old; declaring itself the new ‘supreme force’ to which mankind must go on its knees in unquestioning obeisance.

And, as we know, the majority of mankind has been complicit in fulfilling this role, ensuring a self inflicted avenue of slavery and passive acceptance of the role assigned by the prevailing status quo.

Indeed, there appears to be no end to the butchery and bullying in the cause of keeping the Leviathan rolling forward. The US military – backed by its European ‘allies’ – ranges the planet in support of the ceaseless profligate mining of valuable minerals, to make the fuels that fill the tanks of Big Pharma, Big Agro, Big Army and Big Business. While the public, rather than rising up against mammon, appear to be paralyzed by the spectacle, unable to imagine anything less destructively domineering that might take its place.

I used the words “appear to be” because there is, of course, another emergent energy that tells another story. That breaks through the deception that man is nothing more than a psychopathetic instrument in the hands of all dominant, aggressive and less than human oppressors.

It is not just ‘any’ other energy. It is the long buried – and steadily more volcanic – energy of liberated spirit. A revivified spirit which is finding its way back into the arteries of an ever growing number of ex hostages of the status quo, as well as new arrivals on this planet.

Everyday this spirit is gaining further momentum and a stronger equilibrium. Cracks in the false agenda are widening; the confidence of its perpetrators is wavering; the old power base is leaking.

Chinks of light glitter amongst the darkness; the sense of an upwardly rising change is in the air, counteracting the stench of stagnation and decline.

What is this?

We ‘the people’ have arrived at a critical point in this apocalyptic epoch, finding out that we are possessed of power we never knew we had; starting to believe in a Self we never knew we cradled; hearing a voice we never could hear before. Finding in each other, sources of mutual support, not just a shackled fellow prisoner.

As this process grows, so the false agenda is further revealed for what it is, and its chief perpetrators are exposed ever more clearly for what they are. The seemingly inexorable drive towards a cybernetic future, or one populated and run by gender-bent, micro-chipped mock-humans, is being infiltrated by warm blooded, nature loving true humans. Trees are being planted where concrete was once the only landscape.

We are learning that where our thoughts go – energy follows. And that if these thoughts are full of creativity and life, so will our lives also be. We are learning that we can take charge of our destinies after all. That, at any moment, we could dispense with the false reality of the top down centralized command system, and be free to start our own version of reality. One informed by our love of Truth – a determination to act on this truth – and a growing aspiration to Be rather than to have.

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, a writer, actor and international activist. He is President of the International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside. Julian is the author of two acclaimed titles: Changing Course for Life and In Defense of Life, which can be purchased by visiting www.julianrose.info . He has just completed his third book ‘Overcoming the Mechanistic Mind’ for which he is currently seeking a publisher.

As the Sunday news vine began getting heavy, that sole topic of all-consuming, toxic interest – Brexit – threatened to claim the casualty of the British Prime Minister herself, Theresa May.  Interest centred on a possible troika that had busied itself on harrying May. 

In any context, this troika would have seemed a compilation for pure comic effect: buffoonish Boris Johnson as replacement for PM, Michael Gove as his deputy, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, that “ornament on the backbenchers” as Chancellor.  They would be the “dream team”, though the description of a hallucinatory nightmare is probably more appropriate.

In the course of Sunday night, a “source” in Downing Street issued a statement to delay the delivery of blows against May.  Brexit meant an actual departure from the customs union, rather than some halfway house involving the continued payment of dues and obligations to observe Brussels’ wishes.

Were May not to have come clean on this, the Conservatives would have threatened a walk-out, resulting in a public split.  According to an unnamed (they tend to be these days) Tory MP,

“If they go for a customs union, the party will split.”

What did this Downing Street source go on to say?  Instead of a Customs Union arrangement, the PM will seek one of two options: a “highly streamlined customs arrangement” or a customs partnership.  The weasel words are coming thick and fast ahead of Brexit meetings this week.

The picture is, in other words, an incoherent mess.  Ministers such as Amber Rudd and Philip Hammond have little stomach for the stoic diet being advocated by the likes of Gove and Johnson.  To totally exit the customs arrangement, according to them, would cause undue harm and imperil the UK economy. Then looms the problems of border checks between Northern Ireland and Ireland, a prospect that has been flagged as destabilising to the peace process.

Rudd, in an effort to calm the waters, told the Andrew Marr Show that

“the committee that meets in order to help make these decisions is more united than they think.”

Optimistically, perhaps merely hopefully, she asserted that “we will arrive at something which suits us all.”  Supposedly, somewhere in these discussions, the elusive rabbit of “frictionless trade” will be pulled out of the hat.  All ills will be healed and grievances forgiven.

Rudd’s hopefulness belies the backroom antics that are taking place.  Hilary Benn, the Labour chair of the Brexit committee, pulsates with scepticism on this point.

“I think the government is in a state of open disagreement.  The prime minister has been immobilised.  We’re 19 months since the referendum… and we still don’t know what it is we want.”

The Times has reported that members of May’s Cabinet are sketching plans that would involve Brexiteers conceding to a limited extension to aspects of the existing customs union.  This opportunity would lay the tentative ground for negotiating with non-EU nations for specific trade deals and avoid economic harm – at least in the short term.

Short term stop gaps to limit harm; long term insistence on something apart from the European Union; steps to prevent the manifestation of Brino (Brexit in Name Only).  These are the propositions that hover with tenacity, refusing to leave discussions and intruding at every given moment.

What the Brexiteer cabal insists upon is the fantasy that the UK retains its mould as a dominant power, and that, left alone to its devices, will somehow manage to entertain the likes of India, China and Brazilon a better footing.  Britain outside its European fraternity will be bolder, braver and more effective. Being within the EU customs union, on the other hand, entails negotiating as a bloc of states, a collective understanding.

Figures like the international trade secretary, Liam Fox, demand an end to the “obsessive criticism” of Brexit.

 “Brexit,” he told Conservative Home last month, “is not a time bomb to be defused but a great opportunity to be embraced.”

His overseas trips have been greeted with confidence; on returning, he meets an enervating “self-defeating pessimism that is too often on show from certain politicians, commentators and media outlets over here.”

Britain’s links, however emotional they might be, remain tangibly linked to Europe. These will, in time, become more onerous and costly, and Brussels promises to be stringent on this.  EU negotiators are doing their best to make sure that no benefits accrue to Britain in its departure.  What matters now is how the Brexiteers manage to sell this to the voters.

May’s Britain is flailing before weak leadership and chronic uncertainty, but a Britain with the likes of Johnson-Gove-Rees-Mogg would be an absurdly antiquarian sight, an anachronism that will see the country become a contender for the sick man of Europe.  In destroying the country they claim to love in a fit of patriotic enthusiasm, they just might also destroy the reality of Brexit itself.

*

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

The Trump Administration Nuclear Posture Review released today calls for the development of new, more usable nuclear weapons, and expanding the number of scenarios when the first use of nuclear weapons would be considered, including in response to a non-nuclear attack. The plan renews the calls for massive spending to replace all legs of the nuclear triad, including new strategic bombers, new ballistic missile submarines and new land-based ballistic missile systems. The proposed approach will make America poorer and less secure, and could greatly increase the risk of nuclear war.

In reaction to the Trump Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, Derek Johnson, executive director of Global Zero, the international movement for the elimination of nuclear weapons, issued the following statement:

“Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review marks a dramatic departure from decades of bipartisan efforts to reduce nuclear risks, especially Ronald Reagan’s maxim that ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.’ It’s a radical plan written by extreme elements and nuclear ideologues in Trump’s inner circle who believe nuclear weapons are a wonder drug that can solve our national security challenges. They aren’t and they can’t.

“The disturbing vision laid out in this final document looks nearly identical to the draft Nuclear Posture Review leaked last month, and justifies the alarmed consensus among the vast majority of nuclear security experts. Developing so-called ‘low-yield’ nuclear weapons and loosening restrictions on their use only increases the risk of miscalculation and escalation. This plan increases the likelihood of nuclear conflict and makes America less safe.

“Let’s be clear: ‘Low yield’ is a misnomer — there is no such thing as a ‘small’ nuclear weapon. Nobody on the receiving end of a nuclear attack is going to stop to measure the mushroom cloud before retaliating. As Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz told Congress in January, ‘a nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon.’

“With 4,000 weapons, including almost a thousand lower yield weapons, the U.S. nuclear arsenal is already the second largest on the planet, and easily the most sophisticated and most devastating. For context, that’s 15 times larger than the Chinese nuclear arsenal, which consists of approximately 270 weapons kept in central storage. Trump’s insistence that we need more and better weapons is already spurring countries to follow in his footsteps. Nuclear arms-racing is a steep and slippery slope; we’d do well to learn the lessons of the former Soviet Union, whose collapse was accelerated by its unsustainable nuclear ambitions.

“The top national security priority of the United States should be to ensure that nuclear weapons are never used. Trump’s plan fails on that score in almost every respect. Worse, it contains the seeds of self-fulfilling prophecy: by actively planning for conflicts in which our nuclear weapons are used first, we bring ourselves closer to that point of no return.

“This plan would be troubling under any Administration, but given this President’s consistent and unabashed displays of ignorance, ballistic tendencies and dehumanizing world views, we should all be on red alert. In light of this plan, every effort should be directed to support legislation that reins in executive power to use these weapons, including the ‘Restricting the First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act’ and the No-First-Use bill currently before Congress.

“Congress’s power of the purse could also be a powerful tool to resist Trump’s dangerous nuclear agenda. Fiscal reality is going to hit this nuclear fantasy like a freight train. The price tag to replace our Cold War weapons systems has already ballooned to $1.7 trillion, and the recommendations contained in the Nuclear Posture Review will only push that number higher. Congress must intervene and starve this plan of the bank-breaking taxpayer funds it requires.”

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

Following the highly acclaimed 2012 release of the latest book by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, “Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War“, this title is now available for purchase through the Amazon Kindle program! Now you can take this bestselling title wherever you go and access it through your portable reader.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3

Year: 2012

Pages: 102

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As the Chinese government on Sunday urged the U.S. government to drop its “Cold War mentality” and criticized the Trump administration’s new nuclear weapons posture, released Friday, other world leaders also expressed alarm that the new policy for expanded development of “smaller” atomic weapons and reduced restrictions on their use was leading “humankind closer to annihilation.”

Beijing expressed alarm over how the U.S. characterized the Chinese military buildup as it reminded the world that nuclear weapons should not be considered “first strike” weapons.

“China has always exercised the utmost restraint in the development of nuclear weapons and limited its nuclear capabilities to the minimum level required for national security,” said Ren Guoqiang, a spokesperson of the Chinese defense ministry, in a statement.

“We hope the US side will discard its ‘cold-war mentality,’ shoulder its own special and primary responsibility for nuclear disarmament, understand correctly China’s strategic intentions and take a fair view of China’s national defense and military development,” Guoqiang added.

When the Pentagon on Friday released its new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) (pdf), as Common Dreams reported, peace and disarmament groups in the U.S. and around the world expressed immediate alarm at the document and its implications.

“Who in their right mind thinks we should expand the list of scenarios in which we might launch nuclear weapons?” asked Peace Action in a statement. “Who let Dr. Strangelove write the Nuclear Posture Review?”

In a column for CNN—titled “Give Trump more nuclear weapons and more ways to use them? Not a good idea“—Tom Collina, policy director of the anti-nuclear Ploughshares Fund, noted a recent poll showing that 60 percent of Americans do not trust Trump with nuclear weapons and argued:

The public is right to distrust Trump with nuclear weapons, and we all need to speak up and oppose these new, dangerous policies. People don’t tend to think of nuclear war as a policy choice, but it is, just like health care or immigration.

The Trump administration’s policies are increasing the risk of nuclear war. Sure, you could build a bomb shelter and hide, but that does not lower the risk of war, and it is highly unlikely to save you. Instead, we need to prevent nuclear war in the first place by changing government policy.

In a televised speech on Sunday, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani cited the Trump administration’s new posture and accused the U.S. of “shamelessly threatening Russia with a new atomic weapon.”

“The same people who supposedly believe that using weapons of mass destruction is a crime against humanity,” he added, “are talking about new weapons to threaten or use against rivals.”

Separately, in a tweet, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused Trump of moving in a “dangerous” direction that was bringing “humankind closer to annihilation”:

The US Nuclear Posture Review reflects greater reliance on nukes in violation of the #NPT, bringing humankind closer to annihilation. No wonder the Doomsday Clock is at its most dangerous since 1953. Trump’s obduracy in killing the #JCPOA stems from the same dangerous imprudence.

— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) February 3, 2018

On Saturday, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergie Lavrov also expressed alarm over the new NPR.

“While just having a flick through the document, one can notice that its confrontational charge and anti-Russian focus stare in the face,” Lavrov, quoted by the TASS News Agency, stated. “We state with regret that the US justifies its policy for a massive buildup of nuclear forces and an alleged increasing role of nuclear weapons in Russia’s doctrines. We are accused of lowering a threshold of nuclear weapon use and of some ‘aggressive strategies’.”

He disputed that characterization, but said Moscow would have not choice but to reassess, and possibly alter, its military and nuclear calculations accordingly.

Like China, Lavrov said the change of nuclear posture by the U.S. under Trump contrasts sharply with its own, in which atomic weapons are considered a strictly defensive deterrent, not a weapon they would consider using against a non-nuclear state or in a “first-strike” capacity.

“Russia’s military policy has unambiguously limited the threshold of use of nuclear weapons to two—let us put it bluntly—hypothetical, entirely defensive scenarios,” Lavrov stated. “They are as follows: in response to an act of aggression against Russia and (or) against our allies if nuclear or other types of mass destruction weapons are used, and also—that is the second scenario—with use of conventional arms but only in case our state’s very existence would be in danger.”

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Whether the rationale is the need to wage a war on terror involving 76 countries or renewed preparations for a struggle against peer competitors Russia and China (as Defense Secretary James Mattis suggested recently while introducing America’s new National Defense Strategy), the U.S. military is engaged globally. A network of 800 military bases spread across 172 countries helps enable its wars and interventions.  By the count of the Pentagon, at the end of the last fiscal year about 291,000 personnel (including reserves and Department of Defense civilians) were deployed in 183 countries worldwide, which is the functional definition of a military uncontained.  Lady Liberty may temporarily close when the U.S. government grinds to a halt, but the country’s foreign military commitments, especially its wars, just keep humming along.

As a student of history, I was warned to avoid the notion of inevitability.  Still, given such data points and others like them, is there anything more predictable in this country’s future than incessant warfare without a true victory in sight?  Indeed, the last clear-cut American victory, the last true “mission accomplished” moment in a war of any significance, came in 1945 with the end of World War II.

Yet the lack of clear victories since then seems to faze no one in Washington.  In this century, presidents have regularly boasted that the U.S. military is the finest fighting force in human history, while no less regularly demanding that the most powerful military in today’s world be “rebuilt” and funded at ever more staggering levels.  Indeed, while on the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised he’d invest so much in the military that it would become “so big and so strong and so great, and it will be so powerful that I don’t think we’re ever going to have to use it.”

As soon as he took office, however, he promptly appointed a set of generals to key positions in his government, stored the mothballs, and went back to war.  Here, then, is a brief rundown of the first year of his presidency in war terms.

In 2017, Afghanistan saw a mini-surge of roughly 4,000 additional U.S. troops (with more to come), a major spike in air strikes, and an onslaught of munitions of all sorts, including MOAB (the mother of all bombs), the never-before-used largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, as well as precision weapons fired by B-52s against suspected Taliban drug laboratories.  By the Air Force’s own count, 4,361 weapons were “released” in Afghanistan in 2017 compared to 1,337 in 2016.  Despite this commitment of warriors and weapons, the Afghan war remains — according to American commanders putting the best possible light on the situation — “stalemated,” with that country’s capital Kabul currently under siege.

How about Operation Inherent Resolve against the Islamic State?  U.S.-led coalition forces have launched more than 10,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since Donald Trump became president, unleashing 39,577 weapons in 2017. (The figure for 2016 was 30,743.)  The “caliphate” is now gone and ISIS deflated but not defeated, since you can’t extinguish an ideology solely with bombs.  Meanwhile, along the Syrian-Turkish border a new conflict seems to be heating up between American-backed Kurdish forces and NATO ally Turkey.

Yet another strife-riven country, Yemen, witnessed a sixfold increase in U.S. airstrikes against al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (from 21 in 2016 to more than 131 in 2017).  In Somalia, which has also seen a rise in such strikes against al-Shabaab militants, U.S. forces on the ground have reached numbers not seen since the Black Hawk Down incident of 1993.  In each of these countries, there are yet more ruins, yet more civilian casualties, and yet more displaced people.

Finally, we come to North Korea.  Though no real shots have yet been fired, rhetorical shots by two less-than-stable leaders, “Little Rocket Man” Kim Jong-un and “dotard” Donald Trump, raise the possibility of a regional bloodbath.  Trump, seemingly favoring military solutions to North Korea’s nuclear program even as his administration touts a new generation of more usable nuclear warheads, has been remarkably successful in moving the world’s doomsday clock ever closer to midnight.

Clearly, his “great” and “powerful” military has hardly been standing idly on the sidelines looking “big” and “strong.”  More than ever, in fact, it seems to be lashing out across the Greater Middle East and Africa.  Seventeen years after the 9/11 attacks began the Global War on Terror, all of this represents an eerily familiar attempt by the U.S. military to kill its way to victory, whether against the Taliban, ISIS, or other terrorist organizations.

Image below is Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell

This kinetic reality should surprise no one.  Once you invest so much in your military — not just financially but also culturally (by continually celebrating it in a fashion which has come to seem like a quasi-faith) — it’s natural to want to put it to use.  This has been true of all recent administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, as reflected in the infamous question Madeleine Albright posed to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell in 1992:

“What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

With the very word “peace” rarely in Washington’s political vocabulary, America’s never-ending version of war seems as inevitable as anything is likely to be in history.  Significant contingents of U.S. troops and contractors remain an enduring presence in Iraq and there are now 2,000 U.S. Special Operations forces and other personnel in Syria for the long haul.  They are ostensibly engaged in training and stability operations.  In Washington, however, the urge for regime change in both Syria and Iran remains strong — in the case of Iran implacably so.  If past is prologue, then considering previous regime-change operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the future looks grim indeed.

Despite the dismal record of the last decade and a half, our civilian leaders continue to insist that this country must have a military not only second to none but globally dominant.  And few here wonder what such a quest for total dominance, the desire for absolute power, could do to this country.  Two centuries ago, however, writing to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams couldn’t have been clearer on the subject.  Power, he said, “must never be trusted without a check.”

The question today for the American people: How is the dominant military power of which U.S. leaders so casually boast to be checked? How is the country’s almost total reliance on the military in foreign affairs to be reined in? How can the plans of the profiteers and arms makers to keep the good times rolling be brought under control?

As a start, consider one of Donald Trump’s favorite generals, Douglas MacArthur, speaking to the Sperry Rand Corporation in 1957:

“Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”

No peacenik MacArthur.  Other famed generals like Smedley Butler and Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke out with far more vigor against the corruptions of war and the perils to a democracy of an ever more powerful military, though such sentiments are seldom heard in this country today.  Instead, America’s leaders insist that other people judge us by our words, our stated good intentions, not our murderous deeds and their results.

Perpetual Warfare Whistles Through Washington

Whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere in the war on terror, the U.S. is now engaged in generational conflicts that are costing us trillions of dollars, driving up the national debt while weakening the underpinnings of our democracy.  They have led to foreign casualties by the hundreds of thousands and created refugees in the millions, while turning cities like Iraq’s Mosul into wastelands.

In today’s climate of budget-busting “defense” appropriations, isn’t it finally time for Americans to apply a little commonsense to our disastrous pattern of war-making?  To prime the pump for such a conversation, here are 10 suggestions for ways to focus on, limit, or possibly change Washington’s now eternal war-making and profligate war spending:

1. Abandon the notion of perfect security.  You can’t have it.   It doesn’t exist.  And abandon as well the idea that a huge military establishment translates into national safety.  James Madison didn’t think so and neither did Dwight D. Eisenhower.

2. Who could have anything against calling the Pentagon a “defense” department, if defense were truly its focus?  But let’s face it: the Pentagon is actually a war department.  So let’s label it what it really is.  After all, how can you deal with a problem if you can’t even name it accurately?

3. Isn’t it about time to start following the Constitution when it comes to our “wars”?  Isn’t it time for Congress to finally step up to its constitutional duties?  Whatever the Pentagon is called, this country should no longer be able to pursue its many conflicts without a formal congressional declaration of war.  If we had followed that rule, the U.S. wouldn’t have fought any of its wars since the end of World War II.

4. Generational wars — ones, that is, that never end — should not be considered a measure of American resolve, but of American stupidity.  If you wage war long, you wage it wrong, especially if you want to protect democratic institutions in this country.

5. Generals generally like to wage war.  Don’t blame them.  It’s their profession.  But for heaven’s sake, don’t put them in charge of the Department of “Defense” (James Mattis) or the National Security Council (H.R. McMaster) either — and above all, don’t let one of them (John Kelly) become the gatekeeper for a volatile, vain president.  In our country, civilians should be in charge of the war makers, end of story.

6. You can’t win wars you never should have begun in the first place.  America’s leaders failed to learn that lesson from Vietnam.  Since then they have continued to wage wars for less-than-vital interests with predictably dismal results. Following the Vietnam example, America will only truly win its Afghan War when it chooses to rein in its pride and vanity — and leave.

7. The serious people in Washington snickered when, as a presidential candidate in 2004 and 2008, Congressman Dennis Kucinich called for a Department of Peace. Remind me, though, 17 years into our latest set of wars, what was so funny about that suggestion? Isn’t it better to wage peace than war? If you don’t believe me, ask a wounded veteran or a Gold Star family.

8. Want to invest in American jobs? Good idea! But stop making the military-industrial complex the preferred path to job creation. That’s a loser of a way to go. It’s proven that investments in “butter” create double or triple the number of jobs as those in “guns.” In other words, invest in education, health care, and civilian infrastructure, not more weaponry.

9. Get rid of the very idea behind the infamous Pottery Barn rule — the warning Secretary of State Colin Powell offered George W. Bush before the invasion of Iraq that if the U.S. military “breaks” a country, somehow we’ve “bought” it and so have to take ownership of the resulting mess. Whether stated or not, it’s continued to be the basis for this century’s unending wars. Honestly, if somebody broke something valuable you owned, would you trust that person to put it back together? Folly doesn’t decrease by persisting in it.

10. I was an officer in the Air Force. When I entered that service, the ideal of the citizen-soldier still held sway. But during my career I witnessed a slow, insidious change. A citizen-soldier military morphed into a professional ethos of “warriors” and “warfighters,” a military that saw itself as better than the rest of us. It’s time to think about how to return to that citizen-soldier tradition, which made it harder to fight those generational wars.

Consider retired General John Kelly, who, while defending the president in a controversy over the president’s words to the mother of a dead Green Beret, refused to take questions from reporters unless they had a personal connection to fallen troops or to a Gold Star family. Consider as well the way that U.S. politicians like Vice President Mike Pence are always so keen to exalt those in uniform, to speak of them as above the citizenry. (“You are the best of us.”)

Source: CSMonitor.com

Isn’t it time to stop praising our troops to the rooftops and thanking them endlessly for what they’ve done for us — for fighting those wars without end — and to start listening to them instead?  Isn’t it time to try to understand them not as “heroes” in another universe, but as people like us in all their frailty and complexity? We’re never encouraged to see them as our neighbors, or as teenagers who struggled through high school, or as harried moms and dads.

Our troops are, of course, human and vulnerable and imperfect.  We don’t help them when we put them on pedestals, give them flags to hold in the breeze, and salute them as icons of a feel-good brand of patriotism.  Talk of warrior-heroes is worse than cheap: it enables our state of permanent war, elevates the Pentagon, ennobles the national security state, and silences dissent.  That’s why it’s both dangerous and universally supported in rare bipartisan fashion by politicians in Washington.

So here’s my final point.  Think of it as a bonus 11th suggestion: don’t make our troops into heroes, even when they’re in harm’s way.  It would be so much better to make ourselves into heroes by getting them out of harm’s way.

Be exceptional, America.  Make peace, not war.

*

William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor, is a TomDispatch regular. He blogs at Bracing Views.

The shooting down of a Russian warplane over northern Syria on Saturday threatens to dramatically escalate the confrontation between Washington and Moscow over the US-backed proxy war to oust the Russian-supported regime of President Bashir al-Assad. The Russian media and senior political figures are already accusing the United States of involvement.

The Russian Defence Ministry reported that a Sukhoi Su-25 was struck by a portable surface-to-air missile, or MANPAD, in the northern Syrian province of Idlib. The pilot, who has not been named, ejected from the plane but was killed on the ground during “a fight with terrorists.” The Su-25 is a low-flying, ground attack aircraft.

The Al Qaeda-aligned Tharir al-Sham claimed responsibility, saying one of its fighters scored a direct hit with a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile. The Russian Defence Ministry announced that retaliatory strikes against anti-Assad forces in the area killed more than 30 fighters.

Russian senator Frants Klintsevich, deputy chairman of the Russian Federation Council Defence and Security Committee, blamed the US for the downing.

“I am absolutely convinced… that today the militants have MANPADs, and they were supplied by the Americans through third countries,” he said.

Klintsevich called for a thorough investigation to determine the type of MANPADs that have been supplied and the “circumstances of the downing of the Su-25.” He warned

“the loss of one aircraft is nothing, but it has great significance and far-reaching consequences.”

Russian parliamentarian Dmitry Sablin blamed an unnamed country, neighbouring Syria, for supplying the MANPAD used to shoot down the plane.

“Countries from whose territory weapons arrive, that are then used against Russian servicemen, must understand that this will not go unpunished,” he said.

The Pentagon quickly denied supplying MANPADs to US-backed militias and reiterated the lie that its combat operations are solely focussed on the now-defeated Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

“The US has not equipped any partner forces in Syria with surface-to-air weapons and has no intent to do so in the future,” Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon told the Russian media on Saturday.

The denial does not stand up to serious examination. The US announced just last month that it would arm and equip a 30,000-strong “border force” made up predominantly of Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) to carve out, in effect, an American-aligned enclave in northern Syria from which to launch attacks on the Assad regime.

The US plans are rapidly unravelling. Turkey, which brands the YPG as terrorists aligned to the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party in Turkey, launched a full-scale offensive in the Kurdish enclave. At the same time, Syrian government forces, backed by Russia, began their own attacks on Western-aligned militias seeking to cling onto what remains of opposition-controlled territory.

A lengthy editorial in the New York Times last Wednesday entitled, “As US allies clash, the fight against ISIS falters,” reviewed Washington’s incoherent and contradictory policy that has led to all-out fighting between NATO ally Turkey and the US proxy forces in Syria. Desperate to square the circle, the US gave the green light for the Turkish offensive but drew a line at the Syrian town of Manbij, where hundreds of American troops are based, along with Kurdish militias.

In concluding, the New York Times bitterly attacked Russia and Iran for manoeuvring “to ensure they will have a permanent presence and influence” and accused the United States, effectively President Donald Trump, of “shirking its responsibility for Syria’s political future.” The editorial can be read only as a call for action to rein in Russia and Iran so as to prevent the US from being further marginalised in the Syrian quagmire that it created. Days later, the apparent response came in the form of the downing of a Russian warplane that was attacking US-aligned forces.

In the murky world of Syrian oppositional intrigues, where right-wing Al Qaeda-aligned militias collaborate with openly pro-Western groups and the CIA and US Special Forces, it is impossible to know exactly who supplied the MANPAD and who gave the decision to fire it, or even which militia did the firing.

The Debkafile, which has close ties to Israeli intelligence, reported last month that the Pentagon was “sending the YPG [Kurdish militia] man-portable air defence systems—MANPADs—which are especially effective against low-flying jets and helicopters.”

In an article entitled “Who pulled trigger on Russian jet in war zone bristling with arms?” Al Arabiya pointed out that a number of Syrian opposition militias have access to anti-aircraft missiles. It said US FIM-92 Stingers, one type of MANPAD, were manufactured under licence in Turkey by the Roketsan corporation, and, according to US-based analyst Theodore Karasik, had been delivered to “many Syrian opposition forces, like the [Western-aligned] Free Syrian Army, around Idlib.”

Regardless of who precisely pulled the trigger, the latest incident underscores the extremely tense situation in which Russian and American military forces face off at close quarters on opposing sides of Syria’s disastrous civil war.

The danger of a conflict between the two nuclear-armed powers has been greatly exacerbated by the Trump administration’s release of a new National Defence Strategy in January, which declared that “inter-state strategic competition,” not terrorism, was “now the primary concern.” It branded China and Russia as “revisionist powers” and said the US must “prioritise preparedness for war.”

That was further reinforced last Friday with the release of the latest US Nuclear Posture Review. It names Russia, along with China, North Korea and Iran, as potential threats and calls for an expansion of the US nuclear arsenal. It recommends the development of a range of new weapons that could be used in situations other than full-scale nuclear war, effectively undermining agreements to wind back nuclear arsenals.

The Syrian civil war is just one of the dangerous flashpoints in the Middle East and around the world that could set off a catastrophic conflict as all sides manoeuvre and intrigue to boost their presence and influence. The chief responsibility, however, lies with US imperialism. For the past quarter century, it has waged one war of aggression after another, turning Syria, Yemen, Iraq and the entire region into a volatile powder keg.

During the final stages of World War II, (1939-1945), American B-29 bombers detonated two nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, 1945. It marked the start of the Nuclear Age.

The two atomic bombs were made respectively from enriched uranium-235 and plutonium-239 and produced explosions of between 15 and 22 kilotons. The blasts wiped out 90 percent of the cities’ population, killing at least 120,000 people immediately; tens of thousands more would die later from radiation exposure.

Simple arithmetic will show that a modern nuclear warhead delivered by plane or submarine, and detonated over any country in the world, could kill millions by incineration and radiation in just seconds. If it were London, New York, Moscow, Paris or Tel Aviv then any such city would immediately cease to exist.

Yet, in spite of these horrifying facts, we continue to build-up nuclear stockpiles when we should be abolishing all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. The consequence is that we are heading inexorably to that one day when, in a blinding flash, entire families and indeed entire cities might be incinerated with no survivors. Ground Zero could be London W1 or Grand Central Station in New York, or elsewhere, as a mushroom cloud rises hundreds of feet into the air over an irradiated landscape.

But no one will listen. Least of all today’s political leaders, rushing to deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and submarine launched cruise missiles (SLCM) in a race to mutual extinction.

Trump, Putin, May and Netanyahu are the four Riders of the Apocalypse who are closer than ever to a situation that will bring us Conquest, War, Famine and Death. Nuclear weapons are no longer a deterrent.

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

Following the highly acclaimed 2012 release of the latest book by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, “Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War“, this title is now available for purchase through the Amazon Kindle program! Now you can take this bestselling title wherever you go and access it through your portable reader.

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To win the war planned by Hitler, Germany, a highly industrialized country but lacking colonies and therefore woefully short of strategic raw materials, had to win it fast, before Germany’s stockpiles of petroleum ran out. These reserves, much of which consisted of imports from the US, had been built up in the years leading up to the outbreak of war, and they could not be adequately replenished by synthetic fuel produced at home (on the basis of coal) and/or oil supplied by friendly or neutral countries such as Romania and – after the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939–the Soviet Union.

In this context, the Nazis had developed the strategy of Blitzkrieg,“lightning warfare”: synchronized attacks by massive numbers of tanks, airplanes, and trucks (for transporting infantry), piercing the defensive lines behind which the bulk of the enemy’s forces were typically ensconced in the style of World War I, then encircling these forces, leaving them to face either annihilation or capitulation. In 1939 and 1940, this strategy worked perfectly: Blitzkrieg produced Blitzsieg, “lightning victory,” against Poland, Holland, Belgium, and – spectacularly so – against France. When, in the spring of 1941, Nazi Germany was poised to attack the Soviet Union, everyone–not only Hitler and his generals but also the army commanders in London and Washington – expected a similar scenario to unfold: the Red Army was expected to be finished off by the Wehrmacht within a maximum of two months.On the eve of the attack, Hitler felt supremely confident: he reportedly “fancied himself to be on the verge of the greatest triumph of his life.”

From the Ostkrieg, their Blitzkrieg in the east, Hitler and his generals expected much more than from their previous lightning campaigns. Their stockpiles of fuel and rubber had already dwindled after their gas-guzzling planes and Panzers inflicted death and destruction in Poland and Western Europe; by the spring of 1941, the remaining supplies of fuel, tires, spare parts, etc. sufficed to wage motorized war for no more than a couple of months. The shortfall could not be compensated by imports from the still neutral US, which continued to arrive, mostly via Spain, and in return for the limited supplies of Soviet oil, Germany had to deliver high-quality industrial products and state-of-the-art military technology, used by the Soviets to strengthen their defenses in preparation for a German attack that they expected sooner or later. This dilemma was to be resolved by attacking the Soviet Union, and by attacking as soon as possible, even though stubborn Britain had not yet been vanquished: the “lightning victory” that was confidently expected to materialize quickly in the east would deliver to Germany the rich oil fields of the Caucasus, where the gas-guzzling Panzers and Stukas would in future be able to fill their tanks to the brim at any time. Germany would then be a truly invincible über-Reich, capable of winning even long, drawn-out wars against any antagonist. This was the plan, code-named “Barbarossa,” and its implementation got underway on June 22, 1941; but things would not work out as its architects in Berlin had expected.

While the Red Army took a terrible beating at first, it had not massed its forces at the border but opted for a defense in depth; withdrawing in relatively good order, it managed to elude destruction in one or more of the kind of huge encirclement battles that Hitler and his generals had dreamed of. The Germans advanced, but increasingly slowly and at the price of great losses. By late September, they were nowhere near Moscow and still a very long way from the Caucasian oil fields that were the real object of their desire. And soon the mud, snow and cold of fall and early winter were to create new difficulties for troops that had never been expected to fight in such conditions. In the meantime, the Red Army had recuperated from the blows it had received initially, and on December 5, 1941, it launched a devastating counter-offensive in front of Moscow. The Nazi forces were thrown back and had to adopt defensive positions where they would be able to survive the winter after the Soviet attack petered out. On the evening of that fateful fifth of December, 1941, the generals of the Wehrmacht’s high command reported to Hitler that, on account of the failure of the Blitzkrieg-strategy, Germany could no longer hope to win the war.

German advances

Blue:  from 7 May 1942 to 18 November 1942   

Flesh: to 7 July 1942  

Orange: to 22 July 1942   

Lavender: to 1 August 1942   

Green: to 18 November 1942

Source: CC BY-SA 3.0 

The Battle of Moscow heralded the failure of the lightning-war strategy against the Soviet Union. A Blitzsieg, a lightning-like victory, on the eastern front, was supposed to have made a German defeat in the entire war impossible and would in all likelihood have done so.It is probably fair to say that if Nazi Germany had defeated the Soviet Union in 1941, Germany would today still be the hegemon of Europe, and possibly of the Middle East and North Africa as well; however, in front of Moscow, in December 1941, Nazi Germany suffered the defeat that made an overall German victory impossible, not only victory against the Soviet Union itself, but also victory against Great Britain and victory in the war in general.

It ought to be noted that at that point – a few days before Pearl Harbor – the United States was not yet involved in the war against Germany. In fact, the US only became involved in that war because of the Battle of Moscow. When, within a few days after receiving the bad news from Russia, Germany’s Führer learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 and the subsequent American declaration of war on Japan (but not on Germany), he himself declared war on America on December 11. His alliance with Japan did not require him to do so, as some historians claim, since the land of the rising sun was not the object but the subject of an aggression, but with this spectacular gesture of solidarity with his Japanese partners he hoped to induce them to declare war on his own mortal enemy, the Soviet Union. In this case, the Red Army would have had to fight on two fronts, which would have revived Germany’s chances of winning its war in the east. But Japan did not take the bait, and Nazi Germany was thus saddled with another formidable enemy, though it would take a long time before American forces would engage in actual combat against Nazi troops.

The Battle of Moscow was definitely the turning point of World War II, but other than Hitler and his generals, hardly anyone knew that Germany was henceforth doomed to lose the war – though admittedly only in the long run. The general public certainly was not aware of this, not in Germany, not in the occupied countries, not in Britain and not in the US. It looked as if the Wehrmacht had suffered a temporary setback, presumably – according to Nazi propaganda – due to the unexpectedly early onset of winter; but it was still ensconced deep in Soviet territory and could be expected to resume the offensive in 1942, as indeed it would. Other than Hitler himself and his closest military associates and political cronies, there were in fact some other well-informed observers who were aware in late 1941, and in some cases even earlier, that Germany was doomed to lose the war, though for some reasons they did not divulge that information. Among them were a handful of generals of France’s collaborator-regime in Vichy, the Swiss secret services, and the Vatican.

In the spring of 1942, Hitler scraped together all available forces for an offensive — code-named “Operation Blue” (Unternehmen Blau) – in the direction of the oil fields of the Caucasus. He had convinced himself that he still had a chance of winning the war, but certainly not “if he did not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny.” The element of surprise had been lost, however, and the Soviets still disposed of huge masses of men, oil, and other resources. The Wehrmacht, on the other hand, could not compensate for the huge losses it had suffered in 1941 in its “crusade” against the Soviet Union: 6,000 airplanes and more than 3,200 tanks and similar vehicles; and more than 900,000 men had been killed, wounded, or gone missing in action, amounting to almost one third of the average strength of the German armed forces. The forces available for a push toward the oil fields of the Caucasus were therefore extremely limited. Under those circumstances, it is quite remarkable that in 1942 the Germans managed to make it as far as they did. But when their offensive inevitably petered out, in September of that year, their weakly held lines were stretched along many hundreds of kilometres, presenting a perfect target for a Soviet counterattack. This is the context in which an entire German army was bottled up, and ultimately destroyed, in Stalingrad, in a titanic battle that started in the fall of 1942 and ended in early February 1943, precisely 75 years ago. After this sensational victory of the Red Army, the ineluctability of German defeat in World War II was obvious for all to see; and this – combined with the unprecedented losses suffered by both sides – is what has caused many historians to proclaim this battle as the turning point of the war.

After the victory of the Red Army in Stalingrad, then, Nazi Germany and its allies were confronted with the inevitability of defeat, while France and all other countries occupied by Nazi Germany could look forward to their liberation. But the prospect of Germany being defeated and of France and the rest of Europe being liberated by the Red Army caused alarm bells to ring in the halls of power in London and Washington. The American and British leaders had been happy to remain on the sidelines while the Nazis and Soviets were locked in mortal combat on the Eastern Front. With the Red Army providing the cannon fodder needed to vanquish Germany, the Western Allies minimized their losses and built up their strength so that they would be able to intervene decisively at the right moment, when the Nazi enemy and the unloved Soviet ally would both be exhausted. With Great Britain at its side, the USA would then be able to play the leading role in the camp of the victors and dictate the terms of the peace to the Soviets as well as the Germans. It is for that reason that, in 1942, Washington and London refused to open a “second front” by landing troops in France; instead, they opted for a “southern strategy,” sending an army to North Africa to occupy the French colonies therein November of that same year. (Some of the aforementioned Vichy generals were in North Africa at the time and used the opportunity to defect from the Pétainregime, which they knew to be doomed, and tojoin general de Gaulle’s Free French Forces.)

Because of the outcome of the Battle of Stalingrad, the situation changed dramatically. From a purely military perspective, Stalingrad was of course a boon to the Western Allies, because this defeat had impaired the Nazi enemy’s war machine to their advantage as well. But Roosevelt and Churchill were far from happy with the fact that the Red Army was slowly but relentlessly grinding its way towards Berlin and possibly even farther westward, and that the Soviet Union – and its socialist social-economic system – now enjoyed enormous popularity among patriots in all the occupied countries. (Conversely, the “Anglo-Saxons” were far from popular in countries such as France, partly because of their meagre contribution in the fight against Nazism, and partly because their air raids on cities in France and other occupied countries caused considerable civilian casualties; it was also unhelpful that Washington had long maintained diplomatic relations with the collaborator government of Marshal Pétain in Vichy and was known to be “recycling” Pétainists in North Africa.) It now “became imperative for American and English strategy to land troops in France, liberate Western Europe, and drive into Germany to keep most of that country out of [Soviet] hands” as two American historians, Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble, have written. It was too late to plan such a complex operation for 1943, so things had to wait until the spring of 1944.

Image on the right is from Benoît Prieur / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0.

The landings in Normandy in June 1944 did not constitute the turning point of World War II. Militarily, Nazi Germany had already received decisive blows at the Battles of Moscow and Stalingrad, and again, in the summer of 1943, at the Battle of Kursk. And while the landings officially purported to liberate France and the rest of Europe, their “latent,” that is, unspoken but real function was to prevent the Soviet Union from singlehandedly liberating Europe, possibly including Western Europe all the way to the English Channel– a prospect that was first raised by the Red Army’s victory on the banks of the Volga. Liberating France – or occupying it, much as the Germans had occupied the country, as General de Gaulle described the outcome of the Normandy landings  on one occasion!– also purported to prevent French resistance leaders, of whom the majority had great sympathy and admiration for the Soviets, from playing a major role in the reconstruction of their country; it was feared, for example, that these patriots might proceed to implement the radical social-economic reforms proposed in the “Charter of the [French] Resistance,” including nationalization of corporations and banks that had collaborated with the Nazis. (Dire warnings to that effect were emanating regularly from the leading American spy based in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, later to become head of the CIA.) To prevent such a scenario, which conflicted with their own plans to make room for unbridled capitalism in postwar France and Europe in general, the Americans would have to rely on a popular but conservative leader of the French resistance, Charles de Gaulle.

They actually detested him, but eventually did arrange for him to come to power, orchestrating his much-publicized triumphant stroll down the Champs Elysées at the time of the liberation of Paris. De Gaulle would prove notoriously difficult to deal with, and he would have to allow the radical elements of the resistance some input into government policy. But without him the much more far-reaching reforms of the Charter of the Resistance might have been implemented, and it is extremely unlikely that the US would have been able to integrate France into the anti-Soviet alliance it set up in Europe in the context of the Cold War.

Of that brief moment in French history, when many if not most of the denizens of the country were still aware that their country’s liberation was due mostly to the efforts and sacrifices of the Soviet Union, and, in stark contrast to the present situation, harboured enormous goodwill vis-à-vis the Russians and other Soviet peoples, visitors to Paris are still reminded today by the name, dating back to July 1945, of one of the city’s biggest squares: Place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad, “Square of the Battle of Stalingrad.”

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Jacques R. Pauwels is the author of The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, James Lorimer, Toronto, 2002.

Ever since 1948, the U.S. Government’s foreign policies have been consistently focused upon breaking up the Soviet Union and turning its Warsaw Pact allies against the Soviet Union; and, then, once that would be (and was) accomplished, turning any remaining allies of Russia against Russia; and, then, once that will have been accomplished, conquering Russia. Since at least 2006, U.S. ‘defense’ policy has been that nuclear war will be an acceptable way to conquer Russia if lesser measures fail to do the job. (Since 2006, the concept that a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia would result in “mutually assured destruction,” or “MAD” —  a war that both parties to it would lose — has been rejected at the highest levels of the U.S. Government, but continues unchanged as being the policy at the highest levels of Russia’s Government, which are terrified of the U.S. Government’s attempts to develop anti-ballistic missiles and other systems that would eliminate Russia’s defenses — i.e., ability to retaliate — against a U.S. nuclear first-strike attack — terrified at the U.S. Government’s preparations to win a nuclear war.) 

When the Republican U.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said on 26 March 2012 that, “Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe”, he was actually stating publicly something that U.S. President Barack Obama secretly agreed with and had been working since day-one of his Presidency to implement — and his State Department had secretly already been drawing up plans since 2011 to overthrow the Moscow-friendly leaders of two nations: Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych. But Obama (who was the most gifted liar in U.S. Presidential history, and really understood how to use truths to demolish even lies that his own policies were secretly based upon — simultaneously criticising bad polices while secretly implementing them) responded to Romney’s statement of March 26th, by saying on 22 October 2012,

“Gov. Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that al-Qaeda is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaeda. You said Russia … the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

And Romney replied,

“ROMNEY: Excuse me. It’s a geopolitical foe [now he pretended he hadn’t said that Russia is “our number one geopolitical foe”; he knew that what he had said months earlier would lose him votes, and that Obama was now taking advantage of this], and I said in the same — in the same paragraph I said, and Iran is the greatest national security threat we face. [What he had actually said there when the interviewer challenged him on his anti-Russia remark was “Of course, the greatest threat that the world faces is a nuclear Iran. A nuclear North Korea is already troubling enough.”He diverted the issue from “number one” to “nuclear,” so as to mislead viewers as to what the issue here was. He recognized right away that he had let slip a belief that was highly controversial to express in 2012.] Russia does continue to battle us in the U.N. time and time again. I have clear eyes on this. I’m not going to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia, or Mr. Putin. And I’m certainly not going to say to him, I’ll give you more flexibility after the election. After the election, he’ll get more backbone.”

Little did Romney, or the U.S. public — or Vladimir Putin — know that Obama’s own anti-Russia campaign would become publicly unleashed only after Obama’s re-election.

Whereas Democrats lie, when they are not outright deceived, to say that Obama was a progressive; Republicans lie, when they are not outright deceived, to say that Obama wasn’t a conservative. Republicans want a consistently fascist leader, and can’t be satisfied by anything less. Republicans tend to be uncompromising, demanding to conquer the ‘enemy’; Democratic Party voters prefer “bipartisan solutions” — negotiation, instead of confrontation; win-win games, instead of win-lose games; good-faith deals, instead of bad-faith conquests; and so this is how Democratic Party politicians need to present themselves not only to Republican Party voters, but also to their own Democratic Party voters. Republican Party politicians, by contrast, don’t need to appear ‘bipartisan’ in order to retain the support of Republican voters. This is an authentic strategic difference between the two Parties: it stems from the difference — however slight — that exists between conservatism and liberalism. (Each of those two ideologies is both neoliberal and neoconservative — free-market and imperialistic. Progressivism is neither, but Obama and Trump are both. Billionaires want both, and won’t financially back any Presidential candidate who isn’t both.)

In the same TV interview on 26 March 2012 when Romney uttered his charge that Russia is America’s top enemy, he went on to explain:

“It is always Russia, typically with China alongside. And — and so in terms of a geopolitical foe, a nation that’s on the Security Council, that has the heft of the Security Council and is, of course, a — a massive nuclear power, Russia is the — the geopolitical foe and — and the — and they’re — the idea that our president is — is planning on doing something with them that he’s not willing to tell the American people before the election is something I find very, very alarming.”

Romney actually knew that secret negotiations are going on all the time between nations’ leaders. He was simply trying to appeal to the many voters who don’t know this basic fact. But he wasn’t nearly as gifted a liar as Obama was; so, he lost to Obama.

Romney not only damned Russia’s Government, but he damned China’s Government, and he damned Iran’s Government. That’s the neoconservative trifecta; and the current Republican U.S. President is carrying it out. In order to conquer Russia without a first-strike nuclear blitz attack, the only way would be to eliminate, first, both China’s Government and Iran’s Government, because those are the most powerful Governments remaining still as allies of Russia. And Republicans (such as Romney) even blame Russia for having inherited the Soviet Union’s nuclear defense against America’s growing nuclear MADness, which MADness had started with Reagan’s “Star Wars” ABM (also called “BMD” or ballistic-missile defense) dreams.

Romney was there regretting that the U.S. can’t remove and replace the international arrangements that the great American progressive President FDR had instituted at the U.N. with its inclusion of the Soviet Union on the U.N. Security Council. Republicans now damn Russia for having inherited that U.N. seat, too. They want to un-do all of FDR’s great progressive legacy; they’re not satisfied merely to have worked with the post-Reagan Democratic Party (today’s Democratic Party) and so eliminated almost all of it (Glass-Steagall and almost all of the rest). They want war, global conquest. Whereas Democrats on the national level, as exemplified by Obama, want to conquer Russia gradually, Republicans on the national level don’t have the patience, but rush toward World War III: “brinksmanship.” The Democratic Party’s voters are satisfied merely with continued liberal hypocrisy, such as Obama and the Clintons exemplified — it’s a Party that needs to be replaced, because it leaves the country with no progressive alternative, much like the hypocritical Whigs were replaced in 1860. (But, if some assassin’s bullet then quickly ends that new progressive Party, too, such as happened in 1865, the only progressive alternative remaining will, as a consequence, be outright revolution — if World War III doesn’t come before then.) 

Assassination of John F. Kennedy

The turn away from FDR was gradual between 1945 and 1948, but the future American direction was made clear in 1948 when the U.S. CIA became established finally upon the dual basis of hating Russians and of becoming financially addicted to the international narcotics trade so as to have enough money (in addition to the on-the-books type, from the U.S. Treasury) to expand into and take over America’s Deep State and thus the country, on behalf of America’s international corporations, such that even the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy is now very reasonably attributed by many well-informed Americans to JFK’s growing turn away from the CIA’s obsession to destroy Russia. Already, the CIA had brought over into the United States many key German Nazis (a very bad sign that post-FDR America was going to have a rotten core), and the CIA helped other Nazis to become safely established in Argentina and other countries. JFK had become increasingly disillusioned with the U.S. Deep State that he found himself surrounded by, and he was expecting to implement its ouster from power in his second term, which never came.

Then, on the night of 24 February 1990, U.S. President George H.W. Bush secretly established the U.S. policy for the U.S. and its allied governments to adhere to for the future (after the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact and its communism all ended peacefully in 1991), for America’s equivalent of the Soviets’ Warsaw Pact military alliance — NATO — to continue on afterward, against the now lone nation of Russia, and to take into NATO the formerly Russia-allied nations, so as to create the way, by thus expanding America’s military empire, to surround Russia and finally take over ultimately Russia itself. His successors in the U.S. White House have all adhered to this secret policy of surround-and-capture. Obama entered office intending to eliminate Russia’s ally in Syria, Bashar al-Assad; and, even more importantly, Obama started planning in 2011 to eliminate Russia’s neutralist next door to Russia in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych — thus setting up the basis of lies on which Obama’s sanctions against Russia, and NATO’s massing of troops onto and near Russia’s borders, are ‘justified’.

U.S. President Donald Trump continues this policy, against both Syrians and Ukrainians, with the aim of completing what Obama had only started (but had amplified from his predecessors). First, here, will be discussed Ukraine; then, Syria:

On January 18th, the AP headlined “Ukraine passes bill to get occupied regions back from Russia”, and reported that the Minsk peace accords that Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande, and Vladimir Putin had worked out (contrary to Obama’s intentions), and that had been accepted and signed by both the Ukrainian Government and Russia, as well as by the separatist far-eastern region Donbass, in order to establish a peaceful method for re-integrating into Ukraine the separatist formerly Ukrainian region in Ukraine’s far east, called Donbass, were now officially being reneged-upon and rejected by the Ukrainian Government; and Ukraine also now is committing itself to conquering the Crimean region in the former Ukraine’s far south, which had voted over 90% to rejoin and become again a part of Russia, and Russia did reintegrate Crimea, as the residents there overwhelmingly wanted. Ukraine’s Government has thus now established, as its official policy, that only war and conquest of its former far-eastern portion, and also of its far-southern portion (now again a part of Russia), is acceptable. Ukraine had never complied with the Minsk accords’ requirement for Ukraine to accept the far-eastern region (Donbass) peaceably back into Ukraine. However, the U.S. Government and its allies blamed only Russia and not the Ukrainian Government (which is vastly more to blame) for the failure of the Minsk accords to be implemented, and Obama’s economic sanctions against Russia were constantly being renewed upon that fallacious, clearly counter-factual, anti-Russian, basis. Most of the Minsk accords were simply ignored by Ukraine. For example, here are the final two paragraphs, and they were totally ignored and violated constantly by Ukraine:

• Pullout of all foreign armed formations, military equipment, and also mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine under OSCE supervision. Disarmament of all illegal groups.

• Constitutional reform in Ukraine, with the new Constitution to come into effect by the end of 2015, the key element of which is decentralisation (taking into account peculiarities of particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, agreed with representatives of these districts), and also approval of permanent legislation on special status of particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts in accordance with the measures spelled out in the footnotes, by the end of 2015.

What caused Ukraine to opt for war against Russia, and to turn away from the Minsk accords, is that U.S. President Trump had decided to sell to Ukraine even weapons that Obama had thought would be too likely to bring about a U.S.-Russia war too quickly; Trump is apparently even more eager for a U.S.-Russia war than Obama was. So, now, the fascist regime that Obama had installed in his 2014 coup in Ukraine will be given even greater sway than it had under Obama. They will go back to doing as they had been doing during the first months after Obama had installed this regime: killing the residents in the areas of Ukraine that had voted over 90% (in Donbass) for the man whom Obama had overthrown, and over 75% (in Crimea) for him. Unless those voters can be either killed or forced to emigrate into Russia, the fascist regime that Obama had installed on Russia’s doorstep would be voted out of power in the next general election. Evidently, Trump is at least as dedicated to continuance of that fascist regime as was his predecessor, who had installed it.

Regarding Syria, the Trump regime is likewise continuing the Obama regime’s policies. Obama supported Al Qaeda (called in Syria “Jabhat al-Nusra”) against Syria’s Government, and so does Trump. Even the leading neoconservative propaganda-sheet, the Washington Post, once goofed and included the scandalous reality that the big hang-up between the U.S. and Russia that was preventing a cease-fire and blocking a stop in the bombing in Syria by both the U.S. and Russia, was: “Russia was said to have rejected a U.S. proposal to leave Jabhat al-Nusra off-limits to bombing as part of a cease-fire.” Russia insisted upon continuing the bombing of both ISIS-controlled and Al Qaeda-controlled areas, even during the general cease-fire, but America would allow only continuation of the bombing against ISIS-controlled areas. Without Al Qaeda (Nusra), the U.S. invasion of Syria would have had no boots-on-the-ground leadership for the many other jihadist groups that the Sauds had recruited worldwide and financed to fight there. Protecting Syria’s Al Qaeda was crucial to America’s entire war-effort in Syria. And Trump — who had campaigned against “radical Islamic terrorism” — is continuing Obama’s policy there, too: supporting radical Islamic terrorism, against Syria’s Government.

Brett McGurk, who ran Obama’s Syria-policy, is likewise running Trump’s Syria-policy; and he hasn’t had to change the policy at all: it relies upon Al Qaeda in the Arab-majority areas, and upon Kurds in the Kurdish-majority areas. As that WP article, which was dated 19 February 2016, noted “The U.S. team, headed by senior White House adviser Robert Malley and State Department envoy Brett McGurk,” were negotiating with the Russians about the conditions for a cease-fire in Syria while Obama was in power. (They were the people working to protect Al Qaeda in Syria.) And McGurk still is, and hasn’t changed. (As for Malley — co-authoring there at the neoconservative-neoliberal The Atlantic magazine — he’s with the U.S. and NATO billionaires-funded neoconservative International Crisis Group, which pontificates about being kind and humanitarian in wars, so as to be able to sell more of them to liberals around the world. But McGurk has been the real operator, no such mere “front man” for the war-industry.)

“Next spent two days in #Syria, including downtown #Raqqa. Significant change from a visit only two months ago. Consulted with @ERT_Raqqa, which employs local Raqqawis to clear rubble and deliver services to returnees. Our @coalition and @StateDept proud to support them.” Source: @brett_mcgurk/Twitter

Obama himself would probably be surprised at the extent to which Trump is adhering to Obama’s foreign-policy thrust of placing hostility against Russia and Russia’s allies, above hostility against jihadists and jihadists’ allies. On 10 November 2016, just two days after Trump’s election as President, Obama did a sudden about-face, seemingly in order to avoid the embarrassment of having his successor publicly condemn him for having been depending so heavily upon the hated Al Qaeda: the WP bannered “Obama directs Pentagon to target al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria” and reported that,

“President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria that the administration had largely ignored until now and that has been at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government.” (The clause “at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government” was yet another rare peep in that neocon newspaper, which enabled a perceptive reader to get a glimpse of the broader reality, that America was in Syria not in order to defeat jihadists, but in order to defeat Syria’s Government.)

Nominally, Obama on 9 September 2016 had finally allowed his Secretary of State John Kerry to sign with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a cease-fire agreement that accepted Russia’s demand that both ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria continue to be bombed; but, on September 17th, just five days later, Obama’s Air Force bombed Syrian Government troops in the key city of Deir Zor and thus enabled ISIS to take control of that city, which bombing by the U.S. violated and thus ended that same agreement, and finally ended Russia’s trust in anything it might sign with the U.S. Government. Russia promptly set up its own peace-negotiations for ending the Syrian war, and excluded the U.S. Government from it; the process involved instead Russia, Iran, and Turkey, and it made more progress, in much shorter time, than the U.S.-backed peace-process under U.N. auspices ever did; so, when Obama gave that order, on November 10th, finally to start bombing Al Qaeda in Syria, he probably was trying to accommodate the fundamental change-of-policy on Syria, that Trump had campaigned and won on. Perhaps only later did Obama come to recognize that Trump’s promises didn’t mean anything more than Obama’s own promises did. 

McGurk likewise has continued Obama’s use of Syria’s Kurds to break off a chunk of Syria, and he is infuriating Turkey’s Government on the hot issue of formation of a Kurdistan, just like McGurk’s comments backing the Kurds against Syria were when the U.S. puppet-leader happened to be Obama. Under Obama, a Turkish newspaper reported on 7 February 2016, that Turkey’s leader Tayyip “Erdoğan directed severe criticism at the visit to the town by Brett McGurk, US President Barack Obama’s special envoy for the anti-Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) coalition,” and this was because of America’s support for the Kurds against Syria. Then, the pro-U.S.-regime Arab newspaper in English, Al Monitor, headlined, now during the Trump era, on 1 August 2017, “Turkey in Uproar Over McGurk” and opened,

“Turkey’s scapegoating of US special envoy Brett McGurk over the military partnership between the United States and the Syrian Kurds grew crazier today, with one pro-government newspaper labeling him a murderer.”

On January 22nd, the geostrategic blogger who posts his anonymous reports at his “Moon of Alabama” site, pointed out that the Trump Administration tells contradictory lies to different people, and that it thus assures not only defeat, but embarrassment, to the U.S.:

U.S. allied Turkish forces invade Syria to kill and “cleanse” U.S. allied Syrian YPG/PKK Kurds in Afrin. The Trump administration immediately steps in to assure the respective allies of its continued support:

• Today the Deputy Secretary General of NATO, the U.S. diplomat Rose Gottemoeller, visited Ankara to tell the Turkish allies that everything is fine. The U.S. will stand with them.

• Today Commander of U.S. Central Command General Votel and U.S. Diplomat Brett McGurk visited Kobane to tell their Syrian YPG/PKK allies that everything is fine. The U.S. will stand with them.

On January 18th, McGurk had already reaffirmed to the Kurds in Iraq, that the U.S. backs them against Iraq’s Government. It’s all being done so as to increase U.S. weapons-sales to America’s ‘allies’: to the aristocracies that are vassals to the imperial one, America’s. When the U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 17 January 1960 Farewell Address that “the military-industrial complex” might take over the country, he said it because he knew that it had largely already done so; but, by now, that take-over is long-since a fait accompli.

Not only has this policy destroyed Ukraine, and destroyed Syria, and, before that, destroyed Libya, and destroyed Iraq, and destroyed Afghanistan, etc.; but, the U.S. leaves to Russia’s formerly allied or friendly nations the enormous burdens of repairing the vast harms that the U.S. regime had caused.

For example: At a ‘Defense’ Department press conference, now under President Trump, on 19 May 2017, the “Special Envoy Brett McGurk” said, as he had been saying all along under his former boss, Obama, “We will never work with the Assad regime”; and, “the reconstruction costs of Syria are — are so high in the multiple, multiple billions of dollars” and “the reality in Syria is that so long as — until there’s a credible political horizon, the international community is not going to come to the aid, particularly the areas under the control of the regime.” In other words: the war that the U.S. and Sauds had led and armed and financed against Syria would receive no reconstruction money from the perpetrators unless the given area of Syria where such reconstruction is being done has broken away from Syria’s Government. There is no change, here, too. Even regarding America’s backing the Kurds to grab parts of Syria where they predominate, McGurk-Trump is the same as was McGurk-Obama — and McGurk is infuriating Turkey’s Government on the hot issue of Kurdistan, just like McGurk’s comments backing the Kurds against Syria, and against Iraq, were when the U.S. puppet-leader happened to be Obama.

The reconstruction costs for Syria alone are estimated at upwards of $250 billion.

Trump’s domestic U.S. policies are even more conservative than Obama’s were, but in the field of foreign policies — at least ones that fall under the rubric of ‘national security’ — Trump is continuing Obama’s policies: the neoconservatism continues unchanged, as if ‘U.S. national security’ policies are unaffected by whom the resident in the U.S. White House happens to be. But isn’t that the way it is in any regime? Only the deceit is less skillful now.

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This article was originally published by 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.

This week, following the recent announcement of a new National Defense Strategy that focuses on conflicts with great powers and a new arms race, the Pentagon announced an escalation of nuclear weapons development. The United States’ military is spread across the world, including several dangerous conflict areas that could develop into an all-out war, possibly in conflict with China or Russia. This comes at a time when US empire is fading, something the Pentagon also recognizes and the US is falling behind China economically. This is not unexpected considering that one year ago President Trump sought an inaugural parade that put tanks and missiles on display.

New National Defense Strategy Means More War, More Spending

The new National Defense Strategy announced last week moves from the ‘war on terror’ toward conflict with great powers. Michael Whitney, writing about the conflict in Syria, puts it in context:

“Washington’s biggest problem is the absence of a coherent policy. While the recently released National Defense Strategy articulated a change in the way the imperial strategy would be implemented, (by jettisoning the ‘war on terror’ pretext to a ‘great power’ confrontation) the changes amount to nothing more than a tweaking of the public relations ‘messaging’. Washington’s global ambitions remain the same albeit with more emphasis on raw military power.”

The move from military conflict against non-state actors, i.e. ‘terrorists’, to great power conflict means more military hardware, massive spending on weapons and a new arms race. Andrew Bacevich writes in American Conservative that war profiteers are popping open the champagne.

Bacevich writes the ‘new’ strategy is placed in the false claim that the US is “emerging from a period of strategic atrophy.” The claim is laughable as the US has been in never ending war with massive military spending throughout the century:

“Under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump, U.S. forces have been constantly on the go. I’m prepared to argue that no nation in recorded history has ever deployed its troops to more places than has the United States since 2001. American bombs and missiles have rained down on a remarkable array of countries. We’ve killed an astonishing number of people.”

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis meets with troops stationed at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, April 21, 2017. (DoD photo by Air Force Tech. Sgt. Brigitte N. Brantley)

The new strategy means more spending on weapons to prepare for conflict with Russia and China. Not bothering with reality, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis claimed,

“Our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare—air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace. And it is continually eroding.”

He described the Pentagon’s plans for ‘procurement and modernization’, i.e. the arms race that includes nuclear, space and traditional weapons, cyber defense and more surveillance.

The Pentagon announced its Nuclear Posture Review on February 2, 2018. The review calls for updating and expanding the nuclear arsenal in order to respond to perceived threats, in particular by “great powers,” e.g. Russia and China, as well North Korea and others. Peace Action described a review written by Dr. Strangeglove, adding

“the expansion of our nuclear arsenal called for in the Nuclear Posture Review would cost the American taxpayers an estimated $1.7 trillion adjusted for inflation over the next three decades.”

Bachevich concludes

“Who will celebrate the National Defense Strategy? Only weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, lobbyists, and other fat cat beneficiaries of the military-industrial complex.”

To further the glee of weapons makers, Trump is urging the State Department to spend more time selling US weapons.

Escalating Conflicts Risk War Globally

In his first year as president, Donald Trump handed over decision-making power to “his generals” and as expected, this  resulted in more “warfare, bombing and deaths” in his first year than the Obama era. There has been “an almost 50 percent increase of airstrikes in Iraq and Syria during Trump’s first year in office, leading to a rise in civilian deaths by more than 200 percent compared with the year before.” Trump has also broken the record for special forces, now deployed in 149 countries or 75 percent of the globe. So much for ‘America First.’

Many areas risk escalation to full-scale war, including conflict with Russia and China:

Syria: The seven-year war in Syria, which has killed 400,000 people, began during Obama’s presidency under the guise of destroying ISIS. The real goal was removal of President Assad. This January, Secretary of State Tillerson made the goal clear, saying that even after the defeat of ISIS the US would stay in Syria until Assad was removed from office. The US is moving to Plan B, the creation of a de facto autonomous Kurdish state for almost one-third of Syria defended by a proxy military of 30,000 troops, mainly Kurds. Marcello Ferrada de Noli describes that in response, Syria aided by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah “continues victorious and unabated in its pursuit to retake the full sovereignty of its nation’s territory.” Turkey is moving to ensure no Kurdish territory is created by the US.

North Korea: The latest dangerous idea coming from the Trump military is giving North Korea a “bloody nose.” This schoolyard bully talk risks a US first strike that could create war with China and Russia. China has said if the US attacked first it would defend North Korea. This aggressive talk comes when North and South Korea seek peace and are cooperating during the Olympics. The Trump era has continued massive military exercises, practicing attacks on North Korea that include nuclear attacks and assassination of their leadership.The US did take a step back and agree not to hold such war games during the Olympics.

Iran: The US has sought regime change since the 1979 Islamic Revolution removed the US’s Shah of Iran. The current debate over the future of the nuclear weapons agreement and economic sanctions are focal points of conflict. While observers find Iran has lived up to the agreement, the Trump administration continues to claim violations. In addition, the US, through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy and other agencies, is spending millions annually to build opposition to the government and foment regime change, as seen in recent protests. In addition, the US (along with Israel and Saudi Arabia) is engaged in conflict with Iran in other areas, e.g. Syria and Yemen. There is regular propaganda demonizing Iran and threatening war with Iran, which is six times the size of Iraq and has a much stronger military. The US has been isolated in the UN over its belligerence toward Iran.

Afghanistan: The longest war in US history continues after 16 years. The US has been hiding what is happening in Afghanistan because the Taliban has an active presence in about 70 percent of the country and ISIS has gained more territory than ever before resulting in the Inspector General for Afghanistan criticizing DoD for refusing to release data. The long war included Trump dropping the largest non-nuclear bomb in history and resulted in allegations of US war crimes that the International Criminal Court seeks to investigate. The US has caused devastation throughout the country.

Ukraine: The US supported coup in the Ukraine continues to cause conflicts on the Russian border. The US spent billions on the coup, but documents outlining the Obama administration’s involvement have not been released. The coup was complete with Vice President Biden’s son and John Kerry’s long term financial ally being put on the board of the Ukraine’s largest private energy company. A former State Department employee became Ukraine’s finance minister. The US continues to claim Russia is the aggressor because it protected its Navy base in Crimea from the US coup. Now, the Trump administration is providing arms to Kiev and stoking a civil war with Kiev and western Ukraine against eastern Ukraine.

These are not the only areas where the US is creating regime change or seeking domination. In another strange statement, Secretary of State Tillerson warned Venezuela may face a military coup while winking that the US does not support regime change (even though it has been seeking regime change to control Venezuelan oil since Hugo Chavez came to power). Tillerson’s comment came as Venezuela negotiated a settlement with the opposition. Regime change is the mode of operation for the US in Latin America.  The US  supported recent questionable elections in Honduras, to keep the coup government Obama supported in power. In Brazil, the US is assisting the prosecution of Lula, who seeks to run for president, in a crisis that threatens its fragile democracy protecting a coup government.

In Africa, the US has military in 53 of 54 countries and is in competition with China, which is using economic power rather than military power. The US is laying the groundwork for military domination of the continent with little congressional oversight — to dominate the land, resources and people of Africa.

Opposition to War and Militarism

The anti-war movement, which atrophied under President Obama, is coming back to life.

World Beyond War is working to abolish war as an instrument of foreign policy. Black Alliance for Peace is working to revitalize opposition to war by blacks, historically some of the strongest opponents of war. Peace groups are uniting around the No US Foreign Military Bases campaign that is seeking to close 800 US military bases in 80 countries.

Peace advocates are organizing actions. The campaign to divest from the war machine kicks off from February 5 to 11 highlighting the economic cost of war. A global day of action against the US occupation of Guantanamo Bay is being planned for February 23, the anniversary of the US seizing Guantanamo Bay from Cuba through a “perpetual lease” beginning in 1903. A national day of action against US wars at home and abroad is being planned for April. And Cindy Sheehan is organizing a Women’s March on the Pentagon.

There are many opportunities to oppose war in this new era of “Great Power” conflict. We urge you to get involved as you are able to show that the people say “No” to war.

*

This article was originally published by PopularResistance.org.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance.

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.

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Generations of eager journalism students, for at least a brief moment in their budding careers—particularly during that golden window after Watergate and before Monica—wanted so desperately to be Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

No one ever wanted to be Robert Parry. But they should have.

Woodward and Bernstein made their mark in a series of Washington Post stories that eventually brought down President Nixon, even though the average American today couldn’t tell you what Watergate was really about. Nevertheless, the pair were embraced and mythologized by Hollywood and the liberal political establishment, their place in the pantheon, set. Woodward has been particularly successful, carving out a niche as an sanctioned gossip and chronicler of the Washington courtier class. But since “Deep Throat,” the closest he’s come to ripping the lid off anything in any subversive and enduring way is a cup of coffee on the set of Meet the Press. Still, Woodward’s friends at the Weekly Standard, in an oft-repeated panegyric, call him “the best pure reporter of his generation, perhaps ever.”

Not quite. Parry, who died on January 27 after a recent diagnosis of pancreatic cancer at age 68, was also a Boomer reporter who cut his teeth on the biggest scandals in recent memory. As an Associated Press journalist he broke the story of Colonel Oliver North’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair in 1985. A year before that, he won a George Polk Award for exposing the CIA’s production of an assassination manual for the right-wing contras the Reagan administration was supporting to overthrow the elected leftist government in Nicaragua.

Author and TAC contributing editor Mark Perry, who met Bob in the mid-1980s (at the height of Iran-Contra), remembers what he describes as “Bob’s absolute laser focus on a story, on getting what no one else could.”

“I think that’s what set him apart,” he added in an email. “But it was really the short attention span of the mainstream media that I think most bothered him. He was a reporting bulldog, and he would keep at it.”

Knowing how this business works, the nearly middle-aged Parry could have taken the moment to burrow in, enjoy the warm embrace of the mainstream, even bask in the sunshine of his new celebrity. But he made the decision, and it would prove portentous, to quit AP when he felt his Iran Contra stories were being watered down and delayed due to efforts at the highest levels of the newspaper and the U.S. government to get the release of AP correspondent Terry Anderson, who had been held hostage for nearly seven years during the Lebanese Civil War.

A humble man by all appearances, and respected by those who knew him over the years, Parry was raised in a newsroom—his father was the editor of the Middlesex Daily News in Framingham, Massachusetts.

“I was taught that there were almost always two sides to a story and often more. I was expected to seek out those alternative views, not dismiss them or pretend they didn’t exist,” he wrote.

That’s not just quaint New England windage; it’s what most reporters are taught in Journalism 101. The difference between reporters like Parry and the jaded status seekers of his generation is that Parry never forgot. He never stopped “questioning the Official Story,” and carried a disdain for groupthink and the D.C. media hive that not only lasted a lifetime, but defined his identity. For this he was viewed by his like-minded peers throughout Washington and beyond the Beltway as a journalist of sterling integrity.

That’s far more valuable than a million bestsellers and placement on the imperial city’s social registries. However, it also can mean permanent exclusion from “the body” and all of the material blessings bestowed upon those who play the game. Parry left the AP and worked on investigative pieces for Frontline before finally, taking advantage of the new, accessible promise of the Internet, starting ConsortiumNews.com in 1995 on a shoestring budget. For the next 20 years he encouraged and aided countless writers engaged in professional, courageous journalism on issues of foreign policy, national security, and the environment. He championed tragic underdogs like Garry Webb, who was cast out of the profession after a well-orchestrated government-media blowback campaign against his 1998 series “Dark Alliance,” in which he attempted to establish CIA complicity in the rampaging crack trade in 1980s Los Angeles (Parry and fellow AP reporter Brian Barger had actually broken the first story about the CIA-Contra-cocaine matrix in 1985). Destitute, Webb committed suicide in 2004.

“To this day, none of the journalists or media critics who participated in the destruction of Gary Webb has paid a price,” Parry wrote in an exhaustive autopsy of the Webb story in October 2014, highlighting reams of new information supporting Webb that were brought to light in a 1998 Justice Department investigation.

“None has faced the sort of humiliation that Webb had to endure. None had to experience that special pain of standing up for what is best in the profession of journalism, taking on a difficult story that seeks to hold powerful people accountable for serious crimes, and then being vilified by your own colleagues, the people that you expected to understand and appreciate what you had done.”

As recently as this June, ConsortiumNews has given an annual Freedom of the Press award in Gary Webb’s name. Parry has spent the last 20 years criticizing the media’s role in the Iraq invasion, the ongoing wars overseas, and “the same terrible journalism” that allows the elite—whether in Washington or on Wall Street—to abuse the power and trust and pocketbooks of the American people. Before he died he was quite candid that these realities had only gotten worse, drawing fire from the left for questioning the political motives and machinations behind the Russian collusion investigation.

“The major Western news outlets now conflate the discrete difficulties from made-up ‘fake news’ and baseless ‘conspiracy theories’ with responsible dissenting analysis,” he wrote. “All get thrown into the same pot and subjected to disdain and ridicule.”

Investigative journalist and TAC contributor Gareth Porter, a long-time friend of Parry, was, like many of Parry’s friends, thunderstruck by the news of his illness and death last week.

“Bob was absolutely unafraid of the most powerful men and institutions in this country. He was free of any ideological agenda, but he was committed to penetrating the lies that he knew were second nature to the national security state, and nothing could stop him,” Porter wrote in an email.

“He was the one editor a journalist could count on to publish articles that challenged that assault on freedom of thought in the United States,” Porter added.

As the Washington Post pretentiously promises to ensure that democracy does not “die in darkness,” we know all too well that it’s the unsung heroes like Parry who actually sacrifice everything for the cause. Perhaps someday, he and others like him will replace Woodward and Bernstein in the hopeful heads of dreaming J-school students. It would be our small contribution, as torchbearers of this profession, for all of its faults, to endeavor forthwith to make that happen.

*

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is the executive editor of The American Conservative. Follow her on Twitter @Vlahos_at_TAC.

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FISA Memo Released. Will witch-hunt Russiagate investigations end? Will Trump and his campaign team be exonerated?

By Stephen Lendman, February 04, 2018

The FBI and Justice Department sought multiple FISA warrants based on unverified information from former MI6 spy Christopher Steele’s dodgy dossier on Trump – his work funded by Hillary and the DNC to denigrate him during the 2016 presidential campaign, continuing once in office.

Spying on the Wrong People: The Hypocrisy of the Nunes Memo & FISA

By Juan Cole, February 04, 2018

The GOP is complaining about government surveillance. But it isn’t complaining about the principle of the thing (surprise!). It is complaining that its guy got caught up in these surveillance practices.

Turkey Establishing Long-Sought US “Safe Haven” in Northern Syria

By Tony Cartalucci, February 04, 2018

While the US and Turkey are currently feigning a diplomatic row over the incursion – with Turkey’s targeting and displacement of Kurds allegedly backed by the United States – it is clear that recent claims by the US regarding its expanding support of Kurdish militias it has been arming and backing in Syria was done as an intentional pretext for Turkey to justify an otherwise indefensible invasion of Syrian territory.

US-Armed Jihadist in Syria Shoots Down Russian Plane, Kills Pilot

By Eric Zuesse, February 04, 2018

A U.S.-armed jihadist shot down, on February 3rd, in the Idlib area of Syria, a Russian Su-25 jet, and killed its pilot. In a leaked radio conversation, a “rebel” commander ordered his fighters to kill the pilot then burn his body.

Release of Nunes Memo Throws Anti-Russia Campaign into Disarray

By Andre Damon, February 04, 2018

The so-called Nunes memo, which Democratic lawmakers, US intelligence agencies and major newspapers had been seeking to block for days, alleges that the FBI under the Obama administration used discredited sources and withheld key information to initiate a wiretap of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

As Expected, Mainstream Media Lie Through Their Teeth About House Intelligence Committee Report

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, February 03, 2018

The FISA court document, declassified and released, contains confessions from both the FBI and DOJ that the agencies misled the court and falsely acquired surveillance permission. The FBI and DOJ mischaracterize their deception of the court as “mistakes.”  The agencies provide the court with improvements in their procedures so as not to make “mistakes” in the future.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Russia intervened in Syria to combat terrorists in support of Syrian sovereignty, territorial integrity and right of its people alone to choose their leadership, free from foreign interference.

Syria is Obama’s war, now Trump’s, waged for regime change, wanting pro-Western puppet governance replacing the nation’s sovereign independence, using ISIS and other terrorists as imperial foot soldiers.

There’s no ambiguity about what’s going on. The MSM pretend otherwise, suppressing vital information about Washington’s agenda, reporting disinformation about the war instead, supporting US aggression, not responsibly condemning it.

One of more US-supplied shoulder-launched, man-portable, surface-to-air missiles (MANPADS) were used by terrorist fighters to down a Russian Su-25 aircraft, its pilot murdered on the ground after descending from his disabled plane, takfiris affiliated with the US-supported Free Syrian Army shown gloating over his body in a disturbing video they prepared.

Identified as Major Roman Filippov, Russia’s Defense Ministry said he died “during combat with terrorists.”

Reportedly, Lt. Colonel Sergey Aksenov recommended he be honored for completing combat missions in Syria.

A photo showed his Stechkin machine pistol issued to all Russian pilots along with three magazines, one empty, the others half-empty, indicating he valiantly combated terrorists on the ground until killed.

The incident is one of many showing Washington is waging proxy war on Russia in Syria. Obama and now Trump want endless war and regime change, peace and stability rejected as unacceptable.

A Russian Defense Ministry statement said the following:

“On 3 February 2018, a Russian fighter jet Su-25 crashed when flying over the Idlib de-escalation zone. The pilot was able to report ejection from an area controlled by Jabhat al-Nusra militants. The pilot was killed while fighting against terrorists.”

“According to preliminary information, the jet was brought down with a portable anti-aircraft missile system.”

“The Russian center for reconciliation of warring sides in Syria alongside the Turkish side, responsible for the Idlib de-escalation zone, are taking steps to retrieve the Russian pilot’s body.”

In response to the incident, “(a) group strike using precision weapons has been conducted in the area controlled by the Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist group in Idlib province, from where the missile was launched against the Russian Su-25 airplane.”

“According to radio intercepts, as a result of the strike, more than 30 militants of Jabhat al-Nusra were destroyed.”

Since intervening to combat US-supported terrorists in September 2015, Russia lost four aircraft and four helicopters.

The Su-25 is designed to destroy small-size mobile and fixed ground objects, as well as low-speed air targets.

Following Saturday’s incident, Russian lower house State Duma Defense Committee chairman Yury Shvytkin called for an investigation, saying what happened was the first time terrorists successfully used Western-supplied MANPADS to down a Russian aircraft.

Is Washington responsible for the incident. Though Russia won’t retaliate against US forces in Syria, the Su-25’s downing and death of its pilot escalates things toward possible confrontation between both countries.

Their agendas are polar opposite in Syria and elsewhere, their bilateral relations dismal.

An eventual clash between both countries remains a disturbing possibility, maybe inevitable given Washington’s rage for eliminating all sovereign independent governments, wanting control over planet earth, its resources and populations.

*

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

There is liminal predation amidst surface harmony, with the norm of constant massacre underneath social relations affecting the poor, the deprived and the oppressed peoples.

Duplicities rule. President Duterte said he wants peace. So the left sat in the peace process with the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP), but the armed forces continue their attacks at communities.

He said, he is anti-corruption but the ousted dictator Marcos is given a hero’s burial. 

He said he wants to protect the country but he ordered the killing of peasant-national minorities, and likewise ordered the bombing of Lumad (tribal) communities. He said, he will stop the contractualization of labor, but legalized it under DOLE Dept. Order 174.

He was for a tax reform but that which boosts up more levies on consumer goods. He said lands will be redistributed to farmers but had the appointment of peasant DAR secretary Mariano subject to the approval of landlords in congress.

A family dispute that commenced since 2016 in Muslim, Butig, Marawi City community was transformed into an anti-terrorist campaign killing Muslim civilians and bombing communities in Mindanao under a declaration of Martial Law.ed Art. 106-109 of the labor code and justified it in DO No. 174.

When a rido took place in Marawi you elevated it to ISIS and allowed aerial bombings even beyond Marawi City. You said land will be redistributed to the farmers, but you had it subject to the concurrence of landlords in congress. You said you are anti-destructive mining but you still sustain massive mining. You always say what you are not.

Meantime, in the country-sides, the ruling class keeps killing poor peasants.  A case in point are the landlords in the Island of Negros who have maintained private armies to grab peasant cultivated lands and shoot poor farmers regularly. And just like the Negros landlords, Negros politicians invoke political medievalism and a bankrupt developmental politics attacking human rights defenders conducting fact finding missions in farming communities in Negros.

This is the design of Negros Provincial Ordinance No. 5 Series of 2008 which denies Human Rights Defenders the right to conduct mercy missions, fact finding missions or even medical missions through layers of bureaucratic measures and permit requirements.  The landlords or the ruling class in this country remain to be the problem because they appear to have barren minds which hopelessly rely on private armies to shoot those who question them. They are the problem ever since Philippine history!

The Series of Killings at Guihulngan City

Since July, 2017, a reign of terror hounds Guihulngan City in Negros Oriental with series of Marcos-inspired killings, when progressive groups have called on the abrogation of government’s misplaced policy of three wars against the drug menace, the Bangsamoro rebellion and civilian-political unrest. Guihulngan has become government’s priority target in its counterinsurgency drive as it has been the subject of ruthless attacks by state agents victimizing unarmed political dissenters.  Hence, the murder victims:

1. Glen Absin – July 23, 2017
2. Alberto ‘Leboy’ Tecson – July 24, 2017
3. Danilo Salazar – July 28, 2017
4. Rene Faburada – August 4, 2017
5. LeodegarioBenero, Jr. August 17, 2017
6. Marlyn Vidal – August 26, 2017
7. Oscar Asildo, Jr. –August 30 2017

Alberto “Leboy” Tecson was the vice-chair of fishermen’s group Pambansang Lakasng Kilusang Mamalakaya (Pamalakaya). Oscar Asildo, Jr. was Bayan Muna organizer who is a bookkeeper of DepEd’s Guihulngan Division Office, and then two other reported cases of attempted murder. Rolan Pacunla, driver of a motorcycle-for-hire (popularly known as habal-habal) and is a member of the Guihulngan Habal-habal United Operators and Drivers Association (GHUODA).

He was shot on August 6, 2017 but survived with injuries. Luardo Yac was shot and wounded on Sept. 1, 2017.  He was a resident of Sitio Balay Sungayan, Poblacion and a member of KAUGMAON. He recovered from his injuries but was shot dead on September 13. Yac’s death bring the total number killed to 8.  All the killings were reportedly perpetrated by masked men riding motorcycles. Likewise, activist leaders, Marilou Alangilan (KAUGMAON Spokesperson), Cenona Estrada (KAUGMAON Chairperson), Josephine Saguran (Health workers in Mountain Clinics), Harry Centilla, a member of the Pinagkaisang Samahanng Tsuper at Operators Nationwide (PISTON), Lorna Tecson, wife of Leboy Tecson and Florante Burdado, leader of GHUODA receive constant threats and harrassments.

Policemen killed in an ambush allegedly staged by the New People’s Army (NPA) in Guihulngan City on July 21, 2017

Hence, the climate of Martial Law-like impunity govern the Guihulngan City of Negros Oriental this year while perpetrators remain scot-free inspired by the Duterte go-kill doctrine, while the victims and their families live in anxiety. With the pervasive fear among residents that curtail their movements, livelihood or socio-economic activities are disrupted and displaced.  The pattern shows that state security forces were running amok to satisfy vengeance on a previous (July 21, 2017) incident that resulted to combat losses against the New People’s Army.  They are actually, vending their ire upon hapless civilians and government critics whom they are quick to brand as NPA supporters to justify the execution.

Peace negotiator abducted with two other farmers

In 1986, was chief peace negotiator and ex-priest Rustico “Tikoy” Tan who was abducted early November this year. Operatives of the Cebu Provincial Intelligence Branch (PIB) picked him up last November 9, 2017 at his in-law’s residence at Barangay Pasil, Santander town. Police Inspector Chief Joie Yape, Jr. issued a statement in SunStar Cebu’s November 11, 2017 news report that positively identified the Cebu Police Provincial Office’s (CPPO) PIB as the apprehending office.

However, hopping around military camp to police camps in Cebu City, the relatives and Cebu’s Karapatan Team were denied information on the detention of Fr. Rustico “Tikoy” Tan and two others who were identified to be in police custody with him for the last 3 days. Hence, in the third day, the search for Fr. Tan ended to no avail. Both military and police officers were bent on denying to death the detention of Fr. Tan.

The case in point is that a retired peace negotiator at age 76 is incarcerated under the present dispensation. Is Duterte’s regime bent on reviving the cases of former anti-Marcos activists? Is Duterte too desperate to prove his loyalty to the Marcoses?

In November 13, the Karapatan search team went to the Cebu Police Provincial Office (CPPO) to counter check where the police intelligence kept the missing Fr. Rustico Tan. With all media personnel around, finally Police information Superintendent Virgilio Bayon-on revealed that the warrant of arrest was issued at Bohol, so they sent Fr. Rustico Tan to the 47th branch of the court at Bohol Sunday November 12, but that they said it is not also sure because there is another set of warrant from Negros province.

So another warrant issued from a court’s branch at Negros. If it was yesterday that the captives were transported to Bohol, we were not informed on that account while we were camp hopping the whole day. And for what intent does PNP blind the relatives of the detainee on his whereabouts, when protocol says that PNP should inform the prisoner of his rights? Four days had passed. This is already a case of abduction.

So where do we go now? They won’t give us any copy of the manifesto and/or copy of the arrest warrant. My resolution is rather futuristic, that what we should teach in school are strategies on how to respond against police violations of their own operations manual and the constitution. Two days after, it was learned that the two other farmers who were abducted earlier that day of November 9, at Oslob town were already traced, and billeted at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) at Kalunasan, Cebu City.

The Karapatan workers gathered that 52 year old farmer Mr. Eduardo Cullamat was abducted at about 5:00 p.m. at Barangay Mainit, Oslob, Cebu last Nov. 9, 2017, while calling for his wife through a cellphone. Cullamat said that he and his companion Lopito Paquegbao Jabagat were tied with hands at the back while they were taken via a truckload of armed men from Mainit, Oslob, Cebu. Cullamat shared that for four days he was blindfolded. He said that his chest was repeatedly hit by a hard object, and that he was mauled and manhandled to force him to accept or agree that he is a member of the “sparrow” unit. He also shared that for sometime he was not allowed to eat on his own and that food was administered to him while he was on hand cuffs and repeatedly beaten by some men. Jabagat, on the other hand revealed that he was taken by surprise while cooking his food and his arms pulled to his back and blindfolded. Both said that they were repeatedly interrogated all throughout the four days.

On November 13, 2017, it was learned that both farmers were brought to the Oslob Police Station where Cullamat requested for medical help for his aching chest. In November 14, 2017, they were committed to the CPDRC. Cullamat had P500.00 in his wallet while Jabagat had P45,000.00 and two cellphones taken away from them during their abduction.

Killing of  Barangay Chair Felicisimo “Imok” Rupinta

Cebu’s icon urban poor, vendor and political leader, Felicisimo “Imok” Rupinta (image on the right) was murdered November 23, 2017. His case is one of Cebu’s political killings. Chair Felicisimo “Imok” Rupinta was murdered at Tayud, Liloan,Cebu. A year ago he was suspended with the rest of the Barangay Kagawads of Barangay Ermita Cebu City for defying cooperation with the Duterte’s original operation tokhang/Double Barrel implementation. Last night he was murdered by unidentified gunmen riding in tandem.

Over the years, of ethnographic studies in Cebu City, Chair Imok has always been there as key informant to various researches. His rich experiences in Cebu City politics, his leadership with the Cebu City United Vendors Association (CCUVA) and the KAMANSI Cooperative and his engagement from the SIR-P to the CMP to vendor cooperativism are so valuable that should have earned him great honor as source of that community knowledge. But sadly, he was murdered to highlight on the selective war on drugs despite the absence of litigation against him. Engaging Chair Imok is always an opportunity to understand the anatomy of the underground economies in Cebu City. His death is a blow as it is a great loss to the urban poor and the vendors of Cebu city.

Killing of Badayos and Moises

Attacking human rights defenders is bestial madness. The private army and their patron who murdered Emelisa Badayos of Karapatan Central Visayas and peasant Elioterio Moises must face murder charges.

Sad news came on November 26, 2017 about the Fact Finding Mission (FFM) at Bayawan, Negros Oriental, that resulted to the death of a colleague, Mrs. Emelisa Badayos of Karapatan Negros, and Mr. Elioterio Moises, a barangay tanod and peasant member of the Mantapi Ebwan Farmers Association. Both were with the 30-member team investigating on the massive militarization in Negros communities and on the reported human rights violations in the area, only to be shot at by unidentified men in the afternoon of November 26. Another one who is a Kabataan Partylist member is still in critical condition at the Bayawan hospital when reports came to Cebu City Bayan office. Earlier that day, the team was blocked and harassed at San Ramon, Bayawan by no less than the Mayor’s private army. Patterns and regularities show that armed groups including those of government are unleashed on its bestial madness, shooting on all fronts just for the booty of the what they call monetary rewards that government had used to entice the armed bureaucracy to aggressively attack even human rights defenders.

The situation of the poor sectors in Cebu City

Genuine assets redistribution remains an elusive dream. The urban poor settlers continue to sleep in anguish and fear that the next day their shanties are uprooted and their abode destroyed by continuing and impending demolition. Tomorrow or the next day they may here from the news that Osmena’s City government had already fully demolished the urban poor colony of Mambaling, Cebu City.

While demolition is implemented, government agents constantly manipulate the poor to purchase their lots via government’s market driven programs dubbed as “socialized mass housing” and/or “mortgaging communities”.

It is difficult to understand why government remains poor in their imagination about finding means for genuine assets reforms and genuine assets redistribution. Why is government getting into the profit driven motive? Why can’t government realize public service without having to marketize public welfare, such as public housing, public health care and public education? Why do some scholars in development invoke these neoliberal policies? And they gloss over the repressive state apparatus employing demolition to the nth time. Communities are just being demolished and demolished without really providing them with a final abode they could call their own.

General situationer

As the true character of the Duterte regime now unfolded and flaunted its collusion with the US, various forms of conflicts confront the Filipino people that are ripe for protest actions. Summing up the 1 and a half year of Duterte, was the AFP and PNP’s re-inauguration as strong institutions committing 100 politically motivated killings, 845 illegal arrests, 42,894 victims of threats and intimidation, 416,005 evacuees, and 357,569 victims of killings, indiscriminate firing and aerial bombardments.

Philippine President Duterte with Philippine National Police (PNP) chief, Director General dela Rosa

Given all these, the December 10, 2017 International Human Rights Day shall then be celebrated in the spirit of nationalism and militance in the defence of the basic human rights.

Today, attacks on human rights have worsened, with the deplorable condition of livelihoods and dire poverty.

Martial Law in Mindanao

To consolidate its hold on to power, Duterte completely embraced US imperialism fully relying on militarist and fascist actions. It used one dispute incident in Marawi to justify the imposition of Martial law in the whole of the Mindanao Region. Foremost, with its all-out war and the Oplan Kapayapaan against a citizenry that aspires for genuine peace, genuine change and genuine development, it sabotaged the peace process that the NDFP had launched.

US Imperialism. Neoliberalism and Subservience to Foreign Capital

Just like previous regimes, Duterte regime has now taken the path of a puppet under US imperialism. It sustains the same neoliberal policies that drove the local economy to greater subservience to foreign control, which favours big compradors and landlords. These economic strategy is juxtaposed to an ever stronger counterinsurgency program with Oplan Kapayapaan, and other means of attacks on civilian lives.

A mark of Duterte’s rule is the way of a “killing machine” in the manner Oplan Tokhang/Double Barrel operates that marauds basic human rights and kills thousands of poor citizens. Duterte’s war on drugs was a big failure. Despite the killing of thousands it never stopped the drugs trade. Most of the victims of killings were poor and deprived peoples, while drugs continue to proliferate. Despite the killing of a few suspected drug lords who are also political opponents of the Duterte regime, it dismissed questions on the apprehension of billions worth of drugs involving his son and associated Davao cronies.

In the past month, the SWS survey showed a decrease in Duterte’s net satisfaction rating from 55% to 48%. The greater reason for that decrease in Duterte’s rating is the citizen’s distaste to constant killings that greatly oppressed the Moro people, the national minorities and the poor citizenry in general. It appears that the Duterte regime has no solid program for genuine national development but that solely goes for an all-out war on all fronts against the citizens. It takes fast hold on militarist rule. It does not restrain its idea on imposing martial law for the whole nation, and it utilizes the securitization of its governance against a perceived “leftist take over”, but all as ploy to impose a dictatorial regime.

Massive Protests

On the other hand, protests are constantly gaining grounds, expanding its reach against a militarist, fascist and ambitious dictatorial rule. After the killing of kids like Kian delos Santos, Carl Angelo Arnaiz, and Reynaldo de Guzman in August and September, the brewing large protests developed against the massive extra judicial killings under Oplan Tokhang. Massive protests took place that converged in a big political mobilization of about 25,000 forces at the Luneta Park last 21st of September in the anniversary of the Marcos’ Martial Law.

As expected, the AFP and PNP, deliberately prevented the protest from getting bigger. Disinformation and psychological war strategies were used saying that the left and the yellow forces had conspired to oust Duterte from office. A desperate account on destabilization, countered via police state and militarist actions, were the Duterte regime’s political ploy in order to prevent articulation of legitimate issues and concerns of ordinary citizens in protests. It shows calculated attacks on legitimate protests by tainting the excuse that protest actions sow disorder to the peaceful administration and intends to change the government.

Hence, an Inter-Agency Committee on Legal Action (IACLA) was created which is similar to the Arroyo government’s Inter Agency Legal Action Group (IALAG) that was tasked to persecute by trumped up charges those so called “enemies of the state”. Duterte and AFP generals likewise articulated the threat of a nation-wide martial law.

Meanwhile, violations of human rights continue against the ordinary citizens.

Because poor peasants, farmers and national minorities organized themselves in protests, massive militarization in their poor communities took place, and their leaders and some members murdered which have reached to some 98 incidents very recently. Demolition and constant threats to urban poor communities also take place when the community asserts for better living condition and their right to the security of abode. Duterte also threatened the drivers sector who launched a massive protest against the jeepney phase-out as part of Duterte’s transport modernization program and demands that this be followed as it is due come January 2018, while tainting PISTON, KMU and KARAPATAN as communist fronts.

Recently, Duterte declared that Marawi City is liberated after reports that Isnilon Hapilon and Omar Maute had died. But AFP sustained Martial Law in Mindanao saying that threats to other places within the region continue, especially from other armed groups like the New People’s Army (NPA). The United States of America (USA) was fast to praise Duterte’s war in Marawi City for waging a war “without human rights violations” despite reports of residents that there were lootings of properties, illegal arrests and torture, killings and other gross violations of human rights.

Duterte and the GRP also entertained the possibility of the return to the negotiating table with the NDFP. Peace must however, be pursued and sustained between the GRP and the NDFP. The reason is because the issues of contention are the genuine political, economic and social reforms for the wellbeing of the Filipino people which need not be articulated in a bloody war. The peace process is very important for the realization of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Respect for Human Rights and the International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL) and the release of 435 political prisoners.

Meanwhile, Duterte dominates the Senate and the Congress, and saddles his critics with charges of impeachment, such as the case of Supreme Court Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno and Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales.

*

Phoebe Zoe Maria U. Sanchez, Ph. D. is associate professor, faculty member of the College of Social Sciences at the University of the Philippines Cebu. She is the incumbent chair of Karapatan, Cebu Chapter.

There is liminal predation amidst surface harmony, with the norm of constant massacre underneath social relations affecting the poor, the deprived and the oppressed peoples.

Duplicities rule. President Duterte said he wants peace. So the left sat in the peace process with the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP), but the armed forces continue their attacks at communities.

He said, he is anti-corruption but the ousted dictator Marcos is given a hero’s burial. 

He said he wants to protect the country but he ordered the killing of peasant-national minorities, and likewise ordered the bombing of Lumad (tribal) communities. He said, he will stop the contractualization of labor, but legalized it under DOLE Dept. Order 174.

He was for a tax reform but that which boosts up more levies on consumer goods. He said lands will be redistributed to farmers but had the appointment of peasant DAR secretary Mariano subject to the approval of landlords in congress.

A family dispute that commenced since 2016 in Muslim, Butig, Marawi City community was transformed into an anti-terrorist campaign killing Muslim civilians and bombing communities in Mindanao under a declaration of Martial Law.ed Art. 106-109 of the labor code and justified it in DO No. 174.

When a rido took place in Marawi you elevated it to ISIS and allowed aerial bombings even beyond Marawi City. You said land will be redistributed to the farmers, but you had it subject to the concurrence of landlords in congress. You said you are anti-destructive mining but you still sustain massive mining. You always say what you are not.

Meantime, in the country-sides, the ruling class keeps killing poor peasants.  A case in point are the landlords in the Island of Negros who have maintained private armies to grab peasant cultivated lands and shoot poor farmers regularly. And just like the Negros landlords, Negros politicians invoke political medievalism and a bankrupt developmental politics attacking human rights defenders conducting fact finding missions in farming communities in Negros.

This is the design of Negros Provincial Ordinance No. 5 Series of 2008 which denies Human Rights Defenders the right to conduct mercy missions, fact finding missions or even medical missions through layers of bureaucratic measures and permit requirements.  The landlords or the ruling class in this country remain to be the problem because they appear to have barren minds which hopelessly rely on private armies to shoot those who question them. They are the problem ever since Philippine history!

The Series of Killings at Guihulngan City

Since July, 2017, a reign of terror hounds Guihulngan City in Negros Oriental with series of Marcos-inspired killings, when progressive groups have called on the abrogation of government’s misplaced policy of three wars against the drug menace, the Bangsamoro rebellion and civilian-political unrest. Guihulngan has become government’s priority target in its counterinsurgency drive as it has been the subject of ruthless attacks by state agents victimizing unarmed political dissenters.  Hence, the murder victims:

1. Glen Absin – July 23, 2017
2. Alberto ‘Leboy’ Tecson – July 24, 2017
3. Danilo Salazar – July 28, 2017
4. Rene Faburada – August 4, 2017
5. LeodegarioBenero, Jr. August 17, 2017
6. Marlyn Vidal – August 26, 2017
7. Oscar Asildo, Jr. –August 30 2017

Alberto “Leboy” Tecson was the vice-chair of fishermen’s group Pambansang Lakasng Kilusang Mamalakaya (Pamalakaya). Oscar Asildo, Jr. was Bayan Muna organizer who is a bookkeeper of DepEd’s Guihulngan Division Office, and then two other reported cases of attempted murder. Rolan Pacunla, driver of a motorcycle-for-hire (popularly known as habal-habal) and is a member of the Guihulngan Habal-habal United Operators and Drivers Association (GHUODA).

He was shot on August 6, 2017 but survived with injuries. Luardo Yac was shot and wounded on Sept. 1, 2017.  He was a resident of Sitio Balay Sungayan, Poblacion and a member of KAUGMAON. He recovered from his injuries but was shot dead on September 13. Yac’s death bring the total number killed to 8.  All the killings were reportedly perpetrated by masked men riding motorcycles. Likewise, activist leaders, Marilou Alangilan (KAUGMAON Spokesperson), Cenona Estrada (KAUGMAON Chairperson), Josephine Saguran (Health workers in Mountain Clinics), Harry Centilla, a member of the Pinagkaisang Samahanng Tsuper at Operators Nationwide (PISTON), Lorna Tecson, wife of Leboy Tecson and Florante Burdado, leader of GHUODA receive constant threats and harrassments.

Policemen killed in an ambush allegedly staged by the New People’s Army (NPA) in Guihulngan City on July 21, 2017

Hence, the climate of Martial Law-like impunity govern the Guihulngan City of Negros Oriental this year while perpetrators remain scot-free inspired by the Duterte go-kill doctrine, while the victims and their families live in anxiety. With the pervasive fear among residents that curtail their movements, livelihood or socio-economic activities are disrupted and displaced.  The pattern shows that state security forces were running amok to satisfy vengeance on a previous (July 21, 2017) incident that resulted to combat losses against the New People’s Army.  They are actually, vending their ire upon hapless civilians and government critics whom they are quick to brand as NPA supporters to justify the execution.

Peace negotiator abducted with two other farmers

In 1986, was chief peace negotiator and ex-priest Rustico “Tikoy” Tan who was abducted early November this year. Operatives of the Cebu Provincial Intelligence Branch (PIB) picked him up last November 9, 2017 at his in-law’s residence at Barangay Pasil, Santander town. Police Inspector Chief Joie Yape, Jr. issued a statement in SunStar Cebu’s November 11, 2017 news report that positively identified the Cebu Police Provincial Office’s (CPPO) PIB as the apprehending office.

However, hopping around military camp to police camps in Cebu City, the relatives and Cebu’s Karapatan Team were denied information on the detention of Fr. Rustico “Tikoy” Tan and two others who were identified to be in police custody with him for the last 3 days. Hence, in the third day, the search for Fr. Tan ended to no avail. Both military and police officers were bent on denying to death the detention of Fr. Tan.

The case in point is that a retired peace negotiator at age 76 is incarcerated under the present dispensation. Is Duterte’s regime bent on reviving the cases of former anti-Marcos activists? Is Duterte too desperate to prove his loyalty to the Marcoses?

In November 13, the Karapatan search team went to the Cebu Police Provincial Office (CPPO) to counter check where the police intelligence kept the missing Fr. Rustico Tan. With all media personnel around, finally Police information Superintendent Virgilio Bayon-on revealed that the warrant of arrest was issued at Bohol, so they sent Fr. Rustico Tan to the 47th branch of the court at Bohol Sunday November 12, but that they said it is not also sure because there is another set of warrant from Negros province.

So another warrant issued from a court’s branch at Negros. If it was yesterday that the captives were transported to Bohol, we were not informed on that account while we were camp hopping the whole day. And for what intent does PNP blind the relatives of the detainee on his whereabouts, when protocol says that PNP should inform the prisoner of his rights? Four days had passed. This is already a case of abduction.

So where do we go now? They won’t give us any copy of the manifesto and/or copy of the arrest warrant. My resolution is rather futuristic, that what we should teach in school are strategies on how to respond against police violations of their own operations manual and the constitution. Two days after, it was learned that the two other farmers who were abducted earlier that day of November 9, at Oslob town were already traced, and billeted at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) at Kalunasan, Cebu City.

The Karapatan workers gathered that 52 year old farmer Mr. Eduardo Cullamat was abducted at about 5:00 p.m. at Barangay Mainit, Oslob, Cebu last Nov. 9, 2017, while calling for his wife through a cellphone. Cullamat said that he and his companion Lopito Paquegbao Jabagat were tied with hands at the back while they were taken via a truckload of armed men from Mainit, Oslob, Cebu. Cullamat shared that for four days he was blindfolded. He said that his chest was repeatedly hit by a hard object, and that he was mauled and manhandled to force him to accept or agree that he is a member of the “sparrow” unit. He also shared that for sometime he was not allowed to eat on his own and that food was administered to him while he was on hand cuffs and repeatedly beaten by some men. Jabagat, on the other hand revealed that he was taken by surprise while cooking his food and his arms pulled to his back and blindfolded. Both said that they were repeatedly interrogated all throughout the four days.

On November 13, 2017, it was learned that both farmers were brought to the Oslob Police Station where Cullamat requested for medical help for his aching chest. In November 14, 2017, they were committed to the CPDRC. Cullamat had P500.00 in his wallet while Jabagat had P45,000.00 and two cellphones taken away from them during their abduction.

Killing of  Barangay Chair Felicisimo “Imok” Rupinta

Cebu’s icon urban poor, vendor and political leader, Felicisimo “Imok” Rupinta (image on the right) was murdered November 23, 2017. His case is one of Cebu’s political killings. Chair Felicisimo “Imok” Rupinta was murdered at Tayud, Liloan,Cebu. A year ago he was suspended with the rest of the Barangay Kagawads of Barangay Ermita Cebu City for defying cooperation with the Duterte’s original operation tokhang/Double Barrel implementation. Last night he was murdered by unidentified gunmen riding in tandem.

Over the years, of ethnographic studies in Cebu City, Chair Imok has always been there as key informant to various researches. His rich experiences in Cebu City politics, his leadership with the Cebu City United Vendors Association (CCUVA) and the KAMANSI Cooperative and his engagement from the SIR-P to the CMP to vendor cooperativism are so valuable that should have earned him great honor as source of that community knowledge. But sadly, he was murdered to highlight on the selective war on drugs despite the absence of litigation against him. Engaging Chair Imok is always an opportunity to understand the anatomy of the underground economies in Cebu City. His death is a blow as it is a great loss to the urban poor and the vendors of Cebu city.

Killing of Badayos and Moises

Attacking human rights defenders is bestial madness. The private army and their patron who murdered Emelisa Badayos of Karapatan Central Visayas and peasant Elioterio Moises must face murder charges.

Sad news came on November 26, 2017 about the Fact Finding Mission (FFM) at Bayawan, Negros Oriental, that resulted to the death of a colleague, Mrs. Emelisa Badayos of Karapatan Negros, and Mr. Elioterio Moises, a barangay tanod and peasant member of the Mantapi Ebwan Farmers Association. Both were with the 30-member team investigating on the massive militarization in Negros communities and on the reported human rights violations in the area, only to be shot at by unidentified men in the afternoon of November 26. Another one who is a Kabataan Partylist member is still in critical condition at the Bayawan hospital when reports came to Cebu City Bayan office. Earlier that day, the team was blocked and harassed at San Ramon, Bayawan by no less than the Mayor’s private army. Patterns and regularities show that armed groups including those of government are unleashed on its bestial madness, shooting on all fronts just for the booty of the what they call monetary rewards that government had used to entice the armed bureaucracy to aggressively attack even human rights defenders.

The situation of the poor sectors in Cebu City

Genuine assets redistribution remains an elusive dream. The urban poor settlers continue to sleep in anguish and fear that the next day their shanties are uprooted and their abode destroyed by continuing and impending demolition. Tomorrow or the next day they may here from the news that Osmena’s City government had already fully demolished the urban poor colony of Mambaling, Cebu City.

While demolition is implemented, government agents constantly manipulate the poor to purchase their lots via government’s market driven programs dubbed as “socialized mass housing” and/or “mortgaging communities”.

It is difficult to understand why government remains poor in their imagination about finding means for genuine assets reforms and genuine assets redistribution. Why is government getting into the profit driven motive? Why can’t government realize public service without having to marketize public welfare, such as public housing, public health care and public education? Why do some scholars in development invoke these neoliberal policies? And they gloss over the repressive state apparatus employing demolition to the nth time. Communities are just being demolished and demolished without really providing them with a final abode they could call their own.

General situationer

As the true character of the Duterte regime now unfolded and flaunted its collusion with the US, various forms of conflicts confront the Filipino people that are ripe for protest actions. Summing up the 1 and a half year of Duterte, was the AFP and PNP’s re-inauguration as strong institutions committing 100 politically motivated killings, 845 illegal arrests, 42,894 victims of threats and intimidation, 416,005 evacuees, and 357,569 victims of killings, indiscriminate firing and aerial bombardments.

Philippine President Duterte with Philippine National Police (PNP) chief, Director General dela Rosa

Given all these, the December 10, 2017 International Human Rights Day shall then be celebrated in the spirit of nationalism and militance in the defence of the basic human rights.

Today, attacks on human rights have worsened, with the deplorable condition of livelihoods and dire poverty.

Martial Law in Mindanao

To consolidate its hold on to power, Duterte completely embraced US imperialism fully relying on militarist and fascist actions. It used one dispute incident in Marawi to justify the imposition of Martial law in the whole of the Mindanao Region. Foremost, with its all-out war and the Oplan Kapayapaan against a citizenry that aspires for genuine peace, genuine change and genuine development, it sabotaged the peace process that the NDFP had launched.

US Imperialism. Neoliberalism and Subservience to Foreign Capital

Just like previous regimes, Duterte regime has now taken the path of a puppet under US imperialism. It sustains the same neoliberal policies that drove the local economy to greater subservience to foreign control, which favours big compradors and landlords. These economic strategy is juxtaposed to an ever stronger counterinsurgency program with Oplan Kapayapaan, and other means of attacks on civilian lives.

A mark of Duterte’s rule is the way of a “killing machine” in the manner Oplan Tokhang/Double Barrel operates that marauds basic human rights and kills thousands of poor citizens. Duterte’s war on drugs was a big failure. Despite the killing of thousands it never stopped the drugs trade. Most of the victims of killings were poor and deprived peoples, while drugs continue to proliferate. Despite the killing of a few suspected drug lords who are also political opponents of the Duterte regime, it dismissed questions on the apprehension of billions worth of drugs involving his son and associated Davao cronies.

In the past month, the SWS survey showed a decrease in Duterte’s net satisfaction rating from 55% to 48%. The greater reason for that decrease in Duterte’s rating is the citizen’s distaste to constant killings that greatly oppressed the Moro people, the national minorities and the poor citizenry in general. It appears that the Duterte regime has no solid program for genuine national development but that solely goes for an all-out war on all fronts against the citizens. It takes fast hold on militarist rule. It does not restrain its idea on imposing martial law for the whole nation, and it utilizes the securitization of its governance against a perceived “leftist take over”, but all as ploy to impose a dictatorial regime.

Massive Protests

On the other hand, protests are constantly gaining grounds, expanding its reach against a militarist, fascist and ambitious dictatorial rule. After the killing of kids like Kian delos Santos, Carl Angelo Arnaiz, and Reynaldo de Guzman in August and September, the brewing large protests developed against the massive extra judicial killings under Oplan Tokhang. Massive protests took place that converged in a big political mobilization of about 25,000 forces at the Luneta Park last 21st of September in the anniversary of the Marcos’ Martial Law.

As expected, the AFP and PNP, deliberately prevented the protest from getting bigger. Disinformation and psychological war strategies were used saying that the left and the yellow forces had conspired to oust Duterte from office. A desperate account on destabilization, countered via police state and militarist actions, were the Duterte regime’s political ploy in order to prevent articulation of legitimate issues and concerns of ordinary citizens in protests. It shows calculated attacks on legitimate protests by tainting the excuse that protest actions sow disorder to the peaceful administration and intends to change the government.

Hence, an Inter-Agency Committee on Legal Action (IACLA) was created which is similar to the Arroyo government’s Inter Agency Legal Action Group (IALAG) that was tasked to persecute by trumped up charges those so called “enemies of the state”. Duterte and AFP generals likewise articulated the threat of a nation-wide martial law.

Meanwhile, violations of human rights continue against the ordinary citizens.

Because poor peasants, farmers and national minorities organized themselves in protests, massive militarization in their poor communities took place, and their leaders and some members murdered which have reached to some 98 incidents very recently. Demolition and constant threats to urban poor communities also take place when the community asserts for better living condition and their right to the security of abode. Duterte also threatened the drivers sector who launched a massive protest against the jeepney phase-out as part of Duterte’s transport modernization program and demands that this be followed as it is due come January 2018, while tainting PISTON, KMU and KARAPATAN as communist fronts.

Recently, Duterte declared that Marawi City is liberated after reports that Isnilon Hapilon and Omar Maute had died. But AFP sustained Martial Law in Mindanao saying that threats to other places within the region continue, especially from other armed groups like the New People’s Army (NPA). The United States of America (USA) was fast to praise Duterte’s war in Marawi City for waging a war “without human rights violations” despite reports of residents that there were lootings of properties, illegal arrests and torture, killings and other gross violations of human rights.

Duterte and the GRP also entertained the possibility of the return to the negotiating table with the NDFP. Peace must however, be pursued and sustained between the GRP and the NDFP. The reason is because the issues of contention are the genuine political, economic and social reforms for the wellbeing of the Filipino people which need not be articulated in a bloody war. The peace process is very important for the realization of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Respect for Human Rights and the International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL) and the release of 435 political prisoners.

Meanwhile, Duterte dominates the Senate and the Congress, and saddles his critics with charges of impeachment, such as the case of Supreme Court Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno and Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales.

*

Phoebe Zoe Maria U. Sanchez, Ph. D. is associate professor, faculty member of the College of Social Sciences at the University of the Philippines Cebu. She is the incumbent chair of Karapatan, Cebu Chapter.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Its vital work warrants high honors. In July 2005, a coalition of 171 Palestinian Civil Society organizations created the Global BDS movement against Israel until it complies with international law, including universal principles of human rights – for Occupied Palestinians, Israeli Arabs, and diaspora Palestinian refugees.

Since 1948, countless Security Council and General Assembly resolutions condemned Israel’s international law violations, its repressive occupation and Gaza blockade, apartheid ruthlessness, decades of discriminatory policies, illegal land seizures and settlements on stolen Palestinian land.

Liberation of its people is long overdue. So is accountability for decades of Israeli ruthlessness.

On Wednesday, Norwegian parliamentarian Bjornar Moxnes (image on the right) nominated the Global BDS movement for Nobel Peace Prize recognition – supported by his Rodt Party.

Noted activist/humanitarian Norwegian trauma surgeon Dr. Mads Gilbert endorsed the nomination.

In 2009, he treated countless injured Gazans during Israel’s Cast Lead aggression, many with horrific wounds he never saw before, including from chemical, biological and radiological weapons, along with other banned ones.

Commenting on the horror, he said the following:

“The ‘ground invasion’ of Gaza resulted in scores and carloads with (the) maimed, torn apart, bleeding, shivering, dying – all sorts of injured Palestinians, all ages, all civilians, all innocent.”

“The heroes in the ambulances and in all of Gaza’s hospitals are working 12-24 hour shifts, grey from fatigue and inhuman workloads (without payment (at) all in Shifa (hospital) for the last four months).”

“They care, triage, try to understand the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans.”

“HUMANS! Now, once more treated like animals by ‘the most moral army in the world (sic).’ “

“My respect for the wounded is endless, in their contained determination in the midst of pain, agony and shock; my admiration for the staff and volunteers is endless.”

“My closeness to the Palestinian sumud (steadfastness) gives me strength, although in (some of the) glimpses I just want to scream, hold someone tight, cry, smell the skin and hair of the warm child, covered in blood, protect ourselves in an endless embrace – but we cannot afford that. Nor can they.”

“Ashy grey faces – oh NO! Not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding: We still have lakes of blood on the floor in the ER, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear out.”

“The cleaners (are) everywhere, swiftly shoveling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas – the leftovers from death – all taken away…(only) to be prepared again, to be repeated all over.”

Gilbert had much more to say in his noted book, titled “Gaza War, Eyes on Gaza.” He worked pro bono, trying to save as many Palestinian lives as possible.

Below is Bjornar Moxnes’ statement in nominating the BDS movement for Nobel Peace Prize recognition:

“As a member of the Norwegian parliament, I proudly use my authority as an elected official to nominate the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Nominating the BDS movement for this recognition is perfectly in line with the principles I and my party hold very dear.

Like the BDS movement, we are fully committed to stopping an ascendent, racist and right-wing politics sweeping too much of our world, and securing freedom, justice and equality for all people.

Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement and the American Civil Rights movement, the grassroots, Palestinian-led BDS movement is a peaceful, global human rights movement that urges the use of economic and cultural boycotts to end Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights and international law.

The BDS movement seeks to end Israel’s half-century of military rule over 4.5 million Palestinians, including the devastating ten-year illegal siege collectively punishing and suffocating nearly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, the ongoing forcible eviction of Palestinians from their homes, and the theft of Palestinian land through the construction of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

It seeks equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, currently discriminated against by dozens of racist laws, and to secure the internationally-recognized legal right of Palestinian refugees to return to homes and lands from which they were expelled. Palestinian refugees constitute nearly 50 percent of all Palestinians, and they are being denied their right to return, guaranteed by law to all refugees, simply because of their ethnicity.

The BDS movement’s aims and aspirations for basic human rights are irreproachable. They should be supported without reservation by all democratically-minded people and states.

The international community has a longstanding history of supporting peaceful measures such as boycotts and disinvestment against companies that profit from human rights violations.

International support for such measures was critical in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and the racist colonial regime in former Rhodesia.

If the international community commits to supporting BDS to end the occupation of Palestinian territory and the oppression of the Palestinian people, new hope will be lit for a just peace for Palestinians, Israelis and all people across the Middle East.

The BDS movement has been endorsed by prominent figures, including the former Nobel Peace Prize winners Desmond Tutu and Mairead Maguire.

It is gaining support from unions, academic associations, churches, and grassroots movements for the rights of refugees, immigrants, workers, women, indigenous peoples and the LGBTQI community.

It is increasingly embraced by progressive Jewish groups and anti-racist movements across the world.

Eleven years since BDS’ launch, it’s high time for us to commit to doing no harm, and for all states to withdraw their complicity in Israel’s military occupation, racist apartheid rule, ongoing theft of Palestinian land, and other egregious human rights violations.

Awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to the BDS movement would be a powerful sign demonstrating that the international community is committed to supporting a just peace in the Middle East and using peaceful means to end military rule and broader violations of international law.

My hope is that this nomination can be one humble but necessary step towards bringing forth a more dignified and beautiful future for all peoples of the region.”

The Nobel Committee most often chooses warmakers, other disreputable figures or establishment ones, peace advocates rejected. Rare Exceptions proved the rule.

The Global BDS movement won’t likely become one of its honorees. Wanting Israel held accountable for decades of Palestinian repression rules it out for consideration.

*

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

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Information it contains provides more evidence of what’s known but not acknowledged in the mainstream.

America’s corrupt political system is too debauched to fix – Republicans as tainted as undemocratic Dems. So is Washington’s intelligence community.

The FBI and Justice Department sought multiple FISA warrants based on unverified information from former MI6 spy Christopher Steele’s dodgy dossier on Trump – his work funded by Hillary and the DNC to denigrate him during the 2016 presidential campaign, continuing once in office.

It attempted to smear him with specious, unproven allegations of improper or illegal connections to Russia – including phony accusations of Russian US election meddling.

The secret rubber-stamp FISA court is a national disgrace, a police state body, virtually always issuing warrants on request, often violating Fourth Amendment protections.

No oversight of America’s intelligence community exists. It operates extrajudicially, circumventing the law to suit its agenda.

FISA surveillance warrants are issued for 90-day periods, renewed several times to continue the Trump team investigation.

Requests without probable cause were made by former FBI director James Comey, former Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and former Acting Assistant Attorney General Dana Boente, according to the memo.

There’s plenty about Trump to criticize, as president much to hold him accountable for. Yet nothing connects him improperly or illegally to Russia.

The Russiagate probe is a scam, a disgraceful witch-hunt, not a legitimate investigation. It never should have been initiated. It should be terminated straightaway.

The FISA memo contains no information harmful to national security, as undemocratic Dem Rep. Adam Schiff and others wanting its contents suppressed falsely claimed.

Using “classification laws to prevent disclosure of embarrassing information is…an abuse of federal law and standards,” Law Professor Jonathan Turley explained.

Information in the FISA memo revealed evidence of high-level abuse of power in Washington – common practice but rarely divulged.

Its findings “raise concerns about the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions” with the FISA court,” it stated – “represent(ing) a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process.”

Obtaining a FISA court warrant to spy on Trump during the presidential campaign without just cause was unethical at least, illegal at worst. Current and former high-level heads should roll for what happened.

The memo showed no warrants would have been issued without specious information from Steele’s dodgy dossier. Requesting it from the FISA court was unjustifiable, arguably illegal.

Bruce Ohr

Steele told DOJ official Bruce Ohr he wanted Trump prevented from becoming president, according to the memo. He was paid $160,000 to cook up unverified information to denigrate him.

“…Ohr’s wife was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump,” the memo stated, adding:

“Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research, paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS. The Ohr’s relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was inexplicably concealed from the FISC.”

“(C)lear evidence of Steele’s bias was recorded by Ohr at the same time and subsequently in official FBI files – but not reflected in any of the page FISA applications.”

Steele falsely claimed Russian officials offered Trump campaign foreign policy advisor Carter Page billions of dollars to end US sanctions. He denies the charge.

The FISA memo shows beyond a reasonable doubt that dark forces in Washington wanted Trump prevented from becoming president – then aimed to denigrate him once in office, a scheme to oust him.

What’s likely following the memo’s release? Will culpable individuals be held accountable for their actions?

Will witch-hunt Russiagate investigations end? Will Trump and his campaign team be exonerated?

Will Russia bashing cease? Will common practice in Washington change?

Expect nothing positive following this disgraceful episode, dirty business as usual continuing like always.

Both right wings of US duopoly governance share blame, along with the FBI, DOJ and intelligence community.

*

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

Poland passed an internationally “contentious” draft law banning the phrase “Polish death camps”, the Bandera ideology, and the denial of wartime Ukrainian fascist crimes.

Israel and Ukraine reacted with fury at the decision and harshly criticized Poland for what they each claimed for their own respective reasons was “historical revisionism”. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu forcefully condemned the bill and hinted that it amounts to “denying the Holocaust”, and a few people frenziedly speculated that it would outlaw any conversation about the complicity of some Polish citizens in that tragic event. Kiev, meanwhile, decried what it claimed was the painting of all Ukrainians as fascist sympathizers and protested Warsaw’s use of pre-war geographic terminology in reference to the genocide of Poles by Ukrainian so-called “nationalists” in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.

Newly appointed Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki responded to his Israeli counterpart over the weekend when he wrote on Twitter that “Jews, Poles, and all victims should be guardians of the memory of all who were murdered by German Nazis. Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a Polish name, and ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ is not a Polish phrase”, one day before the two spoke to each other and agreed to enter into a dialogue on this issue. To be fair, historian Jan Grabowski has argued in his work that some Poles did in fact do terrible things to Jews, but claiming that these individuals committed these acts on behalf of the Polish Nation and collectively punishing the entire population with undeserved guilt is wrong and could be criminalized under the new legislation.

After all, approximately 6 million Poles were killed during the Nazi occupation, representing around 1/5 of its total prewar citizenry, which objectively makes the Polish Nation a victim of World War II, not an aggressor like the German one was.

Relatedly, Poles also suffered at the hands of the Hitler-aligned Bandera fascists who slaughtered around 100,000 civilians in the former eastern borderland of the Polish Second Republic and committed acts of terrorism against its people before the war, but Warsaw made the political decision to accept more than 1.5 million Ukrainian migrants over the past 4 years despite these individuals being predisposed to favoring the fascist Bandera ideology and its territorial claims against modern-day Poland. The Polish public is disgusted at the open embrace of fascism by Ukraine’s post-coup political elite and the glorification of Bandera in particular, and the state seems to have finally realized the long-term security implications of shortsightedly allowing so many Ukrainians into the country, some of whom might be Bandera “sleeper cell” sympathizers, hence why they want to belatedly outlaw his ideology.

Taken together, the country’s supposedly “controversial” draft legislation is designed to protect the Polish Nation from defamation through the weaponized inference that so-called “Polish death camps” whitewash Nazi atrocities and revise history in order to solely blame Poles, the same as the government wants to protect the security of the Polish people by finally making it illegal for any of the over 1.5 million Ukrainian migrants in the country to support Bandera’s fascist ideology and territorial claims. Israel and Ukraine are trying to discredit Poland’s EuroRealist government, but they’re actually inadvertently raising the appeal of the ruling Law & Justice Party among the many Poles inside the country who know better and see this as the unwarranted attacks against historical truth and national dignity that they truly are.

This article was originally published by Oriental Review.

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.

The frenzy over the Nunes memo, likely to be released later today by the Trump administration, contains a profound hypocrisy at its core, one that points to the rot at the core of the American government.

The Republican conspiracy theory promoted by Nunes is that the Federal government over-reached in spying on the Trump campaign.

That’s right, the GOP is complaining about government surveillance. But it isn’t complaining about the principle of the thing (surprise!). It is complaining that its guy got caught up in these surveillance practices.

On January 18, Republican-dominated the Senate passed a law extending National Security Agency and other agencies’ prerogative of warrantless spying on Americans for another six years. The unconstitutional and illegal practices of Federal agencies had been exposed by Ed Snowden, who may as well not have bothered. FISA section 702 lets Federal agents snoop on your Facebook posts even if you marked them as only for friends, and God forbid that you should email a friend in Sweden, since they can read that one too. In fact, since email traffic typically bounces around the world before being delivered, the law lets the government basically read all Americans’ correspondence all the time.

There is no evidence that this vast surveillance apparatus has thwarted any significant terrorist plot, since 320 million Americans are not terrorists. The surveillance is being used to advance the careers of government agents by illegally obtaining information about things like drug use, or it is used for economic espionage. The law turns Federal agents into criminals.

Who voted for warrantless surveillance of Americans? Devin Nunes and his whole committee. Almost the whole of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate, with the exception of Libertarians like Rand Paul. Not to mention Democratic stalwarts Diane Feinstein, Mark Warner, and Claire McCaskill.

And Donald J. Trump signed it!

So you know what? If the Republican party thinks warrantless surveillance is constitutional and is a great idea, then they just have to STFU about the Nunes memo, which alleges… warrantless surveillance of Americans in contact with foreigners.

This law is unconstitutional on the face of it, but the Federal government cleverly avoids allowing it to come before a Federal judge by not telling the people whose rights are being violated who they are. Secretly, law enforcement is using the surveillance to bust petty marijuana distributors in Colorado and California and then lying to the judges about the evidence trail. The law is subverting the entire justice system. The GOP desperately wants it. But they don’t want their guys to get caught up in the surveillance.

So now they are squawking. Too bad.

The tendency of Democrats suddenly to lionize former FBI director James Comey because he was fired by Trump, and Comey’s own posturing as a civil libertarian, is part and parcel of the hypocrisy. Comey supports warrantless searches and tried to strong arm Apple into letting every 15 year old hacker in Eastern Europe get at your iPhone just so the FBI could, as well. But at least Comey is consistent.

Securing the Fourth Amendment of the US constitution was one of the reasons for which Americans made their revolution against the British monarchy.

When they defeated the red coats, they put the Fourth Amendment into the Constitution, which says:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I wrote a few years ago, after the Snowden revelations,

“The most important 18th-century precedent in English law for our Fourth Amendment is Entick v. Carrington of 1765, in which Lord Halifax, acting for the king, sent agents into the home of John Entick on a fishing expedition for papers and documents that criticized the king. This Revolutionary War site notes:

“During the trial, Entick charged that the entire search and seizure had been unlawfully conducted, and the Court agreed. The Court said that Lord Halifax had no standing to issue the order to search the premises, that probable cause that a crime had been committed had not been demonstrated and that the warrant allowed a general confiscation of anything the officers found, not specifying exactly what they were to look for or could seize. In addition, there were no records kept of what the officers seized.”

In the New World, however, colonial authorities ignored this important case and began issuing what were called “writs of assistance,” a kind of blanket search warrant that allowed the crown’s tax authorities to try to combat smuggling by indiscriminate search and seizure. (We would now call them “National Security Letters.”) Attorney James Otis took the case of 50 merchants who sued the British crown over these overly broad warrantless searches, and his powerful speech condemning these practices was heard by John Adams, who considered it the spark that led to the American Revolution.

George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 forbade these writs of assistance. Thomas Jefferson depended heavily on that document when he authored the Declaration of Independence. When he talks about “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” one of the things he means by liberty is that the government shouldn’t be able to snoop at will through your private letters.

The sentiment against warrantless searches and overly broad writs of assistance was put into the constitution by James Madison, with what became the 4th Amendment.”

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America’s only threats are invented ones, no others.

Yet the nation’s so-called defense spending far exceeds what Russia, China, Iran and other independent countries spend combined.

Its nuclear arsenal and delivery systems can destroy planet earth multiple times over. The Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) suggests preparation for nuclear war.

It falsely claims the nation must address “an unprecedented range and mix of threats” posed by Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and other countries.

No nations threatened US security since WW II ended, none now. Claims otherwise unjustifiably justify recklessly high military spending, including Trump’s plan to spend around $1.5 trillion over the next 30 years to upgrade America’s nuclear arsenal – needing no upgrading, certainly not what’s proposed.

Claiming “(t)he United States remains committed to its efforts in support of the ultimate global elimination of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons” is belied by its aggressive agenda, notably its permanent war policy.

Washington prioritizes militarism and belligerence, world peace and stability anathema notions it rejects.

Claiming “global threat conditions have worsened markedly since” the Obama administration’s 2010 NPR, “including increasingly explicit nuclear threats from potential adversaries,” is a bald-faced lie.

So is saying Washington is committed to reducing its nuclear arsenal while “Russia and China have moved in the opposite direction” – calling their behavior “increasingly aggressive.”

Claiming Iran has “the technological capability and much of the capacity necessary to develop a nuclear weapon within one year” ignores the Islamic Republic’s abhorrence of these weapons.

North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is solely for defense, genuinely fearing US aggression, hoping its capability can deter the possibility.

Claiming America faces “an unprecedented range and mix of threats, including major conventional, chemical, biological, nuclear, space, and cyber threats, and violent non- state actors” is utter rubbish.

America’s rage for endless wars of aggression, along with its rogue allies, poses the only serious threat to world peace and stability.

Commenting on Trump’s NPR, Russia’s US ambassador Anatoly Antonov (image on the right) said

“(t)he problem is that the Americans are again using the Russian scare to justify the rise in military spending and the nuclear buildup,” adding:

“We realize this comes from their desire to inject more money into the military industry sector. We know the price tag is enormous, (amounting to) trillions of dollars.”

“We were able to get acquainted only with the publicly released part of the document, with the remarks made by Secretary Mattis, but even these remarks raise questions.”

“I think that the remarks, at least those I have seen, do not really encourage practical work.”

“(A)s a Russian diplomat, I want to say that we should not be talked to from the position of strength. We should not be spoken down to. And we should not be told what and how we should do something.”

Russia observes its obligations under international agreements, including the INF Treaty and Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START and new START), Antonov stressed.

America agrees to one thing, then does another, flagrantly violating its international law obligations.

Washington’s claim about Russia developing new intercontinental range nuclear weapons systems, including a hypersonic glide aircraft and a new nuclear-armed undersea torpedo as part of a strategic weapons buildup, is used to justify US development of weapons to counter a nonexistent threat.

In the NPR’s preface, Defense Secretary Mattis explained Washington intends to modernize its nuclear submarines, strategic bombers, nuclear air-launched cruise missiles, ICBMs, as well as its command and control capabilities.

Claiming Moscow’s strategy lowers the threshold for first-strike nuclear weapons use turns truth on its head.

Commenting on the Trump administration’s NPR, Russia’s upper house Defense and Security Committee chairman Viktor Bondarev said it “removes any responsibility from the US leadership for any actions, because it allows for a loose interpretation of events on the international arena and of the situation in the internal affairs of sovereign countries.”

US and Sino/Russian geopolitical agendas are world’s apart. Washington wages endless wars of aggression, seeking unchallenged global dominance, risking catastrophic nuclear war.

Russia and China support world peace and stability, along with mutual cooperation among all nations.

Humanity’s greatest threat lies in Washington, not Moscow or Beijing.

*

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