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America finds new ways of burnishing its rogue state status, more ruthless and dangerous than any others in history over a longer duration.

On November 3, neocon GOP Representatives Louie Gohmert and Steve King introduced the above measure “to prohibit United States assistance to foreign countries that oppose” America’s imperial agenda, its wars of aggression to eliminate sovereign independent states it doesn’t control, its alliance with Israel and other rogue states.

The measure was referred to the House Foreign Relations Committee for further action – none so far.

The bill is the latest example of Washington’s debauched political system, its opposition to world peace, its rage for unchallenged global dominance – no matter the human cost.

It prohibits economic, financial and military aid to nations hostile to Washington’s destructive agenda – based on the Security Council and General Assembly voting records. It states the following:

“(T)he term ‘opposed the position of the United States’ means…that the country’s recorded votes in the United Nations General Assembly during the most recent session of the General Assembly and, in the case of a country which is a member of the United Nations Security Council, the country’s recorded votes both in the Security Council and the General Assembly during the most recent session of the General Assembly, were the same as the position of the United States less than 50 percent of the time…”

The “most recent session of the General Assembly” means its most recently completed one.

US assistance is defined as any under the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, anything military related, anything under the 1976 Arms Export Control Act, and “any other monetary or physical assistance.”

If there’s “a fundamental change in the leadership and policies of the government of a country” denied US aid, renewing it would be considered.

The president may continue aiding any nations – based on national security interests, provided Congress is informed of his reasons.

The State Department issues annual reports on the voting practices of member states at the UN – to show which nations support America’s agenda and which ones oppose it – based on how often they’re for or against it.

The UN Voting Accountability Act of 2017 is the first congressional measure aimed at denying economic, financial and military aid to nations against America’s imperial agenda.

Other hostile legislation will likely follow – including more illegal sanctions on targeted countries than already.

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

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

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/am/manus-island-detainees-remaining-squatters-christopher-pyne/9136760

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Let’s Call Western Media Coverage of Syria by Its Real Name: Propaganda

November 11th, 2017 by Michael Howard

First published by Global Research on May 2, 2017

In his essential study of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, University of Kent Professor Richard Sakwa writes that, somewhere down the road, Western media’s reductive, ideological coverage of the conflict “will undoubtedly become the subject of many an intriguing academic study.” That’s if the human race isn’t wiped out by environmental catastrophe or nuclear holocaust first—far from a sure thing, especially with the Trump regime running amok, lobbing cruise missiles and sending armadas (or not) and dropping MOABs, and all of it to quell suspicions that the president’s undersized hands might reflect a certain priapic compactness.

But while, as Sakwa says, the reportage of Ukraine’s civil war by our renowned newspapers has been abysmal and embarrassing, it doesn’t hold a candle to that of Syria, where any pretense of real journalism was done away with long ago. Syria is proof of how low mainstream Western media are prepared to sink in the service of state power; it’s where journalistic standards, like global jihadists, go to die. Rank propaganda is the order of the day. Honest observers are appalled. Stephen Kinzer wrote that

“coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press,”

while Robert Fisk described the war as

“the most poorly reported conflict in the world.”

Patrick Cockburn registered a similar concern, writing that

“Western media has allowed itself to become a conduit for propaganda for one side in this savage conflict.”

This has grave implications:

News organizations have ended up being spoon-fed by jihadis and their sympathizers who make it impossible for independent observers to visit areas they control. By regurgitating information from such tainted sources, the media gives al-Qaeda type groups every incentive to go on killing and abducting journalists in order to create and benefit from a news vacuum they can fill themselves.

So the ideology-driven Western media, in allying themselves with the armed opposition in Syria, have helped to create a situation in which it pays to kidnap and murder people who seek to report the truth. Ergo, they have violated the canons of their profession in the most egregious manner possible. And you’ll have noticed that they’re totally shameless about it. None of this gives them a moment of pause. They keep pumping out the propaganda, day in, day out, never stopping to reflect on the potential consequences. When one story falls apart, they move on to the next one. The most, or perhaps only, important thing is to manipulate public opinion so that it corresponds to government policy. Beyond that, who cares?

The list of media half-truths and outright lies in the context of Syria is endless. Take chemical weapons. Numerous incidents have been cited in the news, most of them small-time (meaning crude attacks with no casualties), all of them blamed on the government. And yet the UN has documented numerous cases in which terrorist outfits, including ISIS, used chemical weapons against civilians and Syrian soldiers. It also heard testimony from witnesses on the ground that opposition fighters were staging chemical attacks with the goal of framing the Syrian military. And contrary to every major media outlet in the West, the UN did not blame Assad for the infamous sarin attack of August 2013, stating after an investigation that “surface-to-surface rockets containing the nerve agent sarin were used” by one of “the parties in the Syrian Arab Republic.” The culprit was not identified. But all of this is irrelevant. We want Assad to be responsible for every chemical incident; therefore, he is. See Trump’s Tomahawk salvo.

Then there’s the so-called White Helmets, the subject of an Academy Award-winning Netflix documentary. Billed as a volunteer, nonpartisan rescue organization, the White Helmets have become a symbol of heroic resistance to the Syrian government’s barbarism. But appearances can be deceiving, and they most certainly are in this case. Some salient facts: the White Helmets program was put together not in Syria but in Turkey, by James Le Mesurier, a former British military contractor; the White Helmets operate exclusively in “rebel”-held territory, meaning they’re embedded with groups like al-Nusra (al-Qaeda); the White Helmets are paid tens of millions of dollars by the US, UK and other Western governments; the White Helmets have repeatedly called for a NATO-imposed no-fly zone over Syria (think Libya); the White Helmets rail against the United Nations for recognizing the legitimacy of the Syrian government. Curious work for a neutral NGO. It should be noted that the White Helmets have been accused of staging rescue videos for propaganda purposes. Naturally, they deny this indignantly. And yet a video exists in which the White Helmets quite literally do stage a rescue as part of the “mannequin challenge,” whatever the hell that is. Take from that what you wish.

In any case, it’s plain to see that the White Helmets are not exactly who they purport to be. The Oscar-winning Netflix “documentary” is nothing more than a glossy advertisement, or “contrived infomercial,” as investigative journalist Rick Sterling put it. The film is shot in Turkey, not Syria, and it contains no useful information whatsoever, unless you count the fact that one of the White Helmets admits to having been a rebel fighter for a period of three months, and thus can hardly be regarded as neutral. It’s also a very boring documentary, but that’s beside the point. That such a thinly-veiled propaganda film about such a thinly-veiled propaganda organization won an Academy Award should, by rights, engender a minor scandal. But we’re living in the era of fake news, as The New York Times ironically insists.

For a good, comprehensive look at the White Helmets, see Max Blumenthal’s recent article for Alternet.

What else? There was the notorious “Caesar” hoax, in which a self-described defector from the Syrian army—a former army photographer with the codename “Caesar”—claimed to have photographic evidence that the Syrian government had tortured to death 11,000 political prisoners. As it happens, something like half of the 55,000 images depict dead and mutilated Syrian soldiers and pro-government militia. They’re war photos. Tons of dead bodies from both sides of the conflict, some of them blown apart by car bombs, others beaten and emaciated, were photographed for documentary evidence. As Rick Sterling wrote last year,

“The photographs show a wide range of deceased persons, from Syrian soldiers to Syrian militia members to opposition fighters to civilians trapped in conflict zones to regular deaths in the military hospital.”

Had some been tortured by Assad’s security forces? No doubt. But the story was grossly misrepresented in the Western press, leading us to believe that the 55,000 images proved the existence of a network of Nazi-style death camps run by the Syrian government. They didn’t.

Speaking of atrocity propaganda—very chic these days—the eminent BBC joined the club in 2013, throwing journalistic integrity to the wind with its broadcast of Saving Syria’s Children, a documentary that ostensibly showed the aftermath of an incendiary bomb raid. According to the report, the Syrian government used either napalm or thermite to attack schoolchildren in a remote district of Aleppo. The resulting footage, filmed in a nearby hospital, is bizarre in the extreme, with the alleged burn victims clearly taking stage directions from people off-camera. The story was dissected and ultimately exposed as a sham by journalist Robert Stuart, at which point the BBC began removing all traces of the film from YouTube, citing copyright issues. No formal retraction was ever made, to the BBC’s everlasting shame. But perhaps I shouldn’t fault them for exercising prudence. After all, if the BBC began retracting every false and/or inaccurate report on the Syrian conflict there would be very little left.

The fake news reached its acme toward the end of last year as the Syrian military, backed by Russian air support, closed in on eastern Aleppo, then occupied by al-Nusra and some other Wahhabi gangs. Fresh war crimes were being reported almost daily. The “last hospital in Aleppo” was destroyed twelve different times. Women were committing suicide en bloc to avoid being raped (source: “rebel” commander). Assad and Putin were starving and/or bombing to death 250,000 civilians. We heard that figure over and over again: a quarter of a million people trapped in the jihadist enclave. It was drilled into our heads like a religious precept. Nobody seemed to care very much when the real number turned out to be something like 100,000 (or perhaps only 40,000). Presumably the old amnesia kicked in. As they say in the psychology world, motivated forgetting: America’s go-to defense mechanism.

Our memory is very selective indeed. There does appear to be at least one aspect of the battle we haven’t quite forgot: Bana Alabed, aka The Face (or Voice) of Aleppo. The seven-year-old earned that moniker by narrating the city’s gradual “fall” via Twitter. It mattered not that she was being cynically exploited as an instrument of pathos by her mother, who obviously controlled the account and who evidently forgot on occasion that she was tweeting on behalf of a seven-year-old girl (at one point, in a tweet that has since been taken down, she explicitly lobbied for World War Three). Bana, or the idea of Bana, served a useful propaganda function. You see, people in the West need to be shown dead or suffering children before they can, on the one hand, apprehend how despicable war is and, on the other, support another bloody US military adventure in the name of humanitarianism. Because you’d have to be a monster to look at the child and not feel motivated to “do something.”

That’s the way it works. Hence the image of the dead three-year-old refugee who washed up on a beach, or the one of the dust-covered boy sitting in the back of an ambulance, or Trump’s talk of “beautiful babies.” Of course, the effects of the humanitarian escalation, should it come to pass, are duly sanitized.

We didn’t, for instance, see any pictures of dead Iraqi children that were killed as a result of the US invasion. Nor do we keep up with the Twitter account of some seven-year-old child living under siege in Mosul, where American bombs continue to rain down on civilian sites. That would be bad for business. But Bana is good for business. So good, in fact, that she now has a book deal with Simon & Schuster. You’ve just crossed over into The Twilight Zone.

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Who Killed President Kennedy and Why?

November 11th, 2017 by Oriental Review

In late October President Trump ordered that “the veil be lifted” from the investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. More than 3,000 new, previously classified FBI, CIA, and Congressional documents were released to the public.

A quick overview of the material shows that the bulk of it pertains either to the CIA’s covert operations against Cuba (one of the most popular theories about JFK’s assassination focuses on the ties between Lee Harvey Oswald and anti-Castro paramilitary groups that were upset about Kennedy’s “soft” policy toward the island) or the CIA’s search for a “Soviet fingerprint” in the crime – as can be seen in Langley’s fruitless but determined attempts to turn the defector Yuri Nosenko into a key source of information (although, truth be told, he adamantly refused to give the required “testimony” and was for this reason long suspected of being a KGB double agent). We cannot avoid the impression that these huge document dumps – along with the scores of “investigations” conducted over the last 54 years, in addition to the books and movies about this cryptic murder – have one goal: to keep whoever really ordered the JFK assassination from being brought to justice.

All of these materials focus in one way or another on the figure of the unhappy “psychopath,” known as Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone gunman who shot the 35th US president on Nov. 22, 1963, from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, using a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano Italian rifle with telescopic sight. Each new batch of released documents (and there have been three just this year: on July 24, Oct. 26, and Nov. 3) triggers another round of furious debate, all over the world, about his motives, connections, and the facts of the crime.

Oswald being led from the Texas Theatre following his arrest

Oswald being led from the Texas Theatre following his arrest, Nov 22 1963

The narrative of the murder would seem quite straightforward. Just a few minutes after the fatal shots were fired, the security services were already combing through the depository building. On the 6th floor, they discovered an open window, three shell casings, and a rifle bearing Oswald’s fingerprints. Forty minutes after Kennedy’s death, the cops already had a name, physical description, and address for his alleged killer. The crime of the century was easily solved. The police surrounded the Texas Theatre building where Mr. Oswald was hiding, and he was arrested barely an hour after the president was assassinated.

But not everything was quite so simple. A 26-second movie, made that day by Abraham Zapruder, shows the exact moment of the murder, which has made it possible to dissect the instant of Kennedy’s death, frame by frame.

According to the official story, three shots were fired (the first missed, the second passed through the president’s neck and ricocheted into the chest, wrist, and thigh of Texas Governor John Connally, and the third bullet struck Kennedy in the head). But the film clearly shows that the second bullet (frame 225) and third bullet (frame 313) are of completely different types: the second passed through the president’s neck without serious tissue damage, while the third was obviously an expanding bullet, the impact of which shattered the American leader’s skull! A mix of different types of bullets within a single clip of a semi-automatic gun would be a game-changer for shooters. But the most likely explanation is that there were at least two snipers involved.

A number of recognized probe inconsistencies (missing bullets, improper autopsy procedure, faked autopsy photos & notes, to point out a few) that led to repeated official and inofficial attempts to reconsider the case for the past decades, eventually resulted in the fact that today only 24% of Americans believe that LHO had acted alone.

An analysis of the Zapruder film prompts even more awkward questions. It turns out that the killer took about five seconds to fire all the shots. That seems quite unlikely for this model of rifle with a telescopic sight, because the bolt has to be cycled with each firing. If you look at the video below, a professional is taking a few shots using the same type of rifle, but without the telescopic sight.

If you time the video carefully, you can see that this expert rifleman takes just about five seconds to get off three shots, but you’ll notice that he’s making no attempt to aim! Is it possible to believe that a second-rate marksman like Lee Harvey Oswald could have performed with robot-like precision in such an extreme situation?

And so Oswald was arrested. “I did not kill President Kennedy … I didn’t kill anybody … I don’t know anything about what you are accusing me,” he said. Nor for that matter was he allowed to call a lawyer. He never admitted to murdering Kennedy. And two days after the president’s death, while Oswald was being transferred between jails, he was shot at close range by a Texas underworld figure named Jack Ruby (Jacob Rubenstein), who was also, according to the Warren Commission, “a lone gunman.” You don’t have to dig too deeply into the man’s background to realize that he had very deep ties to the police and American security agencies.

And then within the next two years, an astonishing number of people (more than 50!) who possessed some kind of information about the Kennedy assassination died under mysterious circumstances. The Navy officer Lt. William Pitzer, who managed the closed-circuit camera in the autopsy room at the at Bethesda Naval Hospital and filmed the proceeding, was later discovered to have “shot himself”, and the tape of the film had vanished. A week later, the taxi driver who drove Oswald home from the book depository on the day of the president’s assassination, William Whaley, was killed in a car crash. The same fate befell one of the witnesses to the Kennedy assassination, Lee Bowers, who saw “two men shooting from behind the fence.” Three of the five people who were present in Jack Ruby’s house on the evening of Nov. 24, 1963 were shot to death (the lawyer Tom Howard and reporters Bill Hunter and Jim Koethe) … And on Nov. 8, 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen, who was the only journalist granted a private interview with Jack Ruby after Oswald’s assassination, died of a “drug overdose,” although she had never taken drugs. There are dozens of such examples, and the names involved have never been a secret, but is it even worth pointing out once again that these people are never mentioned in the declassified files from the US National Archives?

On Nov. 29, 1963, Lyndon Johnson, the former vice president who had automatically risen to head of state upon JFK’s death, ordered a special commission to be established to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy. The chief justice of the US Supreme Court, Earl Warren, was asked to head the seven-man panel, which also included two senators, two members of the House of Representatives, the former director of the CIA Allen Dulles, and the banker John McCloy. The commission listened to testimony from 552 witnesses and obtained more than 3,000 reports from courts and law-enforcement agencies, which, in turn, had conducted approximately 26,000 interviews, collected in 26 volumes of documentation. However, the final report, which was intended to shed light on the mysterious details of the “crime of the century,” merely offered withering criticism of the CIA, the FBI, and the Dallas police for not being able to prevent the death of the president, who had been shot by a deranged lone gunman… Hale Boggs, a Democratic Representative from Louisiana, was the only member of the Warren Commission who did not buckle to Earl Warren and his disciples and disagreed with the conclusion. In October 1972 he was killed in a plane crash over frozen Alaska …

One of the last photos of Rep. Hale Boggs

The findings of the investigation, which ignored a whole slew of facts and the death of almost all the witnesses, were so obviously bizarre that in 1976 the US Congress created a new special commission on the Kennedy case. In 1979 it issued its verdict: “Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” The HSCA determined, based on available evidence, that the probable conspiracy did not involve the governments of the Soviet Union or Cuba. The committee also added that no organized crime group, anti-Castro group, or the FBI, CIA, or Secret Service was mixed up in that conspiracy. Is it any wonder that following this report,the FBI and the US Department of Justice “raised numerous concerns regarding perceived inadequacies in the Committee’s experts’ methodology, which led to the conclusion of a conspiracy”?

So, who ordered the murder of President Kennedy and then covered up the tracks? Obviously the masterminds were not merely some group of conspirators or Mafiosi, but rather individuals who wield immense and very real power in the American government. So immense that they could force the entire US law-enforcement system to do everything necessary to keep this crime from being solved and to compel the Kennedy family to obediently close their eyes to it!

Who would have been capable of doing this? The Mafia? Cuban emigrants? Anyone could pull the trigger, but not just anyone could force the investigation to overlook obvious facts and turn a blind eye to what any of us can see in the films and photos. Nor did the CIA or FBI command such power. If it were simply a matter of liquidating an undesirable foreign political figure or an out-of-control drug baron, then either of these agencies could contain the scandal on its own. But even they would be in over their heads in any attempt to assassinate a US president in his own country.

In order to get closer to unraveling one of the most mysterious political murders of the 20th century, we should turn our attention to an obscure document signed by that resident of the Oval Office less than six months before his death.

On June 4, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 11110 authorizing the US Treasury to issue paper currency that could be redeemed for silver held by the treasury. As a result, this US currency was printed in denominations of $2 and $5 and inscribed with the words “United States Note” instead of “Federal Reserve Note.”

United States Note 1963

United States Note 1963 5 dollars

Kennedy’s order was intended to wean the Federal Reserve System away from printing money, beginning a smooth transition toward returning the printing press to the hands of the American government.

He was correcting a clear violation of the US Constitution and an absurd situation in which the US government could not print its own money. It was a quiet and inconspicuous coup d’état. For the bankers who had founded the Federal Reserve, their greatest fear was about to come true. Now with one stroke of the pen, their plans to establish complete control over the US government and American society were faced with a clear and present danger. Because the fact was that the issuance of these small banknotes was to be followed by the complete suspension of the Fed’s right to print money. So what was that agency to do then? Regulate the financial market, monitoring it so as to forestall any crises? Fine, regulating and monitoring is all well and good. Just stop printing money …

The Federal Reserve’s monopoly on the issuance of its own dollar, which is for some reason considered to be the “US dollar,” hinges on a single act of legislationthat was signed by President Woodrow Wilson in December of 1913. Consequently, a single, different act of legislation would be enough to destroy this monopoly.But John F. Kennedy failed to realize his agenda. Executive Order 11110 was not revoked but was never actually implemented. For the owners of the Fed, however, the threat remained that the order could be revived by a new US president, potentially JFK’s brother Robert, who in his position as US Attorney General fully grasped the implications of what was happening. And the equally enigmaticmurder of Robert Kennedy, who was a leading candidate headed into the Democratic primary for the 1968 presidential election, occurred exactly five years after the signing of the very executive order that killed his brother. It looks like the very influential bankers from the Federal Reserve sent a clear signal: the clan whose representatives tried to betray the System will no longer be allowed to play a significant role in US politics. And they haven’t.

We still can’t reliably assess President Trump’s motivation in releasing the JFK files. The plenitude, relevance and authenticity of this archive are highly questionable. Nevertheless, he might have intuitively felt that the draining of Washington’s swamp should eventually be completed at the Constitution Avenue…

All images in this article are from Oriental Review.

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Muhammd Bin-Salman’s Purge in Saudi Arabia Is the Prelude to Something Bigger

November 11th, 2017 by Abdel Bari Atwan

Our region stands on the brink of war. We should not let small details — such as the resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri’s resignation or the detention of princes and former ministers in Saudi Arabia — divert us from the big picture and the real developments taking place behind the scenes. The really dangerous phase is the one that will follow Crown Prince Muhammad Bin-Salman’s purge on the domestic Saudi front. It may be the precursor to scenarios for a regional war that could, without exaggeration, end up being the most devastating in its modern history.

All that is currently happening is part of a carefully planned and crafted scheme, and the prelude to a sectarian war waged in ‘Arab nationalist’ guise against the growing power of ‘Shia’ Iran and its surrogates in Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq with American, regional and Israeli backing.

The old Saudi Arabia is no more. Wahhabism is breathing its last, has been all but buried and is in the process of becoming history. A fourth Saudi state, dressed in the garb of modernity and based on different alliances, is being born.

When its would-be founder and man of the moment, Muhammad Bin-Salman, accuses Iran of mounting a ‘direct military attack that may amount to an act of war’ against his country by allegedly supplying missiles to factions in Yemen, and his stance is endorsed and supported by the US, it is clear that a new American-led alliance is taking shape in the region.

Muhammad Bin-Salman’s domestic purge, including the detention of 11 princes and scores of businessmen and former officials under the banner of fighting corruption, is only a first phase. It seems to haves proceeded smoothly so far, without encountering any serious obstacles.

The man now has now brought the four major pillars of state power – the economy, the security and military forces, the media and the religious establishment (both the official Council of Senior Ulema and the unofficial ‘awakening’ clerics) — totally under his control. He has thrown all his opponents, and anyone who uttered any criticism of his rule, behind bars (or, in the case of the princes and other high-ranking figures, incarcerated them in a luxury hotel for now). The latest round of detentions is unlikely to be the last, for we are dealing here with a bulldozer that levels everything that stands in its path.

In due course, Muhammad Bin-Salman will move on to what we believe will be the second and more serious phase, that of military confrontation.

This could include the following steps:

— First, precipitating a military confrontation with Iran against the backdrop of the crushing siege on Yemen, after imposing a total land, air, and sea blockade of the country on the pretext of preventing Iranian missiles from reaching the Houthis.

– Secondly, forming a new alliance along the lines of the Desert Storm coalition formed in 1990 to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Candidates for membership in addition to Saudi Arabia and the UAE include UAE, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan and Morocco. (The King of Morocco has, coincidentally, been in the UAE capital Abu-Dhabi reportedly seeking to mediate with Saudi Arabia over the recent detentions: but he was sent a clear message from Riyadh not to interfere in what is happening inside Saudi Arabia, according reliable sources).

– Third, the bombardment of Lebanon and destruction of its infrastructure on the pretext of trying to eradicate Hezbollah. Such an assault would prompt the party to retaliate with intensive missile strikes against Israel, and would be more likely than ever before to drag in Iran and Syria.

– Fourth, an invasion of Qatar by Egyptian, Emirati and Saudi forces aimed at overthrowing its regime, precipitating a clash with the 30,000-strong Turkish force deployed there.

– Fifth, an American-Saudi-Israeli counteroffensive in Syria aimed at recapturing the areas lost by the US and its allies’ rebel proxies such as Aleppo, Homs and Deir az-Zour. The US cannot easily stomach its defeat in Syria at the hands of Russia and Iran, even at the risk of causing a collision with Russia. It deliberately foiled the Syrian national dialogue conference in Sochi which Moscow had called for by getting the Syrian opposition to boycott it.

– Sixth, mobilizing the Kurdish militias in northern Iraq and Syria as US proxies in these wars with the aim of weakening and destabilizing Iran, Turkey, and Iraq.

These are just the most obvious of the steps that may be taken by the new US-led alliance – whatever it chooses to call itself.

But none of this means that it is assured of success in achieving its aims and reshaping the region to its specifications.

The counter-scenario may be that of the consolidation of an Iranian-Syrian-Turkish-Iraqi alliance with which Russia would sympathize to begin with, and which it may eventually end up leading. These countries combined possess formidable missile arsenals which would mostly be aimed at Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel. The targeted states’ much-vaunted US-made Patriot anti-missile systems would be ineffective in the face of intensive strikes by thousands of missiles fired simultaneously.

The gauge of success in this anticipated and possibly imminent regional war would be the destruction of Iran, regime-change in Qatar and the eradication of Hezbollah. But its failure would mean devastation for Saudi Arabia, Israel and the UAE and the dismemberment of the Saudi kingdom into fragments.

We are neither soothsayers nor fortune-tellers. Nevertheless, this may prove to be the last war that transforms the region, changing its states, its borders, and perhaps its populations as well. The Arabs and Iranians will certainly survive such a cataclysm. But can Israel in its current form survive it too?

Featured image is from the author.

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Fixations of Propriety: The Refugee Convention and the Manus Closure Scandal

November 11th, 2017 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

When confronted with the spectacle of the malnourished, the impoverished, the famine stricken, and the desperate, the Australian political instinct is simple: Why did these poor fools get themselves into this mix? With each wave of refugees arriving in the country’s young history, the cold shoulder has mixed with the lukewarm welcome.

At no points have refugees been welcomed so much as grudgingly accepted. Australia, after all, has a humanitarian intake, and boasts about it like a vulnerable child who feels her grades the best in class.

Like a necessary pantomime, Australia’s distant, estranging middle-class tediousness treats human rights as the necessary costume at the international human rights party. To be such an international citizen, conventions are signed, and modestly implemented. Some are even abused with a degree of legalised gusto.

In a country with no bill of rights, it can hardly be any other way. The rights culture, it can be said, is one of smugness and suspicion. Supremacy resides with Parliament, and a misplaced belief that the executive will somehow be compliant.

The sentiment towards refugees and asylum seekers taking the sea route hardened after the 1990s, when the means of arrival became an issue in Australian politics. (You cannot be punished or discriminated against on the manner of travel under the Refugee Convention, but the lawyers were obviously napping at stages.) Decent people, after all, took planes, and if they did arrive by boat, would surely do the appropriate thing and fly a decent class.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the issue of pressing concern was the arrival of Vietnamese boat people fleeing the Communist Republic. Then, as now, the issue of how these people were arriving bothered certain Australian figures, most notably John Howard. Aqueous borne arrivals, notably of the Asiatic sort, terrified him.

The currently broken, and easily refutable theme in the practiced inhumanity against those now defiantly assembled on the closed Manus processing facility at the Lombrum Naval Base, is that of the “market model”. Refugees and asylum seekers should never partake in a system of exchange. Money for passage is a smutty exchange best stamped out.

To that end, refugee and asylum seeker policy in Australia resembles that of a tax meeting or Reserve Bank board gathering. The agenda never changes: what markets are appropriate, and which ones are not?

The market that encourages the pursuit of the Refugee Convention, its articles, its spirit, is discouraged by the denizens of propriety. To flee persecution, harm and mortal risk, forms the quintessence of international refugee law, but best take a number and wait your turn.

The problem with this approach is simple: awaiting that vital turn in this artificially contrived queue can lead to interminable periods of processing, detention and waiting in camps of varying degrees of comfort. Often, these are located in impoverished states. Rarely are they found in wealthier ones.

Inevitably, this situation of crippling stagnation has produced, over the decades, individuals who facilitate the movement of peoples. Money, often life savings, exchange hands. Risky routes are traversed. Death can never be ruled out as a possible outcome.

Rather than providing solace and comfort to those who brave such routes, the propriety-driven market modellers in Australian Immigration and Border Protection prefer to discourage, and criminalise, the smuggler. But more to the point, the product – individuals availing themselves of the means to reach Australia – are also to be criminalised. Like drug producer like drugs; like pornographer, like porn. All, to be frowned upon, jailed, detained.

The reduction of the entire issue to a business model has similarities to another absurd and futile argument: the puritanical efforts to criminalise prostitution. Where there is demand, there will be supply.

As sex has been a commodity for sale since humans discovered the primeval delights, and desperate pitfalls, of copulation, supply has been forthcoming. The only way you abolish prostitution would be to abolish sex, and, perhaps, lobotimise the entire human race. (This is a proposition that would, no doubt, rest well with the Catherine McKinnon-Andrea Dworkin school of totalitarian, and essentially sexless human relations.)

In refugee politics, a similar type of totalitarian thinking on human relations has taken hold. The refugee must be proper, decent, and very well disposed to begin with. Fleeing poverty and bombs, one must do so with a stoic determination without mental strain, concern of debility. But importantly, in fleeing, one should wait one’s turn. Shut up and put up – Australians are generous.

Those who have bucked this have ended up in such places of tragedy and travesty as Nauru and the Manus Island Centre. The Australian state, through its subsidised satraps, has effectively relocated and dehumanised individuals that could have been processed and resettled far more cheaply in Australia. But that would not be proper.

The language of propriety is neatly tied to the language of property, ownership, and liberal market values. It would be inappropriate to pay a smuggler to assist you in discharging obligations due under the Refugee Convention, but it would also be inappropriate to refuse to relocate to other processing centres where safety at the hands of the local population is questionable.

The 570 men who remain at the facility are therefore deemed, in the words of government minister Christopher Pyne, “squatters”.[1] They supposedly have a choice, a distinctly bankrupt way of assessing the problem given that they never asked to be placed on Manus to begin with.

These obstinate souls are now told they have three centres to be relocated to in Lorengau, faux refugee Hiltons with running water, food and in some cases spending money, yet refuse to heed the direction of authorities. They are, essentially, asserting rights that Australian and PNG authorities regard as non-existent. Forcible removal is deemed imminent.

The term “squatter” has a curious historical salience: Australia was essentially settled (read conquered, plundered, appropriated) by squatters. Indeed, the entire Australian psyche was shaped by squattocratic values. Fascinating, then, when confronted with such a spectacle, it should offend.

As the Manus Island brutality show persists, human rights advocates issue pleas, politicians in Canberra issue cant-filled rebukes, and officials in the Immigration ministry insist on the nonsensical notion that detaining individuals on land is a humanitarian response to preventing deaths at sea. The mendacity of refugee politics knows no end, but obscene propriety, at whatever cost, shall prevail.

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

Note

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From Superpower to Incompetence

November 11th, 2017 by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Having grown up during the second half of the 20th century, I don’t recognize my country today. I experienced life in a competent country, and now I experience life in an incompetent country.

Everything is incompetent. The police are incompetent. They shoot children, grandmothers, cripples, and claim that they feared for their life.

Washington’s foreign policy is incompetent. Washington has alienated the world with its insane illegal attacks on other countries. Today the United States and Israel are the two most distrusted countries on earth and the two countries regarded as the greatest threat to peace.

The military/security complex is incompetent. The national security state is so incompetent that it was unable to block the most humiliating attack in history against a superpower that proved to be entirely helpless as a few people armed with box cutters and an inability to fly an airplane destroyed the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon itself. The military industries have produced at gigantic cost the F-35 that is no match for the Russian fighters or even for the F-15s and F-16s it is supposed to replace.

The media is incompetent. I can’t think of an accurate story that has been reported in the 21st century. There must be one, but it doesn’t come to mind.

The universities are incompetent. Instead of hiring professors to teach the students, the universities hire administrators to regulate them. Instead of professors, there are presidents, vice presidents, chancellors, vice chancellors, provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, associate deans, assistant deans. Instead of subject matter there is speech regulation and sensitivity training. Universities spend up to 75% of their budgets on administrators, many of whom have outsized incomes.

The public schools have been made incompetent by standardized national testing. The purpose of education today is to pass some test. School accreditation and teachers’ pay depend not on developing the creativity or independent thinking of those students capable of it, but on herding them through memory work for a standardized test.

One could go on endlessly.

Instead, I will relate a story of everyday incompetencies that have prevented me from writing this week and for a few more days yet.

Recently, while away from my home, a heavy equipment operator working on a nearby construction site managed to drive under power lines with the fork lift raised. Instead of breaking the wire, it snapped the pole in half that conveyed electric power to my house. The power company came out, or, as I suspect, an outsourced contractor, who reestablished power to my home but did not check that the neutral wire was still attached. Consequently for a week or so my house experienced round the clock surges of high voltage that blew out the surge protection, breaker box, and every appliance in the house. Expecting my return, the house was inspected, and the discovery was that there was no power. Back came the power company and discovered that high voltage was feeding into the house and had destroyed everything plugged in.

So. Here we have a moron operating heavy equipment who does not understand that he cannot drive under power lines with the lift raised. We have a power company or its outsourced contractor who does not understand that power cannot be reconnected without making certain that the neutral wire is still connected.

So every appliance is fried. Glass everywhere from blown out light bulbs. We are talking thousands of dollars.

This is America today. And the incompetents ruling incompetents want war with Iran, Korea, Russia, China. Considering the extraordinary level of incompetence throughout the United States, I guarantee you that we will not win these wars.

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The Korean People: We Are Desperately Afraid

November 11th, 2017 by Hye min Kim

Tears sprung to my eyes upon reading internationally acclaimed author Han Kang’s opinion piece in the New York Times. Never in my life have I been moved to tears by any article. Was it Han Kang’s talent as a writer? No. It was because she had so perfectly expressed the anguish of the Korean people.

The past few weeks have been agitating. The president of a foreign nation speaks flippantly of the possibility of war in my homeland, stating it does not matter to him if thousands die. This nation loves to use the word “peace.” It is a “benevolent” nation that concerns itself with the freedom and human rights of other countries, and backs foreign government and rebel forces in the name of “world peace.” This nation regularly mentions war on the Korean peninsula as a war fought “over there.”

The reason the words of this nation’s president strike such fear in our hearts is because this nation is one of the major nuclear powers of the world. It is the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons on another country. Even the mention of “war” conjures the immediate image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, devastated by this nation’s nuclear bombings. “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” obliterated half the population in these cities without even leaving a trace. People still suffer three or four generations down the line due to hereditary radiation poisoning, which has taken 700,000 lives since the bombing.

Radiation and nuclear warfare are terrifying scenarios, but equally as frightening is the carpet-bombing by U.S. warplanes. The nation with the current highest military defense budget in the world dropped more bombs on the tiny area of the Korean peninsula during the Korean War than all the bombs dropped by every country in World War II. One thousand bombs per square kilometer were dropped on Pyongyang during the Korean War, the destruction leaving only two buildings standing in the entire city.

General Curtis LeMay, who commanded the Strategic Air Force during the Korean War, said in 1984 that U.S. forces “killed off 20 percent of the population.” Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who was highly influential in the United States’ decision to be involved in the Korean War, said the U.S. bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” In the second half of this war, U.S. bombers flew low and destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation to purposely flood and destroy the farmlands and crops of Korean people.

If a war like this broke out again, it would be the most terrible experience of my life. The thought of people dying and killed by war is horrible to even imagine.

I was unsure what to do in response to President Trump casually threatening war in Korea on Twitter a few weeks ago. Constituents I voted into my local districts, National Assembly, even the South Korean President could not reach Trump. Koreans are overwhelmed by this helplessness.

On September 19th, President Trump gave a speech to the United Nations calling to “totally destroy” North Korea. It was shocking. It felt like he would unleash “fire and fury” on the Korean peninsula as soon as tomorrow. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I knew that if I went on with my life and didn’t act now, I would be filled with remorse if the scenario I couldn’t bear to imagine actually came to pass.

I decided not to go on the average “trip to America,” but a “struggle to America” to stop Trump. Young people in their twenties and thirties willingly gave up a week of classes, work, and part time jobs to travel to Washington, D.C. to oppose war on the Korean peninsula. Our plan was to meet President Trump at the White House and use our “No War” dance performance to connect face-to-face with the American people.

However, four hours before our departure, American authorities denied our entry to the United States, singling us out among thousands of travelers at Incheon International that day. Why? We received no explanation.

One news outlet released a headline describing us as a foreign militant force that was refused entry to the United States.

Who could we possibly be to be denied entry to the United States? What is so threatening about a group of 15 youths? Are we viewed in the same classification as influential politicians or terrorist organizations? All we had packed were pickets, clothes, and musical instruments in our plain luggage trunks.

This did not stop us. Returning from the airport, we sat a mat down at the American flag fluttering in front of the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. We announced,

“If Trump is uncomfortable with our entry to the United States, then we are uncomfortable with Trump’s entry to Korea!”

The activities we had planned for America – our press conference, candlelight rallies, and dance – we performed in front of the U.S. Embassy instead. We were joined by other brave Koreans who oppose Trump’s visit to Korea in November.

We fear a re-kindling of the unended Korean War in the name of “peace.” We fear more massacres on the Korean peninsula in the name of “peace.” We fear that the nation that enforces intense sanctions on North Korea in the name of “peace,” and the President who has denied our entry to the United States, may ultimately bring war to our Land of the Morning Calm.

We want to prevent another war on the Korean peninsula. The American flag flutters in front of the U.S. Embassy as we write. We do not want carpet-bombs to drop above our heads, with the same flag painted on the planes.

Translated by Sae Hee “Keshy” Jeong

***

“공포, 불안, 저항, 그리고 절박하다”

뉴욕타임즈에 실린 한 유명작가의 기고문을 보면서 눈물이 났다. 기고문을 읽으며 눈물이 난 건 내 생애 처음이었다. 한강 씨가 글을 잘 썼기 때문일까. 아니다. 한국인들이 느끼는 심정을 너무나 정확하게 표현했기 때문이다.

속상하고 화가 났던 지난 몇 주였다. 다른 나라의 대통령이 아무렇지도 않게 우리나라 전쟁 가능성에 대해 떠들어 대고 수천명이 죽어도 상관없다는 식의 발언들을 일삼았다. 그 나라는 알고 보면 은근 ‘평화’라는 단어를 즐겨 쓰는 나라였다. 세계평화를 위해 항상 다른 나라의 인권을 걱정하고 자유를 염려하며 또는 정부군, 내지 반군을 도와주는 ‘착한 국가’다. 그런 나라가 지금은 “한반도에서의 전쟁”이란 표현을 수시로 담고 있다.

그 나라 대통령 말이 우리에게 공포로 다가온 것은 세계에서 가장 많은 핵무기를 가진 나라이기 때문이다. 세계에서 유일하게 핵무기를 직접 실전에 투입했던 나라이기도 하다. “전쟁”을 이야기하면 바로 “핵으로 초토화된 일본 히로시마와 나가사끼” 사진이 생각난다. “리틀보이”와 “팻맨”은 그 자리에서 인구 절반을 흔적도 남기지 않고 제거시켰다. 방사능 유전성 희귀질환으로 고통받는 피복자들도 3대, 4대까지 이어지고 있고 총 70만명이 방사능 피해로 사망했다.

방사능, 핵에 대한 공포. 무섭다. 그것만큼 두려운 것은 미국비행기의 융단폭격이다. 현재 세계에서 가장 많은 국방비를 쓰는 나라는 2차 세계대전 당시보다 더 많은 폭탄을 한국전쟁 당시 좁은 땅 한반도에 썼다. 전쟁 때 평양에 솟아오른 건물이 단 2채에 불과할 정도로 1평방킬로미터 당 1천개의 폭탄이 투여되었다.

한국전쟁 당시 전략공군사령관이었던 커티스 르 메이 장군은 1984년 “3년 이상 우리는 인구의 20%를 죽였다”고 실토했고 이 전쟁의 후원자, 국무장관을 지낸 딘 러스크는 “미국은 북한 땅 위에서 움직이는 모든 것, 벽돌로 쌓아놓은 모든 것을 겨냥해 폭격했다”고 말했다. 전쟁 후반기에는 미군 폭격기가 저공비행하여 수력-관개 댐을 파괴하고 농지를 범람하게 하여 농작물을 모조리 떠내려 보냈다. 전쟁이 나면 내 인생 가장 최악의 순간이 될 것이다. 전쟁으로 사람들이 죽어가고 피폭되는 광경은 상상만 해도 끔찍하다.

그런데 불과 몇 주 전만 해도 난 미국 대통령 트럼프의 가볍게 날린듯한 전쟁 언급 “트윗”에 어떤 대응을 해야될지 몰랐다. 내가 투표로 당선시킨 지역구 국회의원, 대통령도 트럼프에게 한마디도 하지 못했다. 한국인들은 그렇게 무력감에 휩쌓여 있었다.

9월 19일 트럼프 대통령이 “북한을 완전히 초토화시키겠다”라고 주장한 유엔연설을 했다. 세계 앞에서 사실상 전쟁을 일으키겠다고 선포한 것이다. 충격적이었다. 당장 내일이라도 한반도를 “화염과 절망”속에 집어넣을 것만 같았다. 이제는 가만히 있을 수 없었다. 그저 일상을 살다가 진짜 내가 상상하기 싫은 현실에 맞닥뜨리는 순간 아무 것도 하지 않았다는 자책감이 들 것 같았다.

결국 나는 “미국여행”이 아닌 “미국투쟁”을 결단했다. 트럼프를 막기 위해. 2-30대 청년들은 한반도 핵전쟁을 막기 위해 1주일간의 수업, 직장생활, 아르바이트 등을 다 포기하고 워싱턴DC행을 택했다. 트럼프 대통령을 만나러 백악관을 가고 미국시민들 앞에서 “전쟁반대” 춤을 추며 마주하게 될 미국 방문을 구상했다.

그런데 출국 4시간 전 인천국제공항에 있었던 수천명의 여행객들 중 우리는 유일하게 미국입국이 거부되었다. 왜? 이유를 듣지 못했다. 왜? 절대 알려줄 수 없단다.

한 뉴스 헤드라인이 떠올랐다. 어느 나라 군 통수권자가 미국 입국이 거부되어 반발했다는.
도대체 우리가 뭐길래 미국은 입국을 거부했는가. 우리 15명의 방탄청년단이 그렇게 “위협적인 존재”인가. 우리가 여느 영향력 있는 정치인, ‘전문테러집단’과 같은 급으로 여겨진 것일까. 지극히 평범한 우린 단지 트렁크에 피켓과 몇몇 옷가지, 악기만 챙겼는데.

우리는 이대로 멈추지 않는다. 공항에서 되돌아온 우리는 미국 깃발이 펄럭이는 한국 미대사관 앞에 돗자리를 깔고 앉았다. 우리의 미국 입국이 불편했다면, 우리도 트럼프 입국이 불편하다! 미국에서 하려고 했던 행동들 – 기자회견, 촛불집회, 퍼포먼스 등을 이어갔다. 트럼프 방한을 반대하는 용기있는 한국인들도 동참했다.

우리는 단지 지상에서 끊이지 않는 “평화”라는 이름의 한반도전쟁을 두려워했을 뿐이다. 우리는 지상에서 끊이지 않는 “평화”라는 이름의 학살이 이 땅 한반도에 있을까봐 걱정했을 뿐이다. 결국 우리 방미를 막은 트럼프는 한반도에서의 “전쟁”을 선택하고 싶은 것일까?

우리는 “한반도 땅의 전쟁”이라는 시나리오를 막고 싶다. 어떻게 해야 할까. 미 대사관 앞. 글을 쓰는 이 시각도 성조기는 펄럭이고 있다. 우리는 단지 바란다. 성조기가 찍힌 비행기가 내 머리 위에서 폭탄을 투하하지 않기를.

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New Mass Resistance as Spanish State Jails Catalan Ministers

November 11th, 2017 by Dick Nichols

Judge Carmen Lamela of Spain’s National High Court – direct descendant of the fascist Franco-era Court of Public Order – took the war of the Spanish state against the Catalan pro-independence government to a new level of judicial violence on November 2.

It was not enough that the two leaders of the Catalan mass pro-independence organizations the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) and Catalan cultural and language association Omnium Cultural, were already in jail. It was not enough that the Catalan government had been sacked on October 27 under article 155 of the Spanish constitution. Now the deposed ministers had to be humiliated.

Facing charges of rebellion (up to 30 years jail), sedition (up to 15 years jail) and misuse of public money, eight of the ministers were sent into preventive detention, supposedly to prevent them destroying evidence and fleeing the Spanish state.

The decision immediately provoked a new huge storm of protest across Catalonia. There were demonstrations outside town halls and the country’s parliament and a deafening evening cassolada (banging of pots and pans). A planned November 12 demonstration in Barcelona looks set to be oceanic.

The minority, but rapidly growing, Intersindical-CSC trade union confederation has already called a general strike in the coming days.

The judge’s action was immediately denounced by Catalan President Carles Puigdemont, who is in Belgium with his remaining four ministers. It is expected they will soon be subject to a European arrest warrant, but it is far from certain that the Belgian legal system will return them to the Spanish state.

December 21 Poll

The detentions will also impact the debate within Catalonia’s pro-independence and pro-sovereignty parties over the snap December 21 elections. The new elections were called by Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy as part of his plan to marginalize the Catalan independence movement.

Rajoy announced his intervention under article 155 of the Spanish constitution on the same day the Catalan parliament officially declared an independent republic. In the aftermath, a war of position was almost universally expected: Rajoy and Co would move to behead the Catalan government, sack its senior executives, purge the Catalan police, public broadcasting and education systems, offer election bribes to parts of the population and then – and only then – risk regional elections.

No other strategy seemed possible in a country where unionism (“constitutionalism” to its supporters) had won less than 40 per cent of the vote at the September 2015 “plebiscitary” Catalan elections that put pro-independence forces into government. So it was a surprise for all sides when Rajoy moved with lightning speed – for the first time in his political life – to call Catalan elections for December 21.

Three main factors determined this decision to go early. Firstly, confidence that the considerable body of pro-Spanish voters who traditionally don’t vote in Catalan elections could be mobilized by a hysterical campaign against secessionism. Secondly, hope that the pro-independence camp will split between those favouring a boycott of December 21 and those who support standing. The third and most pressing need was to end, once and for all, the international debate about the legitimacy of recent Spanish state actions (such as sacking an elected government).

The biggest risk with Rajoy’s move is that it could create unity among the often fractious pro-independence and pro-sovereignty forces. This could occur behind an election campaign to validate the Catalan Republic declared by parliament on October 27, or behind a broader campaign to oppose Madrid’s 155 coup and build support for a Catalan right to decide.

At the time of writing, the Spanish People’s Party (PP) government’s hope of provoking a split between pro-independence forces in favour of a boycott and those who will stand on December 21 looks to be failing. This seems especially so after Puigdemont announced at an October 31 Brussels media conference that the Catalan independence movement was not afraid of the ballot box.

The November 2 jailing of the ministers only makes a more united approach by forces deciding to stand more likely. The conservative nationalist Catalan European Democratic Party (PDECat) and the centre-left nationalist Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), partners in the outgoing Together for the Yes (JxSi) ruling coalition, had previously both announced they would “meet Rajoy at the polls.” Media reports suggest opinion within the anti-capitalist pro-independence People’s Unity List (CUP) was also swinging that way.

Boycott?

The initial gut response of many pro-independence activists on hearing about Rajoy’s election announcement was to say the independence movement should boycott. This reaction did not just come from the CUP (whose MP Mireia Boya tweeted that it would be an ideal day for a community paella).

Members of PDECat and the ERC also condemned Rajoy’s elections as ‘illegitimate’. David Font, PDECat mayor of Gironella, said:

“Let’s see if these elections Rajoy wants to have on December 21 he doesn’t have to have in the streets, because the councils aren’t going to provide halls.”

Joan Manuel Tresserras, close to the ERC and a former Catalan culture minister, told the daily Ara on October 30 that pro-independence forces should “certainly not” run on December 21.

He added:

“Another thing would be if it wouldn’t be right to call the constituent elections [envisaged in the Catalan Law of Jurisdictional Transition] and, if necessary, even have them on the same day as those called by the Spanish government.

“It is important that the government make a proposal and that this be discussed and agreed with the CUP and the other components of the pro-independence bloc. If The Commons [Catalunya en Comu, the left-wing party of Barcelona mayor Adu Colau that supports the right to decide but not necessarily independence] are there too, all the better.”

Impact of Madrid’s Coup

However, these sorts of projections were quickly invalidated by the real state of play in Catalonia resulting from Madrid’s coup. That brought the Catalan independence advance, and all the future projections arising from the October 27 independence declaration, to a halt.

The declaration of the independent Catalan Republic was, without doubt, an inspiring and proud moment for hundreds of thousands of Catalans. It was the result of a decade of struggle culminating in the extraordinary David-over-Goliath achievement of holding the October 1 referendum under assault from 10,000 Spanish state police.

It was also something that older generations of militants thought they would never live to see. Now the Catalan Republic lives in the hearts and minds of millions, and the Catalan struggle exists as never before as a spectre haunting European, and even world, politics.

Yet, just one week after the Spanish state takeover, most of the institutional structures of the Catalan Republic have been demolished:

The Catalan police have been brought under the control of the Spanish interior ministry and their previous chief sacked;
Police protection was withdrawn from Puigdemont and his ministers;
All Catalan diplomatic missions have been terminated, with the exception of Brussels, where the Catalan representative to the European Union has been sacked;
All Catalan agencies associated with the transition to independence have been closed down;
The parliament has been suspended, a state of affairs accepted by speaker Carme Forcadell; and
Puigdemont, his ministers, Forcadell and the other members of the speakership panel who allowed debate and the vote on independence face charges of rebellion and sedition.

In this situation, calling for the Puigdemont government to implement the resolutions attached to the declaration of independence is not realistic. His cabinet is in no condition to make them operative.

The impossibility of building and defending the institutions of the fledgling Catalan Republic after the Rajoy coup has made taking part in the December 21 poll inevitable: the thought of what the PP and Citizens would do with Catalonia’s institutions if they got their hands on them ultimately makes a boycott unthinkable.

Resistance

However, the political force of the Puigdemont government has not vanished. The president’s October 31 Brussels media conference with five of his ministers, attended by 300 journalists, was proof of that.

Puigdemont appealed to the world about the basic questions at stake in the Catalan struggle: Do the Catalans have a right to self-determination? Is the Spanish constitution and legal system democratic? Was the October 1 referendum binding?

The goal of the conference was to appeal to the ordinary citizens of Europe over the heads of the European institutions that have lined up with the Rajoy government. This aimed at raising pressure for negotiations and dialogue, which several European leaders have talked about.

Puigdemont said he would accept the result of the December 21 election and challenged Rajoy to do the same. He also challenged the European Union and the international community to support Catalonia’s right to self-determination.

He denounced the legal action taken against his government for doing what it promised to do, and repeated the commitment of the government, pro-independence parties and mass movement to non-violent methods – even while calling on Catalans to resist Madrid’s assault on Catalonia’s institutions.

Puigdemont was also explaining to independence supporters in Catalonia thrown by the Madrid coup how the strategic position had changed, as well as putting the Spanish political and legal system on trial.

The beheading of the Catalan government in no way means popular resistance has ended, as the November 2 protests showed.

If the managers imposed from Madrid move against Catalonia’s firefighters, railway workers, teachers, health workers and other public servants, they will likely run into a wall of non-cooperation. They will face resistance organized through the most active trade union confederation and the Committees to Defend the Republic.

The country’s 750-plus pro-independence councils (out of a total of 947) will also continue to project the symbols of the Catalan Republic and organize what disobedience they deem possible in their “liberated zones.”

Approaches to December 21

This reality has led all pro-independence and pro-sovereignty forces in Catalonia – with the possible exception of the CUP that will decide its approach on November 12 – to accept the need to stand in Rajoy’s “illegitimate” December 21 election.

Before November 2, it seemed unlikely this campaign would see a new edition of the JxSi alliance between PDECat and ERC. This was despite ANC and Omnium Cultural pressing for a single pro-independence ticket, potentially headed by Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart, the jailed leaders of these mass organizations.

The right nationalist PDECat has been the big loser from the independence process (and is now down to 10% in the latest polls compared to 31% for its once junior partner the ERC). The mood in PDECat has been one of wanting to recover conservative Catalan voters unnerved by the independence process’s leftward shift.

Former business minister Santi Vila, who publicly opposed the October 27 independence declaration, has put himself forward as the leader of this “moderate independentism.” He will, however, be opposed by other PDECat leaders who remain loyal to Puigdemont and the independence process.

The ERC scheme for December 21 has been that of a “republican front” that excludes PDECat, while trying to attract unaffiliated independence activists and, in particular, Podemos Catalonia. Led by Albano Dante Fachin, Podemos Catalonia has fallen out with the Podemos leadership in the Spanish state over the latter’s refusal to ally with any pro-independence forces for December 21.

As for the campaign of Catalunya en Comu, it will be led by Xavier Domenech (presently leader of En Como Podem in the Spanish parliament). Its central theme will be defence of Catalonia’s institutions against Madrid’s intervention.

Podemos Catalonia, which is not part of Catalunya en Comu, has raised the possibility of a united campaign by all forces – pro-independence or not – that support a Catalan right to decide and oppose Rajoy’s planned destruction of Catalan autonomy.

However, Podemos Spanish-wide general secretary Pablo Iglesias publicly opposes an alliance with pro-independence forces. He judges it would destroy any chance of Catalonia en Comu winning support from working-class unionist voters – in Catalonia and across the Spanish state. Their vote would go to the PSC or even the new-right Citizens.

On October 29, the Podemos’ Spanish-state leadership instructed Podemos Catalonia to hold a membership poll with the question:

“Do you support Podemos standing in the December 21 elections in coalition with Catalunya en Comu and related political forces that do not approve either the declaration of independence or the application of article 155, with the word Podemos in the name of the coalition and on the voting paper?”

The Iglesias leadership is almost certain to win this ballot – which Fachin is boycotting – but that result won’t solve the challenge that the November 2 arrests have dramatized.

That challenge is how to maximise support for pro-independence and pro-sovereignty forces in the face of what is certain to be a brutal campaign aimed at scaring every last doubter about Catalan independence to vote for the unionist parties.

To stand a chance of defeating it, Catalunya en Comu will have to do more than just saying, as it has to date, “neither 155 nor the unilateral declaration of independence.”

***

Postscriptum. As a contribution to the debate on electoral strategy in Catalonia, I recommend the following comment by Borja de Rique, an eminent Catalan historian, which I have extracted from his article in Viento Sur “Poner los pies en el suelo.” My translation from the Spanish version published in Viento Sur on November 1, 2017. (Richard Fidler)

It is quite clear that we must participate in the elections of December 21 although they have been called by the government in Madrid. Not to participate would be an act of folly. We would run the risk that Ms. Arrimadas [leader of the Catalan Citizens party] would become president of the Generalitat [the Catalan government] and that this institution would then be converted into a type of provincial office subject to the directives of the Spanish government. In my opinion, we have to run in the elections defending anti-repression and pro-sovereignty approaches. Today the political dividing line is situated — as has been sufficiently clear since the Sunday demonstration — between those who support the application of article 155 and those who are opposed; between those who think it is fundamental to demand the democratic right of the Catalan people to decide their future and those who argue that the citizens of Catalonia do not have that right.

A few days ago I was defending the formation of a unitary candidacy, similar to Solidaritat Catalana, including persons from the political formations and the citizens’ organizations that for more than seven years have declared themselves in favour of the right to decide. Faced with the difficulties that this can involve, and taking into account the recent statements by the party leaders, I think that at a minimum it will be necessary to ask them to include the following three demands as common and priority elements of their programs. First, the release of those detained and the stay of proceedings in all of the criminal charges, fines and sanctions of a political character. Second, the demand for immediate repeal of the application of article 155 to the Generalitat. And finally, the demand for a binding referendum with guarantees concerning the future of Catalonia.

If it can be demonstrated with real votes that more than two thirds of the citizens of Catalonia wish to be consulted in a binding referendum, reject the application of 155 and demand amnesty, that will demonstrate to international opinion the intransigence and political blindness of the Rajoy government and favour the possibilities for mediation to attain a referendum.

It may also be necessary to think about a program for government with broad parliamentary support that after the electoral victory will rigorously ensure that this program is carried out. We have to be realistic: even after a hypothetical victory, we will face a long period of tensions with the government in Madrid and their international counterparts. Nor should we discount the need for a unitary Catalan strategy of intervention in Spanish politics to try to get Mariano Rajoy and the PP out of the government in Madrid and create a political scenario more favourable to negotiation.

Things being what they are, it is necessary to avoid the political confrontation being centered on the Catalan Republic, the proclamation of which was questionable. That is not the dilemma that must be put to citizens in the forthcoming elections. The pro-sovereignty movement must go on increasing its strength and not risk losing it. There are social sectors that until very recently were in an expectant position, with doubts about the process, but who were not hostile to it and who were angered by the police brutality of October 1. We must not lose that social layer, which may be electorally decisive at a time when the forces defending article 155 are mobilizing people who until recently were fairly passive and indifferent. I think that the political alternative to the unionist sectors should be clearly centered, combined with the aforementioned anti-repression demands, on the demand for a democratic consultation on the future of Catalonia that is fully guaranteed.

Dick Nichols is Green Left Weekly‘s European correspondent, based in Barcelona. He is running a live blog on the Catalan struggle for independence.

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The Israeli Lobby and the British Parliament

November 11th, 2017 by Hans Stehling

This week it was revealed that Lord Stuart Polak, a professional lobbyist for Israel, had accompanied the now ex Minister for International Development, Ms Priti Patel, to no less than 12 secret meetings with Israeli politicians and/or security officials. There are also rumours of other undisclosed meetings yet to be identified. None of these undocumented meetings were apparently recorded and the Government has no indication of what was said or agreed to by either the peer in question or the then Minister.

Israel, of course, is the only undeclared nuclear weapons state in the world with an estimated underground arsenal of between 200-400 nuclear warheads – enough to incinerate and irradiate the whole of the Middle East and most of Europe. The Israeli state is not a member of NATO nor of the EU. Neither is it a signatory to the worldwide nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), nor apparently to the international Chemical or Biological Weapons Conventions to which the rest of the international community are signatories.

And therein lies the potential danger to the United Kingdom whose future relationship with this Middle Eastern state is unknown. What we do know is that Israel is already in gross breach of UNSC Resolution 2334 and that the Netanyahu government is expected to be replaced with a more radical Right-wing administration in the near future that will want to forcibly annex the Occupied Territories.

As for lobbyist Lord Stuart Pollack, very little is known except that he was born in Liverpool and apparently runs ‘the most effective lobbying operation at Westminster’. The only problem being that his lobbying is exclusively in the interests of a foreign state i.e. Israel. According to the Electoral Commission, his lobbying group – the Conservative Friends of Israel aka CFI – has taken no fewer than 162 British Tory politicians on trips to Israel over recent years, including Boris Johnson, George Osborne, William Hague, Ken Clarke, Sajid Javid and Amber Rudd – not to mention the now retired minister, Priti Patel.

Polak is also the current chairman of a lobbying consultancy that advises clients how to gain from the political process and is further reported to be connected to a lobbying consultancy in Israel itself.

There is, of course, something inherently wrong, if not disturbingly undemocratic, about the apparent undue influence upon Britain’s parliament of a powerful but unelected group of lobbyists that appears to exert a stranglehold over our legislature and executive.

This is an untenable position as can be seen from the unsavoury episode this week whereby this professional lobbyist – who was ennobled by David Cameron – and a government minister, attempted to deliberately usurp the authority of Parliament. Such behaviour might be construed, by some, as seditious.

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Polluting Paris – How Big Polluters Are Undermining Global Climate Policy

November 11th, 2017 by Corporate Europe Observatory

A new report out today from Corporate Europe Observatory co-published with Corporate Accountability International, ActionAid, Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development and ETC Group exposes how the industries most responsible for climate change, especially fossil fuel Transnational Corporations (TNCs), are obstructing real progress to address the climate crisis across key policy areas where urgent progress over the next couple of years will largely determine how habitable our future will be.

At the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), fossil fuel TNCs and other industries intent on exploiting the climate crisis are hijacking the talks, stifling ambition, pushing false solutions, and blocking the financing (and therefore withholding the availability) of real solutions.

Who can doubt, for example, that the failure of the United States to secure domestic climate legislation, or ratify the Kyoto Protocol or the Paris Agreement, is largely the result of industry interference? Perhaps as troubling is that the UNFCCC not only overlooks this obstructionism but welcomes these industries with open arms, further legitimizing them in the eyes of the world.

It might look like world governments are in the driver’s seat, but behind the scenes, it is the industries most responsible for, and those seeking to profit from, climate change that are pulling the strings.

However, without the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement, Global North governments like the US and EU are left free to do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, while the rest of the world—especially Global South countries, low-income communities, people of color, women and children—continues to pay the price. World governments can use the negotiations at the UNFCCC to insulate climate policymaking from corporate capture at all levels, and to hold recalcitrant Global North governments accountable for doing their fair share to address climate change.

We know the Paris Agreement as it currently stands is not enough to stop the climate crisis. Even if all countries honor their current pledges to decrease emissions, the world would still warm by 3 degrees Celsius or more. Yet without the Paris Agreement and what it could be without the interference of Big Polluters, we are unlikely to achieve the global progress that must be made in an extraordinarily short time.

Governments have the opportunity to ensure that the rules and procedures they are currently developing transform the agreement from words on paper into ambitious action. By the end of 2018 at COP24, countries have agreed to develop the guidelines that will chaperone the implementation of the pledges governments have made. This is our opportunity to make sure that the meaningful, equitable, and sustainable solutions at our fingertips become reality.

This report highlights how within the U.N. climate talks, key negotiating tracks undermined by industry interference include finance, mechanisms for international cooperation, agriculture, technology, and observer participation.

“For decades, the U.S. government has used the UNFCCC to advance weak deals and push fossil fuel industry interests ahead of the needs and rights of people.”

But all is not lost. The report also highlights what can be done in each of these tracks to protect against corporate capture and implement the solutions already at our fingertips.

Read the full report: Polluting Paris

Featured image is from TruePublica.

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FAKE NEWS: BBC criticised for using Iraq 2003 photo to illustrate Syrian massacre

November 11th, 2017 by Global Research

First published on May 28, 2012

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been slammed for mistakenly using a photo taken in Iraq in 2003 to illustrate the Syria 2012 massacre, in which over 100 people, including 32 children, were brutally killed.

The picture, taken on March 27, 2003, showed a young Iraqi child jumping over dozens of white body bags containing skeletons found in a desert south of Baghdad.

It was posted on the BBC news website under the heading “Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows”.

According to The Telegraph, the caption stated the photograph was provided by an activist and cannot be independently verified, but said it is “believed to show the bodies of children in Houla awaiting burial”.

A BBC spokesman said the image has now been removed from the website.

“We were aware of this image being widely circulated on the internet in the early hours of this morning following the most recent atrocities in Syria. We used it with a clear disclaimer saying it could not be independently verified,” the spokesman said.

“Efforts were made overnight to track down the original source of the image and when it was established the picture was inaccurate we removed it immediately,” he added.

Meanwhile, a professional photographer, Marco di Lauro, said he nearly “fell off his chair” when he saw the image being used, and said he was “astonished” at the failure of the corporation to check their sources.

“What I am really astonished by is that a news organization like the BBC doesn’t check the sources and it’s willing to publish any picture sent it by anyone activist, citizen journalist or whatever. That’s all,” the paper quoted him, as saying. (ANI)

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Fake News Used to Justify All Out War: The Bosnian Serb “Death Camp” Fabrication. Pretext for R2P “Humanitarian Intervention” (1992) in Yugoslavia

November 10th, 2017 by Global Research News

First published by Global Research on July 15, 2015

Serbian emergency shelters for Bosnian refugees sold to the public as a concentration camp to win public support for international intervention.

In August 1992, millions of people were shocked to see photographs of a supposed Bosnian Serb death camp. But the death camp story was a lie. The ITN crew had filmed from inside a fenced-in storage area. By shooting through the fence ITN created footage that gave the impression that the Bosnian men were imprisoned. With a little editing, this footage was turned into pictures that gave the impression of a death camp – media manipulation.

The death camps were in fact refugee centers.

The photos were produced by ITN, the British TV news giant, from footage shot by an ITN film crew which spent a long day in Bosnia. The film was shot in a refugee center in the town of Trnopolje. (Pronounced Tern-op-ol-yay)

Most of the photographs featured a tall, emaciated man with a deformed chest, stripped to the waist, apparently imprisoned behind barbed wire. Do you remember those pictures?

They were a hoax.

This is proved in the Serbian TV Movie entitled Judgment, English version with commentary produced by Jared Israel and Peter Makara, Emperor’s Clothes.

To start with, the barbed wire was staged. As you will see in this movie the ITN film crew went inside a storage area surrounded by a chicken wire and barbed wire fence. They filmed through the fence, thus creating the false impression that the people they were filming were fenced in. Now if this truly was a facility to murder people why would it be fenced of with a chicken fence, that is about 2m high, this fence could easily be destroyed using bear hands.

That was only their first cute trick. Step by step, Judgment! shows how these phony pictures were created. Judgment! is so damning that ITN’s lawyers have threatened the Internet company that hosts the server with a law suit because they advertise the film on this website, www.tenc.net!

The fabricated photos were broadcast worldwide starting on August 6th, accompanied by captions and comments comparing Trnopolje to Nazi death camps.

It was a big lie.

Since 1992, fake videos and images have been used by the mainstream media to justify US-NATO interventions in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine

Video Production: Emperor’s Clothes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xss0…

This complete version is no longer available

See also the following review, which acknowledges that the images and ITN production which made the headlines of the mainstream media were used as a pretext to invade a sovereign country on humanitarian grounds.

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US Slow-Motion Shutdown of RT and Sputnik? Threat to Free Speech and Independent Media

November 10th, 2017 by Stephen Lendman

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE:

Contact at [email protected].

Hostile US demands on popular English-language Russian media, combined with social media censorship of alternative views called “fake news,” threatens press freedom in America.

It’s tyranny by any standard, the way all police states operate, controlling news, information and analysis, suppressing alternative truth-telling, notably on vital issues.

America is on a dangerous slippery slope in this direction, the future of independent reporting and commentaries at stake, along with other fundamental freedoms – gravely threatened if speech, media and academic freedoms are lost.

The Justice Department demanded a company providing services for RT America register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). An FBI probe is checking for Sputnik News for FARA violations.

FARA was enacted in 1938, aimed at checking NAZI propaganda near the onset of WW II.

It requires agents representing foreign powers politically or quasi-politically to disclose their relationship with governments, along with information about their personnel, activities and finances.

Its enactment had nothing to do with regulating or acting against foreign media. US media operate freely in Russia.

America’s global propaganda operations include Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, along with Radio and TV Marti aimed at Cuba, and Middle East broadcasting networks.

On Thursday, RT said the Justice Department ordered its US operation to register under FARA as a foreign agent – by November 13.

Otherwise, its director risks arrest, along with its assets frozen and likely seized – the demand part of raging Russophobia in America, possible prelude to direct confrontation.

Fact: RT America (and its parent RT International) are media operations – not foreign agents of Russia or any other country.

No evidence suggests otherwise. Rogue state America needs none to pursue its ruthless agenda, defiling rule of law principles, waging war on humanity at home and abroad, operating extrajudicially worldwide..

Hundreds of entities are registered under FARA, no media in any foreign country. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said hostile action against RT “will have serious legal consequences.”

It’ll “compromise the safety of (its) employees.” RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan justifiably blasted the move, saying it forces the broadcaster to accept “conditions in which we cannot work” – Washington’s demand an attempt to “drive (RT) out of the country.”

RT America will comply and register, she said. A court challenge will follow – likely to achieve nothing, US federal courts stacked with right-wing extremists, including at the appeal and Supreme Court levels.

Simonyan said RT will prove in court that actions against it are “discriminat(ory), contradit(ing) democracy and freedom of speech principles.”

Registering under FARA “deprives us of fair competition with other international channels, which are not registered as foreign agents.”

According to earlier Pew Research data, around 160 foreign correspondents reported for their media in Washington in 1968.

In 1994, “507 foreign news organizations from 79 nations and territories work(ed) (in) Washington.”

In fall 2008, 1,490 foreign correspondents, representing scores of nations on every continent, reported from Washington.

Included are full-time reporters, stringers and part-time correspondents. Nearly a decade later, their ranks are likely much larger.

None of the media they represent were forced to register under FARA, RT the only one, solely for political reasons, perhaps prelude to banning the broadcaster altogether – for its truth-telling, conflicting with the official narrative.

Washington wants alternative views silenced. Targeting RT may be prelude to hostile actions against other independent media sources, notably online.

Russia earlier warned it will respond tit-for-tat against hostile actions on its media, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova saying:

“If someone starts to fight dirty, perverting the law by using it as a tool to eradicate the TV station, every move aimed against the Russian media outlet would be repaid in kind.”

Digital democracy in America is threatened. Greater government censorship remains an ominous possibility – the defining feature of totalitarian rule.

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

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

Real Motive Behind Saudi Purge Emerges: $800 Billion in Confiscated Assets

Featured image is from The Daily Beast.

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Spread the Antiwar Message: Special Offers for Groups & Organizations

November 10th, 2017 by Global Research

One of our main goals at Global Research is to spread the antiwar message far and wide and to support the real antiwar groups and civil rights organizations. With this in mind we bring you the following promotion…

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Selected Articles: GMO, Glyphosate Herbicide or Genocide?

November 10th, 2017 by Global Research News

Global Research does not seek financial support from private and public foundations. This is why we value every single donation and contribution. Independent media is threatened. More than ever, we are in the need of the financial support of our readers.

Consider Making a Donation to Global Research

We encourage you to re-post this selection of articles. Share through social media and debate with your colleagues and friends regarding mainstream media disinformation.

* * *

By Zero Hedge, November 10, 2017

Things gradually started to make sense when it emerged that some $33 billion in oligarch net worth was “at risk” among just the 4 wealthiest arrested Saudis, which included the media-friendly prince Alwaleed.

Did Al Qaeda Dupe Trump on Syrian Attack?

By Robert Parry, November 10, 2017

Buried deep inside a new U.N. report is evidence that could exonerate the Syrian government in the April 4 sarin atrocity and make President Trump look like an Al Qaeda dupe, reports Robert Parry.

GM Food Crops Illegally Growing in India: The Criminal Plan to Change the Genetic Core of the Nation’s Food System

By Colin Todhunter, November 10, 2017

The GM Contamination Register database is run by Genewatch and Greenpeace and contains cases of genetically modified (GM) contamination dating from 1997. The authors of a 2014 paper, published in the International Journal of Food Contamination, analysed 400 or so cases in the database by crop and country.

NATO Wants Europe’s Civilian Infrastructure Ready for War with Russia

By RT News, November 10, 2017

NATO needs civilian infrastructure in Europe to meet its growing military requirements, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said ahead of a meeting in Brussels. This will mean coordination with national governments and the private sector, he added.

Trump Threatens China over North Korea and Trade, Bellicose Speech in Beijing

By James Cogan, November 10, 2017

While, compared with other Trump speeches, his tone and rhetoric were measured, the content was nonetheless bellicose and ominous. On the spurious pretext that North Korea’s small nuclear arsenal poses an existential danger, US imperialism is preparing to launch a devastating war on the Korean peninsula.

Killing Us Softly—Glyphosate Herbicide or Genocide?

By F. William Engdahl, November 10, 2017

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US Justice Department Forces RT America to Register as “Foreign Agent”

November 10th, 2017 by Trévon Austin

RT, the Russia-based oppositional TV and Internet broadcaster, announced Thursday that the US Department of Justice has forced it to register as a “foreign agent” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Washington has given the outlet until Monday to register as a foreign agent or its director could be arrested and its assets frozen.

The move is a product of the ongoing anti-Russia witch hunt being led by the Democratic Party, together with the US intelligence agencies, aimed at delegitimizing and outlawing domestic political opposition.

The Justice Department’s actions will have a chilling effect on the numerous independent journalists who have either worked for or appeared on RT, as well as on press freedom in the United States as a whole.

“In demanding RT America register as a foreign agent, the government has produced no evidence that RT qualifies as a foreign lobbying outfit, nor has it bothered to explain how this network is different from Al Jazeera, the BBC, or other state broadcasters,” Max Blumenthal, senior editor for AlterNet’s Grayzone Project, and a regular guest on RT America, told the World Socialist Web Site.

“The only conclusion to draw is that the US government is targeting RT on political grounds, on the basis of its role as a platform for critical perspectives on American foreign policy, and as a test case for a wider campaign of media suppression,” he added.

On January 6, the US Director of National Intelligence issued a report on “Russian intervention” in US politics, which denounced RT as a platform for oppositional sentiment in the United States.

The report alleged that the “channel portrayed the US electoral process as undemocratic and featured calls by US protesters for the public to rise up and ‘take this government back.’”

The report continued, “In an effort to highlight the alleged ‘lack of democracy’ in the United States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third-party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates. The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’”

The Director of National Intelligence report further denounced favorable coverage by RT of the Occupy Wall Street movement, declaring, “RT framed the movement as a fight against ‘the ruling class’ and described the current US political system as corrupt and dominated by corporations.”

The World War II-era Foreign Agents Registration Act required companies or individuals considered to be working on behalf of a foreign government in the US to disclose their funding and relationship with foreign governments or actors with the DOJ. According to RT, over 400 entities are registered under the act, but not a single media outlet is included in the list.

The DOJ originally sent a letter to RT America in September suggesting that the company was obligated to register under FARA. Registration under the law would require the outlet to disclose confidential information, including the personal information of its staff. The Russian Foreign Ministry stated the action would “have serious legal consequences” and “compromise the safety of [RT] employees.”

RT America has announced that it will comply with the DOJ’s demand, but will challenge the decision in court. RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan claimed the decision placed freedom of speech in the US under question.

“We believe this requirement is not just contrary to the law, and we intend to prove it in court. This requirement is discriminatory, it contradicts both the principles of democracy and freedom of speech,” she said. Simonyan added, “It deprives us of fair competition with other international channels, which are not registered as foreign agents.”

In his statement to the WSWS, Mr. Blumenthal condemned the silence of international human rights organization on the crackdown against RT. “So far, liberal civil liberties and human rights organizations have said nothing about the government’s assault on RT America. In their silence, groups from the ACLU to Amnesty International to the Committee to Protect Journalists, have made themselves accomplices in a McCarthyite crusade that is whittling away at press freedom.”

In last week’s congressional hearings on “extremist content,” lawmakers demanded that social media companies take decisive action in censoring “harmful content.” Members of Congress chastised representatives from Google, Facebook, and Twitter into testifying their social media platforms had been used by a foreign power to influence the 2016 elections.

Earlier this month, Google removed Russia Today from its list of “preferred” channels on YouTube. At one of the hearings, Senator Dianne Feinstein pressed Google’s legal counsel on why it took so long for YouTube to revoke the status of Russia Today as a “preferred” broadcaster. She demanded,

“Why did Google give preferred status to Russia Today, a Russian propaganda arm, on YouTube? … It took you until September of 2017 to do it.”

California Democratic representative Jackie Speier asserted that RT “seeks to influence politics and fuel discontent in the United States.” She asked:

“Why have you not shut down RT on YouTube? … It’s a propaganda machine… the intelligence community says it’s an arm of one of our adversaries.”

In addition to its crackdown on RT, Google has made sweeping changes to its search engine and news service that have dramatically slashed traffic to left-wing, antiwar, and progressive web sites, including the World Socialist Web Site, which has had its search traffic from Google fall by 74 percent since April.

The Justice Department’s action will dramatically intensify this campaign for online censorship, targeted first and foremost against left-wing political opposition.

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Real Motive Behind Saudi Purge Emerges: $800 Billion in Confiscated Assets

November 10th, 2017 by Zero Hedge

From the very beginning, there was something off about Sunday’s unprecedented countercoup purge unleashed by Mohammad bin Salman on alleged political enemies, including some of Saudi Arabia’s richest and most powerful royals and government officials: it was just too brazen to be a simple “power consolidation” move; in fact most commentators were shocked by the sheer audacity, with one question outstanding: why take such a huge gamble? After all, there was little chatter of an imminent coup threat against either the senile Saudi King or the crown prince, MbS, and a crackdown of such proportions would only boost animosity against the current ruling royals further.

One day later, a Reuters source reported that in a just as dramatic expansion of the original crackdown, bank accounts of over 1,200 individuals had been frozen, a number which was growing by the minute. Commenting on this land cashgrab, we rhetorically asked “So when could the confiscatory process end? As we jokingly suggested yesterday, the ruling Saudi royal family has realized that not only can it crush any potential dissent by arresting dozens of potential coup-plotters, it can also replenish the country’s foreign reserves, which in the past 3 years have declined by over $250 billion, by confiscating some or all of their generous wealth, which is in the tens if not hundreds of billions. If MbS continues going down the list, he just may recoup a substantial enough amount to what it makes a difference on the sovereign account.”

Then an article overnight from the WSJ confirmed that fundamentally, the purge may be nothing more than a forced extortion scheme, as the Saudi government – already suffering from soaring budget deficits, sliding oil revenues and plunging reserves – was “aiming to confiscate cash and other assets worth as much as $800 billion in its broadening crackdown on alleged corruption among the kingdom’s elite.”

As we reported yesterday, the WSJ writes that the country’s central bank, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, said late Tuesday that it has frozen the bank accounts of “persons of interest” and said the move is “in response to the Attorney General’s request pending the legal cases against them.” But what is more notable, is that while we first suggested – jokingly – on Monday that the ulterior Saudi motive would be to simply “nationalize” the net worth of some of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest individuals, now the WSJ confirms that this is precisely the case, and what’s more notably is that the amount in question is absolutely staggering: nearly 2x Saudi Arabia’s total foreign reserves!

As the WSJ alleges, “the crackdown could also help replenish state coffers. The government has said that assets accumulated through corruption will become state property, and people familiar with the matter say the government estimates the value of assets it can reclaim at up to 3 trillion Saudi riyal, or $800 billion.”

While much of that money remains abroad – and invested in various assets from bonds to stocks to precious metals and real estate – which will complicate efforts to reclaim it, even a portion of that amount would help shore up Saudi Arabia’s finances.

A prolonged period of low oil prices forced the government to borrow money on the international bond market and to draw extensively from the country’s foreign reserves, which dropped from $730 billion at their peak in 2014 to $487.6 billion in August, the latest available government data.

Confirming our speculation was advisory firm Eurasia Group, which in a note said that the crown prince “needs cash to fund the government’s investment plans” adding that “It was becoming increasingly clear that additional revenue is needed to improve the economy’s performance. The government will also strike deals with businessmen and royals to avoid arrest, but only as part of a greater commitment to the local economy.”

Of course, there is a major danger that such a draconian cash grab would result in a violent blowback by everyone who has funds parked in the Kingdom. To assuage fears, Saudi Arabia’s minister of commerce, Majid al Qasabi, on Tuesday sought to reassure the private sector that the corruption investigation wouldn’t interfere with normal business operations. The procedures and investigations undertaken by the anti-corruption agency won’t affect ongoing business or projects, he said. Furthermore, the Saudi central bank said that individual accounts had been frozen, not corporate accounts. “It is business as usual for both banks and corporates,” the central bank said.

However, this is problematic: first, not only is the list of names of detained and “frozen” accounts growing by the day…

The government earlier this week vowed that it would arrest more people as part of the corruption investigation, which began around three years ago. As a precautionary measure, authorities have banned a large number of people from traveling outside the country, among them hundreds of royals and people connected to those arrested, according to people familiar with the matter. The government hasn’t officially named the people who were detained.

… but the mere shock of a move that would be more appropriate for the 1950s USSR has prompted crushed any faith and confidence the international community may have had in Saudi governance and business practices.

The biggest irony would be if from this flagrant attmept to shore up the Kingdom’s deteriorating finances, a domestic and international bank run emerged, with locals and foreign individuals and companies quietly, or not so quietly, pulling their assets and capital from confiscation ground zero, in the process precipitating the very economic collapse that the move was meant to avoid.

Judging by the market reaction, which has sent Riyal forward tumbling on rising bets of either a recession, or devaluation, or both, this unorthodox attempt to inject up to $800 billion in assets into the struggling local economy, could soon backfire spectacularly.

Meanwhile, for those still confused about the current political scene in Saudi Arabia, here is an infographic courtesy of the WSJ which explains “Who Has Been Promoted, Who Has Been Detained in Saudi Arabia”

All images are from Zero Hedge.

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India’s Demonetization, Modi’s “Economic Emergency” and “Black Money”: What Does that Mean for the Common People

November 10th, 2017 by Binu Mathew

Prologue:Why I wrote this article

On November 8th night when I came to know about the move I skimmed through my Facebook timeline. I was aghast. Even prominent liberals were applauding this anti-people move. When I visited the news sites, even the progressive ones were praising this bold master stroke by Modi. When I received the morning papers I was in for a rude shock. Not a word against this monumental blunder. Some papers even carried articles by ‘experts’ that it will flush out black money, even though it would cause ‘minor inconveniences’ for the people. Some one had to call the bluff. I wrote this article in despair, desperation and anger.

At the stroke of midnight November 8, 2016, Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi imposed an undeclared economic emergency on India. With a stroke of pen he wiped out Rs 15 lakh crores in cash from the system. What prompted this drastic step? What will be the fall out of the action for Indian economy is a billion dollar question.

First let us hear what are the reasonings of the government. This what PM Modi said in an unprecedented address to the nation at 8 PM last night.

“In the past decades, the spectre of corruption and black money has grown. It has weakened the effort to remove poverty.

There comes a time in the history of a country’s development when a need is felt for a strong and decisive step. For years, this country has felt that corruption, black money and terrorism are festering sores, holding us back in the race towards development.

Terrorism is a frightening threat. So many have lost their lives because of it. But have you ever thought about how these terrorists get their money? Enemies from across the border run their operations using fake currency notes. This has been going on for years. Many times, those using fake five hundred and thousand rupee notes have been caught and many such notes have been seized.

On the one hand is the problem of terrorism; on the other is the challenge posed by corruption and black money.

To break the grip of corruption and black money, we have decided that the five hundred rupee and thousand rupee currency notes presently in use will no longer be legal tender from midnight tonight, that is 8th November 2016.

So, in this fight against corruption, black money, fake notes and terrorism, in this movement for purifying our country, will our people not put up with difficulties for some days? I have full confidence that every citizen will stand up and participate in this ‘mahayagna’.

New notes of five hundred rupees and two thousand rupees, with completely new design will be introduced.”

So, according to the government’s logic the demonitisation is to fight corruption, black money and terrorism. Well and good. They why the re-introduction of new 500 and even a new Rs 2000 note? Will this not be easier for black money hoarders, corrupt officials and terrorists to handle 2000 note? Then why is this surgical strike on economy?

First thing first.

The all important Uttar Pradesh (UP) elections are coming up. Modi came to power promising to bring back black money stashed in overseas banks and deposit into everyone’s bank account 15 lakh rupees each. Two and half years have passed since this promise made. Not a single rupee appeared in anyone’s bank account. He had to show his electorates that he is doing something to tackle black money. No one should ask how can Modi bring back black money hoarded in Swiss banks or elsewhere by demonitisation. One can blissfully forget that big money hoarders don’t stash their cash under their beds but in the safety of overseas banks in Switzerland, Mauritius or Maccau. Who is Modi fooling? The majority of poor Indians who are leading a life with just Rs 32 to spend a day.

And to the argument on corruption, here is a fact:

The Indian Express reported that “twenty-nine state-owned banks wrote off a total of Rs 1.14 lakh crore of bad debts between financial years 2013 and 2015, much more than they had done in the preceding nine years.” RBI refused to give the names of the beneficiaries. We can’t imagine that that the largesse went small loan holders. If it isn’t corruption, what else is?

What about the black money converted into gold and real estate?

Well, the corruption, black money, terrorism argument falls flat on its face. Then what must have been the government’s other motive?

Scrutinising Modi’s speech closely will give some more clues.

He said, from midnight onwards “…..The five hundred and thousand rupee notes hoarded by anti-national and anti-social elements will become just worthless pieces of paper.”

Here he gives it away. “Anti-national and anti-social elements”! All those who hold a 500 Rupee note or 1000 Rupee note is an anti-national! If you follow the argument to its logical conclusion most of Indian citizens have joined the long list of anti-nationals that this government has been making ever since it assumed office in 2014. Modi further says, “ ….in this movement for purifying our country, will our people not put up with difficulties for some days? I have full confidence that every citizen will stand up and participate in this ‘mahayagna’.”

Purify the country? De ja vu! Haven’t you heard this same rhetoric from Europe half a century before? What was the ‘final solution’?

Modi also draws from Aryan mythology and calls his mission a ‘mahayagna’. Nothing surprising to hear from the Prime Minister of a secular nation who calls himself “I’m a Hindu nationalist because I’m a born Hindu”. These subtle insinuations will have a big impact on the coming UP elections, where Modi’s BJP is trying to consolidate Hindu votes against the ‘Muslim threat’. Remember that BJP orchestrated a riot in Muzaffarnagar in Western UP and boasted about it to gain to rich dividends. BJP won 72 of 80 seats in UP in 2014 parliament election.

Behind Modi’s move there is also the ambition of the PM to make India a cashless country. Even Sweden, one of the most advanced countries in the world, could not fulfill this ambition. How can India with a 80% or more of rural population achieve this? Recently hackers breached and the stole the details of 3.2 million debit cards in India. This breach is a warning that the move to cashless world is fraught with security dangers. Moreover, one can suspect, if this demonitisation is an act to help now emerging e-payment wallet companies like PayTM. PayTM has come out with a 2 page jacket advertisement praising Modi on demonitisation. Modi’s buddy Mukesh Ambani is introducing JioMoney, an e-payment wallet on January 1, 2017, the day after the time to change old notes ends.

Is that all to the story? I think there is more to it than meets the eye.

Here are some facts.

Market capitalization of Public sector banks fell from 4.5 lakhs in Jan 2015 to 2.7 lakhs in January 2016
Public sector banks sitting on over Rs 7 lakh crore stressed assets, including Non Performing Assets and restructured loans.
The Hindu Businessline reported that the sharp deterioration of public sector banks’ finances in the last couple of years has shaken investors’ confidence.
The Business Standard reported that the Reserve Bank of India had to buy a lot of bonds from the secondary market – Rs 2.1 lakh crore in the past 12 months, to help banks come in a neutral liquidity zone now.
The Business Standard again wrote -unless a bank lends money, it can’t create more money. Since banks have slowed their lending exercise, enough money is not getting created and therefore, the multiplier has slumped to a multi-year low. This gap in money creation has led to liquidity shortage, prompting RBI to step in with bond purchase support.
The Business Standard again wrote -Liquidity in the banking system has again become tight because of a number of reasons. Apart from the weak money multiplier, currency in circulation has risen among the public because of festive demand. Holding cash means taking money away from banks and this contributes to the liquidity shortage. According to Credit Suisse estimates, the currency in circulation increased by Rs 2.6 lakh crore over the past 12 months.

From above all these reports it is amply clear that the Indian banks were facing a liquidity crisis. Ever since Modi came to power he was trying with all his might to kick start the economy. Like Donald Trump in USA his mantra was to make “India a manufacturing hub”. In spite of all his efforts, according to available data manufacturing output did not pick up but actually fell over the past few years.

Modi might have thought or his advisers coaxed him to believe that to kick start the economy and ‘make India great again’ a surgical strike on economy was necessary. RBI was helpless since it could not increase liquidity for fear of igniting inflation. So the last card on the table was to call back all the money in circulation and deposit it in banks thereby foisting the wobbling banking industry, and the chance of increasing liquidity after the pain of the surgery was over.

Look at the timing of the announcement. It was just after Diwali, the biggest festival in India, when largest amount of cash is in circulation. India has physical cash circulation of Rs 17 lakh crore , of which 88 per cent is Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. According to the RBI press conference after the announcement of the PM, there are 16.5 billion ‘500-rupee’ notes and 6.7 billion ‘1000-rupee’ notes in circulation right now. Roughly Rs 15 lakh crores was sucked back from the system. 15 lakh crore rupees will go back into banks. And there is restriction on how much you can withdraw from your account. Now it is Rs 20,000 for a week. There lies the catch.

The banks will lend out the money ‘confiscated from you’, several times the amount by fractional reserve banking. Who will benefit? Not the poor farmers who are committing by their thousands every month. Not the children who are dying of malnutrition in several parts of the country. Not the small manufacturers who are struggling to keep up their businesses? Who will benefit? The crony capitalists that props up the Modi regime. This demonetization is the biggest crony capitalist neo-liberalist coup that has ever taken place in India. Never doubt it, India will have to pay a heavy price for it.

Last night, after the news broke, I looked at my wallet and found some ‘anti-national’ notes in it. I wanted some ‘nationalist’ notes to survive for the ‘hard days’ ahead. I went to several ATMs. Most of them had only 500, 1000 notes. One which I saw had a long line of people standing in front of it. I went to a less crowded ATM machine. There was a small queue. One man who was in the cabin was furiously withdrawing money, keeping us all waiting. One gentleman got angry and barged into the ATM and asked him to stop and leave.

People are getting infuriated. Panic is spreading. Two days of complete banking ban, limits on withdrawal when the banks open. What will someone do in case of a medical emergency? A life support machine costs Rs 75000 in rent for a day! That’s for the people who are linked to banks.

What about nearly 80% of Indians who don’t have access to banks, or don’t depend on banks for their daily lives? How much hardship they’ll have to pay to change whatever little ‘anti-national notes’ they hold. If they have a bank account, and if they choose to go to bank, their money will be sucked into the loan they owe to the bank, which most in rural India do.

Some financial experts are worried about breaking the money chain. They are worried that breaking it will bleed the economy and getting it back on track will be a hard task. Who will suffer? The poor people of India. Real wages could plunge. Deflation is a real possibility. Will the poor and the middle classes remain mute spectators, while their wealth being sucked up by the banks and eventually the crony capitalists? Like that man in the ATM, will they revolt? If they revolt the financial emergency will turn to political emergency.

Meanwhile, the rich crony capitalists will laugh all the way to the bank.

Binu Mathew is the editor of www.countercurrents.org and can be reached at [email protected]. This article was originally published by Countercurrents where the image was also sourced.

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India’s Demonetization, Modi’s “Economic Emergency” and “Black Money”: What Does that Mean for the Common People

November 10th, 2017 by Binu Mathew

Prologue:Why I wrote this article

First let us hear what are the reasonings of the government. This what PM Modi said in an unprecedented address to the nation at 8 PM last night.

“In the past decades, the spectre of corruption and black money has grown. It has weakened the effort to remove poverty.

There comes a time in the history of a country’s development when a need is felt for a strong and decisive step. For years, this country has felt that corruption, black money and terrorism are festering sores, holding us back in the race towards development.

Terrorism is a frightening threat. So many have lost their lives because of it. But have you ever thought about how these terrorists get their money? Enemies from across the border run their operations using fake currency notes. This has been going on for years. Many times, those using fake five hundred and thousand rupee notes have been caught and many such notes have been seized.

On the one hand is the problem of terrorism; on the other is the challenge posed by corruption and black money.

To break the grip of corruption and black money, we have decided that the five hundred rupee and thousand rupee currency notes presently in use will no longer be legal tender from midnight tonight, that is 8th November 2016.

So, in this fight against corruption, black money, fake notes and terrorism, in this movement for purifying our country, will our people not put up with difficulties for some days? I have full confidence that every citizen will stand up and participate in this ‘mahayagna’.

New notes of five hundred rupees and two thousand rupees, with completely new design will be introduced.”

First thing first.

And to the argument on corruption, here is a fact:

What about the black money converted into gold and real estate?

Well, the corruption, black money, terrorism argument falls flat on its face. Then what must have been the government’s other motive?

Scrutinising Modi’s speech closely will give some more clues.

He said, from midnight onwards “…..The five hundred and thousand rupee notes hoarded by anti-national and anti-social elements will become just worthless pieces of paper.”

Purify the country? De ja vu! Haven’t you heard this same rhetoric from Europe half a century before? What was the ‘final solution’?

Is that all to the story? I think there is more to it than meets the eye.

Here are some facts.

Market capitalization of Public sector banks fell from 4.5 lakhs in Jan 2015 to 2.7 lakhs in January 2016
Public sector banks sitting on over Rs 7 lakh crore stressed assets, including Non Performing Assets and restructured loans.
The Hindu Businessline reported that the sharp deterioration of public sector banks’ finances in the last couple of years has shaken investors’ confidence.
The Business Standard reported that the Reserve Bank of India had to buy a lot of bonds from the secondary market – Rs 2.1 lakh crore in the past 12 months, to help banks come in a neutral liquidity zone now.
The Business Standard again wrote -unless a bank lends money, it can’t create more money. Since banks have slowed their lending exercise, enough money is not getting created and therefore, the multiplier has slumped to a multi-year low. This gap in money creation has led to liquidity shortage, prompting RBI to step in with bond purchase support.
The Business Standard again wrote -Liquidity in the banking system has again become tight because of a number of reasons. Apart from the weak money multiplier, currency in circulation has risen among the public because of festive demand. Holding cash means taking money away from banks and this contributes to the liquidity shortage. According to Credit Suisse estimates, the currency in circulation increased by Rs 2.6 lakh crore over the past 12 months.

Meanwhile, the rich crony capitalists will laugh all the way to the bank.

Binu Mathew is the editor of www.countercurrents.org and can be reached at [email protected]. This article was originally published by Countercurrents where the image was also sourced.

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Did Al Qaeda Dupe Trump on Syrian Attack?

November 10th, 2017 by Robert Parry

Featured image: Photograph of men in Khan Sheikdoun in Syria, allegedly inside a crater where a sarin-gas bomb landed. (Source: Consortiumnews)

A new United Nations-sponsored report on the April 4 sarin incident in an Al Qaeda-controlled town in Syria blames Bashar al-Assad’s government for the atrocity, but the report contains evidence deep inside its “Annex II” that would prove Assad’s innocence.

If you read that far, you would find that more than 100 victims of sarin exposure were taken to several area hospitals before the alleged Syrian warplane could have struck the town of Khan Sheikhoun.

Still, the Joint Investigative Mechanism [JIM], a joint project of the U.N. and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW], brushed aside this startling evidence and delivered the Assad guilty verdict that the United States and its allies wanted.

The JIM consigned the evidence of a staged atrocity, in which Al Qaeda operatives would have used sarin to kill innocent civilians and pin the blame on Assad, to a spot 14 pages into the report’s Annex II. The sensitivity of this evidence of a staged “attack” is heightened by the fact that President Trump rushed to judgment and ordered a “retaliatory” strike with 59 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian airbase on the night of April 6-7. That U.S. attack reportedly killed several soldiers at the base and nine civilians, including four children, in nearby neighborhoods.

So, if it becomes clear that Al Qaeda tricked President Trump not only would he be responsible for violating international law and killing innocent people, but he and virtually the entire Western political establishment along with the major news media would look like Al Qaeda’s “useful idiots.”

Currently, the West and its mainstream media are lambasting the Russians for not accepting the JIM’s “assessment,” which blames Assad for the sarin attack. Russia is also taking flak for questioning continuation of the JIM’s mandate. There has been virtually no mainstream skepticism about the JIM’s report and almost no mention in the mainstream of the hospital-timing discrepancy.

Timing Troubles

To establish when the supposed sarin attack occurred on April 4, the JIM report relied on witnesses in the Al Qaeda-controlled town and a curious video showing three plumes of smoke but no airplanes. Based on the video’s metadata, the JIM said the scene was recorded between 0642 and 0652 hours. The JIM thus puts the timing of the sarin release at between 0630 and 0700 hours.

But the first admissions of victims to area hospitals began as early as 0600 hours, the JIM found, meaning that these victims could not have been poisoned by the alleged aerial bombing (even if the airstrike really did occur).

According to the report’s Annex II,

“The admission times of the records range between 0600 and 1600 hours.” And these early cases – arriving before the alleged airstrike – were not isolated ones.

“Analysis of the … medical records revealed that in 57 cases, patients were admitted in five hospitals before the incident in Khan Shaykhun,” Annex II said.

Plus, this timing discrepancy was not limited to a few hospitals in and around Khan Sheikhoun, but was recorded as well at hospitals that were scattered across the area and included one hospital that would have taken an hour or so to reach.

Annex II stated:

“In 10 such cases, patients appear to have been admitted to a hospital 125 km away from Khan Shaykhun at 0700 hours while another 42 patients appear to have been admitted to a hospital 30 km away at 0700 hours.”

In other words, more than 100 patients would appear to have been exposed to sarin before the alleged Syrian warplane could have dropped the alleged bomb and the victims could be evacuated, a finding that alone would have destroyed the JIM’s case against the Syrian government.

But the JIM seemed more interested in burying this evidence of Al Qaeda staging the incident — and killing some expendable civilians — than in following up this timing problem.

“The [JIM] did not investigate these discrepancies and cannot determine whether they are linked to any possible staging scenario, or to poor record-keeping in chaotic conditions,” the report said.

But the proffered excuse about poor record-keeping would have to apply to multiple hospitals over a wide area all falsely recording the arrival time of more than 100 patients.

The video of the plumes of smoke also has come under skepticism from Theodore Postol, a weapons expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who noted that none of the three plumes matched up with damage to buildings (as viewed from satellite images) that would have resulted from aerial bombs of that power.

Postol’s finding suggests that the smoke could have been another part of a staging event rather than debris kicked up by aerial bombs.

The JIM also could find no conclusive evidence that a Syrian warplane was over Khan Sheikhoun at the time of the video although the report claims that a plane could have come within about 5 kilometers of the town.

A History of Deception

Perhaps even more significantly, the JIM report ignored the context of the April 4 case and the past history of Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front staging chemical weapons attacks with the goal of foisting blame on the Syrian government and tricking the U.S. military into an intervention on the side of Nusra and its Islamic-militant allies.

On April 4, there was a strong motive for Al Qaeda and its regional allies to mount a staged event. Just days earlier, President Trump’s administration had shocked the Syrian rebels and their backers by declaring “regime change” was no longer the U.S. goal in Syria.

So, Al Qaeda and its regional enablers were frantic to reverse Trump’s decision, which was accomplished by his emotional reaction to videos on cable news showing children and other civilians suffering and dying in Khan Sheikhoun.

On the night of April 6-7, before any thorough investigation could be conducted, Trump ordered 59 Tomahawk missiles fired at the Syrian air base that supposedly had launched the sarin attack.

At the time, I was told by an intelligence source that at least some CIA analysts believed that the sarin incident indeed had been staged with sarin possibly flown in by drone from a Saudi-Israeli special operations base in Jordan.

This source said the on-the-ground staging for the incident had been hasty because of the surprise announcement that the Trump administration was no longer seeking regime change in Damascus. The haste led to some sloppiness in tying down all the necessary details to pin the atrocity on Assad, the source said.

But the few slip-ups, such as the apparent failure to coordinate the timing of the hospital admissions to after the purported airstrike, didn’t deter the JIM investigators from backing the West’s desire to blame Assad and also create another attack line against the Russians.

Similarly, other U.N.-connected investigators downplayed earlier evidence that Al Qaeda’s Nusra was staging chemical weapons incidents after President Obama laid down his “red line” on chemical weapons. The militants apparently hoped that the U.S. military would take out the Syrian military and pave the way for an Al Qaeda victory.

For instance, U.N. investigators learned from a number of townspeople of Al-Tamanah about how the rebels and allied “activists” staged a chlorine gas attack on the night of April 29-30, 2014, and then sold the false story to a credulous Western media and, initially, to a U.N. investigative team.

“Seven witnesses stated that frequent alerts [about an imminent chlorine weapons attack by the government] had been issued, but in fact no incidents with chemicals took place,” the U.N. report said. “While people sought safety after the warnings, their homes were looted and rumours spread that the events were being staged. … [T]hey [these witnesses] had come forward to contest the wide-spread false media reports.”

Dubious Evidence

Other people, who did allege that there had been a government chemical attack on Al-Tamanah, provided suspect evidence, including data from questionable sources, according to the report.

The report said,

“Three witnesses, who did not give any description of the incident on 29-30 April 2014, provided material of unknown source. One witness had second-hand knowledge of two of the five incidents in Al-Tamanah, but did not remember the exact dates. Later that witness provided a USB-stick with information of unknown origin, which was saved in separate folders according to the dates of all the five incidents mentioned by the FFM [the U.N.’s Fact-Finding Mission].

“Another witness provided the dates of all five incidents reading it from a piece of paper, but did not provide any testimony on the incident on 29-30 April 2014. The latter also provided a video titled ‘site where second barrel containing toxic chlorine gas was dropped tamanaa 30 April 14’”

Some other witnesses alleging a Syrian government attack offered curious claims about detecting the chlorine-infused “barrel bombs” based on how the device sounded in its descent.

The U.N. report said,

“The eyewitness, who stated to have been on the roof, said to have heard a helicopter and the ‘very loud’ sound of a falling barrel. Some interviewees had referred to a distinct whistling sound of barrels that contain chlorine as they fall. The witness statement could not be corroborated with any further information.”

Nikki Haley, United States Permanent Representative to the UN, addresses the Security Council’s meeting on the situation in Syria on April 27, 2017 (UN Photo)

However, the claim itself is absurd since it is inconceivable that anyone could detect a chlorine canister inside a “barrel bomb” by “a distinct whistling sound.”

The larger point, however, is that the jihadist rebels in Al-Tamanah and their propaganda teams, including relief workers and activists, appear to have organized a coordinated effort at deception complete with a fake video supplied to U.N. investigators and Western media outlets.

For instance, the Telegraph in London reported that “Videos allegedly taken in Al-Tamanah … purport to show the impact sites of two chemical bombs. Activists said that one person had been killed and another 70 injured.”

The Telegraph quoted supposed weapons expert Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat and a senior fellow at the fiercely anti-Russian Atlantic Council, as endorsing the Al-Tamanah claims.

“Witnesses have consistently reported the use of helicopters to drop the chemical barrel bombs used,” said Higgins. “As it stands, around a dozen chemical barrel bomb attacks have been alleged in that region in the last three weeks.”

The Al-Tamanah debunking in the U.N. report received no mainstream media attention when the U.N. findings were issued in September 2016 because the U.N. report relied on rebel information to blame two other alleged chlorine attacks on the government and that got all the coverage. But the case should have raised red flags given the extent of the apparent deception.

If the seven townspeople were telling the truth, that would mean that the rebels and their allies issued fake attack warnings, produced propaganda videos to fool the West, and prepped “witnesses” with “evidence” to deceive investigators. Yet, no alarms went off about other rebel claims.

The Ghouta Incident

A more famous attack – with sarin gas on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on Aug. 21, 2013, killing hundreds – was also eagerly blamed on the Assad regime, as The New York Times, Human Rights Watch, Higgins’s Bellingcat and many other Western outlets jumped to that conclusion despite the unlikely circumstances. Assad had just welcomed U.N. investigators to Damascus to examine chemical attacks that he was blaming on the rebels.

Assad also was facing the “red line” threat from President Obama warning him of possible U.S. military intervention if the Syrian government deployed chemical weapons. Why Assad and his military would choose such a moment to launch a deadly sarin attack outside Damascus, killing mostly civilians, made little sense.

But this became another rush to judgment in the West that brought the Obama administration to the verge of launching a devastating air attack on the Syrian military that might have helped Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate and/or the Islamic State win the war.

Eventually, however, the case blaming Assad for the 2013 sarin attack collapsed.

An analysis by genuine weapons experts – such as Theodore Postol, an MIT professor of science, technology and national security policy, and Richard M. Lloyd, an analyst at the military contractor Tesla Laboratories – found that the missile that delivered the sarin had a very short range placing its likely firing position in rebel territory.

Later, reporting by journalist Seymour Hersh implicated Turkish intelligence working with jihadist rebels as the likely source of the sarin.

We also learned in 2016 that a message from the U.S. intelligence community had warned Obama how weak the evidence against Assad was. There was no “slam-dunk” proof, said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. And Obama cited his rejection of the Washington militaristic “playbook” to bomb Syria as one of his proudest moments as President.

With this background, there should have been extreme skepticism when jihadists and their allies made new claims about the Syrian government engaging in chemical weapons attacks. But there wasn’t.

The broader context for these biased investigations is that U.N. and OPCW investigators have been under intense pressure to confirm accusations against Syria and other targeted states.

Right now, the West is blaming Russia for the collapsing consensus behind U.N. investigations, but the problem really comes from Washington’s longtime strategy of coercing U.N. organizations into becoming propaganda arms for U.S. geopolitical strategies.

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney receive an Oval Office briefing from CIA Director George Tenet. Also present is Chief of Staff Andy Card (on right). (White House photo)

The U.N.’s relative independence in its investigative efforts was decisively broken early this century when President George W. Bush’s administration purged U.N. agencies that were not onboard with U.S. hegemony, especially on interventions in the Middle East.

Through manipulation of funding and selection of key staff members, the Bush administration engineered the takeover or at least the neutralizing of one U.N.-affiliated organization after another.

For instance, in 2002, Bush’s Deputy Under-Secretary of State John Bolton spearheaded the takeover of the OPCW as Bush planned to cite chemical weapons as a principal excuse for invading Iraq.

OPCW Director General Jose Mauricio Bustani was viewed as an obstacle because he was pressing Iraq to accept OPCW’s conventions for eliminating chemical weapons, which could have undermined Bush’s WMD rationale for war.

Though Bustani was just reelected to a new term, the Brazilian diplomat was forced out, to be followed in that job by more pliable bureaucrats, including the current Director General Ahmet Uzumcu of Turkey, who not only comes from a NATO country but served as Turkey’s ambassador to NATO and to Israel. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “U.N. Enablers of ‘Aggressive War.’”]

Since those days of the Iraq invasion, the game hasn’t changed. U.S. and other Western officials expect the U.N. and related agencies to accept or at least not object to Washington’s geopolitical interventions.

The only difference now is that Russia, one of the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council, is saying enough is enough – and Russia’s opposition to these biased inquiries is emerging as one more dangerous hot spot in the New Cold War.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

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GM Food Crops Illegally Growing in India: The Criminal Plan to Change the Genetic Core of the Nation’s Food System

November 10th, 2017 by Colin Todhunter

GM rice accounted for about a third of contamination cases, despite the fact there is officially no GM rice grown anywhere in the world. They also focused on cases of contamination arising from unauthorised GM crops: those without any authorisation for commercial growing anywhere in the world. Nine cases were discovered of GM contamination of these unauthorised (non-commercialised) GM crops that haven’t undergone any environmental or food safety analysis. The authors argue that once GM contamination has happened, it can be difficult to contain.

Don Westfall, biotech industry consultant and vice-president of Promar International back in 2001, was at the time quoted by the Toronto Star (9 January 2001) as saying that the hope of the GM industry is that over time the market is so flooded with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that there’s nothing you can do about it; you just sort of surrender.

It is not just a vague hope. It is an intentional strategy.

Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, is the most heavily-used agricultural chemical in history. (Photo: Mike Mozart/Flickr/cc)

GM wheat is not approved to be grown for commercial use in the US or anywhere else in the world. Yet in 2013, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that unapproved GM wheat had been found growing in an Oregon wheat field. Since 1994, Monsanto has conducted 279 field trials of Roundup Ready wheat over more than 4,000 acres of land in 16 US states. The USDA has admitted that Monsanto’s GMO experiments from 1998 to 2005 were held in open wheat fields. The GM wheat escaped and found its way into commercial wheat fields in Oregon (and possibly 15 other states), causing self-replicating genetic pollution that now taints the entire US wheat industry.

Prior to this, in 2006, the USDA granted marketing approval of GM Liberty Link 601 (Bayer CropScience) rice variety following its illegal contamination of the food supply and rice exports. The USDA effectively sanctioned an ‘approval-by-contamination’ policy.

The GMO agritech industry’s strategy has been to first spread seeds illegally or contaminate supplies and then obtain regulatory approval. It has not only happened in the US, but in India too.

Unremitting fraud in India to contamination by all means necessary

In India, four high-level reports have advised against the adoption of GM crops:

The ‘Jairam Ramesh Report’ of February 2010, imposing an indefinite moratorium on Bt Brinjal;
The ‘Sopory Committee Report’ [August 2012];
The ‘Parliamentary Standing Committee’ [PSC] Report on GM crops [August 2012]; and
The ‘Technical Expert Committee [TEC] Final Report’ [June-July 2013]).

These reports advocate this approach because the story of GM crops in India has thus far been a case of blatant violations of biosafety norms, hasty approvals, a lack of monitoring abilities, general apathy towards the hazards of contamination and a lack of institutional oversight mechanisms.

Despite these reports, the push to get GM mustard commercialised (which would be India’s first officially-approved GM food crop) has been relentless. The case is still held up in the Supreme Court even though the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) deemed it necessary to give it the nod.

This mustard is being undemocratically forced through with flawed tests or no tests and a lack of public scrutiny: in other words, unremitting scientific fraud and outright regulatory delinquency. This crop is also herbicide-tolerant (HT) (to be reliant on Bayer’s non-selective weedkiller Basta – glufinosate, a neurotoxin), which is wholly inappropriate for a country like India with its small biodiverse farms that could be affected by its application.

Despite the ban on GM cops, in 2005, prominent biologist Pushpa Bhargava alleged that there were reports that unapproved varieties of several GM crops were being sold to farmers in India. In 2008, Arun Shrivasatava wrote that illegal GM okra had been planted in India and poor farmers had been offered lucrative deals to plant ‘special seed’ of all sorts of vegetables.

In 2013, a group of scientists and NGOs protested in Kolkata and elsewhere against the introduction of transgenic brinjal in Bangladesh – a centre for origin and diversity of the vegetable – as it would give rise to contamination of the crop in India. As predicted, in 2014, the West Bengal government said it had received information regarding “infiltration” of commercial seeds of GM Bt brinjal from Bangladesh, which that country had gone ahead with commercial releasing.

At the time, Pradeep Majumdar, agriculture advisor to State Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, stated:

“Commercial seeds may have infiltrated… they might have been smuggled in. We have to ascertain the various effects of Bt brinjal on local indigenous species before taking any step else farmers will suffer.”

Bt brinjal had never undergone independent safety testing but the industry’s own tests show it is toxic.

In 2017, the illegal cultivation of a GM food crop – GM soyabean – which is HT, has been reported from Aravalli district in Gujarat. Bhartiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), a national farmers organisation, has claimed that Gujarat farmers have been cultivating HT crop illegally as there is no clearance from the government for any GM food crop. There are also reports of HT cotton illegally growing in India too, prompting calls for probes into the workings of the GEAC and other official bodies.

The Times of India reports BKS general secretary Badrinarayan Chaudhadry as saying:

“The HT soyabean was cultivated this year in three villages in the Modasa taluka in Aravalli district in Gujarat. The farmers produced three tonnes of the soyabean. Someone had given the farmers a buy back guarantee at four times the price of the soyabean in the market. This became the talk of the town and BKS came to know about it. We informed the state agriculture department which enquired into the issue and seized the seed material on Diwali day. The test results by government lab were found to be positive for the Roundup (glyphosate-the herbicide) of Monsanto.”

Chaudhary said that BKS had also alerted the GEAC, but the committee has taken no notice.

In the same report, Coalition for GM Free India (CGMFI) spokesperson Kavitha Kuruganti said that the regulators have been caught sleeping. She says that India’s first GM crop cultivation – Bt cotton – was discovered in 2001 growing on thousands of hectares in Gujarat, spread surreptitiously and illegally by the biotech industry. The GEAC was caught off-guard when news about large scale illegal cultivation of Bt cotton emerged, even as field trials that were to decide whether India would opt GM crops were still underway. In March 2002, the GEAC ended up approving Bt cotton for commercial cultivation in India. To this day, no liability was fixed for the illegal spread which presented a fait accompli to the regulators.

Once the GM genie is out of the bottle, there could no going back. The genetic core of food crops will have been irreversibly changed. Lead petitioner in the Supreme Court for a moratorium on GM crops Aruna Rodrigues says,

“This technology is a classic case of ‘unforeseeable systemic ruin’, which means that we will know we are ruined after it happens. As they say, the dead cannot make a comeback.”

The CGMFI says:

“The regulatory system in the country is in tatters. Incident after incident shows that with the current regulatory regime, citizens’ interests cannot be protected. If the regulators had acted decisively in the past with severe deterrence against illegal Bt cotton and later HT cotton cultivation and other illegal imports of GM foods, this situation could have been prevented. The government has to think of a serious overhaul of the entire set-up and significant improvements in the inter-agency coordination are required to ensure that no illegal GM cultivation or sales takes place in the country.”

It continues:

“GM HT soy cultivation in other countries is well documented to cause numerous problems–agri-chemical usage increase, soil health effects, impact on beneficial organisms like bees and monarch butterflies, health impacts from glyphosate used on the HT crop, increase in resistant ‘super weeds’, farmers caught in the trap of proprietary/patented treadmill technologies and decrease in yields. In India, the additional socio-economic issue of huge employment loss for poor agricultural household by the deployment of herbicide-tolerant seed technology is also an important matter of concern. Numerous official committees have repeatedly recommended against the introduction of such HT crops in the country, keeping all of this in mind.”

There are strong calls to make seed suppliers and regulators legally liable.

Certain pro-GMO activists want to celebrate the current state of affairs, saying that farmers have taken the decision to act in favour of GM crops in response to official dithering caused by the anti-GMO faction in India. This position says as much about their contempt for democracy and democratic procedures as it does for their ignorance of the reality of farming in India.

Professor Glenn Stone has noted where GM cotton has been concerned, any decision by farmers to plant GM seeds was not necessarily based on objective decision-making. There was no experimentation or the testing of seeds within agroecological contexts by farmers as has been the case traditionally. Farmers found themselves at the mercy of seed vendors who sold whatever seed they had in stock, regardless of what the farmers wanted. Without agricultural support services from trusted non-governmental organisations, farmers had to depend on local shopkeepers. They believed they were buying the latest and best seeds and created a rush on whatever supplies were available.

In other words, traditional knowledge, testing and evaluations by farmers in the field has been undermined or has broken down and seems to have given way to an unregulated industry-orchestrated free for all. All the more alarming now that we are dealing with HT crops and the possible runaway use of dangerous biocides.

Given the failure to win the debate on GM and the democratic pushback against this technology, isn’t the current situation what the GM agritech industry has wanted all along? After all, it wouldn’t be the first time that the not-so-hidden hand of powerful agri sector players has set out to profit from the destruction of Indian agriculture.

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South Korea’s Sunshine Policy: 80 Percent of South Koreans Support Peace and North-South Engagement

November 10th, 2017 by Tim Shorrock

With Donald Trump scheduled to address the South Korean parliament today, Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman spoke to Tim Shorrock, a veteran journalist who’s covered the Koreas for decades.

Shorrock describes how a vibrant South Korean left with roots in the labor and democracy movements of the 1980s is coping with the latest security threat in the White House. Despite a conservative military establishment with deep ties to the US security state, South Koreans are seeking dialogue with the North.

Seth Ackerman: Everyone focuses on Trump’s bluster on North Korea, but less attention is paid to how things are seen south of the demilitarized zone. What’s the mood in South Korea these days?

Tim Shorrock: According to one poll, 80 percent of South Koreans support South-North engagement: direct negotiations, talks on military issues, and family visitations. There’s enormous support for the kinds of cultural and economic exchanges that existed during the years of the “sunshine policy” of 1998 to 2008. They want peace with North Korea. That was the platform that Moon Jae-in, the current president, was elected on this spring.

South Koreans are more afraid of what Trump might do than what Kim Jong-un will do. They’re worried about a war between the US and North Korea that would spill over into South Korea.

For example, there were reports over the summer that Trump was considering a unilateral preemptive strike to take out two or three dozen missile sites in North Korea. That was very alarming to Moon Jae-in’s government.

The night that story came out, Moon’s national security advisor asked for a meeting with H. R. McMaster, his counterpart in the White House. They put out a statement the next day that the US will not act unilaterally and will consult closely with South Korea on any action. That was a sign of how much concern there is within the South Korean government.

A similar pledge was made just before Trump arrived in Seoul for his state visit.

SA: What’s Moon’s background?

TS: Moon was an activist who came out of the progressive democratic movement — a labor lawyer in Busan who was arrested at least twice during the period of military dictatorship. His political roots are in the democratic and opposition movement from the period before democratization.

I saw Moon campaign in Gwangju twice this spring. He held a photograph of his progressive predecessors as president, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, above his head, signaling that he was following in their footsteps.

Kim Dae-jung, the originator of the sunshine policy toward North Korea, had been an opposition leader who was almost murdered by Park Chung Hee in the 1970s and nearly executed a decade later by the Chun Doo-hwan military government. He then spent years in exile in the US, came back to Korea, and was eventually elected president in 1998.

So he’s the one who started that whole policy of détente with the North. His successor, Roh Moo-hyun, pursued it, too.

As Roh’s chief of staff, Moon went to North Korea for a summit with Kim Jong Il in 2007. The US did not like Roh at all because he was not 100 percent behind US military and strategic policies in Korea.

SA: What provoked last May’s snap election that brought Moon to power?

TS: The previous, right-wing president, Park Geun-hye, was impeached over corruption, including her relationship with some of the country’s largest conglomerates, like the Samsung Corporation.

She and her government completely botched the attempted rescue of a ferry that capsized near Jeju Island in 2014, and over three hundred high school students and their teachers died needlessly as a result. Everywhere you go in South Korea now, people still wear the yellow ribbons that signify solidarity with the victims and anger at the sheer incompetence of the Park government.

And then, of course, Park had a relationship with a shaman, a sort of guru, who was not part of the government but who was reading her papers and writing her speeches. She began to look like a wacko.

The so-called Candlelight Movement was launched in response, a series of demonstrations calling for her removal. It was very peaceful. People stood with candles weekend after weekend. During months of peaceful assembly, there wasn’t a single injury or arrest. Finally, the National Assembly voted to impeach. A lot of the charges were upheld by the Constitutional Court, and now she’s in jail. As of November, she was still in her cell as her trial continues. She wasn’t held in the Ritz-Carlton, like the Saudi billionaires who were just arrested in Saudi Arabia.

The demonstrations had been organized by a pretty broad-based cross-section of civic organizations and labor unions. I interviewed Moon Jae-In two days before his election, at a time when he was way ahead in the polls. He told me his expected election win was a continuation of the democratic movement that started in 1960 with the revolution against Syngman Rhee, running through the 1980 Gwangju uprising, and now the Candlelight Movement. So there was a lot of hope connected with him.

Probably the most serious issue facing workers now is youth unemployment and underemployment. Fifty percent of laborers are classified as precarious workers. They don’t have full-time jobs. They’re hired by contract, they don’t have benefits.

The first thing Moon did as president was to go to Incheon Airport, where there are precarious workers employed by the government; he went to show solidarity and to say that the public sector should begin reforms by ending the system of precarious labor. Unions that backed him had made precarious work their number one issue in the elections, and appreciated that act.

SA: Does the labor movement tend to take a more dialogue-oriented approach to North Korea?

TS: There are two big federations. The KCTU (Korean Confederation of Trade Unions) grew out of the democratic and labor movements of the 1980s and was based on a CIO style of organizing. In the late 1980s there was a whole series of organizing drives in heavy industry where a lot of these big conglomerates like Samsung had previously kept unions out.

So the KCTU organized industrial unions, and they’ve been very aggressive about organizing temporary workers. On foreign policy, the KCTU has been at the forefront against war. They’ve actually had soccer tournaments with North Korean labor unions.

The FKTU (Federation of Korean Trade Unions) represents hotel workers and transport workers. They’re less assertive in terms of foreign policy, closer to the AFL-CIO’s way of not tackling foreign policy. In fact, a relationship has existed between the AFL-CIO and FKTU for decades,whereas relations between the KCTU and AFL-CIO have been shaky.

Though they’ve improved in recent years: at the last AFL-CIO convention, the KCTU president Han Sung-gyun, who’s been in prison since December 2015 for organizing what the Park government called an “illegal” labor demonstration, was honored by US unions with its human rights award.

SA: Is there anything South Korea can do to make it harder for the Trump administration to pursue its hardline policies toward the North?

TS: Moon is adamant that he wants diplomacy to work and that there cannot be another Korean War. He says it again and again. If Trump hasn’t heard it, H. R. McMaster and James Mattis have.

People in South Korea think Moon should be doing a lot more. But South Korea is the only country in the world where a foreign general is in charge during times of war. There’s a joint US-South Korean command structure and in wartime, it falls under the command of a US general. So if there was a war today, the entire Korean military would be under US command.

These relationships go back six or seven decades. They exist between every branch and every level of the US and South Korean militaries. And Korean military leaders tend to be more conservative — that’s who the US interacts with.

I think when Trump goes to Korea we’re going to see huge demonstrations. There’s going to be a big labor mobilization over the issue of temporary workers — there’s been an attack on collective bargaining there for quite a few years, so the protest will be focused on strengthening workers’ rights and labor rights along with lessening the power of the big conglomerates.

The American left needs to expand relationships with South Korea. They have really vibrant unions, a really vibrant civil society. The large coalitions are really something. Americans on the Left ought to pay more attention to what’s going on there. I mean, here we are trying to get rid of a corrupt, racist president, and we have a lesson right in front of us in how to do it. It requires persistence and organizing, week after week, month after month.

***

Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based investigative journalist and the author of Spies for Hire. He’s covered the Korean peninsula for several decades.

Seth Ackerman is on the editorial board of Jacobin and a doctoral candidate in history at Cornell.

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Councils in UK Invest £16.1 Billion in Fossil Fuels.

November 10th, 2017 by Brendan Montague

Featured image: This summer wildfires have ravaged southern Europe including this one in Portugal (c) Fossil Free UK

Councils across Britain invest £16.1 billion of their workers’ pensions into companies that extract coal, oil and gas, fueling dangerous climate change, according to research published today.

The new data reveals that UK local government pensions are financially invested in the industry most responsible for climate change. It has been released to conincide with the COP23 United Nations meeting in Bonn held to discuss progress on Paris Agreement climate goals.

The data and online map released by 350.org, Platform, Energy Democracy Project, and Friends of the Earth ranks councils by their fossil fuel investments, and allows residents to see every company or fund their local council has invested into.

Divest their pensions

Investments in fossil fuels have gone up in real terms (from £14bn) and did not change significantly in proportion to the size of the pension funds, when compared to 2015 data.

These figures show that councils have not made any significant changes to their investments in response to calls from the climate movement, governments, and shareholders to take climate risk into account, in the two years since the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Jane Thewlis, West Yorkshire Pension Fund member and divestment campaigner, said:

“Our pensions are investing in the companies responsible for the climate crisis. This flies in the face of the Paris Agreement, and of all the efforts being made locally to reduce emissions and combat climate change. It’s time to divest.”

George Guivalu Nacewa, Fiji Climate Warrior attending the COP23 talks in Bonn, said:

“In the Pacific, the impacts of climate change are not a debate, it is our reality. We need to keep fossil fuels in the ground. We no longer have time to talk. Now is the time to act.”

Several councils have already committed to divest their pensions from fossil fuels, among them Waltham Forest.

Solar farm

Councilor Simon Miller, the cabinet member for economic growth and previously of the pension fund, said:

“I am proud that Waltham Forest has committed to divest from fossil fuels.

“Given current pressures on Local Authority budgets, our pension funds have a key role to play, not only in making our economy greener and our communities healthier, but as driver of sustainable, future focused investment in local areas.“

Furhter, Strathclyde Pension Fund has invested £10 million in Albion Community Power, who own hydro stations with capacity to power 4,000 homes.

Falkirk Pension Fund has provided £30 million for a major programme of 190 new homes, including council housing, in the Forth Valley.

Lancashire County Council has invested £12 million into Westmill Solar Co-operative, a community owned solar farm.

Cleaner, safer future

Unison is represented on the boards of a number of the council pension funds. In June this year the largest trade union representing local government workers in the country passed policy to “seek divestment of Local Government Pension Schemes from fossil fuels over five years giving due regard to fiduciary duty”.

Sarah Shoraka, a Platform campaigner said:

“Local councils are gambling with our future. By continuing to heavily invest in companies like BP and Shell, local authorities are risking the future of our pensions and our climate.

“Council pension funds have an opportunity to invest instead in things communities really need: affordable housing, public transport, and publicly owned renewable energy. Councils must divest to secure pensions and invest in our future.”

Deirdre Duff, a Friends of the Earth divestment campaigner, said:

“It’s astonishing that councils across the UK are continuing to invest vast sums of money in climate-wrecking fossil fuels through their pension funds.

“With urgent action needed to tackle the climate change crisis our local authorities should be doing far more on this issue. Council pension funds should pull their cash out of coal, gas and oil and invest in the new technologies that are already helping to build a cleaner, safer future.”

Public institutions

Ellen Gibson, Divestment Campaigner with 350.org said:

“With hurricanes devastating the Caribbean, wildfires ravaging southern Europe and flooding and drought destroying lives across the world – the impacts of climate change are hitting hard.

Despite this, UK councils are still plowing billions into companies like Exxon, Shell and BP who have spent decades fuelling the crisis, and profiting on its back.

Climate change isn’t a problem for future generations – it’s happening now, and action has never been more urgent. Our councils, and all public institutions, must cut their ties with the fossil fuel companies responsible and divest.”

The first Fossil Free campaigns in Europe kicked off in autumn 2013. Since then, over 250 campaigns are underway in the UK, Germany, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Finland and other countries.

Brendan Montague is Editor of The Ecologist website. He Tweets at @EcoMontague.

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Is Hillary Just the “Fall Guy” for the Intel Agencies and Their Moneybag Bosses?

November 10th, 2017 by Mike Whitney

For nearly a year, Hillary Clinton failed to admit that her campaign and the Democratic National Committee had provided funding for the notorious dossier that alleged Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election. Then, two weeks ago, the Washington Post published a blockbuster article that proved that Clinton had been misleading the public about her Campaign’s role in producing the report. Here’s a snippet from the article in the Post:

“The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.”

Following the article’s publication, Clinton went into hiding for more than a week during which time she huddled with her political advisors to settle on a strategy for dealing with the crisis. On Wednesday, she resurfaced on the Daily Show where she was treated with kid gloves; no hardball questions were asked and she was given plenty of time to recite her prepared remarks without challenge. Naturally, she downplayed her role in contributing to the year-long “hacking-collusion” investigation that has tied up both Houses of Congress, implicated the nation’s main law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and deepened divisions between Washington and Moscow. Here’s part of what Hillary said in the interview:

“When Trump got the nomination of the Republican Party, the people ‘doing it’ (gathering raw intelligence for the dossier) came to my campaign lawyer, and said, would you like us to continue it. He said ‘Yes’. He is an experienced lawyer and knows what the law is. He knows what opposition research is. It’s part of what happens in a campaign where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try make sure anything you put out in public arena is accurate. So this thing didn’t come out until after the election and its’ still being evaluated.”

Clinton wasn’t asked why her campaign tried to obfuscate their role in financing the dossier or whether she felt any remorse for the way the Russia hacking allegations had ballooned into 4 major investigations on Capitol Hill. She wasn’t even asked to comment on the motives of the people who continued to fund the dossier after the DNC terminated their contract in November 2016. Wasn’t she suspicious that these new financiers might have more nefarious objectives in mind, after all, who continues a smear campaign after the election is over, unless, of course, they intend to inflict even more damage on the two main targets, Trump and Russia? Wouldn’t Hillary have figured that out?

Technically speaking, Clinton was right, it was opposition research, which in political parlance means ‘digging up dirt on one’s opponent.” And, yes, it is perfectly legal. But the Trump dossier was much more than that. It was presented as the work of intelligence professionals who were unattached to any political organization. Had the public known that the dossier was financed by the Clinton campaign, they would have known that it was a “malicious and defamatory” hit-piece aimed at improving Clinton’s chances of winning the election.

And when Hillary opines that the dossier was not released before the election, it is certainly not from lack of trying. Her colleagues made every effort to shop the piece to their friends in the media before the balloting, but all of them backed away. The report was simply too lurid and far-fetched to be believed. (In October, just weeks before the election, former M16 agent, Christopher Steele, who authored the dossier, met with reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yahoo News.)

The Democrat leaders have not won any friends in the media by concealing their support for the dossier. According to an article at The Hill:

“The New York Times senior White House correspondent Maggie Haberman and reporter Kenneth Vogel are slamming Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), saying they lied about funding for the so-called Trump dossier….

“Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year,” Haberman tweeted to her more than 650,000 followers on Tuesday….

(NYT journalist Kenneth Vogel offered this comment on Twitter) “When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong,’ ” Vogel tweeted, referring to Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias. (“New York Times reporters blast Dems over Trump dossier funding claims”, The Hill)

Clearly, Clinton did not want the American people to know the real origins of the dossier for fear that they would dismiss its findings as politically-motivated and unreliable. So they lied, and by lying, they helped to fuel the anti-Russia hysteria that’s swept across the country sabotaging any chance for rapprochement between the two nuclear-armed superpowers.

But, why? Why would Hillary persist with the “hacking-collusion” meme after she had already lost the election and had nothing to gain by smearing Trump?

That’s not a question that can be easily answered, but I suspect it has less to do with Hillary’s presidential ambitions than it does with the way her campaign found common cause with powerful members of the intelligence community who wanted to use the hacking narrative to pursue their own geopolitical strategy of isolating, punishing and demonizing Russia. “Russian meddling” became the perfect rallying cry for the CIA’s broader information operation (IO) that was designed to poison public opinion against “Russian aggression” and to reign in Trump’s plans to normalize relations with Moscow. The fact that the CIA had essentially extracted a credible narrative from sections of the notorious dossier, left Hillary with no other option except to play-along even after the votes had been counted. As a result, Clinton became the “fall guy” in a darker, deep-state propaganda campaign for which she is only partially responsible. Here’s a little background from Joe Lauria’s “must read” article “The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate”:

“…the Steele dossier was shared with the FBI at some point in the summer of 2016 and apparently became the basis for the FBI to seek Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against members of Trump’s campaign. More alarmingly, it may have formed the basis for much of the Jan. 6 intelligence “assessment” by those “hand-picked” analysts from three U.S. intelligence agencies – the CIA, the FBI and the NSA – not all 17 agencies that Hillary Clinton continues to insist were involved….

If in fact the Steele memos were a primary basis for the Russia collusion allegations against Trump, then there may be no credible evidence at all.” (Consortium News)

So, were “the Steele memos the primary basis for the Russia collusion allegations against Trump”? This is the pivotal question that still remains largely unanswered. As Lauria notes, the FBI did in fact use the “salacious and unverified” dossier to obtain at least one FISA warrant. This is from The Hill:

“The FBI used the dossier alleging Russian ties to President Trump’s campaign associates to help convince a judge to grant a warrant to secretly monitor former campaign aide Carter Page, CNN reports.

FBI Director James Comey has cited the dossier in some of his briefings with lawmakers in recent weeks as one of the information sources used by his bureau to bolster its probe, U.S. officials briefed on the investigation told CNN.” (“FBI used Trump dossier to help get warrant to monitor ex-aide: report”, The Hill)

The article proves that the nation’s premier law enforcement agency was using parts of a discredited “raw intelligence” report that was paid for by the DNC and was clearly commissioned as a part of a smear campaign– to spy on members of the opposition party. Clearly, one could easily make the case that the FBI was abusing its extraordinary police-state powers to subvert the democratic process.

The FBI, under James Comey, also attempted to use agent Steele for future research but abandoned the idea after parts of the dossier began to surface in the media making it politically impossible to maintain the relationship. This is from a February article in the Washington Post:

“The former British spy who authored a controversial dossier on behalf of Donald Trump’s political opponents alleging ties between Trump and Russia reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work, according to several people familiar with the arrangement. The agreement to compensate former MI6 agent Christopher Steele came as U.S. intelligence agencies reached a consensus that the Russians had interfered in the presidential election by orchestrating hacks of Democratic Party email accounts…..

Ultimately, the FBI did not pay Steele. Communications between the bureau and the former spy were interrupted as Steele’s now-famous dossier became the subject of news stories, congressional inquiries and presidential denials, according to the people familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.” (“FBI once planned to pay former British spy who authored controversial Trump dossier”, Washington Post)

The fact that the FBI was willing to build its investigation on the sensational and unverified claims in the DNC-bought-and-paid-for dossier, suggests that the real motive was not to reveal collusion between Trump and Moscow or even to uncover evidence related to the hacking claims. The real goal was to vilify Russia and derail Trump’s efforts at détente.

It’s also worth noting , that Steele’s earliest report implausibly alleges that the “Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US presidential candidate Trump for at least 5 years.” (No one had any idea that Trump would run for president 5 years ago.) The report also details perverted sexual acts involving Trump and urinating prostitutes in a hotel in Moscow. (All fake, of course) The point we are trying to make, is that Steele’s first report focused on corruption, perversion and blackmail, whereas, his second installment completely changed direction to cyber-espionage operations on foreign targets.

Why?

It was because, on July 22, 2016, just days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published 20,000 emails hacked from DNC computers revealing the corrupt inner-workings of the Democratic establishment. In response, Steele decided to craft a story that would support the Dems plan to blame the Russians for the moral cesspit they-alone had created. In other words, his report was a way of “passing the buck”.

Steele’s July report helped to prop up the threadbare “hacking” storyline that was further reinforced by the dubious cyber-forensic analysis of DNC servers performed by CrowdStrike, “a private company co-founded by a virulently anti-Putin Russian.”

The hacking theme was also aided by the deluge of unsourced, evidence-lite articles cropping up in the media, like this gem in the Washington Post:

“Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.

The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.

The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies…” (“Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump”, Washington Post)

What’s remarkable about the above excerpt is that it follows the same basic approach to propaganda as nearly all the other pieces on the topic. Unlike the lead-up to the Iraq War, where journalists at the New York Times made every effort to create a believable storyline that included references to aluminum tubes, Niger uranium, mobile weapons labs, etc. The media no longer tries to support their narrative with evidence or eyewitnesses. The major media now simply tells people what they want them to think and leave it at that. Even so, it doesn’t require much critical thinking to see the holes in the Russia hacking story. One merely needs to suspend judgment long enough to see that main claims all emerge from (Democratic) sources who have every reason to mislead the public. Here’s an excerpt from Joe Lauria’s article that sums it up perfectly:

“The two sources that originated the allegations claiming that Russia meddled in the 2016 election…were both paid for by the Democratic National Committee, and in one instance also by the Clinton campaign: the Steele dossier and the CrowdStrike analysis of the DNC servers.

Think about that for a minute….

In other words, possibly all of the Russia-gate allegations, which have been taken on faith by Democratic partisans and members of the anti-Trump Resistance, trace back to claims paid for or generated by Democrats.

If for a moment one could remove the sometimes justified hatred that many people feel toward Trump, it would be impossible to avoid the impression that the scandal may have been cooked up by the DNC and the Clinton camp in league with Obama’s intelligence chiefs to serve political and geopolitical aims.” (“The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate”, Consortium News)

Russia-gate is entirely a Democratic Party invention. Both sources of information (Crowdstrike and Steele) were chosen by members of the Democratic hierarchy (through their intermediaries) to create stories that coincided with their political objectives. Due to the obvious bias of the people who funded the operations, neither the methods nor the information can be trusted. But that’s just part of the story. The bigger story relates to the role played by the nation’s premier intelligence and law enforcement agencies. And that’s where we see signs of institutional corruption on a truly colossal scale.

As we noted earlier, the Clinton smear campaign would probably have ended after the votes were counted had not the intel agencies, particularly the CIA, decided the hacking story could be used to inflict more damage on Russia. It wasn’t Clinton’s decision to gather more information for the dossier, but others whose motives have remained largely concealed. Who are they?

According to a timeline in the Daily Caller:

November: The contract between the Democrats, Fusion and Steele ends along with the presidential campaign.

Nov. 18: Arizona Sen. John McCain and a former assistant, David Kramer, are told about the existence of the dossier by an associate of Steele’s, former British diplomat Sir Andrew Wood. Kramer travels to London later that month to meet with Steele and find out more about the dossier. Steele forwards a copy of the dossier to Fusion, Kramer and McCain.

Dec. 9: McCain provides a copy of the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey during a meeting at the latter’s office.

Dec. 13: Steele writes the final memo of the dossier. It alleges that a Russian tech executive used his companies to hack into the DNC’s email systems. The executive, Aleksej Gubarev, denied the allegations after the dossier was published by BuzzFeed on Jan. 10, 2017. He is suing both BuzzFeed and Steele.

Jan. 6: Comey and other intelligence community officials brief then-President-elect Trump on some of the allegations made in the dossier.

Jan. 10: CNN reports that the briefing of Trump took place four days earlier. Citing that reporting as justification, BuzzFeed publishes the dossier. (The Daily Mail)

John McCain? Is that who we’re talking about? Was it McCain who paid former M16 agent Christopher Steele to add another report to the dossier? Why?

Is it that hard to imagine that a Russophobic foreign policy wonk like McCain– who has expressed his vehement hatred for Vladimir Putin on the floor of the senate– would hire a mud-slinging free agent like Steele to craft a story that would further demonize Russia, discourage Trump from normalizing relations with Moscow, and reinforce the theory that the Kremlin meddled in the 2016 elections?

Does that mean that McCain may have told Steele (or his intermediaries) precisely what he wanted the final draft to say?

It certainly seems probable. And here’s something else to mull over. This is from the Business Insider:

Steele …gave the dossier to Republican Sen. John McCain. McCain then gave it to the FBI director at the time, James Comey. Comey, along with the former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, briefed both President Barack Obama and then-President elect Trump on the dossier’s allegations in January.

Intelligence officials purposefully omitted the dossier from the public intelligence report they released in January about Russia’s election interference because they didn’t want to reveal which details they had corroborated, according to CNN.” (“Mueller reportedly interviewed the author of the Trump-Russia dossier — here’s what it alleges, and how it aligned with reality”, Business Insider)

This is a damning admission that the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that was released on January 6, and was supposed to provide rock-solid proof of Russia hacking and collusion, was built (at least, in part) on the thin gruel and specious allegations found in the sketchy “Trump dossier”. Former CIA Director John Brennan has refuted this claim, but there’s significant circumstantial evidence to suggest that it is true.

On December 9, 2016, The Washington Post reported that the CIA determined that Russian hacking was conducted to boost Trump and hurt Clinton during the presidential campaign. This same theory that was propounded in the ICA report just a month later. It appears that Brennan and his “hand-picked” intelligence analysts decided to carefully comb the dossier cherry-picking the most credible allegations to weave into their dubious intelligence Assessment. So even though large sections of the dossier were scrapped, the report itself was used as the foundation for the ICA.

Brennan spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign from the get-go. As early as August 2016, Brennan was providing classified briefings to ranking members of Congress expressing his conviction that Moscow was helping Trump to win the election. The former Director offered no proof to back up his claims nor has he since then. It was also Brennan who gradually persuaded Clapper, Comey and Morrell to join his anti-Russia jihad, although all were reluctant participants at first. Were they won over by compelling secret evidence that has been been withheld from the public?

Not likely. It’s more probable that Brennan was merely able to convince them that the powerful foreign policy establishment required their cooperation on an issue that would have grave impact on Washington’s imperial plan for Syria, Ukraine, Central Asia and beyond?

Some readers might remember when Brennan testified before Congress way-back on May 23 and boldly stated:

BRENNAN: “I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals and it raised questions in my mind, again, whether or not the Russians were able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.”

It’s clear that Brennan had no “information or intelligence” that would lead a reasonable man to think that anyone in Trump’s entourage was colluding with Russian officials or agents. The whole story is spun from whole cloth. The disturbing implication however is that Brennan, who was an outspoken supporter of Hillary and equally harsh critic of Trump, was using the CIA’s intrusive surveillance powers to spy on a rival political party in the heat of a presidential campaign. If that is not a flagrant example of subverting democracy, then what is? Here’s a clip from the Washington Times:

“It was then-CIA Director John O. Brennan, a close confidant of Mr. Obama’s, who provided the information — what he termed the “basis” — for the FBI to start the counterintelligence investigation last summer….Mr. Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee on May 23 that the intelligence community was picking up tidbits on Trump associates making contacts with Russians…

But he said he believed the contacts were numerous enough to alert the FBI, which began its probe into Trump associates that same July, according to previous congressional testimony from then-FBI director James B. Comey.” (The Washington Times)

It all started with Brennan, he’s the ringleader in this dodgy caper. But Brennan was not operating as a free agent pursuing his own malign political agenda, but as a strong-arm facilitator for the powerful foreign policy establishment which includes leaders from Big Oil, Wall Street, and the giant weapons manufacturers. These are the corporate mandarins who pull Brennan’s chain and give Brennan his marching orders. This is how power trickles down in America.

So while the moneytrail may lead back to the DNC and Hillary’s Campaign, the roots of Russia-gate extend far beyond the politicians to the highest-ranking members of the permanent state.

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 the author.

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US, Sweden, Finland Launch New Format Talks: Dancing to Washington’s Tune

November 10th, 2017 by Peter Korzun

US Defense Secretary James Mattis visited Helsinki on Nov. 6-7 to attend a meeting of the Northern Group, a multilateral forum of 12 countries: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Before the event, the secretary was received by Finnish President Sauli Niinistö and then met his counterparts from Sweden and Finland. This is the first time a US Defense Secretary held talks in this format. Looks like the tripartite format talks are going to become a regular event as a similar meeting was announced to be planned for 2018.

Finnish Defense Minister Jussi Niinistö explained that the goal of this format was meant to supplement, rather than replace, Finnish and Swedish bilateral relations with Washington. According to him, no new alliance is being built despite the expanded military cooperation with the United States. The minister also invited the US military to participate in large-scale military drills in 2020 or 2021. According to him, Finland started preparations for a major military exercise of a scale it had not arranged since the end of the Cold War.

“If there’s a crisis, it will be good for us to practice receiving help,” Jussi Niinistö said.

Formally a neutral country, Finland is offering a scenario which envisages receiving US-led NATO reinforcements, like if it were a full-fledged member of the North Atlantic Alliance to be defended in accordance with Article 5 of the Washington Treaty!

Erkki Tuomioja, a former foreign minister and member of the Social Democrat Party, said he believes the defense minister is skirting parliamentary procedures in pushing to host such a large exercise and that he intends to oppose the drills.

A poll published on Nov.5 suggested 59 percent of Finns are opposed to NATO membership. Only 22 percent support the idea. Finland is to hold presidential election on January 28, 2018. None of the current presidential candidates support NATO membership except for Nils Torvalds of the Swedish People’s Party, who is polling a meager 1 percent. Sauli Niinistö, the incumbent who enjoys 76 percent support ahead of the election, has pushed to keep the prospect of NATO membership open to be backed by a majority of Finns, possibly via a referendum. But Finnish Defense Minister Jussi Niinistö keeps on stubbornly pushing his country into NATO’s arms without taking political reality into consideration.

He also said that cooperation to combat hybrid warfare was a priority item on the agenda. The term hybrid warfare is used in the West to label Russia. The Helsinki-based hybrid threat center – the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats – commenced its operation on Oct.4. 11 European governments plus the United States have joined forces to build it. Similar centers exist in other countries but this one is the first to link NATO with the auspices of the EU. Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said the center is a sign that the two organizations are cooperating at “an unprecedented level,” as evidenced by Finland, an EU country that is not a NATO member, being the host.

Swedish Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist, a tripartite talks participant, sent a very important security policy message. Following the meeting with Mattis, the Swedish defense chief informed the parliamentary defense committee that the government had chosen the US missile system Patriot as a replacement for the current outdated defense Robot System 97. The idea is to equip Sweden’s two air defense battalions with Patriot missiles until 2025. Sweden — Finland’s closest military ally and another non-NATO member — remilitarized the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea for the first time since the end of the Cold War and reintroduced conscription, among other things, to gradually move the country to war footing.

Some US-NATO deployments take place in the region for the first time ever. For instance, Baltops-2016 was the first NATO exercise to be held on Finnish territory. In September, US military made their first appearance on Swedish soil during the Aurora 17 military drills, the country’s largest training event in decades. Norway, a NATO member, welcomed an extended deployment of US Marines in June. It’s the first time a foreign force had been posted on Norwegian soil since World War II. Thus, Norway has actually shifted from the “no foreign forces on national soil” true-and-tried policy with political implications to follow. The Marines also have large stockpiles of tanks, artillery and other weaponry, which fill a network of caves. The equipment can accommodate roughly 14,000 troops, or a full Marine Expeditionary Brigade.

In June, Sweden and Finland joined the United Kingdom-led Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) – a rapidly deployable unit capable of conducting the full spectrum of NATO operations.

The countries of Northern Europe, including non-NATO Sweden and Finland, support the Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO, to pull together at least 20 EU countries in jointly planning, developing and coordinating weapons and equipment for military. The initiative is complementary to the operations of NATO. According to the Financial Times, more than half the EU’s member states are expected to sign up within days to a landmark joint defence effort at a meeting of European foreign and defence ministers on November 13 and launch the project in December.

The militarization of Northern Europe rarely hits headlines, but a look at the facts shows the trend is gaining momentum. It does not go unnoticed in Russia, prompting it to take appropriate measures. The recent Zapad exercise is an example. There is little wonder that Russia is concerned about the growing US influence in Northern Europe. After all, Russia belongs to the region, while the United States has no territorial or any other justification for its military presence there.

There will be a reaction if Sweden or Finland joins the North Atlantic Alliance. Even without formal membership, there is very little space between “being in NATO” and “being outside the alliance.” Evidently, no such thing as military neutrality on the Scandinavian Peninsula exists anymore to make the abovementioned countries priority targets for Russian response in case a military conflict sparks. Russia did not start it but it has to react as the countries of the region appear to abandon traditional good neighbor policies in favor of dancing to US tune.

Peter Korzun is an expert on wars and conflicts.

Featured image is from the author.

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NATO Wants Europe’s Civilian Infrastructure Ready for War with Russia

November 10th, 2017 by RT News

Defense ministers from the 29 NATO states arrived in Brussels to begin discussions on a “revision” of the NATO Command Structure. What is envisioned is a new command to protect sea lines between North America and Europe, and another to “improve the movement of troops and equipment within Europe.”

Stoltenberg believes that a revision of NATO’s structure is necessary to tackle the alleged threat from Russia. Thus, for the purpose of “deterrence and collective defense,” the alliance wants European roads to be ready to handle the rapid mobilization of tanks, artillery and the like.

“This is not only about commands. We also need to ensure that roads and bridges are strong enough to take our largest vehicles, and that rail networks are equipped for the rapid deployment of tanks and heavy equipment,” Stoltenberg said Tuesday at the pre-ministerial press conference. “NATO has military requirements for civilian infrastructure, and we need to update these to ensure that current military needs are taken into account.”

NATO hopes that national governments and the private sector will cooperate to take the measures necessary, emphasizing that the European Union has an “important role to play.”

While troop and equipment movement across Europe will be demarcated, the proposed Atlantic Command, Stoltenberg believes, would strengthen the military bloc’s “ability to protect the sea lines which are so critical for a transatlantic alliance.”

‘Biggest NATO deployment since Cold War’: Hundreds of British battle tanks arrive in Estonia https://t.co/5JyBJ42QE4 pic.twitter.com/pI1CRgb8EZ

— RT (@RT_com) April 6, 2017

“We have to be able to move forces, troops, across the Atlantic from North America to Europe. And it will include a command which is focused on and responsible for the movement of troops within Europe, which is of course also of a great importance,” Stoltenberg said.

German tanks arrive in #Lithuania for #NATO deployment https://t.co/Z5nxyIPfoR pic.twitter.com/O7KdlH1ZRS

— RT (@RT_com) February 25, 2017

NATO currently has seven commands with a total of some 7,000 personnel, compared with 33 and 22,000 respectively at the height of the Cold War. Stoltenberg argued that the new structure is needed to adapt to NATO’s reality in the present security climate.

“We have been very focused on out-of-area expeditionary military operations, now we have to continue to be focused on expeditionary operations but at the same time increase the focus on collective defense in Europe, and that’s the reason why we are adopting the command structure,” Stoltenberg explained.

It is also hoped that there will be the possibility of integrating into the cyber domain. “In every military operation, in any foreseeable possible military mission or operation of NATO, there will be a cyber component, so cyber is more and more integrated into everything we do and therefore we will also discuss how we can strengthen… the cyber element” the secretary general said.

Russia has yet to comment on the proposed changes. Moscow, though, has repeatedly voiced concerns over NATO’s buildup on Russia’s borders, which has accelerated in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis. Late last month, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said Moscow needs to be mindful of its western borders.

“We’re implementing a set of measures to neutralize the emerging challenges and threats,” Shoigu said.

He added that the Western Military District will receive more than 1,800 pieces of new and modernized hardware by the end of this year.

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Bombshell: Qatar’s Former Prime Minister Says US Funded ISIS

November 10th, 2017 by Free West Media

The explosive interview is a “public admission to collusion and coordination between four countries to destabilise an independent state, [including] possible support for Nusra/al-Qaeda,” by former Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani.

Al-Thani oversaw operations against Syria on behalf of Qatar until 2013. He confirmed that Gulf nations were arming jihadists in Syria with the approval and support of the US and Turkey:

“I don’t want to go into details but we have full documents about us taking charge [in Syria].”

He added that both Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah – who ruled until his death in 2015 – and the United States had given Qatar a leading role in running covert operations for the proxy war in Syria.

“The former prime minister’s comments, while very revealing, were intended as a defense and excuse of Qatar’s support for terrorism, and as a critique of the US and Saudi Arabia for essentially leaving Qatar ‘holding the bag’ in terms of the war against Assad.

“Al-Thani explained that Qatar continued its financing of armed insurgents in Syria while other countries eventually wound down large-scale support, which is why he lashed out at the US and the Saudis, who initially ‘were with us in the same trench,’” Zero Hedge reported on October 29.

The US officials who were in charge at that time, namely President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have remained silent about the allegations.

The Qatari bombshell has been ignored by the American mainstream media. In fact, not a single major outlet in the United States ran the story, except the Ron Paul Institute.

In August 2016 Donald Trump accused Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton of being respectively the “founder” and “co-founder” of ISIS. His accusations caused outrage across the media and political world.

Supposedly “neutral” fact-checkers quickly all denounced Trump as “false,” (FactCheck.org), flirting with “conspiracy theories,” (Snopes) and outright lying as in “pants on fire” (PolitiFact).

But the charge is not new. Money and weapons were being funneled to jihadists when Hillary was Secretary of State in 2012, according to Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) memo, towards the creation of a “salafist principality,” that became ISIS in 2013.

In 2015, subject to a FOIA request from Judicial Watch, an August 2012 DIA report was made public. It specified that outside support for jihadist forces fighting against the Syrian government created the “possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist [radical Islamic terrorist] principality in Eastern Syria”.

The money and support to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the Muslim Brotherhood was exactly what their US handlers had wanted in order to isolate the Syrian regime.

General Michael Flynn, formerly DIA director and former advisor to president Trump, commented that the rise of what became ISIS was not a result of turning a “blind eye” but of a “willful decision” in 2015 already. Flynn told Al Jazeera:

“I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.”

Meanwhile the “fact-checkers” have all ignored efforts to point out their erroneous “facts” denying the funding of ISIS by the US administration.

Featured image is from Free West Media.

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U.K. Secretary Priti Patel Resigns – Israel Lobby Mourns the Loss of a Valuable British Asset

November 10th, 2017 by Moon of Alabama

A British Minister of Hindu heritage was fired after it emerged that she secretly met Israeli officials in Israel and elsewhere without informing the Foreign Office. Back in Britain she then tried to arrange additional finances for Israel’s arming of al-Qaeda in the Golan heights. The affair shines light on the nefarious influence of the Israel lobby on British politics.

Priti Patel was International Development Secretary, responsible for British aid to various countries and organizations. She is a Thatcherite Conservative, a vocal supporter of Britain’s exit from the European Union and of Hindu fascism in India:

She has been a strong cheerleader of the Narendra Modi government, publicly praising a number of its policies including demonetisation.

In August Patel went on a “family holiday” to Israel. Instead of enjoying the beach she met dozens of Israeli officials from Prime Minister Netanyahoo down to the heads of Zionist aid organizations. She was shepherded by one Lord Polak, a long time Israel lobbyist in British politics. Polak accompanied her to every meeting. None of these were disclosed to the British Embassy, the Foreign Office or Downing Street. Cabinet rules demand that all such meetings are coordinated and briefed through these official channels.

Stuart Polak is a major character in Zionist lobbying in Britain:

Ennobled by David Cameron two years ago, Lord Polak is a veteran of Westminster’s corridors of power. He has taken literally hundreds of Tory MPs to Israel over the years, educating them about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and securing their support in parliamentary votes and the public arena.Under his guidance, CFI became the biggest lobbying group in Westminster, holding lunches for 700 guests, making countless Downing Street visits, and developing contacts throughout Israel and the Middle East.

Polak fled when the media tried to question him about his Israel visit arrangements for Patel.

One of Patel’s meetings was at an army hospital in the Israel occupied Syrian Golan heights where the Israeli military patches up al-Qaeda Jihadis which were wounded while fighting the Syrian government. Only last week the Israeli army in the occupied Golan supported a murderous attack of al-Qaeda Jihadis on the Syrian Druze village of Hader in the Quneitra area. The Jihadis in the Golan are surrounded by Syrian government forces. Their only supply line is through Israel occupied land. Druze in Israel who protested against the attack were arrested.

Back in Britain Priti Patel asked her department to move British aid money from Palestinian causes to the Israeli military operation in the occupied Golan. (Funny how the Guardian in its wrap-up fails to mention that point …)

Additionally to her busy holiday, Priti Patel had two other meetings with Israeli officials which she similarly did not disclose.

When it became clear yesterday that Priti Patel’s behavior would cost her her job, the British Zionist lobby launched a rescue attempt. Based on anonymous sources, the Jewish Chronicle claimed that Prime Minister May had been informed about two of the meetings and had ordered Patel to not disclose them:

Number 10 instructed Development Secretary Priti Patel not to include her meeting with the Israel foreign ministry official Yuval Rotem in New York on 18 September in her list of undisclosed meetings with Israelis which was published on Monday, the JC has learned.

Downing Street immediately denied the claim and no other source backed it up. The blackmail attempt failed. The Jewish Chronicle also was at the forefront of the slander campaign that tried to smear the British labor leader Corbyn as anti-semite.

The Independent notes about the Patel affair:

[T]here is another point about all those meetings which Patel helpfully, if belatedly, detailed in her apologetic statement on Monday: their remarkable one-sidedness. Patel heads a department which has a long history of humanitarian and development funding for Palestinians. Indeed she has taken a close interest in that funding, going so far as to announce a review last year which has already resulted in notable cuts of some £17m. This includes, to the widespread dismay of NGOs, cuts in funding to Gaza, where humanitarian and economic conditions are generally agreed to be at their direst ever.

Cutting aid money to a devastated Gaza while handing it to the Israeli occupation army that supports Takfiris fighting Syria is beyond the already extreme British Zionist sculduggeries.

Prime Minister May is herself a strong Zionist. She recently celebrated the Balfour declaration in which, a hundred years ago, the British empire promised land it did not own to a people that did not exit at the cost of the owners and inhabitants of that very land. That promise, handed to a very influential Jewish banker, opened new credit lines for the British war against Germany. It also reinforced lobbying efforts in the U.S. for entering the war on the British side. May asked the British people to feel “pride” for the treacherous paper and completely ignored the devastation it caused for the Palestinian people:

The Israelis will be celebrating – and why not, for it set Britain’s seal on the future Israeli state in Palestine. Perhaps Israel would not have been created without it. But the fearful suffering and tragedy of the Palestinian refugees which was to follow in the coming years suggest that the Balfour letter – through its very wording – was certain to create a terrible wrongdoing which to this day curses the place we used to call the Holy Land.

In January AlJazeera broadcasted an in depth investigation on the Zionist lobby in Britain. It proved that the lobby is directed by and its slander campaigns run from Israel’s embassy in London.

Peter Oborne and James Jones just published a long paper on The pro-Israel lobby in Britain. They find:

The Friends of Israel groups in the House of Commons have firmly established themselves in the interstices of British political life. Their heavy presence at party conferences is taken for granted, their lunches and dinners an ingrained part of the Westminster social scene, the donations a vital part of the political financing. An environment now exists where MPs and ministers feel cautious about criticizing the foreign policy of the Israeli state, wary of opening themselves to criticism on the home front.
…
While this pro-Israel lobbying is lawful, it is emphatically not transparent. We have shown in this pamphlet that journalists very rarely declare their [Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre] funded trips to Israel. We have also shown how patterns of donations from [Conservative Friends of Israel] members to Tory candidates are sometimes opaque.Indeed, the financial structure of the CFI as a whole is obscure.
…
A similar observation applies to other pro-Israel pressure groups. While BICOM’s work is entirely legitimate, it is by no means transparent. They never declare, for example, which journalists go on trips and who they meet.

Oborne and Jones also find that the Israel lobby does not reflect the opinion and values of British Jews. It is an extremely right-wing syndicate arranged to disguise its sources of money and the foreign interests involved in it.

The Zionist lobby in Britain is vicious. It operates in the dark and hides its financing. This affair removes the curtain it uses to hide its malicious influence. It does not welcome the disinfecting sunlight this affair shines on it and is mourning the loss of its valuable asset.

Priti Patel has been removed as a minister but is still a conservative Member of Parliament. The new revelations about her and the sinister powers influencing her will hopefully convince the British voters to finally kick her out.

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The Tragic Declaration: Colonial Legacies, Balfour and Israel

November 10th, 2017 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

So much after the fact; so much in terms of opportunism gone to seed and destruction. But planned historical calamities tend to be rare. There are only absurd moments, dastardly opportunities, and tragic convergences. History is less the outcome of wise deliberation than folly dressed up as reason, occasionally tinged by a touch of malice.

On November 2, 1917, the British government published the Balfour Declaration (one of “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations”) by means of a letter written by Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild. It suggested forthcoming British assistance for the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine.

Problems soon emerged, showing what Arthur Koestler would suggest as the solemn promising of one nation to a second the country of a third, all happening even before the Ottoman Empire had ceased to exist.

This was British imperial opportunism at its worst, or, if you fancy that sort of pluck, best. It played on the aspirations of Zionists; it also went counter to the promise of liberation for Arabs in the event they overthrew their Ottoman overlords. The moral tic only came later, a sort of retrospective imposition.

Submerged in the Declaration are a series of questions writ large. There is the Eastern Question – one of Ottoman-eastern influences on Europe and more broadly, the Occident. Then there was that overall niggling problem of where European Jewry persisted as carriers of an eastern legacy in Europe, “which Enlightened and un-Enlightened European Christians,” poses Joseph Massad, “found intolerable.”[1]

This became, with all its paranoid fixations, cultural mania and concern, the “Jewish question”, an absurdist fantasy that attempted to press Jewish influence in Europe as a matter of unreformed, eastern practice. How much better, then, to have that influence exiled altogether?

This task also assumed the oddest of forms, and the creation of uncomfortable bed fellows in what effectively became a colonial project of collusion and complicity. Theodor Herzl, founder of the First Zionist Congress in August 1897, revealed the realpolitik caste of mind that would also be mirrored by the politics behind Balfour.

Those “anti-Semites,” he proclaimed, “will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

The Balfour letter itself retained those various contradictions. Having pitched for a Jewish state, it then went on to suggest that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status of Jews in any other country.” This was imperial parcelling of the worst sort, making claims about racial, religious and ethnic reordering without a mind to consequence.

Over time, reading the Declaration suggested the workings of a psychodrama, teasing historians into adventurous analyses. Historian Barbara Tuchman in her classic Bible and Sword, England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (1956) imputed to Lord Balfour a religious motive, morally biblical more than realpolitik imperial. The Jews, went this line, needed repaying in some form, a gesture of historical recompense.

Tuchman, it must be said, then proceeded to acknowledge good old little Englander power plays at work. It was Britain’s intention “to take Palestine anyway for its strategic value; but they had to have a good moral case”. By proclaiming “that Britain would enter Palestine as trustee for its Old Testament proprietors would fulfil this purpose admirably and above all would quiet the British conscience in advance.”

As appropriately noted by Michael J. Cohen, reading the British response here requires an understanding of public show and private intimations.[2] A degree of duplicity in diplomacy – the public self adorned differently to the private – is always demanded.

Take, as an example, the meeting between Prime Minister Lloyd George and Chaim Weizmann held on July 21, 1921 at Lord Balfour’s home, with the Colonial Secretary Churchill present. Weizmann, it is noted, was reassured that the British “had always understood and meant the eventual possibility of a Jewish state.”

The 1922 Churchill White Paper supplies an example of the public show, a case of hedging, avoidance, and qualification as to what the intention of the Declaration had been. There was, for instance, never an intention to create “a wholly Jewish Palestine”. To think so was to sport an “impracticable” expectation.

Indeed, the paper went on to suggest a reassurance: that the Declaration had not envisaged that “Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be found in Palestine.” A home, as it were, within a home – or perhaps a spacious room in a large abode.

The terminology “National Home” was picked up by the Peel Royal Commission in 1936 as a problematic formulation, having caused “unrest and hostility between Arabs and Jews”. That term, it is also worth noting, was a confection, less of British foreign policy than that of the First Zionist Congress in 1897.

The language does not suggest promise, but a degree of wooliness. But there was enough certainty to propel modern relevance. It has encouraged urgings on the part of the Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Minister, Riyad al-Maliki, to press for an international law suit fronted by Arab states against the United Kingdom citing the Declaration as the cause of the mass Palestinian eviction in 1948 that became the Nakba.

The complexity behind the machinations of Balfour have now been washed away by moral absolutes and declarations. The gala dinner on November 2 saw British Prime Minister Theresa May speak of British pride in “our pioneering role in the creation of the state of Israel” yet careful to insist on a two-state solution negotiated by fictionally equivalent partners.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also afforded thanks, and suggested with force the ultimate triumph of a colonial venture that had to be swallowed, consequence and whole.

“A hundred years after Balfour, the Palestinians should finally accept a Jewish national home and finally accept a Jewish state. And when they do, the road to peace will be infinitely closer.”[3]

A truly bitter history pill to swallow.

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

Notes

[1] https://electronicintifada.net/content/balfour-declarations-many-questions/22216

[2] http://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/doi/pdf/10.1080/00263206.2017.1360289?needAccess=true

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/02/may-netanyahu-balfour-declaration-israel-palestine

Featured image is from Jerusalem Post.

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People Are Crazy and Times Are Strange

November 10th, 2017 by Philip A Farruggio

The title’s lyrics are from one of Bob Dylan’s greatest songs of social commentary, “Things Have Changed “.

Actually, to this writer the lyrics are about the empire we live under and how it has adversely affected our lives.

Just recently, The American Psychological Association conducted a survey and found that 2/3 of Americans feel stress about the future of our country. Why not? Where shall I begin?

Well, random acts of murder are on the rise, and not just the fake ‘talking points finger pointing’ at so called terrorists. No, too many mass murders are committed by obviously stressed out and emotionally disturbed people from a wide spectrum of demographics. It is easy to pin the blame on foreign terrorist groups for the craziness of domestic killers. Maybe if more of our national treasure was spent on psychological therapy and not on warrior therapy….

People are crazy and times are strange

I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range

I used to care, but things have changed

This place ain’t doing me any good!

We have the ‘masters of the empire’ who control the corporations, the Pentagon, the mainstream media and of course our phony 2-Party/One-Party political system. They mesmerize most of the public into thinking that it is OK to become mega rich… after all the mega rich all worked hard for it (sic), and used ingenuity and creativity with long hours to succeed (sic). They sell you the doctrine of the ‘Free Market’ and the allure of ‘Flipping houses’ and ‘Rental property’ as a means of financial success. They pin white working stiffs against black and Latino working stiffs… with ALL against the ‘sleeper cell jihadists’ who also live here. They give you a Donald Trump to demagogue and phony populist away the phony and warmongering Mrs. Clinton.

Some things are too hot to touch

The human mind can only stand so much

You can’t win with a losing hand

The masters of empire create and handle every president that they allow to win office. They give you the Chinese restaurant choice of column A) the predatory Republican Party and column B) the ‘I feel your pain’ hypocritical Democrats. Column A will go backwards faster to a feudal America with ‘dog eat dog’ economic and racial polarization. Column B will suck up to the corporations while saying they don’t. And of course both sides of the empire’s menu will give away our federal revenues to the War economy in the name of ‘defense of the realm or homeland’. They all thank our soldiers for their ‘service to our country’ when in reality they do NOT serve you and me, but the War Empire.

Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose

Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose

People are crazy and times are strange

I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range

I used to care, but things have changed

This place ain’t doing me any good!

When the mass of we working stiffs finally reject the political system, turn off our boob tubes from the mainstream phony news and commentary, stand tall to pull back this military empire and say ” Enough is enough” with peaceful street corner protests and viable economic boycotts ….

This article was originally published by OpEdNews.

Featured image is from the author.

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The Trump-US House of Representatives $4.6 Trillion Tax Cut: Who Pays?

November 10th, 2017 by Dr. Jack Rasmus

“Last month Trump and released his initial proposals for cutting taxes on the rich. The proposals were developed behind closed doors by his key economic policy makers, Steve Mnuchin, Treasury Secretary, and Gary Cohn, director of the Trump Economic Council—both former senior managers of the Goldman Sachs investment bank. (see my prior article this blog, ‘The Trump-Goldman Sachs Tax Cut for the Rich’).

The initial Trump-Goldman Sachs proposal defined only the broad outlines of the Trump tax plan, but still clearly benefiting the wealthy and their businesses. But the proposal said little how the multi-trillion dollar handout would be paid for. This past week the tax plan was further revised and clarified by the Republican run US House of Representatives.

The Trump-Goldman Sachs-Paul Ryan Tax Plan

The Trump-Goldman Sachs proposals have been melded with tax cuts proposed by US House speaker, Paul Ryan, who has led the effort for years to use the tax system to transfer wealth to the rich and their corporations. This past week’s Trump-Ryan proposals now clarify further ‘who pays’—i.e. mostly the middle class and especially working class households earning less than $50,000 annual income.

How exactly are they paying, in this latest iteration of the tax cuts and income transfer for the rich that’s been going on since Reagan in the 1980s, accelerating under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama?

The Trump-Republican latest iteration of the tax handouts will cost about $1.5 trillion, according to the Trump administration. That’s what they say it will cost the federal government budget deficit and thus will add to the federal debt. But the total tax cuts are actually around $4.5 trillion. The $1.5 trillion number is only the estimated final impact of the cuts on federal budget deficits. By Congressional rules, if the Trump-Ryan version can keep the budget impact to $1.5 trillion, it needs only 50% votes (plus one) in Congress to pass; but if the hit to the deficit is more than $1.5 trillion, it takes 60%.

The $2.6 Trillion Corporate-Business Tax Cuts

It’s estimated the corporate tax cut measure in the Trump-Ryan bill alone—cutting the nominal tax rate from current 35% to 20% and the corporate Alternate Minimum Tax–will together reduce tax revenue and raise deficits by $1.5 trillion, according to the Congress Joint Committee on Taxation. But that’s only the beginning of the total tax cuts to businesses. That’s just for corporate businesses, and just one of the several big corporate tax cut windfalls in the plan.

There are tax reductions for non-corporate businesses as well. By reducing the nominal tax rate for non-corporate businesses from 39.6% to 25% (affecting what’s called ‘pass through business income’) the result, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, is an additional $448 billion tax reduction for businesses that are proprietorships, partnerships, S corporations, and other non-traditional corporations. And this cut goes to the wealthiest, high end of non-corporate companies. Small businesses (mom and pop businesses) whose owners earn less than $260,000 a year would see nothing of this proposed ‘pass through’ reduction. Half of all ‘pass through’ business income is earned by the wealthiest 1% non-corporate businesses.

Back to the corporate tax cutting, then there’s the daddy of all big corporate tax cuts for US multinational corporations. Trump, Ryan and other business interests claim that US multinationals—i.e. Apple, Google, big Pharma companies, global banks, oil companies and their ilk—pay the highest corporate taxes in the world and therefore cannot compete with their offshore counterparts in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. But that’s a lie. Studies have shown that US MNCs pay an effective tax rate (i.e. actual and not just ‘on paper’ nominal rate) of only 12.5%. Add to that 12.5% a mere 2-4% additional tax they pay in offshore countries, and another 2% or so they pay to US States with corporate income tax laws, and the true, total global tax rate is around 17%–not 35%.

US MNC’s currently hoard at least $2.4 trillion in their offshore subsidiaries (what they publicly admit to) that they have been refusing pay taxes on for years. Apple Corp., one of the worst tax avoiders, currently has $268 billion in cash; 95% of that $268 billion is stashed away in its offshore subsidiaries in order to avoid paying US corporate taxes. That’s just the legally admitted number. No one knows how much Apple, other MNCs, and wealthy individual investors sock away in offshore tax havens and shelters in order to avoid even reporting, let alone paying, taxes on.

The Trump-Ryan plan for this $2.4 trillion tax avoided money hoard is to cut the tax rate for cash held offshore from 35% to 12%. But that 12% is really 5%, since the 12% applies only to cash offshore; other forms of corporate ‘liquid’ assets are taxed at only 5%. That means it will be easy for corporations like Apple to ‘game’ the system by temporarily converting cash to liquid assets and then back again after the lower 5% rate is paid. They’ll pay 5%, not the 10%. Another measure calls for a 10% tax on future profits earned, but only on ‘excess offshore profits’ held by subsidiaries. If it’s not ‘excess profits’, then the tax rate is 0%. Just the latter measure, referred to as the ‘territorial tax’, is estimated to reduce MNC’s taxes by $207 billion.

A variation of this very same tax shell game was played previously, in 2005. Under George W. Bush, US multinational corporations were hoarding about $700 billion offshore by 2005. They were given a special ‘one time’ deal of a 5.25% tax rate if they brought the money back to the US and reinvested it in jobs. They brought about half of the $700 billion back—but didn’t reinvest in production. Instead they used it to buy back stock and pay more dividends that didn’t produce any jobs, and finance mergers and acquisitions of their competitors which actually reduced jobs. US MNCs got away with a 35% to 5.25% tax cut in 2005, so they began repeating the practice of shifting US profits to their offshore subsidiaries immediately after once again in order to avoid paying taxes. Now Congress is cutting them a similar deal—i.e. for a second time while calling it once again, as in 2005, a ‘one time’ deal. This so-called ‘repatriation tax’ measure results in is an incentive to shift even more production and operations to offshore subsidiaries, which reduces jobs in the US even further.

All this amounts to a total tax cut windfall for US multinational corporations of at least $500 billion, and likely even hundreds of billions of dollars more over the coming decade.

And there’s still more, however, for corporations in the Trump-Ryan plan. The tax plan’s ‘depreciation’ provision, which is another name for tax cuts for investment, are also liberalized to the tune of $41 billion new tax cuts. Companies can deduct from their tax bill the cost of all the new equipment they buy in the same year. And they can do that for the next five years. As that paragon advocate of economic justice, Larry Summers, former champion of bank deregulation, recently admitted recently in the business daily, Financial Times: “Effective tax rates on new investment is reduced to zero or less, before even considering the corporate rate reduction.” And there’s another roughly $50 billion in miscellaneous business tax cuts involving limits on business expending and other provisions.

How Trump Personally Benefits

The commercial real estate industry—i.e. where Trump made his billions and continues to do so—gets a particularly sweet deal. It is exempt from any cap the Trump plan places on its deduction of business expenses. Commercial real estate companies are also allowed to continue deferring taxes when they exchange properties. And the industry’s numerous tax loopholes remain unchanged in the Trump-Ryan bill. Yet Trump himself says he will not benefit personally from the tax proposals—even though the tax returns he released for one year back before 2005 show his company realized billions in tax relief from the special loopholes enjoyed by the commercial real estate industry. And Trump himself paid $35 million in the corporate AMT, which is now projected to go away as well.

In summary, there’s at least $2.6 trillion in total corporate-business tax cuts in the Trump-Ryan plan. That’s well above the $1.5 trillion limit mandated by Congressional rules, however. And the $2.6 trillion does not include personal income tax reduction for wealthy households and investors. The corporate-business tax cuts alone amount to almost twice the $1.5 trillion allowed by Congressional rules. But the personal income tax cuts for the wealthy will cost another minimum $2 trillion, just for changes in top personal income tax rates and for limiting, then ending, the Alternative Minimum Tax and the Inheritance Tax. That’s $4.6 trillion and three times the $1.5 trillion!

The Personal Income Tax Cuts for the Wealthy

While personal income taxes will rise for the middle and working classes to cover the tax cuts for business, the hikes will also have to cover simultaneous tax cuts for wealthy individuals, 1% households, and investors. There are three big ways wealthy individuals and investors get tax cuts in their personal income tax in the Trump-Ryan bill:

(1) reducing of personal tax brackets and lowering of rates;

(2) reducing and then eliminating altogether the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT); and

(3) exempting and then ending the Inheritance (Estate) tax.

The top personal tax rate is currently 39.6%. The cutoff occurs for those earning $466,000 a year or more. They pay the 39.6%. But many more now will not under the bill. The Trump-Ryan bill raises the threshold at which they pay the 39.6% to $1 million. Those now earning between $466,000 and $1 million will now pay a lower rate of 33%. Those previously paying 33% are now reduced to 25%. Those at 25%–i.e. the middle class—stay at 25% and thus get no cut. So the personal tax rate on the middle class rate is not reduced, but the higher income levels are significantly reduced. The total tax cut from lower tax brackets for the wealthy has been estimated at $1.1 trillion, according to the Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation.

The Inheritance, or Estate, tax is paid by only 0.2% of households. Nonetheless, the exemption will double from the first $5.5 million value of the estate to $11 million per person. And it will be completely repealed by 2024. The gift tax, through which the wealthy pass on much of their estates before dying, will also enjoy a $10 million exemption. That all amounts to a $172 billion tax cut for the 1% wealthiest households.

The other ‘biggie’ tax cut for the rich is the reduction and subsequent elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax, AMT. This was designed to get the rich to pay something in taxes, after they exploited all their available tax loopholes and/or stashed their money offshore in tax shelters and havens, both legally and illegally. (Note: the just released so-called ‘Paradise Papers’, show how much and where they hide their wealth offshore to avoid taxes—from Queen Elizabeth of Britain to entertainment celebrities like Madonna, Bono, and a long list). 60% of the AMT is paid by individuals earning more than $500,000 a year, and another 20% by those earning adjusted income of more than $200,000. The AMT measures in the Trump-Ryan bill will amount to a $696 billion tax cut for the wealthy, according to estimates by the Joint Committee of Congress last week. And that’s not even counting the changes to the AMT paid by businesses as well.

Just the ‘big 3’ personal income tax cuts amount to nearly $2 trillion in total reductions. Add to that the estimated additional $2.5 trillion in corporate-business tax cuts and the total is $4.5 trillion—not the $1.5 or even $1.75 trillion currently referred to in the business and mainstream media.

How the Middle and Working Classes Pay for it All

• Personal Exemptions and Standard Deductions

The personal exemption for a family of four current reduces taxable income by $16,600 a year. This is ended under Trump-Ryan and replaced with an increase in the Standard Deduction, from current $13,000 a year to $24,400. So the Standard Deduction rises by $11,400 but is less than $16,600. So the net result is an increase in $5,200 in taxable income for a family of four.

The increase is even greater for a family of four that itemizes its deductions. For total itemization of $15,000, they will find their taxable income increasing by $7,200 a year. These gaps will also rise over the 10 year period and result in even higher taxes over time.

Repeal and changes to the Personal exemption and Standard deductions amount to a $1.6 trillion tax hike.

• Elimination of Itemized Deductions

Nearly half of all tax filers with annual income between $50,000 and $75,000—i.e. the core of the middle and working classes—currently itemize deductions to reduce their total taxable income and taxes paid. So it’s not true that only the rich itemize. And here is where the Trump-Ryan tax proposals take their biggest whack at the middle class.

-All State and Local income tax deductions are ended under the Trump plan. That’s a roughly $186 billion tax hike—a measure that will mostly hit ‘blue’ Democratic states where state income taxes exist. Contrary to Trump-Ryan propaganda, only 27% of state-local tax deduction is claimed by the wealthiest 1% households. The majority of the deduction is by the middle class.

-Limits on the property tax deduction will result in a further tens of $billions of tax hikes. Limits on this deduction will also reduce property values and thus have a negative wealth effect on middle class homeowners—especially in the ‘blue’ coastal states where home prices are highest.

-Deductible interest on first mortgages are reduced by half. This will reduce new home construction, and result in an indirect effect of escalating apartment rental costs, reducing middle and working class real incomes.

-Ending the extraordinary medical expenses deduction will hike taxes by $182 billion. These expenses are incurred by families with extraordinary medical expenses, as health insurance coverage pays less and less of such coverage. Previously they could deduct up to 10% of their income. This is now ended.
Expenses formerly deducted for personal casualty losses, un-reimbursed employment expenses for teachers, alimony, moving to a new job expenses, equity home loans interest, are all totally eliminated under the Trump-Ryan plan.

Limits and elimination of deductions are estimated at a tax hike of another $1.3 trillion, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

That’s $2.9 trillion to offset the $4.6 trillion in tax cuts for corporations, businesses, and the wealthiest households!

In addition are further miscellaneous tax hikes on the Middle Class in the following ways:

• Alternative Energy Credits

Current credits for installing solar and other alternative energy end, raising taxes by $12.3 billion.

• Adoption Credits

Credits for families adopting children end, raising taxes of $3.8 billion

• Flexible Health Savings Accounts and Elderly Dependents Expenses

Currently, workers may reduce taxes from gross wages by setting aside some income in a flexible health savings account. Business also enjoy a tax deduction for payments they make into health insurance plans and pensions. The total amounts to $540 billion a year. Businesses can continue their tax deduction for health payments, but workers will not. Nor may they deduct expenses for elderly dependents’ care. Their costs also tens of billions of dollars.

• Education Credits

Students and colleges take a big hit under the Trump-Ryan plan. Several education credit programs are ended, leaving one education credit. The result is a cut and tax hike of $17 billion. Student loan interest deductions are also ended, costing $13 billion. Companies that assisted higher education programs for employees with $5,250 tax free tuition aid for employee and company are ended; now they are taxable. May companies will now reduce their tuition assistance programs. Education tuition costs deductions for low income households are ended. So are tax free interest higher education savings bonds and savings accounts. It’s a total tax hike of $65 to $95 billion over the decade.

• New Price Index and Reduced EITC

The Trump-Ryan bill brags that it reduces taxes for the near and working poor who now pay an income tax rate of 15% and 10%, by consolidating the two brackets to a combined 12% rate. The former 10% group will of course get a 2% tax hike. But the increase in the income limit at which taxes are paid, from current $12,000 to $24,000, will offset this hike, according to Trump-Ryan. But the plan’s shift to a new, lower consumer price index will reduce the amount increasingly over time the working poor may claim tax reimbursement under the Earned Income Tax Credit, EITC. And it’s highly likely in any final bill that the $24,000 will be significantly reduced.

The foregoing is just a short list of the many ways the middle and working classes will pay for the Trump-Ryan tax bill. We’re talking about approximately $3.5 trillion in tax hikes in the Trump-Ryan bill negatively affecting mostly middle and working class households.

Closing 3 Big Capital Income Tax Loopholes

If Trump-Ryan really wanted to raise taxes, instead of targeting the middle class, they could have easily raised $2 trillion by ending just two other programs: Eliminating the preferential tax rate for long term capital gains taxation, which would bring in $1.34 trillion by 2024; and ending the practice of foregoing all taxation on stocks transferred at death, for which recipients of the stock pay no taxes whatsoever. That would generate another $644 billion. That’s $2 trillion.
Another at least $2.5 trillion could be raised by ending corporate tax deductions for payments into company pension and health insurance plans. Workers don’t get to deduct their contributions to these plans. Why should employers?

In other words, just three measures alone targeting corporate and capital incomes would raise $4.5 trillion in tax income over the coming decade. The three could pay for all the corporate-business-wealthiest 1% tax cuts in the Trump-Ryan bill, without raising any taxes on the middle and working classes! But that’s targeting capital incomes of the rich and their corporations, and politicians elected and paid for by the same won’t ‘bite the hand that feeds them’, as they say.

Concluding Comments

If the cost of the Trump-Ryan tax cut proposals are thus $4 trillion at minimum, and if the proposals only call for $1.3 trillion in tax hikes for the middle and working classes by raising their personal income taxes, where is the remaining $2.7 trillion to come from?

My prediction is that the Senate version, and final joint House-Senate version, of the bill that will now follow in coming weeks will have to pare down the tax cuts for wealthy individuals and raise some more the tax hikes on the middle class. Cutting the corporate tax rate is the priority for the Trump administration. After that ensuring US Multinational corporations get to shield even more of their profits from taxation. Congress will take it out of the personal income tax provisions which will be scaled back from the current Trump-Ryan proposals. Tax breaks for wealthy individuals will be softened, and new ways to quietly raise taxes on the middle class households may be found.

But the main solution will be to offset the more than $1.5 trillion net tax breaks with more spending cuts on social programs. In 2011 Congress and Obama cut spending by $1 trillion on education, health, transport, etc. Another $500 billion was cut in 2013. They will therefore try to repeat the ‘fiscal austerity’ solution to enable tax cutting for corporations. But that’s not new. The process of spending cuts to finance corporate-wealthy tax cuts has been going on since Ronald Reagan. It’s one of the main causes of the growing income inequality in the US that is the hallmark of Neoliberal policy since the 1980s.

The Trump-Ryan proposals are just the latest iteration of Neoliberal fiscal policy that has been making the rich richer, while destroying the economic and social base of the USA. Neoliberal policies associated with tax and spending programs, free money for bankers and investors provided by the central bank (the Federal Reserve), industrial policy deregulating everything and destroying unions, and trade policy enabling offshoring of production and jobs and free re-entry of US goods produced overseas back to the US (aka free trade) have been together ripping a gaping and ever-growing hole in the social fabric of the country. That has in turn been giving rise to ever more desperate radical right wing politics and solutions—i.e. the political consequences of the Neoliberal economic policies.”

Dr. Jack Rasmus is author of ‘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’ and ‘Looting Greece’, also by Clarity Press, 2016. He blogs at jackrasmus.com and his website is http://www.kyklosproductions.com and twitter handle, @drjackrasmus.

This article was originally published by Jack Rasmus.

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Trump Threatens China over North Korea and Trade, Bellicose Speech in Beijing

November 10th, 2017 by James Cogan

Yesterday, the overblown state honors paid by the Chinese regime to Donald Trump, and the latter’s reciprocation with gushing flattery of Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife, failed to prevent the US president from issuing a new threat against North Korea and delivering an ultimatum to China that it grant massive economic concessions to US corporations.

Trump delivered his speech yesterday afternoon, in the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, to an audience of the Chinese Communist Party elite and flanked by President Xi.

Trump declared:

“The US is committed to the complete and permanent de-nuclearisation of North Korea … All nations must come together to ensure this rogue regime cannot threaten the world with its nuclear weapons.

“Time is quickly running out. We must act fast and hopefully China will act faster and more effectively on this problem than anyone.

“I’m also calling on Russia to help rein in this potentially very tragic situation.”

US imperialism has, at the ready, the means to cause a “tragic situation”—or, more accurately, catastrophic death and destruction. Three aircraft carrier battlegroups are positioned off the coast of the Korean peninsula, along with cruise-missile armed submarines and an unknown number of Ohio-class submarines armed with ballistic nuclear missiles. Hundreds of Air Force jet fighters and dozens of long-range bombers are based in South Korea, Japan, Guam and Alaska.

The naval armada will conduct exercises from November 11 to 14—the first joint exercise involving three aircraft carriers in more than a decade. Trump’s statement that “time is quickly running out” is particularly ominous, given that two of the battlegroups cannot stay in East Asia for much longer. One, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, is only in the region as it transits to the Persian Gulf. Another, the USS Nimitz, has been on operational deployment since June, and is scheduled to return to its base on the US west coast for maintenance and rest.

North Korea has already signaled that it rejects the US ultimatum of “complete and verifiable denuclearisation” before the Trump administration will even consider negotiations and the relaxation of crippling economic sanctions. One North Korean official told CNN:

“We don’t care what that mad dog [Trump] may utter, because we’ve already heard enough.”

Iraq and Libya submitted to similar US demands, only to be invaded and their leaderships executed.

There is little doubt that intense diplomatic talks are taking place behind the scenes—involving American, South Korean, Chinese, Russian and other officials—to pressure the North Korean elite, headed by Kim Jong-un, to make some form of capitulation to the Trump administration.

Even within the US military there is trepidation about the consequences of war. A report prepared by the Pentagon warned that the only way to achieve the Trump administration’s stated objectives would be a “ground invasion” of North Korea.

An invasion would require hundreds of thousands of troops and, given recent experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the history of Korea itself, would need to be followed by protracted and bloody operations to suppress an anti-occupation insurgency. The financial cost would run into the trillions of dollars. The human cost would be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives.

This stark reality only heightens the danger that nuclear weapons will be used for the first time since 1945.

The threat of war against North Korea is not motivated by any concern in Washington over North Korea’s nuclear program, let alone the “freedom” of the North Korean masses. It is part of a calculated strategy by US imperialism to use military force to reverse the ongoing emergence of China as a rival centre of strategic and economic power in the Asia-Pacific and internationally.

Trump’s speech yesterday in Beijing underscored the fact that more than 25 years of continuous wars of aggression by the United States have been driven by the determination of the American ruling elite to stem the decline of its post-World War II economic and strategic dominance. He combined his threat to plunge East Asia into instability and turmoil, by launching a war on the Korean peninsula, with veiled threats that China must open its economy to US banks and corporations—or else.

Trump told Xi Jinping and assembled CCP dignitaries that the US trade deficit with China was “as high as $500 billion a year”—far higher than the official figure in 2016 of $347 billion.

“We must immediately address the unfair trade practices that drive this deficit, along with barriers to market success,” he insisted. “We really have to look at access, forced technology transfer and the theft of intellectual property, which just by and of itself is costing the US and its companies at least $300 billion a year …”

“We have to fix this,” he concluded, “because it just doesn’t work for our great American companies and it doesn’t work for our great American workers.”

Trump declared “I don’t blame China” and tried to score domestic political points by accusing past administrations of responsibility for the trade deficit. The reality, however, is that contained within his speech is the same confrontational stance toward Beijing that animated the Obama administration’s military “pivot to Asia,” and its terms for membership in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade bloc.

Obama had insisted that Beijing would only be able to join the TPP after it removed obstacles to American corporations competing in China’s domestic markets, including, and most controversially, its banking and finance system. His administration had also demanded that China accelerate the privatisation of its state-owned companies, and legislate the same protections for intellectual property rights as exist in the US and elsewhere. Control of patents ensures the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars in royalties to American-based technology, pharmaceutical and other conglomerates.

Trump has repudiated the TPP, but is seeking the same ends as Obama, albeit through other means—the threat of tariffs and trade war and the imposition of other sanctions on Chinese-based corporations. His Beijing remarks suggest that he will make demands for concessions to US corporate interests at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum that begins today in Da Nang, Vietnam.

At the same time, while his administration has abandoned the term “pivot” or “rebalance,” it is continuing with concentrating 60 percent of the American air force and navy in the Asian region as initiated under Obama in 2011. The strategic rationale behind this military build-up is the calculation that economic competition between US imperialism and the Chinese capitalist oligarchy will ultimately lead to clashes and the potential for war between the two nuclear-armed powers.

Preparations for a conflict with China is what ultimately lies behind the drive to use the pretext of North Korea’s nuclear weapons to bring about regime-change in that tiny country, and its incorporation into US-aligned South Korea. Such an outcome would create the conditions for American and allied forces to deploy directly along China’s northeastern border with the peninsula.

In 1950, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops were sent to defend North Korea from a US-led invasion force, in order to prevent precisely this from taking place.

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Putin-Trump Meeting in Vietnam?

November 10th, 2017 by Stephen Lendman

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE:

Contact at [email protected].

Both leaders will meet at the November 10 – 11 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Danang, Vietnam.

It’s inconceivable that they wouldn’t – whether formally for private talks or publicly for shorter ones remains to be seen.

During years of US aggression on Vietnam, Danang’s airport was the Pentagon’s main airbase.

In March 1965, 9th marine expeditionary brigade forces were the first US combat troops deployed to the country, landing in Danang.

Indo-China wars began post-WW II, French involvement from 1946 to defeat of its forces in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, the last major battle during the first phase of Vietnam’s 30-year war against Western imperialism.

America’s involvement followed France’s, beginning in 1955 with thousands of so-called military advisors.

On August 2, 1964, the US-staged Gulf of Tonkin false flag was a pretext for war on the country – initially with illegal terror-bombing of North Vietnamese naval and port facilities, following the August 10, 1964 Gulf of Tonkin (joint House and Senate) Resolution.

Its Orwellian language authorized “promot(ing) the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia.”

War on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos raged for another 11 years. It ended with America’s humiliating April 1975 departure from the rooftop of its Saigon embassy, the city renamed, honoring North Vietnam leader Ho Chi Minh.

Post-WW II, he wanted freedom from France, respect for his country’s sovereignty, and normalized relations with Washington and other nations.

Instead, he got 30 years of Western aggression, millions of Vietnamese lives lost, large parts of the country ravaged.

In 1965, then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told Lyndon Johnson the Vietnamese were “(n)ever going to quit,” adding:

“And I don’t see…that we have any…plan for victory – militarily or diplomatically” – his remarks at the onset of deploying over half a million US troops to the country.

Johnson admitted he had a Hobson’s choice, saying

“I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. We’re in quicksand up to our necks, and I just don’t know what the hell to do about it.”

He knew America couldn’t win the war, fearing he might be removed from office by impeachment or JFK’s fate if he pulled out.

In January, 1969, he left office disgraced and defeated. The once powerful, bigger-than-life figure was never the same again, a shadow of his former self. Four years later he was dead.

George Bernard Shaw once said “(w)e learn from history that we learn nothing from history,” US misadventures repeat, beginning with its 1989 invasion of Panama, followed by the 1991 Gulf War, the rape of Yugoslavia, multiple post-9/11 wars of aggression, and likely others ahead.

The longer US wars on humanity continue, the weaker the country gets compared to China, Russia, India and other rising powers. Earlier lessons weren’t learned, the same mistakes repeated endlessly, perhaps greater ones ahead, possible nuclear war against one or more countries, madness if launched.

On November 8, Putin aide Yuri Ushakov said he and Trump “have a lot to discuss (at the APEC summit), including major international issues ranging from Syria to North Korea and so on. There are many bilateral problems. Bilateral relations have reached a low point.”

“We are ready for a separate substantive bilateral meeting whose possibility has been discussed on numerous occasions. However, the timeframe for such a meeting has not been agreed on yet.”

Both leaders are participating in the APEC summit. “(I)t is logical that they can meet and discuss certain issues.”

According to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, “(r)egarding a Putin meeting, there was never a meeting confirmed, and there will not be one due to scheduling conflicts on both sides,” adding:

Both leaders may possibly “bump into each other and say hello.” A formal meeting is “not one on the calendar, and we don’t anticipate that there will be one.”

Claiming “scheduling conflicts” is too flimsy an excuse to take seriously, certainly not on the Russian side. Sanders’ remark reflects the dismal state of bilateral relations – Washington entirely to blame.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said “(d)iscussions continue” on arranging a meeting. There is no clarity yet.”

Both leaders are together at the Danang APEC summit. It’s inconceivable for them not to meet, for how much discussion remains to be seen.

Underage Marriage in Iraq: Changes to Marriage Law Just Another Erosion of Iraqi Women’s Rights

November 10th, 2017 by Mustafa Habib

Featured image: A cartoon by Iraqi artist Ahmed Falah, to protest against changes to the personal status law that would allow girls as young as nine to be married. (photo: احمد فلاح )

On October 30, Iraq’s parliament made a decision that stirred up much anger around the country. They agreed to make amendments to the country’s personal status law in principle. The proposed changes have been a subject of controversy for years but this time it seems that politicians may finally be getting their way.

In many Muslim countries, issues like divorce, custody of children and marriage are ruled by religious law, or Sharia. However in 1959, the Iraqi government passed a new personal status law, based on the law of the land that treated all sects and ethnicities equally. This is Law Number 188 and it is still in effect today, with rulings on related issues made by government-run courts.

As Germany’s Heinrich Boell foundation has reported, the current Iraqi law is based on religious rules but it took a more liberal approach.

“It restricts child marriages (by setting the legal age of marriage at 18 years), bans forced marriages and restricts polygamy; it curtails men’s prerogatives in divorce, expands women’s rights in divorce, extends child custody to mothers, and improves inheritance rights for women,” the foundation has stated. “It remains one of the most liberal laws in the Arab world with respect to women’s rights.”

The latter quality is something that many modern Iraqis have been proud of. Hence the uproar when news broke about the agreement to amend the personal status law.

Those amendments have been a long time coming. Shortly after the regime headed by former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, was removed by a US-led invasion, the new Iraqi government stated its intention to change Law 188 and to reinstate religious courts on a sectarian basis – that is, cases would be heard by either a Sunni or Shiite Muslim court, depending on the sect of those using the law. Ever since 2004, protests by civil society organisations have managed to prevent this.

But it seems that this time the politicians may be able to make the changes they have sought for so long – even though it seems that any actual amendments will be a far longer time coming.

“There are serious constitutional and legal violations in this desire of the Islamic parties to amend the law,” one Iraqi MP, Shuruq al-Abaji, told NIQASH.

She points out that Article 41 of the Iraqi Constitution guarantees that Iraqis are free to choose personal status according to their religious beliefs, sects or other choices. Before the amendments can be made to the personal status law, this article would need to be changed, al-Abaji insists.

And there is another legal issue, the politician notes. The proposed new personal status law would refer issues of marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance to the religious endowment authorities – these are the bodies tasked with running and maintaining Shiite or Sunni mosques and shrines and they are very important institutions within their own sectarian communities. But, as al-Abaji argues, that violates not just the principle of the separation of powers but also human rights and international laws around women’s rights.

“The organization of these issues should be the responsibility of the courts and not the executive branch of Sunni or Shiite religious orders,” al-Abaji concludes.

Iraq’s original personal status law and the proposed amendments could not be more different. The first one grants mothers the right to custody and gives wives the right to inherit their husband’s estate. Meanwhile religious jurisprudence tends to say the custody of children is a matter for the father and that women do not have the right to inherit real estate or land.

One of the protests in Baghdad against the proposed changes to Iraq’s personal status law.

However these were not even the issues that really riled Iraqis up. The change that most angered locals was the one related to legal marriageable age. Civil law says a couple should be aged at least 18 in order to marry. Meanwhile religious law says puberty means a female is of marriageable age. In some cases, this is considered to be nine years old, in others 12 years old.

“The newly proposed law encourages the marriage of minors and reminds us most of the way that the [extremist group] Islamic State behaved with young girls, how the organisation forced them to marry group members when they were in control in Mosul and Raqqa,” says MP Rizan al-Sheik Daleer.

Once again, civil society and women’s rights organisations rallied around to protests the changes in the law. Many Iraqis on social media used the hashtag #NoToUnderageMarriages and a number of Facebook pages were created to organize the protests and garner support.

The change in law also comes at a time when women’s rights appear to be being eroded in Iraq, many of the activists believe.

“Islamic parties’ attempts to pass this new personal status law comes at the same time as a decline in the female role in Iraqi politics,” states Hanaa Edwar, the influential head of the Al Amal (Hope) civil society organization. “In 2004 women occupied a fair few of the positions in government but their numbers have decreased dramatically over the past 10 years. It’s a serious indication that male chauvinism is on the rise in Iraq.”

In the first Iraqi government after the fall of Saddam Hussein, there were six female ministers. Currently there are only two – the minister of health and the minister of housing. There were eight deputy ministers in 2005 but in 2013, only one.

When the Iraqi parliament elected a new oversight commission for elections last month, for the first time ever there was no woman on it. In 2005, when the commission was first formed there were two.

At one stage the staffs of the ministries of finance, education and health were around half female. But their numbers have dropped a lot over the past few years. Three months ago parliament refused to vote on measures impacting the Federal Public Service Council, which regulates the affairs of the federal public service, including appointment and promotion, because of the fact that the president and deputy are independent women, according to Edwar. Male MPs have also refused to vote on a bill on domestic violence for years, she added.

All of this should be a wakeup call, Edwar argues, when it comes to the role of Iraqi women in their own society.

“Men occupy all the high-ranking positions and they reject the laws that might support women,” Edwar notes. “If there were no quotas in place that require that females make up 25 percent of parliament and provincial councils, things would be even worse.”

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South Korea Should “Brexit” the United States

November 10th, 2017 by Jacob G. Hornberger

With President Trump being accompanied by three U.S. carrier groups during his trip to Korea, South Koreans should pull a “Brexit” on the United States. As I counseled last April and August in two separate articles, South Korea should dissolve their alliance with the United States and kick all U.S. troops out of the country. (See “South Korea Should Give U.S. Troops the Boot” and “South Korea Should Give U.S. Troops the Boot, Part 2.) The time to do so is now, before it is too late.

The top priority of U.S. officials is to prevent North Korea from acquiring the ability to hit the United States with a nuclear bomb. Everything else, including the lives of South Koreans and even the lives of U.S. civilians in South Korea and the lives of U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea, is of secondary importance. If hundreds of thousands of those people must be sacrificed to protect the United States from the threat of nuclear attack, there is a growing possibility that Trump and the generals surrounding him will seek war, either by provoking it or initiating it.

Throughout the controversy, most U.S. commentators have assumed the U.S. military presence in Korea as a permanent given. They are unable to think outside the old Cold War box. Their proposed solution to the crisis has been for U.S. officials to sit down with North Korea and try to work out a deal.

That might work, but then again it might not, especially since North Korea knows that the U.S. government cannot be trusted to keep its word in any deal that is reached.

The reason North Korea wants a nuclear capability is not to start a war with the United States or with South Korea. The reason it wants a nuclear capability is to defend itself from one of the U.S. government’s storied regime-change operation or to deter such an operation. If the U.S. government were no longer in South Korea, then the threat of a U.S. regime-change operation would plummet. Most likely, so would the desire of North Korea to acquire a nuclear capability to strike the United States.

But even if North Korea were to proceed with its nuclear program, the chance that it would initiate a war with the United States is nil. Like many totalitarian regimes, North Korea just wants to be left alone. The problem is that the U.S. government won’t leave it alone. It wants regime change, just as it did throughout the Cold War.

When I wrote those two articles last spring and summer, I really didn’t think there was much of a chance that South Koreans would consider a “Brexit” from the United States.

And then I read an article in this week’s New York Times that shows that the idea is being considered … by at least one South Korean. The title of the article is “Is South Korea’s Alliance with the United States Worth It?” The author is a man named Se-Woong Koo, who is the editor in chief of Korea Expose, a major news magazine in South Korea. Here is what Koo says in part:

Consider Mr. Trump’s repeated threats to incite war here, and the majority of the American public’s indifference to Korean lives — a poll from September found 58 percent of Americans support military action against Pyongyang if peaceful means cannot put a stop to its weapons program, even as a congressional report recently concluded that a military conflict on the Korean Peninsula could leave up to 300,000 people dead in the early days of fighting.

In the age of Trump, South Korea should look to an example set by another longtime American ally. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany didn’t hesitate to say in May that Europe can no longer “completely depend” on the United States. “We Europeans have to take our destiny into our own hands,” she said.

After being a dutiful ally for more than six decades, it may be time for South Koreans, too, to take their destiny into their own hands.

The South Korean people would be wise to follow Koo’s counsel. Suddenly and immediately dissolving the old Cold War-era South Korea-U.S. alliance and ordering all U.S. troops to immediately withdraw from South Korea would undoubtedly shock the world, just as Brexit did. But so what? Why should South Koreans care about what the United States and rest of the world think when a South Korean “Brexit” ‘from the United States would be the best way — perhaps the only way — to save South Koreans from a devastating war brought on by the U.S. presence in their country, a war they will undoubtedly will end up winning but at a very high cost in terms of loss of life and destruction of property?

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics.

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Killing Us Softly—Glyphosate Herbicide or Genocide?

November 10th, 2017 by F. William Engdahl

One of the more bizarre actions in terms of the health and safety of EU citizens is the saga of Monsanto and its toxic herbicide or weed-killer, Roundup, the most widely used weed-killer on the planet. On October 25, 2017 the European Union Commission again announced that it lacked the necessary member state votes to approve a ten year license extension for weed-killer glyphosate. They will try again. Behind this seeming routine announcement is one of the hottest battles over food and human health the world has seen since the 1972 USA decision to ban spraying of deadly DDT pesticides on crops. This time the stakes go far beyond the ban on glyphosate. It affects the future of human fertility or lack of it.

In June 2016 the EU Commission made a rotten compromise to allow an 18 month extension of use in EU of glyphosate-based weed killers, during which time more scientific studies would supposedly clarify whether glyphosate was a carcinogen. It was the same member- states deadlock over whether to grant the toxic glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto Roundup herbicide, a license renewal as we saw this October.

In March 2017 the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) of the EU, issued a report stating that “available scientific evidence did not meet the criteria in the CLP Regulation to classify glyphosate for specific target organ toxicity, or as a carcinogen, as a mutagen or for reproductive toxicity.” The ECHA, based in Hensinki is a body created only in 2007 and established to monitor safe use of chemicals and to make information available rather than conduct its own tests on safety of chemicals. It made no independent study or tests to determine if glyphosate is or is not a probable carcinogen, a fact which Brussels and the pesticide industry slickly glosses over.

In March 2015, the WHO’s Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which has such research competence, classified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen.”

In October 2015 before the license expiry deadline, some 47 environmental, health and cancer organizations, scientists and doctors wrote an open letter to EU Health Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis calling on the Commission to ban glyphosate pending a full scientific assessment. The assessment that the EU Commission was using was provided by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), and was based on industry safety studies given to BfR by Monsanto and other industry sources.

EU Corruption and human health

The determination of “non-carcinogenity” for glyphosate by using the ECHA was an apparent political ploy by the corrupt EU commission to get another “yes” body to back their pro-glyphosate stance, a stance that benefits only Monsanto and other agro-chemical producers at the expense of human life and health.

The source for both the EU’s European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) and the European Chemicals Agency statements that glyphosate was non-carcinogenic, in contradiction to the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), is the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) responsible within the EU for the evaluation of glyphosate for the EU.

According to stated EU regulations, a substance is to be considered carcinogenic if two independently conducted animal studies show an increased tumor incidence. In the case of glyphosate, at least seven out of twelve such long-term studies found an increased tumor incidence.

A report by German toxicologist Dr Peter Clausing found that the EU bodies and the German body designated by the EU to evaluate the safety of glyphosate, the German BfR ignored those relevant studies. Clausing states,

“BfR failed to recognize numerous significant tumor incidences, due to its failure to apply the appropriate statistical tests stipulated by the OECD and ECHA. BfR had instead relied on statistical tests applied by industry…”

And the German BfR report was the basis for the later rubber-stamp determinations of EFSA and now of ECHA, the EU bodies entrusted with protecting the population from dangerous chemical toxins. Someone is being played for fools by Brussels, but the stakes involve far more in terms of human health and even human reproduction itself.

Sperm disruptor?

The dimensions of the human and animal exposure to the enormous quantities of glyphosate-based weed-killers in the world food chain are only dimly beginning to be appreciated. The reason is the enormous clout of the agro-chemical industry lobby around companies such as Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer AG, soon to be the owner of Monsanto. They have so far managed to use their financial resources and their legal resources to distort test results and to win regulatory approval from the demonstrably corrupt Monsanto-influenced Washington Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.

From there it has spread to the EU Commission and relevant agencies such as EFSA and European Chemicals Agency, this despite the overwhelming popular rejection of GMO crops.

A recent study published by the Journal of Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology–a study given no visibility in mainstream media–sounds the alarm over the effects of long-term human exposure to glyphosate for the healthy production of human sperm, an issue that is beginning to be cause of great alarm across the western countries where chemical herbicides and pesticides are used in massive doses by agro-industry producers.

The study, which definitely warrants major follow-up studies, found effects of a glyphosate-based herbicide after an 8-day exposure of adult rats, including

“a significant and differential expression of aromatase in testis.” Aromatase is an enzyme responsible for a key step in the biosynthesis of estrogens according to Wikipedia, found among other locations of the body in the brain and in the gonads, and is an important factor in sexual development. The authors concluded that, “The repetition of exposures of this herbicide could alter the mammalian reproduction.”

Ample tests now exist, independent of Monsanto and other corrupt industry sources demonstrating to an alarming degree that the exposure of human and animal species to glyphosate-based herbicides or weed-killers can cause cancer tumors but can also be damaging to human sexual reproduction, that is, as in the future of the human species.

Other tests have revealed presence of significant amounts of glyphosate from spraying of weed-killers in major portions of the population in the United States where Monsanto Roundup and other glyphosate-based weed-killers are used in massive doses in agriculture as well as in home gardens. A study of urine samples of willing volunteers seeking to know if they had glyphosate exposure by the University of California at San Francisco found glyphosate in 93% of the urine samples tested at an average level of 3.096 parts per billion (PPB). Children had the highest levels with an average of 3.586 PPB. The highest levels of glyphosate were found in the American West and Midwest, the heart of US agribusiness farming. The US-based Detox Project which published the study notes that “Glyphosate has never been studied by regulators or the chemical industry at levels that the human population in the U.S. is being exposed to–under 3 mg/kg body weight/day. This is a huge hole in the risk assessment process for glyphosate, as evidence suggests that low levels of the chemical may hack hormones even more than high levels…many toxic chemicals have as much or even more of an influence on our health at low doses– these chemicals are known as hormone hackers or endocrine disruptors. “

Isn’t that what eugenics advocates such as Bill Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffett, the Rockefeller family and more recently Britain’s Prince William are cheering for? Culling of the human herd so that the wealthy have more wildlife species? vii

Frederick Osborn, first President of John D. Rockefeller III’s Population Council, and a founding member of the American Eugenics Society, formulated the problem the eugenics advocates around Rockefeller, people who financed Nazi eugenics research in Berlin, faced after the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps was uncovered and their inhuman experiments in eugenics of killing off inferior human beings as defined by the Third Reich.

In a 1956 article in the Rockefeller-financed Eugenics Review,

“The very word eugenics is in disrepute in some quarters…. We must ask ourselves, what have we done wrong? We have all but killed the eugenic movement.”

Osborn had a ready answer: people for some reason refused to accept that they were “second rate” compared to Osborn, Rockefeller, Sanger and their “superior class.” As Osborn put it,

“We have failed to take into account a trait which is almost universal and is very deep in human nature. People are simply not willing to accept the idea that the genetic base on which their character was formed is inferior and should not be repeated in the next generation…. They won’t accept the idea that they are in general second rate….”

The refusal of Monsanto, a company founded in World War I as part of the Rockefeller network of war chemicals makers, and which numbered a Rockefeller on its board until recently, to remove glyphosate-based Roundup, or even to allow independent testing of its “trade secret” adjuvants that by some estimates make the glyphosate 2000% more toxic, has more to do with that long-standing Rockefeller eugenics agenda of killing off or “culling” the human herd than with corporate profit. Prince William’s grandfather, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in an interview in 1988 with a German press agency declared, “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.” Hmmmmm…

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.

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The US Military Bases Abroad Are Disrupting the World Order

November 10th, 2017 by Sami Karimi

This article was originally published by GR on June 2017.

In years before 2014, the Afghan think tanks would opine that the US may wind down the Afghanistan’s conflict through the end of this year, inferring that the goal of founding the nine large military bases across the country is almost accomplished. Many would delightfully say that Afghanistan is phasing into a new chapter with the flames of war quelled as the US government insisted on troop withdrawal.

Entrenching military headquarters in strangers’ territories has no excuse or legal ground under any circumstances. The Afghan nation would cast aside objection to this permanent military foothold thanks in most part to the bitter reality that the US operates about 800 enormous military stations and installations in more than 70 countries worldwide, and would embrace the approach of so many other host countries that are economically and militarily too powerful, provided that they are offered the same peaceful life the others enjoy.

Afghanistan’s war, notorious for being protracted and the lengthiest in the US history has spiraled into a state the US calls “out of control”. Even if the US determines to end the war, commanding the very military bases in different region is quite a threat to human life there, an impetus to likely war with regional adversaries. The perpetuality of American bases in Afghanistan – and perhaps elsewhere – is substantiated with the comments of an American war expert made in an interview last year that Afghanistan’s conflict and crisis is bound to last for at least another fifty years

The largest US military base by quantity of personnel is situated in Germany with over 9000 members. The world’s challenging power claims that Europe-based military headquarters safeguard its allies in the continent against Russia; stations in the Middle East ensure the free flow of oil and contain Iranian influence, and bases in Asia including Afghanistan protect its Asian allies from a rising China and North Korea.

The first of two THAAD interceptors is launched during a successful intercept test by the US Army (credits to the owner of the photo)

The reality is no country in the world is willing to bully the other to a measure that might require building up of as much huge and as many more bases. North Korea, for example, has been demonized in recent years through the lens of media, but indeed, after the brouhaha over threats from North Korea unexpectedly faded out, it unveiled the secret behind it which was the installation of THAAD defense system in South Korea’s border with North. It elicited extensive reactions from South Korean communities. It also opened the mind that the North Korea’s entire boasting of nuclear advances and test-firings were just seen as potato-small challenges that is overplayed to allow the US place THAAD for objectives beyond the region – China and Russia.

The US military seniors are reasoning that if they bring troops back home, they may be less safe. As a largest military operator abroad, hasn’t there been any so-called terrorist attack in the US or other European countries so far. Or the number of overseas servicemen still needs to mount to contain these risks.

In September 2016, the new Philippine president, who rose against American policies, told US Special Forces to leave the southern Philippines, accused them of fanning the flames of conflict. Referring to recasting of its foreign policy towards the Washington, he says:

“For as long as we stay with America, we will never have peace in that land [Mindanao], we might as well give it up.”

Even during the Cold War, as Robert Johnson has argued, the Soviet threat was subject to “undue alarmism” and even without American forces deployed in Western Europe; a Soviet attack was extremely unlikely. According to International relations scholar Robert Jervis:

“The Soviet archives have yet to reveal any serious plans for unprovoked aggression against Western Europe, not to mention a first strike on the United States.”

In 2005, the Uzbekistan’s government gave the US a deadline of six months to quit its large military base in southern town of Khanabad which was also referred to as K2. The military station was opened weeks after 9/11 to supply logistical aid for the Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Washington faced quandary and scrambled to renew the leasing agreement for the base, with US$ 15 million already paid to that date. The US offered a hefty aid package to make this former Soviet stronghold accept the request. But the order remained firm to take effect.

The US bases all over the world has back fired in many ways. Taking Iran as example, the Islamic revolutionary regime kicked off and beefed up its nuclear enrichment program due in main part to deter rising US bases on the east and west. By the same token, North Korea solidified its offensive and defensive power, prompted to do so for the large-scale US installations in South Korea and Japan.

Under present circumstances when the US bases are overwhelming the jurisdictions of the enemy states [Russia, China or Iran], how would it react if one of rival states move its military base somewhere close to the US?

Apart from Afghanistan which is under outright occupation, the rest of the world nations housing the US military bases feel belong to colonial territory. In 1991, the Philippine Senate attacked on the US military presence, calling it tantamount to colonialism and affront to Philippines sovereignty and then president Aquino ordered complete withdrawal.

Image result for us base in the philippines

Protesters in Columbus Circle on the National Day of Action Against EDCA (Source: Roman Damaso via PopularResistance.Org)

Those US military bases sitting somewhere between the extremes of the US and a potential rival may play bulwark to the US defense. That is to say, these military bases armed to teeth with advanced warfare are on the frontline and fire would initiate from the same points as instant response or preemptive strike on the opposite fronts. What is vague to mind is to what extent does the US guarantee the safety of the accommodating states?

If Russia or China points one arm to the US in the event the chances of a hot war come to a head, the other is targeted at Afghanistan or others. No inhabitant would be in security. This theory, thus, discredits the legality of military bases at all. If the US goes to war with China over the South China Sea dispute, first it needs to deliver a security guarantee to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. The last country in row has already backed down from the US-China strife by uttering “NO” to the US military presence there.

Afghanistan is the most defenseless of all submitting states hosting the US troops. The US, as alleged “custodian” of Afghan nation against foreign aggression [stated in Kabul-Washington Bilateral Security Agreement] has done the least for the dying nation in return for immense military bases it occupied. There is no modern defense system in place, other than something to protect the bases.

As a most destructive non-nuclear bomb, the use of MOAB on Afghan soil alerts the Afghan citizens about loads of such explosives behind the perimeters of the US stations. If there can be MOAB in their camp, there certainly are other demolishing ordnance like those used in latest truck bombing in Kabul’s diplomatic quarter that sent powerfully blowing shockwaves to surroundings.

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Playing Games with War Deaths. How Many People have been Killed in US Wars?

November 10th, 2017 by Nicolas J. S. Davies

This article first appeared on GR on January 2016.

There’s a double standard in how the U.S. mainstream media reports civilian deaths depending if the U.S. military is fighting the wars or not, accepting absurdly low numbers when the U.S. is at fault and hyping death tolls when “enemies” are involved, a manipulation of human tragedy, says Nicolas J S Davies.

How many people have been killed in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Somalia? On Nov. 18, a UN press briefing on the war in Yemen declared authoritatively that it had so far killed 5,700 people, including 830 women and children. But how precise are these figures, what are they based on, and what relation are they likely to bear to the true numbers of people killed?

Throughout the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, the media has cited UN updates comparing numbers of Afghans killed by “coalition forces” and the “Taliban.” Following the U.S. escalation of the war in 2009 and 2010, a report by McClatchy in March 2011 was headlined, “UN: U.S.-led forces killed fewer Afghan civilians last year.” It reported a 26 percent drop in U.S.-led killing of Afghan civilians in 2010, offset by a 28 percent increase in civilians killed by the “Taliban” and “other insurgents.”

U.S. Army troops on patrol in during Operation Southern Strike III in the Spin Boldak district of Afghanistan’s Kandahar province on Sept. 2, 2012. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Katie Gray)

This was all illustrated in a neat pie-chart slicing up the extraordinarily low reported total of 2,777 Afghan civilians killed in 2010 at the peak of the U.S.-led escalation of the war.

Neither the UN nor the media made any effort to critically examine this reported decrease in civilians killed by U.S.-led forces, even as U.S. troop strength peaked at 100,000 in August 2010. Pentagon data showed a 22 percent increase in U.S. air strikes, from 4,163 in 2009 to 5,100 in 2010, and U.S. special forces “kill or capture” raids exploded from 90 in November 2009 to 600 per month by the summer of 2010, and eventually to over 1,000 raids in April 2011.

Senior U.S. military officers quoted in Dana Priest and William Arkin’s book, Top Secret America,told the authors that only half of such special forces raids target the right people or homes, making the reported drop in resulting civilian deaths even more implausible.

If McClatchy had investigated the striking anomaly of a reported decrease in civilian casualties in the midst of a savagely escalating war, it would have raised serious questions regarding the full scale of the slaughter taking place in occupied Afghanistan. And it would have revealed a disturbing pattern of under-reporting by the UN and the media in which a small number of deaths that happened to be reported to UN officials or foreign reporters in Kabul was deceptively relayed to the world as an estimate of total civilian war deaths.

The reasons for the media’s reluctance to delve into such questions lie buried in Iraq. During the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, controversy erupted over conflicting estimates of the numbers of Iraqis killed and details of who killed them. If more UN officials and journalists had dug into those conflicting reports from Iraq and made the effort to really understand the differences between them, they would have been far better equipped to make sense of reports of numbers of people killed in other wars.

The critical thing to understand about reports on numbers of civilians killed in wars is the difference between “passive reporting” and scientific “mortality studies.”

When I was investigat ing the conflicting reports of civilian deaths in Iraq, I spoke with Les Roberts, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s School of Public Health and one of the co-authors of two comprehensive mortality studies conducted in occupied Iraq in 2004 and 2006.

Les Roberts had conducted mortality studies in war zones for many years, including studies inRwanda in 1994 and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2000 that are still widely cited by the media and Western politicians without the taint of controversy that was immediately attached to his and his colleagues’ work in Iraq.

In 2004, Roberts and his colleagues conducted a scientific epidemiological study of mortality in Iraq since the U.S. invasion. They concluded that “about 100,000 excess deaths, or more” had resulted from the first 18 months of U.S.-led invasion and occupation. They also found that, “Violent deaths… were mainly attributed to coalition forces,” and, “Most individuals killed by coalition forces were women and children.”

Both Nancy Youssef of McClatchy (then Knight Ridder) and John Simpson of the BBC also reported that U.S.-led forces, not Iraqi resistance fighters, were probably responsible for most civilian deaths in Iraq, based on figures published by the Iraqi Health Ministry.

On Sept. 25, 2004, the Miami Herald carried a report by Youssef under the headline, “U.S. attacks, not insurgents, blamed for most Iraqi deaths.” A Health Ministry official told Youssef, “Everyone is afraid of the Americans, not the fighters. And they should be.”

But after John Simpson noted the same pattern in the next Health Ministry report on the BBC’s flagship Panorama news program, the BBC received a phone call from the occupation government’s Health Minister disavowing his own ministry’s published data on who was killing who in Iraq. The BBC retracted its story and subsequent Health Ministry reports no longer assigned responsibility for civilian deaths to either party in the conflict.

Les Roberts and his colleagues completed an even larger mortality study in Iraq in 2006, by which time they found that an estimated 650,000 Iraqis had died in the first three years of the war. Both their studies revealed much higher mortality rates than had been reported by Iraqi hospitals, the Health Ministry, the Western media or “Iraq Body Count”, a much-cited Western compilation of data from such “passive” sources.

As each of their studies was released, Roberts and his colleagues became targets of blistering campaigns by U.S. and British officials to dispute and dismiss their findings. The critics didn’t make educated critiques of their methodology, which was state-of-the-art in their field, but mostly just insisted that they were out of line with other reports and so must be wrong.

These campaigns were so successful in throwing mud in the water and confusing the media and the public that corporate media became very reluctant to attach any credibility to this otherwise solid evidence that the U.S.-led war in Iraq was far more deadly than most people in the West had realized. Corporate media took the easy way out and began referring to numbers of civilian deaths in Iraq only in vague, politically safe terms, if they mentioned them at all.

In reality, the huge discrepancy between the results of these mortality studies and “passive reporting” was exactly what epidemiologists expected to find in a conflict zone like occupied Iraq.

As Les Roberts and his colleagues have explained, epidemiologists working in war zones typically find that passive reporting only captures between 5 percent (in Guatemala, for example) and 20 percent of the total deaths revealed by comprehensive mortality studies. So their finding that passive reporting in Iraq had captured about one in 12 actual deaths was consistent with extensive research in other war-torn countries.

In the U.K., Prime Minister Tony Blair dismissed the “Lancet survey ” out of hand, claiming that, “Figures from the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which are a survey from the hospitals there, are in our view the most accurate survey there is.”

But in 2007, the BBC obtained a set of leaked documents that included a memo from Sir Roy Anderson, the chief scientific adviser to the U.K.’s Defense Ministry, in which he described the epidemiologists’ methods as “close to best practice” and their study design as “robust.”

The document trove included emails between worried British officials admitting that the study was “likely to be right” and that “the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.” But the very same official insisted that the government must “not accept the figures quoted in the Lancet survey as accurate.”

Other mortality surveys conducted in Iraq have produced lower figures, but there are legitimate reasons to regard the work of Les Roberts and his colleagues as the gold standard, based on their experience in other conflicts and the thoroughness of their methods.

Other surveys were conducted by the occupation government, not by independent researchers, inevitably making people reluctant to tell survey teams about family members killed by occupation forces. Some studies excluded the most war-torn parts of Iraq, while one was based only on a single question about deaths in the family as part of a lengthy “living conditions” survey.

The authors of the most recent study, published in the PLOS medical journal in 2013, a decade after the invasion, have acknowledged that it produced a low estimate, because so much time had elapsed and because they did not interview any of the more than 3 million people who had fled their homes in the most devastated areas. They made adjustments to compensate for such factors, but those adjustments themselves were deliberately conservative. However, their estimate of 500,000 violent civilian deaths is still four times the highest numbers passively reported.

Gilbert Burnham, a co-author of both the Lancet studies and the PLOS study, does not find the results of the three epidemiological studies incompatible, emphasizing that, “These represent estimates, and that’s what we’ve always said.”

In 2015, Physicians for Social Responsibility co-published a report titled Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the “War on Terror,” with a new estimate of 1.3 million total war deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2001 and 2011.

This 97-page report meticulously examines and evaluates mortality studies and other evidence from all three countries, and the authors conclude that the studies published by the Lancet are still the most accurate and credible studies conducted in Iraq.

But what can all this tell us about the figures cited by the UN and the media for civilian deaths in other war-torn countries since 2006?

As noted in Body Count, the only reports on civilian mortality in Afghanistan, including those published by the UN, are based on passive reporting. To accept these figures as actual estimates of war deaths would be to believe that the most heavily bombed country in the recent history of warfare (over 60,000 air strikes in 14 years) has been a safer place to live than most Western cities, with only 5.9 violent deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per year, compared to 6.9 in Frankfurt and 48 in Detroit.

As the authors explain, “The problem in determining the number of killed civilians is the ‘passive’ research method itself. It can capture only a fraction of all cases. … In order to get more reliable approximations, on-site research and scientific polls would be necessary. In Afghanistan, these simply do not exist.”

The authors of Body Count very conservatively estimate the number of Afghan civilians killed at 5 to 8 times the number passively reported, giving an estimate between 106,000 and 170,000. At the same time, they acknowledge the conservative nature of this estimate, noting that, “compared to Iraq, where urbanization is more pronounced, and monitoring by local and foreign press is more pronounced than in Afghanistan, the registration of civilian deaths has been much more fragmentary.”

If the ratio of actual deaths to passively reported deaths in Afghanistan is in fact somewhere between those found in Iraq (12:1) and Guatemala (20:1), the true number of civilians killed in Afghanistan would be somewhere between 255,000 and 425,000.

As in Guatemala, the UN and Western reporters have little access to the remote resistance-held areas where most air strikes and special forces raids take place, so the true number of Afghan civilians killed could well be closer to the higher of these numbers.

Paradoxically, the Syrian government’s role as an “information victim” of U.S. information warfare may have led to more comprehensive reporting of civilian deaths in Syria than in Iraq or Afghanistan, by the UN, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and other human rights groups.

But even without Western political pressure to under-report civilian deaths (except in U.S.-led air strikes), passive reporting in Syria is still just passive reporting. The ratio of actual deaths to the numbers being reported may be lower than in Iraq or Afghanistan, but even the most thorough passive reporting is unlikely to capture more than 20 percent of actual deaths.

As in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala and Iraq, only serious, scientific mortality studies can expose the full scale of the slaughter endured by the people of Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and other war-ravaged countries.

The politically contrived controversy surrounding mortality estimates in Iraq has deterred the U.S. corporate media from making any attempt to gain a more accurate picture of the scale of the slaughter in these other wars.

This has left average Americans in almost complete ignorance of the human cost of modern war, and has served to shield our political and military leaders from accountability for appalling decisions and policies that have resulted in catastrophic losses of human life.

Deaths counted by “passive reporting” cannot be an estimate of total deaths in a war zone because they are fragmentary by nature. But serious researchers have developed scientific methods they can use to make realistic estimates of total war deaths.

As with climate change and other issues, UN officials and journalists must overcome political pressures, come to grips with the basic science involved, and stop sweeping the vast majority of the victims of our wars down this Orwellian “memory hole.”

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He also wrote the chapters on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.

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Middle East Intrigue. Riyadh Accuses Iran and Hezbollah of Sowing Strife, War on Lebanon and Iran?

November 9th, 2017 by Stephen Lendman

Lebanon’s PM Hariri

On November 4, Lebanese PM Saad Hariri resigned, claiming an Iranian-backed Hezbollah plot to assassinate him. Utter nonsense. Something else is going on.

Hariri lied accusing Iran and Hezbollah of sowing strife in the Middle East, seeking “to destroy the Arab world.”

His resignation wasn’t voluntary. He was pushed, the Saudis behind it, demanding what he couldn’t refuse.

Riyadh accused Lebanon and Iran of declaring war on the kingdom. Its aggression on Yemen achieved nothing but mass slaughter of civilians, vast destruction, and humanitarian crisis conditions.

Its attempt to bully Qatar into submission failed. So has its support for ISIS and other terrorists in Syria and Iraq.

Iran and Damascus are rising regionally, Russia a key player. Riyadh’s strategic plan failed, maybe a key reason behind crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s purge, Hariri’s forced resignation, and hostile accusations against Lebanon and Iran – along with Bin Salman’s power play.

Is Riyadh shifting its troublemaking from Syria to Lebanon and Iran? Is Hariri dismissal tied to what’s going on?

Are America and Israel involved? Will Lebanon and Iran be the region’s next battlegrounds?

On November 8, Israeli military intelligence linked DEBKAfile, falsely claimed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) “have been pumping fresh supplies of new surface missiles to Yemen by sea,” adding:

“Iranian experts have managed of late to lengthen the range of the ballistic missiles shipped to Yemen.”

Tight US/Saudi blockade on the country prevents weapons, munitions and related items getting in, currently blocking everything, including all humanitarian aid.

A previous article discussed Riyadh and Israel colluding against Iran and Lebanon, likely intending greater regional violence and destabilization, a Israeli diplomatic cable to its embassies revealed, calling for ramping up pressure on Hezbollah and Iran.

Is it part of a sinister plot to stoke further regional violence and turmoil?

Beirut believes Riyadh may be holding Hariri under house arrest, along with purged Saudi princes and ministers.

“Lebanon is heading towards asking foreign and Arab states to put pressure on (the) Saudi(s) to release Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri,” an unnamed senior government official told Reuters, adding:

“(R)estricting (his) freedom in Riyadh is an attack on Lebanese sovereignty. Our dignity is his dignity. We will work with (foreign) states to return him to Beirut.”

Lebanese President Michel Aoun wants him returned to explain his announced resignation. He has extensive business interests in the kingdom, including with a construction company founded by his father, Rafik.

The company, Saudi Oger, did extensive development work in the country, falling on hard times because of low oil prices, weakening economic conditions.

Reportedly the company owes around $3.5 billion to Saudi banks. An anonymous kingdom source claimed Hariri’s resignation is connected to the unpaid debt, saying:

He was summoned to Riyadh to be held “captive with the rest of the detained princes and businessmen to blackmail him (to) force him to bring back the funds he has abroad, particularly those not linked to Lebanon” – a different twist on what’s going on with him, if true.

Most important geopolitically involves heightened tensions following Riyadh accusing Iran and Lebanon of declaring war on the kingdom.

Is war on Iran and/or Lebanon likely? Whatever happens ahead, the region remains highly unstable and in play for whatever dark forces intend to try next.

A Final Comment

On Thursday, Saudi Arabia ordered its nationals to leave Lebanon immediately, others told not to travel there. On November 5, Bahrain issued a similar warning. Is something disruptive planned? We’ll know more in the days ahead.

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

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

US Strikes Soaring in Afghanistan, Along with Civilian Deaths

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Selected Articles: US Led Wars in The Middle East and Africa

November 9th, 2017 by Global Research News

In an era of media distortion, our emphasis has been on the “unspoken truth”. To maintain our independence, we do not seek foundation funding and elite philanthropic sponsorship, which invariably contribute to setting limits on the scope and focus of media reporting.

We therefore largely rely on contributions from our readers. You can help us by forwarding our articles far and wide as a means of battling alternative media censorship.

Please consider making a donation and/or becoming a Global Research Member. Any amount large or small will contribute to the broad objective of Truth in Media.

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By Jason Ditz, November 09, 2017

With the US once again escalating the war in Afghanistan, the number of US warplanes dropping munitions on the central Asian country are on the rise, and with it, the number of civilians being killed in those strikes.

Video: The Saudi Purge: The Middle East Is on the Verge of A New War

By South Front, November 09, 2017

A missile gets fired on the Saudi capital. A missile, which was allegedly built in Iran and smuggled to Yemen, just to be fired at Saudi Arabia.

Mission Creep in Darkest Africa. US Military Expands its Operations Throughout the Continent

By Eric Margolis, November 09, 2017

There is one part of the globe that has remained free from heavy US influence since 1945, sub-Saharan Africa. But this fact is clearly changing as the US military expands its operations the width and breadth of the Dark Continent.

The UN and Genocide by Starvation in Somalia

By Thomas C. Mountain, November 09, 2017

According to just released information sourced from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the FSNAU between October 2015 and April 2016, a period of only six months, upwards of 400,000 Somali’s, two thirds of whom were children, died of starvation.

Saudi Arabia: Wellspring of Regional Instability

By Paul R. Pillar, November 09, 2017

A clan of royals lives on rake-offs from the country’s petroleum wealth, while using more of that wealth to buy off a fast-growing population. The Saudis have had to play that game through the vicissitudes of the oil market on which the Saudi economy depends. The potential for breakdown has always been present. Now a king and his favorite—and ambitious and inexperienced—son are bringing the potential closer to reality.

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US Strikes Soaring in Afghanistan, Along with Civilian Deaths

November 9th, 2017 by Jason Ditz

Seemingly every month the US announces that coalition munitions dropped are up dramatically from the month prior, and while a lot of the civilian casualties are officially still just “under investigation,” the UN is openly expressing concern about the rising toll.

The UN has reported 466 civilian casualties, including 205 deaths, just in the first nine months of 2017, which is already a 52% increase from the number killed in 2016. With strikes continuing to escalate, the final figure will only be higher.

This comes amid reports that the US strikes in Iraq and Syria are on the decline, which may allow more of America’s air power to be recommitted further east to Afghanistan, where insurgents still hold vast amounts of territory, and where the Afghan government is generally ambivalent about incidents in which civilians are slain.

Jason Ditz is news editor of Antiwar.com.

Featured image is from the author.

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Book Review: ‘Dear World’: A Syrian Girl’s Story of War and Plea for Peace’ by Bana Alabed

November 9th, 2017 by Susan Dirgham

The book ‘Dear World: A Syrian Girl’s Story of War and Plea for Peace’ was published in October 2017. It is purportedly written by a Syrian girl, Bana Alabed, with the help of her mother and an editor. The book is being prominently promoted in the US and UK and is anticipated to be a big seller this coming Holiday Season.

Background

Bana Alabed is an 8-year-old Syrian girl who rose to fame in 2016 when a Twitter account was set up in her name and she started tweeting in fluent English from east Aleppo as it was under bombardment by Syrian and Russian forces trying to dislodge insurgents.

The first tweet in Bana’s name appeared on 24^th September 2016. It simply read, ‘I need peace’. The Twitter account soon had tens of thousands of followers, among them J. K. Rowling, the author of ‘Harry Potter’. It was later observed in a video that 7-year-old Bana knew very little English and was being prompted or told what to say.

Bana and Anne Frank?

The book begins with a quote from ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’, thus inferring that there are parallels between Bana and the famous Dutch Jewish girl who was forced to hide from the Nazis in the Second World War. If Bana is meant to represent Anne, then presumably the Syrian and Russian governments are meant to represent the Nazis. This is misleading. Several brave Dutch people hid the young Anne and her family from the Nazis. In Syria, Islamist militants, such as those in east Aleppo have targeted Syrians simply because they belonged to minorities. Australian anthropologist Dr. Fiona Hill described how her adoptive Syrian brother, a Sunni, risked his life to rescue three Alawi families from the Free Syrian Army and ‘inevitable summary murder’ at their hands.

Bana and Malala?

“Dear World” is published by Simon & Schuster, part of the CBS media empire. It was edited or perhaps ghost written by senior editor Christine Pride who sees Bana Alabed “as a heroine reminiscent of Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai”. This is misleading to the point of being bizarre. Before a Taliban gunman shot her, Malala wrote a blog detailing life under Taliban rule. Bana may be a brave and good child, but ‘Dear World’ does not take a stand against extremist forces. On the contrary, Bana’s father was active with the extremist insurgents.

Jabhat al-Nusra, a group linked to both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, was the strongest of the militia groups in east Aleppo at the time Bana was sending her tweets. Former Australian soldier Mathew Stewart’s story points to these links. Soon after the start of the war in Afghanistan, Stewart joined the Taliban, and then in 2015 he worked ‘as a trainer with Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s proxy militia in Syria’.

Those who tweet and write in Bana Alabed’s name seem unconcerned about the enforcement of harsh punishments by Jabhat al-Nusra, such as the execution of women. Nor are they concerned about the group’s violence or terror tactics, which are detailed on the Australian National Security webpage.

Ironically, although peace is a word used liberally in ‘Dear World’, one tweet since deleted from Bana’s Twitter account read,

Dear world, it’s better to start 3rd world war instead of letting Russia & Assad commit #HolocaustAleppo

The book portrays the young narrator and her mother as courageous and compassionate. According to this narrative the only militants in east Aleppo were the FSA and they were good guys fighting against the evil Syrian government forces. This is public relations propaganda, very far from the reality which American journalists James Foley and Stephen Sotloff documented before being assassinated.

A Western, not Syrian, Readership

‘Dear World’ is not directed at readers in Syria who are aware of the war’s complex nature and “rebel” reality. Most Syrians grieve the loss of loved ones in the war, want women to maintain freedoms and minorities to be able to worship without fear. Most Syrians do not want their country to be partitioned and made a haven for extremists. The book is written for a western audience, conditioned by the simplistic mainstream media narrative of ‘heroic revolutionaries’ fighting the brutal ‘dictator Assad’.

In January 2017, Bana implored Donald Trump to stop the bombs in Syria and ‘save the children’. But in April 2017, Bana expressed support for Donald Trump’s airstrikes on a Syrian airfield after it was claimed the ‘regime’ had dropped a bomb containing sarin. There were no calls for a thorough impartial investigation, just a call to bomb. Four children were killed in the U.S. airstrikes. It seems clear there is political manipulation guiding the social media messages of a photogenic sweet girl.

Jesus, King, Gandhi … and the FSA?

‘Dear World’ champions Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr, and Gandhi, while extolling fighters in the ‘Free Syrian Army’. To the extent that it exists at all, the FSA is made up armed groups that fly the ‘opposition flag’ rather than al-Qaeda or ISIS ones. This allows them to receive weapons and supplies from western governments even as they defect and turn over these weapons to Syria’s version of Al Queda, Jabhat al Nusra.

James Foley, the American journalist beheaded by ISIS, interviewed an FSA commander in east Aleppo who ‘promised Aleppo would burn’. In this commander’s opinion, ‘the people of Aleppo were only concerned about their barbecues’ and deserved punishment for not supporting the armed ‘revolution’.

‘Dear World’ distorts the truth, abusing the trust of its readers. The book is a weapon in the covert and overt efforts of Syria’s enemies to effect ‘regime change’ by any means. Despite the narrator’s plea for peace, the book’s depiction of the ‘regime’ as the personification of evil could lead a generation of young readers in the West to uncritically support war against Syria and its people for years to come.

As a beautifully packaged children’s book that includes the endorsement of the author of ‘Harry Potter’, ‘Dear World’ could conceivably encourage some impressionable readers to take up arms against a government. Some young readers may believe Syria is an uncivilized wasteland and a battlefield that even they could potentially enter one day, flying a flag, trying to be a hero, killing locals who don’t support the ‘revolution’. For an attractive looking children’s book, ‘Dear World’ is a potentially dangerous package.

British PR Firm Created ‘Bana’, the Brand

Could there be any significance in the fact that the PR firm, The Blair Partnership, which handles J. K. Rowling’s publicity also handles Bana’s? The Blair Partnership has transformed ‘Bana’ from a little girl into a brand that represents opposition to the Syrian government and, in effect, support for British foreign policy.

Lies and Omissions in War

Though J .K. Rowling endorses ‘Dear World’, it can be assumed that Peter Ford, the former UK ambassador to Syria would not. According to him the British Foreign Office has lied about the war and “it was not the case” that the opposition was dominated “by so-called moderates”.

Apart from mentioning the kidnapping of two of Bana’s uncles, the book hardly refers to the well-documented violence of the Islamist factions operating in east Aleppo at the time Bana was supposedly there. Nor is there mention in ‘Dear World’ of the civilians killed in west Aleppo when insurgents fired rockets into residential areas or detonated car bombs. In October 2016, the mother of 20-year-old Mireille Hindoyan recounted how a ‘rebel’ missile had killed Mireille and her 12-year-old brother. They had been standing in the street waiting for their mother to finish her shopping. Mireille’s body was dismembered. An online search indicates that the BBC, ABC and the American PBS did not present this story. They surely would have if this had happened in a western country: it was an act of terror, the victims were young and innocent, and Mireille was a local swimming star. Like most of the mainstream western media, those behind the Bana phenomenon seem to have no regard for the victims of ‘rebels’.

Likewise, the beheading of a young boy in July 2016 by an Islamist group in east Aleppo that received funding from the United States is not referred to in ‘Dear World’.

Investigating Claims

‘Dear World’ presents a long list of claims against the ‘regime’. They include the bombing of schools and hospitals, the random shooting of civilians from a helicopter, and the dropping of cluster bombs, phosphorous, and chorine on people in east Aleppo.

However, these claims almost invariably originated from media outlets and ‘activists’ linked to the ‘rebels’. The unverified claims have been promoted by western media and some prominent Non-Governmental Organizations while refutations have been ignored. Detailed examinations in case after case have shown the accusations to be exaggerated if not false. It seems this book is actually written by an adult with a political motive.

Bana and Turkish President Erdogan

In December 2016, the extremists controlling east Aleppo were finally forced out of the city. Most surviving civilians rushed into the government controlled west Aleppo and described their “liberation” from the terrorists who had dominated east Aleppo since 2012. In an agreement with the Syrian government, remaining extremists and their families were taken from Aleppo to Idlib province while some others, including Bana and her family, went to Turkey.

Even US Vice President Biden admitted that Turkey supported violent extremists including Al Qaeda (al-Nusra) in Syria. Turkey’s pivotal role and complicity in the violence was confirmed in a video produced by American Lebanese journalist Serena Shim, who died for her work.

Thus it is ironic and a measure of the distortions that Bana told President Erdogan at a meeting in the presidential palace, “Thank you for supporting the children of Aleppo and helping us to get out from war. I love you.”

This is not to suggest that Bana Alabed does not deserve our sympathy. She does, especially since it appears that nefarious forces, which stretch from Syria to Turkey to Britain, are exploiting her. With consummate cynicism, they are using her cute face and demeanor to promote a vicious invasion and war.

Bana Alabed’s ‘Dear World’ is a book that tugs on the heartstrings as it misleads readers. It is actually propaganda for “regime change” in a small sweet package.

Susan Dirgham is an English as a Second Language Teacher. Beginning in September 2003, she taught at the British Council in Damascus for two years and has subsequently visited Syria several times. With a team that includes Syrian women on humanitarian visas in Australia, she edits the magazine ‘Beloved Syria – Considering Syrian Perspectives’. She can be reached at [email protected]

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Video: The Saudi Purge: The Middle East Is on the Verge of A New War

November 9th, 2017 by South Front

Saudi Arabia is going through a major internal political crisis the likes of which has rarely been seen.

A missile gets fired on the Saudi capital. A missile, which was allegedly built in Iran and smuggled to Yemen, just to be fired at Saudi Arabia.

According to initial reports, two Saudi princes died back to back in 24 hours: one in an “accidental” helicopter crash, the other during a firefight that broke out while security forces were trying to arrest him. On November 7, Saudi Arabia’s information ministry spokesman said that “Prince Abdulaziz is alive and well”. However, the prince could not be independently reached for comment by the media.

Other high-ranking members of the establishment and the royal family — the two tend to be one and the same in Saudi Arabia — get arrested on charges of corruption, with their bank accounts frozen.

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri unexpectedly resigns after he was summoned to Riyadh by his Saudi-backers.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia accused Iran of conducting acts of “direct military aggression” and accused Lebanon of “declaring war” on Riyadh by allowing Hezbollah “aggression” against the kingdom.

All this happened in a span of just a few days.

With ever-growing security challenges and problems at the regional level, the crisis that took hold of Saudi Arabia does not seem to be slowing down.

One contributing factor to the ongoing crisis is a major split in the Saudi royal family: the power struggle that resulted in the former crown prince being deposed and replaced with a new one, a move that shook things up quite a bit inside the country. The echo of this can be seen in the current “anti-corruption” persecution, enforced by the current Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

Outside the country, several key foreign policy projects failed: the effectiveness of the Yemen intervention can be judged by the fact that it resulted in a missile being fired at Riyadh. Bashar al-Assad is still in power in Syria. The attempts to scare Qatar into submission backfired, as Qatar has been getting more and more friendly with Russia, Turkey and Iran.

Iran is gaining more and more influence in the region, while the Saudis seem to be losing it, hence they are trying to compensate for their losses by participating in proxy wars elsewhere.

The Saudis also tried to flex their diplomatic muscle. King Salman even visited Moscow, where the two sides exchanged promises with no guarantees that these will ever be fulfilled. This also backfired, as some considered it a demonstration of weakness or an attempt to make peace by making concessions.

Add economic struggles to this series of failures, and one can see why the King’s and his Crown Prince’s position seem less and less stable by the minute. The situation apparently seemed so dire, that in order to keep everything afloat active persecution seemed the only possible way to keep the King and his successor in power. The “anti-corruption” campaign is just an excuse: the corruption has always been high in Saudi Arabia, and no one batted an eye before now.

These are temporary measures.

Persecution can hardly solve foreign and internal matters, and it will not lead to a solution of the problems. Right now, the kingdom’s leadership is desperately in need of an enemy to unite the population and draw their attention away from the chaotic events that unfolding in the country.

A warlike rhetoric against Iran, Lebanon and Hezbollah are a clear sign of this. While Iran is a potent regional power in military and diplomatic terms, Hezbollah is a non-state actor. So, Riyadh may choose the group as an enemy for its risky foreign policy undertaking. Saudi Arabia and Israel are obvious allies in their will to destroy Hezbollah. On November 5, Tel Aviv started the largest-ever aerial exercise in the history of Israel. A leaked diplomatic cable confirmed that the Saudis and Israelis are coordinating their efforts against Iran and Hezbollah thus escalating the already tense situation in the Middle East.

The region may be heading for another large-scale military conflict.

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Mission Creep in Darkest Africa. US Military Expands its Operations Throughout the Continent

November 9th, 2017 by Eric Margolis

Featured image: Commander, U.S. Africa Command, U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, speaks with members of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, Aug. 18, 2016, at Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti.

‘Take up the white man’s burden’ – Rudyard Kipling, poet laureate of British imperialism

The British Empire, which at the end of the 19^th century ruled one quarter of the earth’s land surface, is long gone. But its robust successor and heir, the United States, has set about enlarging it.

As I sought to explain in my last book ‘American Raj – How the US Rules the Muslim World,’ the US imperium exerts its power by controlling tame, compliant regimes around the world and their economies. They are called ‘allies’ but, in fact, should be more accurately termed satrapies or vassal states. Many states are happy to be prosperous US vassals, others less so.

The US power system has successfully dominated much of the world, except of course for great powers China, Russia and India. Germany and much of Western Europe remains in thrall to post WWII US power. The same applies to Canada, Latin America, Australia, and parts of SE Asia.

We are seeing a rerun of the fine old 1930’s film, ‘Beau Geste’ which was taken from a cracking good 1924 Victorian novel by C. Percival Wren. Set in French North Africa, Wren’s dashing French Legionnaires end up defending a remote fort against masses of hostile Arab and Berber tribesman.

Beau Geste 1939 film poster

The novel and film negatively shaped western attitudes to the Arab world and its peoples but glorified the French Foreign Legion. Wren claimed to have been a member of the Legion which was the primary enforcement arm of France’s African colonial empire.

The famed Legion, which fought from Mexico to Indochina, has now shrunken to a pitiful 8,000 men. France’s thread-bare finances proved a deadlier enemy than Saharan horsemen.

Even so, the Legion is still used by Paris for sudden shock interventions across West Africa to support client French regimes and punish those who challenge the status quo. I’ve lifted a glass with many Legionnaires. They are an amazingly tough bunch: you never know whether they are going to kill you or buy you drinks.

US troops have now stepped into the boots of ‘La Legion.’ Almost unnoticed, US Special Forces – our version of the Legion – have been slipping into Africa, the newest and most exciting market for the Pentagon.

Creation of the new US Africa Command in 2007, with headquarters in Germany, was discreet but it signaled active US military and geopolitical interest in resource-rich Africa, a key target of Chinese interest. No one in Washington seems to know how many US troops operate in Africa, but it’s at least 12,000 not counting mercenary contractors and CIA units. There was consternation in Congress when these facts emerged last week.

The key US base in Africa is at Djibouti, a poxy, fly-blown French colony on the Red Sea that is also shared by the Legion and, curiously, a Chinese naval station. US forces in Djibouti operate into Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Central Africa. US forces in West Africa operate in Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Liberia, Uganda, and anywhere that pro-US regimes are under pressure. Mali and Chad, where nomadic tribes battle the central government, are key operating regions. Both are under nasty dictatorial regimes backed by Washington.

Djibuti

As in the British Empire, the ‘natives’ are kept under control by small numbers of skilled Western troops. There’s no need for big battalions of regulars. The key is western air power and intelligence. Particularly so in often barren sub-Saharan West Africa where French and US warplanes patrol the skies. `We have the Maxim gun (machine gun) and they have not’ wrote a Victorian poet. Nothing much has changed.

France’s previous president, Francois Hollande, charged into a local tribal squabble in Mali, a key uranium supplier, between black town dwellers and nomadic Tuareg and assorted Islamists. Unable to afford the spreading war, France asked for US help and got it. The bitterly anti-Muslim Trump administration could not miss a chance to attack Muslims in West Africa under the banner of ‘anti-terrorism.’

A ‘terrorist’ in this case is anyone who challenges the western-dominated political order, from Malian nomads to Central African Republic rebels. In the brutal dictatorial regimes of former French West Africa the only effective opposition comes from groups calling themselves Islamic. This pulls the chain of the Trump administration and its Christian fundamentalist allies at home who seek to uproot fast-spreading Islam from Africa.

So off the US military charges into Africa, with little understanding of the region and even less strategic planning. It’s Vietnam-style ‘mission creep’ all over again.

Washington is still trying to figure out what happened to Herzegovina in the Balkans while it plunges into darkest West Africa. That’s why Trump and French president Emmanuel Macron are so chummy these days.

Eric Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist, writing and commenting for the top media outlets of the United States, Canada UK, France, Gulf states, Turkey, Malaysia and Pakistan.

All images in this article are from Oriental Review.

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Syria Will Join Paris Climate Accord, US is the Only Country Which Refuses to Sign

November 9th, 2017 by Sophie Mangal

Syria plans to join the Paris climate accord, an official from the war-ravaged country said Tuesday, a move that leaves the United States as the only United Nations member state not supporting the agreement, according to Associated Press.

While the United States ratified the 2015 Paris Agreement last year, President Donald Trump announced in June that he wants to pull out unless the U.S. can get a better deal.

Syria was the last U.N. member state not to have signed the accord after Nicaragua did so last month. Not all signatories have ratified the treaty yet.

Its ascension can also be seen as a kind of geopolitical troll. Since Nicaragua signed onto Paris last month, Syria was the only remaining country left out of the Paris process. Nicaragua gets almost all of its energy from renewable sources, and it declined to join the treaty in 2015 because it said the accord did not go far enough.

If the Trump administration follows through with its threat, the U.S. withdrawal would take effect in November 2020.

In an address to delegates at a global climate meeting in Bonn, Germany, Syria’s deputy minister of local administration and environment, M. Wadah Katmawi, said his country would join the Paris deal “as soon as possible.”

Katmawi said Syria will seek foreign aid to help it meet its commitments under the climate accord, which aims to limit global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Nations that are entering the phase of post-war recovery – as my nation has seen a war that was oppressive upon it – should be given the priority in reconstruction and reorganizing the environment and climate,” he said.

Syria’s ascension to the treaty is the first major news to emerge from this year’s UN climate talks, which are being held in Bonn, Germany, this month.

Sophie Mangal is a special investigative correspondent at Inside Syria Media Center where this article was originally published.

Images are from the author.

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Outrageous Wealth Disparity in America. 400 Richest More Wealth than Bottom 64%

November 9th, 2017 by Stephen Lendman

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE:

Contact at [email protected].

According to an Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) report titled “Billionaire Bonanza 2017,” America’s 400 richest individuals have more total wealth than the nation’s bottom 64%.

The three richest billionaires are wealthier than the bottom 50%. The bottom 1% of Americans have a negative net worth of $196 billion. The top 1% has a combined net worth of $33.4 trillion.

Shocking stuff! It happened by design, not accident – neoliberal harshness for most Americans, near-zero interest rates and trillions of dollars of money printing madness by the Wall Street owned and controlled Fed, near-free money, making super-rich Americans far richer.

Transferring wealth from most Americans to wealthy elites has been going on for years, a deliberate scheme to concentrate it in the hands of the nation’s privileged class at the expense of most others.

Below are the highlights of the IPS report:

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett own more wealth than 63 million US household – 160 million people.

America’s wealthiest billionaires are as rich as 70 million US households – 178 million people.

Billionaires comprising Forbes’ 400 have more wealth than 64% of the US population – 204 million people.

Median US family net worth is $80,000, excluding automobiles owned.

Source: IPS Report

Forbes 400 members are wealthier than 33 million US families with the above net worth.

One-fifth of US households have zero or negative net worth. Over 30% of Black households and 27% of Latino ones have no wealth or they’re underwater.

Since the Forbes 400 list was published on October 17, Bezos increased his wealth by $7 billion – in a few weeks.

According to IPS, figures in its report “underestimate our current levels of wealth concentration. The growing use of offshore tax havens and legal trusts has made the concealing of assets more widespread than ever before.”

Rich elites worldwide shelter their wealth offshore, paying minimal or no taxes on it. Lawyers and accountants enable them to avoid paying their fair share of taxes on wealth maintained at home.

Many large US corporations pay nothing. On average, they pay around 14% of their income in federal taxes. The current corporate rate is 35%.

From 2008 – 2015, over half of S&P 500 companies paid no federal income taxes, despite combined profits of over $3.8 trillion, according to the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy – calling the 35% corporate rate a “myth.”

The GOP tax plan will increase inequality further, a bonanza for super-rich Americans, crumbs for most others, and for some a tax increase.

According to IPS researchers Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie,

“(o)ver recent decades, an incredibly disproportionate share of America’s income and wealth gains has flowed to the top of our economic spectrum.”

“At the tip of that top sit the nation’s richest 400 individuals, a group that Forbes magazine has been tracking annually since 1982.”

“Americans at the other end of our economic spectrum, meanwhile, watch their wages stagnate and savings dwindle.”

The net worth of super-rich Americans continues growing. Most others struggle to get by on low wages, poor or no benefits, along with millions of students entrapped by over $1.3 trillion in debts incurred to pay tuition and other school expenses.

America’s out-of-control wealth disparity is a national disgrace. Bipartisan policies make things worse, not better.

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

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

Featured image is from Stephen Ewen / Wikimedia Commons.

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The Syria “Chemical Weapons Attacks”. UN ‘Joint Investigative Mechanism’ Report on Khan Shaykhun Proven Inaccurate, Politically Biased

November 9th, 2017 by Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli

Introduction

Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) [1] meant that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Instead in this modern episode, politics acts as the continuation of war: At the same rhythm in which the Syrian army and Russian forces, as well other allies, progress its irreversible military victory, the losing parties in the conflict seemingly assay to compensating their defeat by means of salacious political manoeuvres.

The strategy of deposing the secular republic presided by Bashar al-Assad by financing pro-sharia fundamentalists that for years terrorized the Syrian population, did not work. The shift in the plan appears to consist in a multiple international effort to discredit the winners, politically and ad-hominem. Specifically, this has been pursued via allegations of ‘chemical attacks’, no matter how preposterous, or evidence-deprived, these claims may be.

The most recent episode is a report of the “UN Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM)” [2] recently discussed at the Security Council. There are multiple reasons why to question the work of the JIM, as well of the ‘UN-Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic’ (COI), [3] now centred on the alleged incidents in Khan Shaykhun of April 2017. These reasons have to do with logical and methodological contradictions showed in the reports it self; some others are referred to political motivations and bias exercised by those commissions; and finally, related to serious flaws pertinent to the primary source for the allegations, principally the West-founded propaganda organization ”White Helmets”.

I have recently reported in The Indicter Magazine an updated analysis (“From Timisoara to Khan Shaykhun”) [4] regarding this and previous allegations of such a “chemical attacks”, illustrated with the so-called “Sarmin incident” of March 2015. All this, in the historical context of ‘false flag’ operations devised to justify a strategy of regime-change. My early reports on the White Helmets dealt with fake medical and life-saving procedures on children presumably already dead. [5] [6] Those reports were based in analyses we did at our NGO Swedish Doctors for Human Rights, report which was later quoted by the Syrian Ambassador at the UN Security Council, in April this year. [7]

At first glance, we may see a similar pattern between the above episode and regarding the Khan Shaykhun official narrative. This refers both to the discussable credibility of primary sources been used –i.e. the White Helmets– [8] who reported the allegations to the “open sources”, which in turn are used as separated, independent sources. Added the astonishing lack of “quality control” of those testimonies from the part not only of the UN investigators, but also by a number of Western delegations at the Security Council. Fundamental principles of verifiability and reliability are ignored by the non-experts investigative panel.

May I remind that fake videos which the White Helmets fabricated in 2015 were shown at the UN [9] without a minimal verification regarding the authenticity or correctness of the “life-saving” procedures on dead children shown in the materials. [5] [6] This, to the point that the then U.S. ambassador Samantha Power declared to the press after the White Helmets video-show at the UN headquarters 16 April 2015, “If there was a dry eye in the room, I didn’t see it” [10]

The narrative authored by the “Seventh report of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons – United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism” tells that a main probe that one bomb containing a chemical substance of highest toxicity was dropped by the ‘Syrian government’ consists in a crater left in a Khan Shaykhun road. The same JIM authors acknowledge that rebels in Khan Shaykhun have however destroyed evidence by filling the purported impact “crater” with concrete.

Why the “rebels” have done that – and what consequences that sabotage would have for the investigation of facts is not even considered by the panel. Instead, what the JIM reports is that “The high security risk of a site visit to Khan Shaykhun, which is currently in a situation of armed conflict and under the control of a listed terrorist organization (Nusrah Front), outweighed the benefits to the investigation.”

What the panel is really messaging is that their own perception of a personal risk outweighs their unethical behaviour of condemning the Syrian government without investigating an essential piece of evidence. But equally true is that a visit on-site would make difficult for he JIM to disregard evidence that may contra the departure-premises of the investigators: ‘al-Assad is guilty’, ‘Russia is guilty’, ‘Iran is guilty’, and all those that oppose the U.S. pipeline dream in the Middle East shall be ‘guilty’ the same.

Besides, what danger al-Nusra and the rest of the “moderate terrorists” would possibly pose to the JIM team? Those forces have been militarily, logistically and politically supported by the same Western powers behind the JIM ‘conclusions’.

As regarding the ‘bomb crater’ version defended by the JIM, the panel reports about witnesses’ testimonies, photographs and even “satellite imagery”. These efforts would be appropriate in case some one would be questioning the existence of he crater. But the existence of the hole in the road is NOT the issue in discussion. The issue is instead to discern what caused that crater. In this regards, it is incomprehensible that the JIM neglected to report details of the exhaustive investigations conducted by Ted Postol, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and who demonstrated that such a crater could not possibly be the result of an aerial bombing. [11]

III

By acknowledging that Khan Shaykhun was then under control of al-Nusra, the JIM report exhibits yet another methodological contradiction: That would mean that al-Nusra and its jihadists allies, by having control of the area, they were also in control of the ‘official’ information delivered from Khan Shaykhun on the alleged incident. This would imperatively call for a questioning of the reliability/credibility (bias) of main sources that the panel used for its allegations.

Particularly concerning propaganda organizations such as the White Helmets and other formations “under control of al-Nusra” (it is what JIM says), or in frank collaboration. For the White Helmets, main source at the UN reports of recent years, could possibly function in those areas only insofar a convergence would exist towards the local powers in control. No need to remind that territories occupied by terrorists do not function as a democracy.

What those biases not investigated by JIM would consist of? The answer is in what has been the core of the propaganda strategy of al-Nusra / FSA/ White Helmets and the rest of the sharia-adept jihadist organizations of the “Syrian opposition”, and from the very beginning: [12] the constant advocating for an escalation of the U.S./EU military intervention. For instance –as I have already pointed out in The Indicter Magazine and in interviews with Russian and EU media– each time an allegation of “chemical attacks” arises from the part of the “Syrian opposition”, and in particular by the White Helmets, those claims have been immediately followed by their renewed international pledge for a No-Fly Zone in Syria. [13] [14] [15] [16]

Further, the JIM presents a highly confusing argument on that the purported ‘sarin’ would not be properly sarin, but instead some sort of substance of the like. Then the panel admits that the mysterious substance is not actually ‘Syrian” sarin as such, but instead it would contain something that previously would also has been present in chemical materials time ago stockpiled in Syria (Syria destroyed all chemical weapons between 2013-2014). [17] But considering the documentation existing a) on the possession of chemical weapons (inclusive sarin) by opposition forces –[18] which comprises ISIS sarin; [19] b) on the rebels ‘homemade’ amateurish fabrication and stockpiling; and c) on the actual weapon-transfers that has existed between jihadists formations in the area, ISIS included, [20]: Who would possibly accept such an ambiguous JIM argument on the “semi-sarin” as unequivocal evidence that the alleged attack was ordered by the Syrian government?

Finally, the panel states, again paradoxically, that “Should conditions improve and it be determined that an on-site investigation would produce valuable new information, a visit could take place in the future.” So, if I may ask, why not waiting for that possibility instead of passing judgement and declaring Syria ‘guilty’ already now, in absence of solid evidence?

The answer is elsewhere in the JIM document, where the panel admitted that the more time passes, the less possibilities remain for evidence collection. So, they may think, why to hurry?

To the above it should be added the numerous incongruences in the documentation and testimonies that the JIM accepted to include in its report. For instance, that several dozens of ‘victims’ of the alleged attack were admitted and registered in the vicinity hospitals at a time-point before the purported occurrence of the said attack; or the notorious clinical disagreement reported in samples taken from same individuals, etc. These and other kinds of epidemiological flaws or oddities, such as an atypical ratio between injured and reported fatalities, are equally prominent in the parallel COI report.

The JIM conclusions in its latest report [2], which declared ‘guilty’ the Syrian government for a ‘war crime’ on the base of “open sources” and one-sided or non verifiable information, further entails –precisely as its sister report issued by the COI [2]– two fundamental forensic flaws:

i) Absence of a ‘crime motive’ demonstration.

The JIM fails to demonstrate what conceivable purpose would exist from the part of the Syrian government, the wining side in the war, to indulge in such a self-damaging decision. At the contrary, such imputation against the Syrian government is deprived of logic, particularly ‘geopolitical logic’. [21] As indicated by former British Ambassador to Syria, Mr Peter Ford, the allegations against Syria are simply not plausible. [22]

ii) Absence of the “beyond doubt” principle.

Typically, any mob’s judgement that has further leaded to a lynching, appeal to the principle “We have reasons to believe”. At the contrary, a forensic, scientific, or juridical conclusion reached by any authentic experts-panel or court regarding severe criminal charges has to be based in the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. This is not the case in the unprofessional conclusions issued by The JIM and COI, whose reports refer to allegations of “war crimes”, and not a kind of lesser crimes where the required standard could be of a lesser solidity. [23] [24]

What to do?

The ultimate human right is the right to exist. War is the most certain risk opposing that fundamental right. This is thereason of SWEDHR engagement in denouncing the warmongering of those –in Sweden or internationally– pursuing or provoking conflicts that might fatally lead to a worldwide confrontation, to a WW3 and its unpredictable risk of nuclear holocaust. It is highly the time that the warmongering behind the arbitrary conclusions of panels composed by a few, non-expert individuals, and of the powers behind, be exposed. Likewise, the politically biased behaviour of self-proclaimed “human-rights” organizations, such as HRW and others, [25] particularly the Swedish Section of Amnesty International, ultimately financed or ideologically controlled by those same powers. [26] [27] [28]

Swedish Doctors for Human Rights therefore suggest the establishment of an international, independent and multidisciplinary expert-panel of scientists aimed to review the procedures leading to the JIM assessment; to investigate the methodological bias behind their evidence-deprived conclusions. The suggested professional team shall be a true objective panel not only concerned with the flawed report on the Khan Shaykhun incident, but reviewing similar faulty allegations done in recent years, which together form a pattern of an aggressive geopolitical behaviour, and a contributing menace to world peace.

“The use of chemical weapons –an immoral and condemnable act anywhere, at any time, and under any circumstances.” –The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 27 October 2017

***

Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli is professor emeritus of epidemiology (research focus on Injury epidemiology), medicine doktor i psykiatri (PhD, Karolinska Institute), and formerly Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School. He is the founder and chairman of Swedish Professors and Doctors for Human Rights and editor-in-chief of The Indicter. Also publisher of The Professors’ Blog, and CEO of Libertarian Books – Sweden. Author of “Sweden VS. Assange – Human Rights Issues.”

This article was originally published by The Indicter.

Notes

[1] Carl von Clausewitz , “On War”. Berlin: Dümmlers Verlag, 1832. English translation: https://www.clausewitz.com/readings/OnWar1873/TOC.htm

[2] “Seventh report of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons – United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism”. http://static.alarabiya.net/files/PDF/2017/10/27/17021a74-d826-4752-aba6-f4083d8e7220.pdf

[3] “Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic (Advance Edited Version)” http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/CoISyria

[4] M. Ferrada de Noli, “From Timisoara to Khan Shaykhun. Part I: The Staged-Massacre Routine for Regime Change”. The Indicter Magazin, 24 October 2017. http://theindicter.com/from-timisoara-to-khan-shaykhun-part-i-the-staged-massacre-routine-for-regime-change/

[5] M. Ferrada de Noli, “White Helmets Video: Swedish Doctors for Human Rights Denounce Medical Malpractice and ‘Misuse’ of Children for Propaganda Aims”. The Indicter Magazine, 6 March 2017. http://theindicter.com/white-helmets-video-swedish-doctors-for-human-rights-denounce-medical-malpractice-and-misuse-of-children-for-propaganda-aims/

[6] M. Ferrada de Noli, “White Helmets Movie: Updated Evidence From Swedish Doctors Confirm Fake ‘Lifesaving’ and Malpractices on Children”. The Indicter Magazine, 17 March 2017. http://theindicter.com/white-helmets-movie-updated-evidence-from-swedish-doctors-confirm-fake-lifesaving-and-malpractices-on-children/

[7] “Report by Swedish Doctors for Human Rights referred in UN Security Council. White Helmets, Syria”. The Indicter Channel, YouTube, 12 April 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6RqQlFXo2A

[8] NOTE:

Independent journalists Eva Bartlett and Vanessa Beeley have conducted several investigations on the organization White Helmets. See a list of relevant publications by Eva Bartlet at https://ingaza.wordpress.com/syria/ ; articles by Vanessa Beeley at https://muckrack.com/vanessa-beeley/articles

[9] Nick Logan, “UN officials in tears watching video from alleged chlorine attack in Syria”. Global News, 17 April 2017. https://globalnews.ca/news/1945397/un-officials-in-tears-watching-video-from-alleged-chlorine-attack-in-syria/

[10] New York Times, “U.N. Security Council Sees Video Evidence of a Chemical Attack in Syria”. New York Times, 16 April 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/world/middleeast/un-security-council-sees-video-evidence-of-a-chemical-attack-in-syria.html

[11] Ted Postol, “Assessment of White House Intelligence Report About Nerve Agent Attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria”. Global Research, 13 April 2017. https://www.globalresearch.ca/assessment-of-white-house-intelligence-report-about-nerve-agent-attack-in-khan-shaykhun-syria/5584867

NOTE: “Theodore Postol, a professor emeritus of science, technology, and national-security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who once served as a scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations at the Pentagon.” https://www.thenation.com/article/the-chemical-weapons-attack-in-syria-is-there-a-place-for-skepticism/

[12] Syria Needs a No-Fly Zone! A no-fly zone was Syrians’ earliest demand from the international community. http://www.sacouncil.com/syria_needs_a_no_fly_zone

[13] “White Helmets ‘Made Up Syria Gas Attack Story in Campaign for No-Fly Zone”. Sputnik, 19 April 2017. https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201704101052502141-white-helmet-syria-chemical-attack/

[14] Interview with the author, “NATO White Helmets Denounced by Swedish Doctors”. UK Column News. Published on Mar 8, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijcA3LCKCl0

[15] Interview with the author, “De Hvide Hjelmes propaganda er farlig”. Arbeideren, Denmark, 26 April 2017. http://arbejderen.dk/udland/de-hvide-hjelmes-propaganda-er-farlig

[16] Associazione di medici svedesi: “Attacco chimico in Siria è una fake news”. Oltre La Linea, Italy. http://www.oltrelalinea.news/2017/04/10/associazione-di-medici-svedesi-attacco-chimico-in-siria-e-una-fake-news/

[17] “Destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons”. Wikipedia article, retrieved 2 November 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Syria%27s_chemical_weapons

[18] “U.N. has testimony that Syrian rebels used sarin gas: investigator”, Reuters, 5 May 2013. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-un/u-n-has-testimony-that-syrian-rebels-used-sarin-gas-investigator-idUSBRE94409Z20130505

[19] The New York Times, “ISIS Used Chemical Arms at Least 52 Times in Syria and Iraq, Report Says”. NYT, 21 November 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/world/middleeast/isis-chemical-weapons-syria-iraq-mosul.html

[20] The New York Times, “U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell Into Jihadis’ Hands”. NYT, 5 December 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/world/africa/weapons-sent-to-libyan-rebels-with-us-approval-fell-into-islamist-hands.html

[21] M Ferrada de Noli, “UOSSM admits that doctor reporting alleged Khan Shaykhun ‘aerial attack’ was not qualified to do that”. The Indicter Magazine, 29 April 2017. http://theindicter.com/uossm-admits-that-doctor-reporting-alleged-khan-shaykhun-aerial-attack-was-not-qualified-to-do-that/

[22] BBC, “Trump has just given jihadists a thousand reasons to stage fake flag operations”. Video uploaded by BBC News. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LKsn4ZutxQ

[23] Grechenig, Nicklisch & Thoeni, Punishment Despite Reasonable Doubt – A Public Goods Experiment with Sanctions under Uncertainty, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (JELS) 2010, vol. 7 (4), p. 847-867

[24] NOTE:

Such as “clear and convincing evidence” or “preponderance of the evidence.”See, “What Is Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt?” HG.org legal resources. https://www.hg.org/article.asp?id=35819

[25] Eva Bartlett, “Deconstructing the NATO Narrative on Syria”. DissidentVoice.org, 10 October 2016. https://dissidentvoice.org/2015/10/deconstructing-the-nato-narrative-on-syria/

[26] M. Ferrada de Noli, “Swedish Doctors for Human Rights on biased allegations of ‘war crimes’ put forward by Amnesty International against Russia”. The Indicter Magazine, 26 December 2015. http://theindicter.com/swedish-doctors-for-human-rights-on-the-allegations-of-war-crimes-put-forward-by-amnesty-international-against-russia/

[28] M Ferrada de Noli, “New Amnesty International’s fabrications aim to interfere President Trump’s upcoming decision on US participating in the anti-terror war in Syria”. The Indicter Magazine, 9 February 2017. http://theindicter.com/new-amnesty-internationals-fabrications-aim-to-interfere-president-trumps-upcoming-decision-on-us-participating-in-the-anti-terror-war-in-syria/

[29] NOTE:

On the pro-USA stances displayed by the Swedish Section of Amnesty International, as well as its ties with the Swedish government, see also from the author: a) Former paid agent of Swedish Security Police dictated Amnesty Sweden’s stance against Assange ; and b) Swedish Section of Amnesty International voted to reject human-right actions on cases Assange, Snowden and tortured Palestinian children.

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Race, Repression and Russiagate: Defending Radical Black Self-Determination

November 9th, 2017 by Ajamu Baraka

It is absurd and an insult to argue that Russian propaganda efforts “deepen political and racial tensions in the United States,” as proposed by Julia Ioffe in a recent article in the Atlantic.

But the linking of the legitimate struggle of African/Black people in the United States against systemic oppression with “foreign” influences has been a recurrent feature of the ideological and military containment strategy of the U.S. state ever since the Soviet Union emerged as an international competitor to the four hundred-year-old colonial/capitalist Pan-European project.

From the early twentieth-century activism of the Pan-African Conferences through the Garvey movement, the socialist African Blood Brotherhood and the International African Service Bureau born out of the rise of fascism in Europe and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in the 30s, Black radicals formulated a theoretical understanding of and practical response to the realities of colonial and capitalist racist oppression throughout the African world.

And with the taking of state power by the Bolsheviks and the establishment of the Soviet Union and the Third International (COMINTERN), many black radicals gravitated to revolutionary Marxism, as both a critique of the Western capitalist dominance and a theory for disrupting that dominance.

The complex and often contradictory relationship between Black radicals and the international communist movement did not, however, stop the U.S. state from suggesting that every oppositional movement on the part of African/Black people in the U.S. was communist inspired.

From our agitation at the United Nations for human rights and against colonialism to what became known as the civil rights movement, the emerging national security state labelled our movement subversive and targeted our activists. Containment of the Soviet “threat” abroad meant ideological and political containment domestically so that by the mid-fifties, targeted repression and the McCarthy hearings had the result of effectively de-internationalism our movement for democratic and human rights and isolating various black radicals like Claudia Jones, W.E.B. Dubois, and Paul Robeson from the emerging civil rights movement.

In fact, by the time of the Montgomery bus boycotts, most activists in the South were afraid to even mention the term human rights because it had been effectively associated with communist subversion and the Soviet Union.

Today, the new McCarthyism is being led by centrist and liberal democrats utilizing the almost comical notion that capitalist Russia possesses the power and influence to not only impact elections but also create racial tensions. And once again, Black opposition is being casted as somehow foreign influenced and, therefore, a security threat that justifies special targeted repression.

But it is not just the radical “Black identity extremists” who write for Black Agenda Report and other Black radicals that find themselves subject to greater state scrutiny and on the receiving end of smear campaigns by rags like the Washington Post. Even loyal servants like Donna Brazile have now provoked the ire of the Democrat party leaders who question whether or not she has also become a Russia mole.

Donna Brazile didn’t even try and run from the Democrat plantation, but she is being treated like a runaway slave for just having the temerity to question Massa Clinton.

It shouldn’t take a Ph.D. in social psychology or a deep understanding of psychological operations (psy-ops) to see the transparent lunacy of today’s McCarthyism. But in a culture where six capitalist multinational corporations control most of the news content, it is not surprising that the public’s attention would be diverted to the ongoing soap opera of Russiagate.

Yet, for those of us on the frontlines in the struggle for our collective dignity, human rights and survival, we don’t have the luxury of allowing our attention to be diverted from the primary forces responsible for our oppression.

It is not Russians shooting down our people in the streets; transferring our children from juvenile to adult courts in record numbers; infiltrating our organizations; suppressing our votes; closing down schools and hospitals in our communities, poisoning the water and land in our communities; raising our rents and taxes and displacing us out of the cities; or militarizing the police through the 1033 program. No… these are the results of the policies enacted and implemented by good-old “Americans” in a society where the lives of the Black working class and poor don’t and never have mattered.

We must be clear. The elements of the capitalist oligarchy that have an issue with their capitalist counterparts in Russia have nothing to do with us. If they have an issue, they should fight it out among themselves. Capitalist competition has been at the center of the causes of wars among European powers, after all. We oppose war and want peace, but if the rich want war we need to make sure that the poor and working classes of all races are not the ones fighting. Let the rich fight for themselves!

On this 100^th anniversary of the revolution that brought into existence the Soviet Union, we are clear that the Russia of today is not the Soviet Union of 1917. But we will never dismiss the role, with all of its contradictions, that the Soviet Union played in supporting the fight against Western colonialism in Asia, Africa, Latin America and throughout the world and in support of African/Black democratic and human rights in the U.S.

For us, our historic task is to organize black dual and contending power for self-determination that is rooted in the black working class – the majority of our people – as part of the effort to build a broader multi-national, multi-racial, anti-oppression radical social bloc to transform the social and productive relations in this country. In other words, our responsibility is to make revolution.

That is the baseline for all strategic considerations regarding allies, objective social forces internationally, and determining whom our friends and enemies might be.

We stand in solidarity with all those who stand with us, who respect our autonomous processes, and who are committed to authentic revolutionary de-colonialization and building a socialist future. But we will fight all who attempt to erase us, to silence our voices, and collaborate consciously or unconsciously with the white supremacist, patriarchal, colonial/capitalist order.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch magazine.

Featured image is from Fibonacci Blue | Public Domain.

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Last Major ISIS Stronghold in Syria Liberated

November 9th, 2017 by Stephen Lendman

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Contact at [email protected].

At peak strength, ISIS controlled up to 70% of Syrian territory, according to Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu.

Its remnants are now confined to smaller areas, especially near Damascus and southwestern Daara.

US-supported ISIS was mostly defeated by Syrian and allied forces, greatly aided by Russian airpower since September 2015, the war’s turning point after its forces got involved.

On Wednesday, government and allied forces (including Iraqi troops) liberated Albukamal, the last ISIS stronghold in Syria, located in the Euphrates valley bordering Iraq, Syrian forces allowed to operate cross-border to accomplish the objective.

Days earlier, Russia’s Defense Ministry said ISIS now controls less than 5% of Syrian territory. Nearly all of Deir Ezzor Governorate is liberated, ISIS pockets remaining in western province areas..

Thousands of its fighters remain in Syria, many along the Iraqi border, their supply lines cut or considerably comprised.

Most will likely continue fighting to the death. Eliminating them entirely remains to be accomplished, a goal likely to be slow-going.

With its numbers reduced and strength greatly weakened, its goal of establishing a caliphate in Syria and Iraq was defeated.

It remains a threat with thousands of remaining fighters. It’ll take time to eliminate them altogether, a battle being slowly won despite Washington and its rogue allies supporting the scourge, along with other regional terrorist groups.

Liberating Syria from US-supported terrorists is being won in multiple ongoing battles, steady progress made.

On Tuesday, chief of Russia’s General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov said over the past two years,

“(m)ore than 1,000 inhabited communities have been liberated, over 54,000 members of illegal armed units killed, including more than 2,800 natives of Russia and 1,400 from former Soviet republics.”

They had about 1,500 tanks and armored vehicles, along with hundreds of other heavy weapons.

“There was no shortage of ammunition and material, which were constantly replenished from abroad,” he stressed.

“Their commanders were trained in special camps under the watchful eye of Western instructors and military advisers from some countries of the Middle East, Western Europe and America. In some cases, special forces officers from these countries led illegal armed units.”

Areas they controlled had “well thought out fire systems, concrete structures, a ramified system of artificial obstacles and underground communications.”

“During the two years of our armed forces’ participation in the fighting, it was possible not only to turn the tide of the hostilities in favor of government troops but also rout big militant groups in the most important areas, liberate the key cities and recapture major communication lines.”

Russia’s vital invention turned near-certain defeat into triumph, hopefully one day when all remaining US-supported terrorists are eliminated from the country, along with America’s hostile presence.

Separately, US forces illegally occupying southern Syrian territory continue blocking humanitarian aid to internally displaced refugees in dire need, Russia’s reconciliation center saying:

“During (a) video conference, the Russian party raised the issue of the US activities aimed to prevent delivery of humanitarian aid through the 55-km zone.”

“The parties also discussed issues of delivering humanitarian aid to al-Rukban camp and providing security to humanitarian convoys of international humanitarian organizations.”

A memorandum signed last May in Astana obligated signatories to allow safe, unimpeded humanitarian aid where needed.

Washington ignored it, continuing to block deliveries, Syrians suffering and dying from war, related violence, untreated diseases and extreme deprivation.

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

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