Americans are the most over-entertained, uninformed people on the planet – despite 84% of households having a computer, 73% with broadband Internet access, according to Pew Research.
Instead of relying on credible information sources easily available online, too many Americans apparently follow mainstream television – providing disinformation, Big Lies and fake news, masquerading as the real thing.
A mid-September Gallup poll showed 58% of US adults surveyed favor military action against North Korea if (nonexistent) diplomacy fails.
Support varied by party affiliation – 82% of Republicans favoring war, 56% of independents, only 37% of (undemocratic) Democrats.
A newQuinnipiac University poll showed 46% of Republicans support a preemptive strike on the DPRK, 41% against – 1% for is unacceptable.
North Korea threatens no other nations. It wants peace, not war, its national sovereignty recognized and respected by the world community, along with a peace treaty formally ending the 1950s war.
Throughout its entire post-WW II history, it never attacked another country. America and its rogue allies rape and destroy one nation after another.
Is North Korea next on Trump’s target list, maybe along with Iran? His extreme hostility toward both countries makes the unthinkable possible.
He rejects diplomacy. His leading diplomat, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, is largely a potted plant when it comes to decision-making on geopolitical issues.
Trump earlier told him not to “waste his time” negotiating with North Korea, adding he’ll “do what has to be done,” vowing to “totally destroy” the country if provoked.
Porn publisher Larry Flynt reportedly offered $10 million in cash for dirt leading to his impeachment and removal from office. A recent poll showed his approval rating at 32%, a new low.
On Sunday, Tillerson told CNN Washington will continue (nonexistent) diplomacy “until the first bomb drops.” He twisted reality claiming Trump wants things resolved diplomatically, adding:
“He is not seeking war. He made it clear…that he will continue diplomatic efforts.” He’s been waging a war of words for months, maybe prelude for things turning hot, madness if he attacks North Korea preemptively, risking catastrophic nuclear war, endangering the entire region.
His “calm before the storm” comment was directed at Pyongyang, he confirmed days after making it.
North and South Korean officials in St. Petersburg declined to hold direct talks on Monday.
Russian upper house Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko will hold separate talks with Pyongyang’s deputy legislature head and South Korea’s top parliament official.
Russian-language RIA news agency cited lower house State Duma deputy speaker Piotr Tolstoi and a DPRK delegation member, saying no direct talks will be held.
The unnamed North Korean official was quoted, saying Seoul bending to Washington’s will along with provocative joint military exercises show preconditions for direct talks haven’t been met.
Federation Council Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Konstantin Kosachyov said both sides will again be encouraged to meet face-to-face on Monday, saying:
“(I)t will be pity, both on the human and political level, if another opportunity to de-escalate tensions in relations between North Korea and South Korea is missed.”
On Sunday, National Security Advisor HR McMaster said Trump will do “anything necessary” to prevent North Korea being able to reach America with nuclear weapons.
Tensions between Washington and Pyongyang remain unacceptably high. Trump’s rage for endless wars makes the unthinkable possible.
Attacking North Korea would be madness. He seems heading in this direction.
In one day, on October 15, Venezuela has achieved several outstanding landmarks in our region at a time when we face dangerous world conflicts and unrest. By carrying out fair elections for governors of the 23 states, Venezuela has shown that people value the opportunity to participate in decision-making even under hard circumstances.
The Gran Polo Patriotico (Great Patriotic Pole), a coalition of ten parties, including the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela – PSUV), and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), have won 17 governorships and lost 5 to the coalition Democratic Unity Roundtable (Mesa de la Unidad Democratica – MUD) (One State still pending at the time of writing).
This represents winning a significant battle, but the war may still be brewing.
The significance of this victory lies in the different fronts in which Venezuela has established a clear claim.
On the democratic front 64% of the voters who participated in the elections have made an implicit statement that there is no dictatorship in Venezuela, contrary to the propaganda of Western right wing corporate media. In fact, there has been no shortage of elections in Venezuela. This has been the 22nd free, secret ballot in the last 18 years, including a failed referendum to revoke Hugo Chavez from the presidency in 2004.
This display of building democracy flies in the face of the recent action of the OAS Secretary General, Luis Almagro, who staged a swearing in ceremony in Washington, DC of a “supreme court” whose members are Venezuelans opposing the Maduro government who have left the country. This is a fragrant illegitimate, anti-democratic interference in internal affairs of Venezuela. Luis Almagro has no shame to show his personal antipathy for Nicolas Maduro but he should be ashamed to involve the organization he represents.
This victory for democracy in Venezuela has been succinctly expressed by Bolivian President, Evo Morales, who posted a tweet that said,
“Democracy has won over intervention and conspiracy. The people defend their sovereignty and dignity.”
The second front where this election can claim a victory is likely the most welcome: Desire of people to live in peace. The large turn out of voters is both a testimonial to fearless defiance and a statement of aspiration for a country at peace. Around 10 million Venezuelans have agreed to engage in this electoral dialogue in the understanding that violence cannot be a bargaining chip.
Telesur reported the president of the National Constituent Assembly, Delcy Rodriguez praising the Venezuelan people for going to the polls and ratifying their desire to live in peace.
“This was an election convened by the National Constituent Assembly and we were not mistaken,” said Rodriguez. “This election has allowed us to consolidate the peace and to defend (our) sovereignty.”
The victory of Chavismo on the political front is perhaps the most tangible for political analysts. Despite the economic hardship in Venezuela caused by harsh US sanctions, despite negative media propaganda, and despite months of street violence triggered by the opposition that caused 126 deaths, Venezuelans are still putting their trust in support of the governing party, the PSUV, with a 54% overall popular vote. Considering that the PSUV is a party openly anti-imperialist that fiercely advocates for independence and sovereignty, the vote signals a rejection of any direct intervention by the United States. Evo Morales rightly interpreted this sentiment in his tweet,
“the people triumphed over the empire. Luis Almagro lost with his boss Trump.”
The opposition MUD has not performed badly if we take into account that they gained two more states compared to the three they had in the 2012 elections. (States gained by the opposition in the 2017 elections: Anzoategui, Merida, Nueva Esparta, Tachira and Zulia)
However, early indications suggest that the opposition will not respect the democratic process in the days to come, will reject the offer of peace and dialogue, and will not recognize the elections results. In fact, they have already called for a recount and at the same time for “street actions” in protest.
In a true democracy differences in state politics is not a ground for revolt, but the continued belligerent attitude of the opposition MUD is dangerously fueled by the US, Canada and increasingly by the EU. This is precisely the kind of interference that Venezuela does not need and the Bolivarian Revolution is fighting back. Under these circumstances, the opposition cannot be trusted and nobody can lower the guard.
For now, we join all Venezuelans in a vigilant celebration for their victory for democracy over violence.
President Trump has nominated Kathleen Hartnett-White to lead the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). A former chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Hartnett-White is now affiliated with an oil industry-funded think tank in Austin.
Below is a statement by Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The Council on Environmental Quality has a critical role in making sure federal policy is carried out in accordance with laws that protect our health, safety and the environment. Her record and public statements place her far out of the mainstream, and raise grave doubts about her fitness for this position.
“There’s strong evidence that Kathleen Hartnett-White favors private over public interests. At the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Hartnett-White often put industry preferences ahead of public health—pushing for a lax ozone standard, approving pollution-intensive coal plants and lowballing fines for companies that violate state laws. Her work at the Texas Public Policy Foundation is funded by fossil fuel companies, creating potential conflicts of interest for her future work at CEQ.
“Most egregiously, she has been vocal in denying the science of climate change. In fact, she has said that the overwhelming acceptance of the evidence for climate change is ‘more like the dogmatic claims of ideologues and clerics than scientific conclusions,’ that renewable energy is ‘parasitic’ and ‘a false hope,’ and that carbon dioxide ‘has no adverse environmental impacts on people.’
“Nominating Hartnett-White fits a disturbing pattern of this administration: putting people at agencies with responsibilities they have questioned and in jobs they are unwilling to fulfill. Much like Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Hartnett-White has a clear record of fighting to undermine the very laws she would be charged with overseeing.
“We have already seen the damage that officials such as Pruitt can cause when they are allowed to head agencies whose missions they oppose. We do not need yet another fox to guard the henhouse. It is time for Senators to draw the line and say no to this nominee.”
At a time when US political leaders decry with little evidence what they claim is a pandemic of “Russian interference” in Western political affairs from Western Europe to North America, years of documented evidence exist of this very same interference in the domestic affairs of other nations around the world, funded and directed not by Moscow, but by Washington D.C.
Across Southeast Asia alone is an interlocked, deeply rooted and heavily financed network of American-backed agitators and propagandists, operating behind the cloaks of journalism and rights advocacy, working to upend local, independent political institutions and replace them with a system created by and serving exclusively the interests in Washington that created them.
Shedding Light on US Interference in the Philippines
The Manila Times in a recent article titled, “CIA conduit funding anti-Duterte media outfits,” would shed light on US government money being channeled into the Philippines for the explicit purpose of manipulating public perception, particularly regarding politics.
The article cites the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and its grantees, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR), and the Vera Files.
The article outlines the funding, stating:
NED documents show that for 2015—the earliest year for which data is available—2016 and 2017, it gave the PCIJ $106,900; Vera Files $70,000, and CMFR, $278,000. (Another funder of Vera Files is Reporters without Borders, which is also recipient of NED funds.)
Even if NED wasn’t a CIA conduit, it is an institution funded by the US government, and therefore advances US interests. Shouldn’t we be outraged that the US government is funding anti-Duterte media outfits here?
It also points out that this US interference in Filipino politics fits into a much larger, global pattern of political interference engaged in by the US government. The article cites US interference in Ukraine in particular, noting that it was US backing that eventually led to the overthrow of the elected government there between 2013 and 2014.
The article’s author, Rigoberto Tiglao, attempted to contact several of the Filipino US NED grantees, only to be confronted or evaded, a response typical of US NED grantees worldwide when questioned about their foreign funding, the dangerous conflicts of interests they are indulging in and the contradictions of posing as independent media organisations entirely dependent on foreign government funding.
Pressure on the Philippines through US-funded media is only one of several fronts the US is using to transform, direct and determine the future of the Philippines as a nation. It has placed direct political pressure on Manila to cooperate in confronting Beijing over the South China Sea. It has also attempted to use Saudi-funded terrorism in the Philippines’ south as a vector to reintroduce a significant and expanding US military presence across the archipelago nation.
The use of terrorism as both a pressure point against Southeast Asian states and as a pretext for a US military presence is a tactic the US is attempting to reuse everywhere from Indonesia and Malaysia, to southern Thailand and neighbouring Myanmar. So is the use of US NED-funded organisations operating under the guise of independent journalism or rights advocacy.
Like their Filipino counterparts, they pose as proponents of democracy and as human rights advocates, but cover current events in a transparently one-sided manner, excusing or omitting abuse and corruption among the opposition and targeting only Thailand’s independent institutions, particularly the military and the monarchy.
In Cambodia, US government funding goes one step further, funding the entire opposition, hosting them in Washington D.C. and creating an entire media network to skew public perception in favour of this foreign enterprise and the interests that propel it.
And, the USA that has assisted me, they asked me to take the model from Yugoslavia, Serbia, where they can changed the dictator Slobodan Milosevic,” he continues, referring to the former Serbian and Yugoslavian leader who resigned amid popular protests following disputed elections, and died while on trial for war crimes.
“You know Milosevic had a huge numbers of tanks. But they changed things by using this strategy, and they take this experience for me to implement in Cambodia. But no one knew about this.”
In essence, while the US tenuously accuses Russia of buying Facebook and Google ads, it is openly engaged in overthrowing nations around the world. In Southeast Asia, these efforts are often interlinked, with US-funded organisations in one country supporting and helping to amplify the activities of another next door.
An American Empire’s Success Story: Myanmar
Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) political party’s ascension into power is an example of where exactly US ambitions will lead if unchecked. With the current government in Myanmar quite clearly disinterested in either democracy or human rights, considering the burgeoning Rohingya crisis, it is proof positive that US-funded interference merely operates behind the façade of such principles, and in no way actually seeks to uphold them.
Many NLD party members are former heads of organisations funded by the US government, while others are the recipients of US NED-funded training programmes.
Myanmar is being run by a government handcrafted by US money and interference. It is a government being pressured to turn its back on neighbouring China in favour of US plans, particularly those of its industry and financial institutions. It is also a government currently creating a humanitarian crisis that has opened the door to US-Saudi funded terrorism, a potentially larger conflict featuring brutal violence, all leading to a potential opportunity for a US military presence in a nation that directly borders China.
If allowed to, the US will transform the rest of Southeast Asia into either cooperative client states, or divided and failed states. In either scenario, it will create a united front across Southeast Asia vis-à-vis Beijing that will complicate China’s rise both in the Asia Pacific region and upon the global stage, buying time for the current ruling hegemon to consolidate its position or even reassert itself.
Pushing Back
In many ways, America’s own imagined war against Russian influence gives governments across Southeast Asia the perfect precedent and pretext to push back. Cambodia has already expelled the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a subsidiary of the US NED. It has also tightened laws regarding foreign-owned and foreign-funded media organisations. Opposition members who have openly and for years flaunted their foreign sponsorship are now being arrested and tried while their political parties are being disbanded.
As governments expose and uproot foreign influence from the region, it is equally important for Southeast Asia to fill sociopolitical game board with its own pieces regarding social networks, charity organisations, media (both domestic and international) as well as rights advocates. The price for genuinely putting government corruption in the spotlight and in relative check is easily offset by eliminating the shadows foreign-backed opposition parties have used to systematically undermine regional interests for decades from.
Russia and China, the two primary targets of US interference both directly and by disrupting their peripheries in regions like Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, have implemented a wide array of countermeasures. Governments in Southeast Asia should consider them each in turn and how they could be adapted best to protect sovereignty and stability at home and across the region.
Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
I Democratici, che ogni giorno attaccano il repubblicano Trump per le sue dichiarazioni bellicose, hanno votato al Senato insieme ai Repubblicani per aumentare nel 2018 il budget del Pentagono a 700 miliardi di dollari, 60 miliardi in più di quanto richiesto dallo stesso Trump. Aggiungendo i 186 miliardi annui per i militari a riposo e altre voci, la spesa militare complessiva degli Stati uniti sale a circa 1000 miliardi, ossia a un quarto del bilancio federale. Decisivo il voto all’unanimità del Comitato sui servizi armati, formato da 14 senatori repubblicani e 13 democratici.
Il Comitato sottolinea che «gli Stati uniti devono rafforzare la deterrenza all’aggressione russa: la Russia continua ad occupare la Crimea, a destabilizzare l’Ucraina, a minacciare i nostri alleati Nato, a violare il Trattato Inf del 1987 sulle forze nucleari a raggio intermedio, e a sostenere il regime di Assad in Siria». Accusa inoltre la Russia di condurre «un attacco senza precedenti ai nostri interessi e valori fondamentali», in particolare attraverso «una campagna diretta a minare la democrazia americana». Una vera e propria dichiarazione di guerra, con cui lo schieramento bipartisan motiva il potenziamento dell’intera macchina bellica statunitense. Queste alcune delle voci di spesa nell’anno fiscale 2018 (iniziato il 1° ottobre 2017): 10,6 miliardi di dollari per acquistare 94 caccia F-35, 24 in più di quanti richiesti dall’amministrazione Trump; 17 miliardi per lo «scudo anti-missili» e le attività militari spaziali, 1,5 in più della cifra richiesta dall’amministrazione; 25 miliardi per costruire altre 13 navi da guerra, 5 in più di quante richieste dall’amministrazione.
Dei 700 miliardi del budget 2018, 640 servono principalmente all’acquisto di nuovi armamenti e al mantenimento del personale militare, le cui paghe vengono aumentate portando il costo annuo a 141 miliardi; 60 miliardi servono alle operazioni belliche in Siria, Iraq, Afghanistan e altrove. Vengono inoltre destinati 1,8 miliardi all’addestramento e l’equipaggiamento di formazioni armate sotto comando Usa in Siria e Iraq, e 4,9 miliardi al «Fondo per le forze di sicurezza afghane». Alla «Iniziativa di rassicurazione dell’Europa», lanciata nel 2014 dall’amministrazione Obama dopo «l’aggressione revanscista russa all’Ucraina», vengono destinati nel 2018 4,6 miliardi: essi servono ad accrescere la presenza di forze corazzate statunitensi e il «preposizionamento strategico» di armamenti Usa in Europa. Vengono inoltre stanziati 500 milioni di dollari per fornire «assistenza letale» (ossia armamenti) all’Ucraina.
L’aumento del budget del Pentagono traina quelli degli altri membri della Nato sotto comando Usa, compresa l’Italia la cui spesa militare, dagli attuali 70 milioni di euro al giorno, dovrà salire verso i 100.
Allo stesso tempo il budget del Pentagono prospetta che cosa si prepara per l’Italia. Tra le voci di spesa minori, ma non per questo meno importanti, vi sono 27 milioni di dollari per la base di Aviano, a riprova che continua il suo potenziamento in vista dell’installazione delle nuove bombe nucleari B61-12, e 65 milioni per il programma di ricerca e sviluppo di «un nuovo missile con base a terra a raggio intermedio per cominciare a ridurre il divario di capacità provocato dalla violazione russa del Trattato Inf».
In altre parole, gli Stati uniti hanno in programma di schierare in Europa missili nucleari analoghi ai Pershing 2 e ai Cruise degli anni Ottanta, questi ultimi installati allora anche in Italia a Comiso. Ce lo annuncia dal Senato degli Stati uniti, con il suo unanime voto bipartisan, il Comitato sui servizi armati.
The several works of American literature set in Okinawa or about Okinawans include travel narratives, war diaries, memoirs, biography, fiction, drama, and musical theater Perhaps the earliest, Francis L. Hawks’s 1856 Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, is an account of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s gunboat diplomacy of 1853–1854 when he forced his demands on leaders of what was then the Ryukyu Kingdom, allowing Americans to land, travel, and trade there. Hawks also provides informative and colorful descriptions of the local residents, architecture, and natural environment.1
A century later, Okinawa commanded all of America’s attention in the spring of 1945 during the last and worst battle of the Pacific War. Two Okinawan immigrants to the United States published autobiographical accounts in English of mid-20th-century Okinawa, including the battle and its aftermath. In “My Story: A Schoolgirl in the Battle of Okinawa,” Masako Robbins describes her long ordeal as the daughter in an impoverished family, sold by her father into prostitution, who barely survived the battle. Jo Nobuko Martin’s novel A Princess Lily of the Ryukyus (1984) depicts the horrifying ordeal of the Princess Lily Student Corps of high school girls, the author among them, and their teachers, who were drafted as combat nurses during the Battle of Okinawa. 237 out of 240 died in the fighting, and several committed suicide, having been told by the Japanese military they would be raped if captured by U.S. soldiers. Writing from the American side of the battle, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ernie Pyle accompanied U.S. forces as a war correspondent. His account in The Story of Ernie Pyle (1950) begins with American battleships’ shelling of Okinawa and ends the day he was killed by a Japanese sniper on the offshore island of Iejima.
More than 12,500 Americans died in the Battle of Okinawa, which took the lives of approximately 94,000 Japanese soldiers and 160,000 Okinawan civilians, between one-quarter and one-third of the prefecture’s population at the time. The widespread devastation left most residents homeless, destitute, or both. During the months that followed, the American military placed thousands in refugee camps, sometimes for more than a year, supplying food, shelter (mostly tents), and medical treatment for the wounded and ill. U.S. occupation personnel supervised the distribution of relief aid and the construction of homes and public buildings; they were also tasked with bringing “democracy”to Okinawa, which many Americans considered feudalistic.
The contradiction between American espousals of democracy and policies imposed top-down under U.S. military rule soon became obvious to Okinawans, and to at least some American military personnel. One of them, Vern Sneider, published a satirical novel, The Teahouse of the August Moon, in 1951. Later adapted into two plays and a film starring Marlon Brando as an Okinawan, it is probably the best-known work of American literature set in Okinawa. Lucky Come Hawaii (1965) by Jon Shirota depicts the experience of Okinawans in Hawaii, focusing on the strained relations among resident ethnic groups following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was the first novel by an Asian American writer to become a bestseller. Among later postwar works, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End by Norma Field (1993) provides retrospectives on the Battle of Okinawa. “Memorial” by Gary Snyder and The Yokota Officers Club (2001) by Sarah Bird depict effects of the grossly disproportionate military presence in Okinawa which continues to this day.
My Story: A Schoolgirl in the Battle of Okinawa
Masako Shinjo Summers Robbins wrote My Story2 in English, which she learned after coming to the United States from Okinawa with her first American husband in 1952. Her account of life in prewar, wartime, and early postwar Okinawa compels the reader to experience the history of this tumultuous era from the perspective of a daughter in an impoverished family. As a child in the 1930s, she was sold by her father to a brothel in Naha, Okinawa’s capital city. Drafted by the Japanese military as a combat medic during the Battle of Okinawa, she barely survived sheltering in a cave that collapsed around her from shelling. After spending several months in a refugee camp at the end of the battle, her family returned to their village to find their home destroyed. Her strength, resourcefulness, and resilience through these horrifying ordeals are nothing short of astounding.
Of her childhood at the family home in the Imadomari section of Nakijin Village on the Motobu Peninsula of northern Okinawa, she writes,
“We were so poor that we didn’t have a decent door to close when we all went to bed.”3
Later, she describes her life after her father sells her to a woman managing what she calls “a house, not a home,” and the fear and disgust she felt when the woman sold her virginity to a wealthy businessman. After U.S. firebombing in October of 1944 destroyed most of Naha City, including the brothel where she worked, she felt relieved that “now [the woman] had no power over me.”4
Six months after the bombing of Naha, U.S. forces invaded Okinawa Island on April 1, 1945. Masako watched from a cave shelter as U.S. Navy ships offshore fired cannon barrages.
“The American ships were so close that, as we lay on the ground watching, we could see sailors moving about on deck, or in the distance a kamikaze attack.”5
After U.S. forces occupied the central and northern regions in fighting that caused heavy casualties on both sides and among Okinawan civilians, Masako and the other women refugees were moved from shelter to shelter by the Japanese army in its long, chaotic retreat under fire to the southern portion of the island in which thousands more soldiers and civilians died. She tells how Japanese soldiers seized food from Okinawan homes, killing a family who tried to hide one cup of rice, and how they killed a baby inside a cave shelter whose crying, they said, might attract the attention of the enemy.
In late June American soldiers captured Masako and a friend from her school days hiding in a sugar cane field.
“We were quickly surrounded by what seemed like fifty American soldiers standing in the sugar cane. All had weapons and they were pointed at us.”6
Civilian refugees in the Battle of Okinawa
Robbins describes the months that followed, most of which she spent in refugee camps where the internees, prohibited from returning to their villages, were fed and sheltered, but where some American soldiers raped young women and girls. Later, she is hired to work in the post-exchange at the Okuma Officers Rest Center in northern Okinawa. This was one of the many installations the U.S. military took over from the Japanese army, greatly expanding them and building vast new bases for their occupation (1945–1972), which lasted twenty years longer than the Allied occupation of mainland Japan. The grossly disproportionate U.S. military presence remains to this day.
Princess Lily of the Ryukyus by Jo Nobuko Martin
In December, 1941, the author was a teenage schoolgirl in Naha when the principal called all students and teachers into the auditorium for an emergency assembly.
“I have an official announcement from Imperial Headquarters,” Mr. Masaoka began . . . He paused about five seconds to prepare us for the news. “We have just declared war on Britain and the United States . . . Our mighty bombers have wiped out an entire unit of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.”7
Soon makeshift military training was added to the school curriculum.
We had no metal for weapons, but bamboo grew abundantly in backyards and in the countryside. Bamboo was light and supple, and made excellent spears; . . . straw dummies with the heads of Churchill or Roosevelt were fashioned.8
Six months after the October 10, 1944, air attack that destroyed the capital city of Naha, U.S. forces landed on the Keramas, just off the coast of Okinawa Main Island, in late March of 1945. Thus began the last and worst battle of the Pacific War, taking some 230,000 lives, more than half of them Okinawan civilians, and destroying most standing structures.
Nobuko, as one of the Himeyuri student medics, had made her way through an “iron tempest” of “falling . . . shells” to the underground field hospital where she’d been assigned.
Wounded men lay on bunk beds lining the walls. In addition to the usual musty odors associated with cave life, there was the stench of putrefying flesh, pus, and medicines. The air was thick with fluffy soot from the many kerosene lamps on the walls . . . In the operating room under a naked electric bulb two masked doctors in white were bending over the operating table. A nurse stood by, holding a tray with gleaming instruments. Their patient groaned in pain. To eyes accustomed to the yellowish light from kerosene lamps, the white, glowing electric light was blinding, and the brightly illuminated operating room contrasted harshly with its shadowy surroundings. The scene reminded me of a horror movie I had once seen, in which a mad doctor was performing an operation on a screaming victim.9
American soldiers and Japanese POW’s
In late June, Nobuko, her classmates, and other refugees heard a loudspeaker announcement in Japanese from a U.S. Navy ship off the coast of southern Okinawa Island. “The war is over. Come out. We won’t hurt you.”
We had been moving northward along the coral beach for fifteen minutes or so when, all of a sudden, there they were—fifty of them, at least—huge men with rifles! . . .
I turned around. Someone took hold of my shoulder . . . “Where are you going?” he asked, in Japanese. It was bookish, heavily accented Japanese, but quite comprehensible.
. . . I stared up at him for a moment. He had blue eyes—blue eyes! . . .10
Later, much later, some of us learned a Japanese officer named Akamatsu had ordered the inhabitants of [Kerama] island to commit mass suicide to avoid being captured . . . Hand grenades were distributed. There was one grenade for twenty to thirty people—Not nearly enough for a clean, instant death for everybody. Those who did not die immediately used clubs, axes, grubbing hoes, razors or rocks to finish each other off.11
Ernie Pyle
In ordering their suicides, the Japanese military had told Okinawans that if they were captured, the Americans would torture them for information, then rape the women before killing all of them. In a dispatch dated April 23, 1945, less than one week before he was killed in the battle, American war correspondent Ernie Pyle described how some civilians reacted after realizing they’d been misled:
After a few days the grapevine carried the word to them that we were treating them well so they began to come out in droves and give themselves up. I heard one story about a hundred Okinawan civilians who had a [Japanese] soldier among them, and when they realized the atrocity stories he had told them about the Americans were untrue, our MPs had to step in to keep them from beating him.12
The Story of Ernie Pyle
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ernie Pyle’s writing about Okinawa, where he accompanied U.S. forces as a war correspondent, starts with a premonition of his own death there. As the American invasion force in navy ships headed for the island, he wrote,
“Sometimes I get so mad and despairing I can hardly keep from crying . . . I worry so much about what might happen to me, I’ve even gotten to brooding about it and sometimes can’t sleep.”13 “On the last day we changed our money into newly manufactured ‘invasion yen,’ drew two days K-rations, took a last bath, and packed our kits before supper. We had a huge turkey dinner. ‘Fattening us up for the kill,’ the boys laughingly say.”14
While the temporary calm prevailed, he recorded his impressions of Okinawa, praising the local scenery in a description reminiscent of Bayard Taylor’s account of Perry’s arrival in Ryukyu ninety-two years earlier. The landscape that had reminded Taylor of “the richest English scenery” impressed Pyle for “the similarity with the villages of Sicily.”
Since this island is the closest to Japan we’ve landed on we seem to feel this really is Japan, rather than just some far outpost . . . There are tropical-like trees . . . All through the country are narrow dirt lanes and now and then a fairly decent gravel road . . . We had read about what a worthless place Okinawa was, but I think most of us have been surprised about how pretty it is.15
Pyle gives his impressions of local residents:
Okinawan civilians we bring in are pitiful. The only ones left seem to be real old or real young. And they all are very, very poor . . . The people here dress as we see Japanese dressed in pictures: women in kimonos and old men in skin-tight pants . . . We found two who spoke a little English. They had once lived in Hawaii. One was an old man who had a son (Hawaiian-Japanese) somewhere in the American Army! . . .
They were obviously scared to death . . . After all the propaganda they’ve been fed about our tortures, it’s going to be a befuddled bunch of Okinawans when they discover we brought right along with us, as part of the intricate invasion plan, enough supplies to feed them, too!16
He writes of American aircraft carriers barraging Okinawa with thousands of shells, and of planes launched from aircraft carries dropping bombs armed with napalm. “The ghostly concussion set up vibrations in the air—a sort of flutter—which pained your ears and pounded upon you as though . . . with invisible drumsticks.”17 His description seems to mirror Masako Robbins’s account from the other side in the battle of “bombing and gunfire from offshore . . . The American ships were so close that, as we lay on the ground watching, we could see sailors moving about on deck.”18 Just before going ashore with Marines in a small landing craft, Pyle again contemplates the possibility that he will not survive the invasion. “There’s nothing romantic whatever in knowing that an hour from now you may be dead.”19
Pyle shared the Marines’ astonishment at the total absence of Japanese resistance to the regiment’s initial landing on the beaches of central Okinawa.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” he wrote. “And we don’t either. It just can’t be true. And yet it is true. The regiment of Marines I am with landed this morning, on the beaches of Okinawa absolutely unopposed, which is indeed an odd experience for a Marine. Nobody among us dreamed of such a thing. We all thought there would be slaughter on the beaches . . . We don’t expect this to continue, of course.”20 And he quotes the first words he heard spoken by a marine on Okinawa. “Hell, this is just like one of MacArthur’s landings!”21
Later, Pyle describes the capture of two Japanese soldiers:
“They were real Japanese from Japan, not the Okinawan home guard . . . Fortunately, they happened to be the surrendering kind, rather than the fight-to-the-death kind, or they could have killed several of us.”22
His observation is important for countering the widespread impression of Japanese soldiers as monolithically committed to joyful “banzai” suicides honoring the emperor to avoid the shame of capture. In fact, although many fought until they were killed, and some strapped explosives on themselves to attack tanks and bunkers, thousands also surrendered in Okinawa and were held in prisoner-of-war camps during and after the battle.
The calm that initially greeted Pyle and the Marines soon ended, and the counterattack began, as it had earlier at Iwo Jima, by Japanese soldiers firing from fortified caves and bunkers. According to the official history of operations in Okinawa, the Seventy-Seventh Marine Division, which had fought on Guam and Leyte in the Philippines, “was to meet the stiffest opposition in its experience.” Pyle biographer Lee Graham Miller quotes a marine officer’s description of the enemy on Iejima Island just off the coast of northern Okinawa:
“He killed until he was killed. He remained hidden until our troops passed him, and then he fired at their backs. He came out of hiding at night, every night, to kill as many Americans as he could before he was cut down; he made a living bomb of himself and threw himself under tanks and into foxholes against groups of GIs.”23
In the six days of fighting on Iejima, the Seventy-Seventh lost 172 killed and 902 wounded. Almost five thousand Japanese died. On April 18, 1945, Ernie Pyle was traveling with four Marines in a jeep. Coming under machine gun fire, they jumped out to take cover in a ditch by the roadside, where he was struck by a sniper’s bullet in the left temple and died instantly.24 A monument stands there today honoring perhaps the best-known American correspondent of World War II.
At This Spot
The 77th Infantry Division
Lost a Buddy
ERNIE PYLE
18 April 1945
The Teahouse of the August Moon
Ernie Pyle was one of more than 12,500 Americans to die in the Battle of Okinawa. It took the lives of approximately 94,000 Japanese soldiers and 160,000 Okinawan civilians, between one-quarter and one-third of the prefecture’s resident population at the time. The widespread devastation left most residents homeless, destitute, or both. During the months that followed, the American military placed thousands in refugee camps, sometimes for more than a year. As Pyle noted, the U.S. invasion force had prepared for this chaotic aftermath, supplying food, shelter (mostly tents), and medical treatment for the wounded and ill. Starting in 1946, the U.S. Congress voted funds for GARIOA, Government Aid and Relief in Occupied Areas, which not only delivered food supplies and materials to rebuild destroyed communities but later provided college scholarships for Okinawans to study in the U.S. However, GARIOA failed to address the hundreds of serious crimes, especially rape, committed by U.S. soldiers, the military’s forcible seizures of farmers’ lands for construction and expansion of American bases, and the daily violations of human rights under U.S. military occupation.
Marlon Brando as Okinawan interpreter in film of “Teahouse of the August Moon”
U.S. occupation personnel supervised the distribution of relief aid and the construction of homes and public buildings, but they were also tasked, as in mainland Japan, with “reforming” Okinawan society, considered by many Americans to be backward and “feudal.” This was to be accomplished by implementing American conceptions of democracy, or “demokurashii,” a word invoked so often in Japanese that it became a punchline for jokes about the occupiers. The contradiction between American espousals of democracy and policies imposed top-down under U.S. military rule soon became obvious to Okinawans, and to at least some American military personnel. One of them, Vern Sneider, was assigned as commander of Tobaru, a village of five thousand in central Okinawa. Based on this experience, he published a satirical novel, The Teahouse of the August Moon,25 in 1951, adapted in 1953 by John Patrick for a Pulitzer Prize–winning Broadway play,26 in 1956 for a film starring Marlon Brando in the role of the commander’s Okinawan interpreter,27 and in 1970 for a Broadway musical, “Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen.”28 The Teahouse of the August Moon, in its four incarnations, is probably the best-known work of American literature set in Okinawa.
The curtain opens on Patrick’s play with a monologue by the interpreter Sakini giving the audience a history lesson in a stereotypical “oriental” patois. From the perspective of today’s sensitivities, it must be remembered that Teahouse is a satire of American images and attitudes and of Okinawan responses to them.
Lovely ladies, kind gentlemen: Please to introduce myself. Sakini by name. Interpreter by profession. Education by ancient dictionary. Okinawan by whim of gods. History of Okinawa reveal distinguished record of conquerors. We have honor to be subjugated in fourteenth century by Chinese pirates. In sixteenth century by English missionaries. In eighteenth century by Japanese war lords. And in twentieth century by American Marines. Okinawa very fortunate. Culture brought to us . . . Not have to leave home for it. Learn many things. Most important that the rest of the world not like Okinawa. World filled with delightful variation. In Okinawa . . . no locks on doors. Bad manners not to trust neighbors. In America . . . lock and key big industry. Conclusion? Bad manners good business. In Okinawa . . . wash self in public bath with nude lady quite proper. Picture of nude lady in private home . . . quite improper. In America . . . statue of nude lady in park win prize. But nude lady in flesh in park win penalty. Conclusion? Pornography question of geography. But Okinawans most eager to be educated by conquerors. Deep desire to improve friction. Not easy to learn. Sometimes painful.29
Yet the “painful” cultural “friction” in Teahouse is felt much more by the occupying Americans than by the occupied Okinawans. At one point, Colonel Wainwright Purdy, the commander of the central island region, who is hoping for a promotion to brigadier general, says in frustration, “My job is to teach these natives the meaning of democracy, and they’re going to learn democracy if I have to shoot every one of them.”30
In one major misunderstanding early on, Captain Jeff Fisby, commander of Tobiki Village and a central character in the story, has unwittingly given permission to Mr. Motomura, a wealthy man from Awasi Village, to reside in Tobiki. Only later does he learn that Mr. Motomura had been expelled from Awasi for corrupt activities. They involved two geisha, whom he now presents to Captain Fisby as a “gift of gratitude” for permission to live in the village.
[He] turned to Sakini. “But I can’t own geishas,” he protested.
Sakini scratched his head. “Don’t understand, boss. A very honorable profession.”
Fisby groped for words, tried to think. Then he smiled. “Well, it’s just not allowed, Sakini. You see, once there was a great man in our country. We called him the Great Emancipator.”
“The great who?”
“Emancipator. And he said that people can’t own other people, so—” Fisby shrugged and eased himself back into the swivel chair, pleased with his explanation.
Sakini considered carefully. “Boss, did the Great Emancipator say you can’t own geishas?”
In self-defense, Fisby edged forward on the chair. “Well, not exactly. In the first place, I don’t think he knew about geishas.”
Sakini nodded slyly. “Everything all right then, boss. You own.31
The two geisha, who, it turns out had been the cause of the breakdown in social order at Awasi, have the same effect in Tobiki. They distract the men from their assigned reconstruction tasks, sew jealousy among the women, and sabotage Captain Fisby’s pet project of constructing a school with U.S.-aid-funded materials and labor, which the villagers vote unanimously must be used instead to build a teahouse for the geisha to entertain. Unable to resist their demands for “democracy,” Fisby resigns himself to arrest and court martial with the visit to Tobiki of Colonel Purdy along with a congressional committee monitoring the expenditure of U.S. aid funds and the progress of occupation policies. Instead, the story ends happily as the congressmen are deeply impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit in Tobiki and “American get-up-and-go in the recovery program.” Besides the success of the teahouse, the villagers are running a lucrative business brewing potato brandy in home distilleries. “The Pentagon is boasting. Congress is crowing. We’re all over the papers,” exults Colonel Purdy.32
Risa Nakayama compares the novel, play, and film versions of “Teahouse” in her article “Perverted Okinawa: De-Okinawanization in the Adaptation of The Teahouse of the August Moon.”33
Because Vern Sneider, the author of the novel, stayed in Okinawa during and after World War II, the way he describes Okinawa and Okinawans is more or less realistic . . . On the other hand the film, and the play adapted by John Patrick, apply a form of slapstick comedy, using stereotyped characters.34
Nakayama notes that the play’s director, Robert Lewis, had initially wanted an Asian actor in the role of Sakini but had settled on David Wayne in “yellow face.” For the film, Brando was chosen over others for his box-office draw (Mickey Rooney was also considered for the role) at a time when it was common for white actors to play Asians in Hollywood films, sacrificing verisimilitude in favor of star power. Nakayama also notes the “juvenilization” of Okinawan characters as one aspect of what today would be called “Orientalism.”35
Author James D. Houston also writes of the “child-like” characters in the play version of Teahouse, but calls it an early breakthrough for literary and dramatic portrayals of Asians by American writers:
In a way it’s a miracle that in 1952 such a play was produced at all: a bilingual production with dialogue in both English and Japanese, with an Asian character in a leading role, an Asian we are actually allowed to like, rather than encouraged to mistrust which had been the norm, in film and fiction, from the days of the Gold Rush onward.36
Lucky Come Hawaii by Jon Shirota
Jon Shirota was born on Maui in 1928, the son of immigrants from Okinawa. His writing depicts the Okinawan immigrant experience in Hawaii, focusing on the strained relations among resident ethnic groups—Caucasian, mainland Japanese, Okinawan, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese, and Native Hawaiian. “Shirota gives his Okinawan characters cultural and ethnic traits that distinguish them from other Japanese,” explains Katsunori Yamazato.
The troubled relations between Okinawa and the rest of Japan have continued since1879, when the Ryukyu Kingdom was annexed by the rising East Asian empire of [Japan]. Even after Okinawans settled in Hawai’i and the United States, they must struggle for an identity of their own, Japanese and yet undeniably Okinawan.37
Lucky Come Hawaii, originally published by Bantam Books in 1965 and reissued by University of Hawai’i Press in 2010, was the first novel by an Asian American writer to become a bestseller. Shirota adapted the story as one of a series of plays produced in Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo. It is set during and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. That day Kama Gusuda, an Okinawan immigrant and the central character, is delivering one of the pigs he raises to a Chinese restaurant in Honolulu. The elderly proprietor Lin Wo suddenly informs a stunned Gusuda, “God-tem Jap-anee! Kill ’em lotsa ’Melican sailah and soldiah, Pear’s Har-bah! . . . You no heah radio, Gusuda?” . . . God-tem Jap-anee! . . . Al’time kill, kill. Kill ’em lotsa Chineee in China. Now kill ’em lotsa ’Melican soldiah and sailah.”38
Shirota portrays reactions to the attack among characters of the various ethnicities, focusing on a split between first- and second-generation Okinawans. Gusuda and other immigrants are proud of Japan’s military successes and expect to benefit from an anticipated Japanese conquest of Hawaii. However, the younger Okinawans born and raised there worry about rising anti-Japanese sentiment and the U.S. government’s interrogations and detentions of local residents wrongly suspected of planning sabotage. Young men soon feel pressures to join the U.S. military in order to prove their loyalty. Another of the older immigrants, Mr. Higa, paints a rising sun flag on his roof so that Japanese planes in the successful invasion he anticipates won’t bomb his house.
“Japanese soldiers are too brave for the Americans,” he explains. “Whenever the ’Merican soldiers come across the Japanese soldiers they’re sure to run.” But, hearing about the interrogations, he hurriedly washes off the flag. Gusuda’s second-generation daughter Kimiko wonders, “How foolish can people be? . . . Those superstitious fools, starting a war! Wanting to die for the Emperor because he was supposed to be a God—a descendant of the Sun.39
Through the characters’ recollections, Shirota portrays the immigrant experience and mainland Japanese prejudice against Okinawans in Hawaii. “The Naichis [mainland Japanese] are always looking down on us, [but] they’re no better . . . Like us, they had to come to Hawaii because they were poor back in Japan.”67Shirota writes that Gusuda recalls “the hardships he himself had gone through back in Ginoza Village in Okinawa. Everyone had always been so poor and hungry there.”40
He arrived in Waipahu, Oahu, near Pearl Harbor in 1905. He had never worked so hard in his life: cutting sugar cane with a heavy bolo knife under the scorching tropical heat . . . six days a week . . . After living in Waipahu for two years, convinced he could never return to Okinawa a wealthy man, he paid a local marriage broker . . . to have a picture bride sent from Okinawa.41
Lucky Come Hawaii concludes with MPs, guns drawn, bursting into the home of a Japanese American family falsely reported to possess a short-wave radio, which turns out to be a phonograph playing children’s songs.
Get your hands up!” the Sergeant bellowed, stabbing his automatic at the frail-looking, middle-aged Japanese man in sleeping kimono, and two pajama-clad girls, about eight and ten . . . A small phonograph on the floor kept on playing soft Japanese music . . . “Peterson, search the house for that radio set,” the Sergeant ordered. “And I don’t give a damn if you wreck the joint finding it.” . . .
“Hey, Sarge,” the driver said . . . “[T]here ain’t no radio set in this heah house. I’ve searched everywhere.” . . . The Sergeant said, “These people ain’t got no business listening to Jap music.” He picked up the record off the phonograph and crushed it over his knee, [then] bent down to grab a handful of other records.42
Among the two thousand men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry arrested, detained, and interned in Hawaii, no evidence of espionage or sabotage was found, and no charges were ever filed.
The author of two other novels, Shirota adapted Lucky Come Hawaii as a play produced in Los Angeles, Hawaii, and New York in the early 1990s. His 1999 play Leilani’s Hibiscus43 was produced in Los Angeles, Hawaii, and New York and, in a Japanese translation by Katsunori Yamazato, in Tokyo and Okinawa. Set in Hawaii during the early postwar period, it features seven characters, two of whom are speaking posthumously at their grave site, who reminisce about their lives filled with hardship as immigrants working on the plantations, as soldiers serving in Okinawa, and as members of a minority facing discrimination.
Fifty-year-old Yasuichi Gusuda immigrated to Hawaii in the 1930s but chose to return to Okinawa in 1941 just before the start of the Pacific War. “Bad timing,” he says.74 He recalls his uncle, who asks, “What happened to her family?” “They all jumped off the cliff: her father, mother, two older sisters and a baby brother,” answers Ichiro, who then reveals for the first time that the girl he rescued is his wife, Mayumi.46
Shirota’s play “Voices from Okinawa” takes place more recently, at the time of the Iraq War.47 As during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the U.S. military used its bases in Okinawa to train troops and store weapons for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The central character, Kama Hutchins, lives in Hawaii and is in Okinawa to trace his family’s roots as part of his PhD thesis on immigration. “I’m one-quarter Okinawan, three-quarters American . . . My grandmother married an American, and her daughter, my mother, married an American.”48
Most of the play addresses the ubiquitous effects of the U.S. postwar occupation and military presence in Okinawa. Kama explains one of its effects to his Okinawan student, Yasunobu Hokama:
Did you know that millions of American military have come and gone through Okinawa since 1945 . . . leaving behind offspring with tall noses and round eyes? The influence of Americans is everywhere today: music, language, clothing.49
Yasunobu explains why he is learning English:
I am barber. My barbershop near Kadena Air Base. Most of my customers GIs. GIs sure talk funny. Always say, “Gotcha.” What they got, I don’t know. Even when speaking to just-a-one man, they say “Y’all.” I come to Naha English School so I can speak like ’Mericans in ’Merica; not on’y like GIs in Okinawa.50
Much of the play’s dialogues are filled with such humor, but when Kama meets his relatives, he learns about the devastating consequences of the sixty-year military presence. His great-aunt tells him how she has been offered “millions of yen” to lease her land for a military base, but that she is determined to stay in the home where she has lived all her life. The woman who is the principal of the English school where he teaches supports her decision. “Lease, sell—what’s the difference? More army camps, more abused young girls.” Referring to the 1995 rape of an elementary schoolgirl by three American serviceman, the principal adds, “She was just twelve years old!”51 In act 2 Kama’s great-aunt tells him a U.S. Army interpreter, a Japanese American soldier, came and threatened to burn her house and sugar cane field if she refused to sign a lease and move out.
“A Monument on Okinawa”
The work of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gary Snyder reflects an immersion in Buddhist spirituality and a devotion to environmental preservation. He lived in Japan for several years and translated Japanese poetry. His 1958 poem “A Monument in Okinawa” on the shrine dedicated to the Himeyuri student nurses (discussed in the section above, Princess Lilies of the Ryukyus by Jo Nobuko Martin) evokes their compulsory suicides during the Battle of Okinawa and shows how militarization of the island has continued.84The families of farmers whose land was seized by U.S. occupation forces for base expansion and construction in the 1950s, as well as many others, were forced in the devastated local economy to find gainful employment in the “military service” sector.
“One hundred twenty schoolgirls
Committed suicide together here.”
Dead now thirteen years,
Those knot-hearted little adolescents
In their fool purity
Died with a perverse sort of grace;
Their sisters who live
Can be seen in the bars—
The agreeable hustlers of peace.52
Devoid of the sentimentality and nationalistic overtones in Japanese films and manga on the Himeyuri schoolgirls, this poem radiates a tone of bitter irony in describing their “fool purity” and the “perverse grace” in their deaths. The irony seems to turn cold when Snyder depicts women, many compelled to work in GI bars by economic circumstances in Okinawa under U.S. military occupation, as “agreeable hustlers.” They might smile agreeably for their customers but could hardly be said to enjoy their work. Perhaps the poem’s ultimate irony is Snyder’s reference to the “peace” in Okinawa, a bastion of weapons, troops, and warplanes for America’s wars in Korea and Vietnam, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Yokota Officers Club
The daughter of an Air Force officer stationed at Kadena Air Base during the Cold War, Sarah Bird has written two novels set in Okinawa. The Yokota Officers Club53 features tumultuously comic scenes of a military family’s life on base and their visits to the adjacent base town (in both senses of the word) Her novel reveals the rigid hierarchy among American officers’ wives that results in bullying of the younger women among them. The story concludes with tense drama when the main character’s father, an air force pilot, narrowly escapes death in a dangerous reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Union.
Returning to the airbase one afternoon shortly after arriving in Okinawa, the family encounters a protest demonstration against B-52s in Okinawa that were flying bombing missions to Southeast Asia.
Back at Kadena, the knot of demonstrators at Gate Three has swollen by several hundred. The new protesters are not the polite suit-jacketed crowd that was there the other day. A Japanese man in Trotsky glasses, his hair in a spiky brush-cut, marches back and forth in front of the demonstrators, yelling into a bullhorn, and beating his fist in the air in time with his message. Like many of the other new demonstrators, he has a look of pasty-faced fanaticism that I recognize from the ringleaders of the protest movement in college. This time many signs are in English.
NUCLEAR NO! U.S. BASE GO! DISMISS B52S FROM OKINAWA.
“Do you think they mean ‘remove’?” [my sister] asks.”54
Bird pointedly contrasts the Okinawan world of crowded streets and cramped living conditions with the wide-open spaces and comfortable living quarters for American military personnel and their dependents on base.
On base, we move from a chaotic, congested world crowded with small vehicles and small people into a world where armored personnel carriers and broad-beamed six-footers roam an orderly, expansive landscape of boulevards, runways, and fields, most of them ringed with white-painted rocks.
Among the most expansive of the many rolling spaces on-base is a parade ground.55
Bird describes what the family sees driving through Koza, Okinawa’s most notorious base town, just outside the largest air force and army bases on the island.
Koza is like a low-rent tropical Bourbon Street populated by roving groups of GIs. The white boys are unmistakable in their newly plucked haircuts, JC Penney Dacron shirts and trousers, and the twitchy air that comes from their effort to channel homesickness and vulnerability into swaggering machismo.
Pawnshops, tattoo parlors, tailor shops, and optical, electronics, and T-shirt shops are scattered among the bars: Ace High, Okay Joe, New Pussycat No. 3, Gentilemans Club, Stateside Bar. Promises of SEXY FLORR SHOW! or GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! or GO-GO SHOW! are illustrated with posters of dark-haired girls—either totally naked or encumbered only with go-go boots, pink baby dolls, and a whip—thrusting out perfect breasts . . .Bar girls flood out of [a] club. My father watches the girls tug the men inside.
“There’s your American fighting man. There’s your sentinel of liberty.”56
Koza, Okinawa, 1960s
Above the East China Sea
Based on her extensive research in Okinawan history and culture, Bird’s Above the East China Sea juxtaposes the horrifying ordeal of Tamiko, an Okinawan high school girl drafted to serve in 1945 as a combat medic during the Battle of Okinawa, with the story of Luz, an American military dependent sent with her family some sixty years later to the vast complex of bases in Okinawa. Both teenagers contemplate suicide. Tamiko is told by Japanese forces to leap from high cliffs to her death in the ocean to avoid capture by the Americans. “The soldiers, either Japanese or American, will kill us as soon as the sun rises.”57Luz is overcome with grief for her sister Codie, the person she is closest to. In a troubled relationship with her mother, Luz feels abandoned when Codie enlists in the air force. On her first deployment, she is killed by mortar fire at an air base in Afghanistan. Luz peers “a hundred feet straight down at the base of the cliffs . . . That’s where I’d land. Death would be instantaneous.”58
The loss of family members in war and Okinawan rituals for communicating with spirits of the dead connect these two narratives that take place in disparate times and cultures, but in the same lush environment of this subtropical island subjected to the continuing violence of militarization by Japan and the United States.
This article is excerpted and adapted from “Okinawa in American Literature” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (2017).
Steve Rabson is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies, Brown University. He was stationed in Okinawa as a U.S. Army draftee in 1967-68., and is an Asia-Pacific Journal contributing editor.
Notes
1 Francis L. Hawks, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000). See Steve Rabson, “Perry’s Black Ships in Japan and Ryukyu: The Whitewash of History,” Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 14, Issue 16, Number 9, August 15, 2016. http://apjjf.org/2016/16/Rabson.html
2 Masako Shinjo Summers Robbins, “My Story: A Schoolgirl in the Battle of Okinawa,” Asia-Pacific Journal 13.8.4, February 23, 2015. http://apjjf.org/2015/13/7/Masako-Shinjo-Summers-Robbins/4286.html
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Jo Nobuko Martin, A Princess Lily of the Ryukyus (Shimonoseki, Japan: Shin Nippon Kyoiku Tosho, 1984), 18-19.
25 Vern Sneider, The Teahouse of the August Moon (New York: Signet, 1956).
26 John Patrick, The Teahouse of the August Moon (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952).
27 The Marlon Brando Collection: Julius Caesar; Mutiny on the Bounty 1962; Reflections in a Golden Eye; The Teahouse of the August Moon; The Formula (Warner Home Video, DVD, 2006).
28 Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen was a musical based on John Patrick’s play and screenplay. After three previews, the Broadway production opened on December 28, 1970, at the Majestic Theatre, where it ran for only nineteen performances.
29 Patrick, Teahouse of the August Moon, 8.
30 Ibid., 23.
31 Sneider, Teahouse of the August Moon, 25–26.
32 Patrick, Teahouse of the August Moon, 174.
33 Risa Nakayama, “Perverted Okinawa: De-Okinawanization in the Adaptation of The Teahouse of the August Moon,” Okinawa Kōgyō Kōtō Senmon Gakkō Kiyo (Bulletin of Okinawa National College of Technology) 5 (2011): 33–43.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 James D. Houston, “Dancing among the Ghosts: An Okinawa Journal,” Manoa 8.1 (Summer 1996): 97.
37 From Katsunori Yamazato, preface to Frank Stewart and Katsunori Yamazato, eds., Voices from Okinawa (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), vii–viii.
38 Jon Shirota, Lucky Come Hawaii (New York: Bantam, 1965), 5–6.
39 Ibid., 90.
40 Ibid., 72.
41 Ibid., 73.
42 Ibid., 75.
43 Ibid., 246-247.
44 Ibid., 63.
45 Ibid., 65.
46 Ibid., 68.
47 Ibid., 94-133.
48 Ibid., 94-95.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 79.
51 Ibid., 110.
52 Gary Snyder, Left Out in the Rain: New Poems, 1947–1985 (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1986).
53 Sarah Bird,The Yokota Officers Club(New York: Random House, 2001).
54 Ibid., 119.
55 Ibid., 120.
56 Ibid., 26-27.
57 Sarah Bird, Above the East China Sea (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 3.
58 Ibid., 5.
All images in this article are from the author.
Posted in Uncategorized
Comments Off on American Literature on the Battle of Okinawa and the Continuing US Military Presence
The several works of American literature set in Okinawa or about Okinawans include travel narratives, war diaries, memoirs, biography, fiction, drama, and musical theater Perhaps the earliest, Francis L. Hawks’s 1856 Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, is an account of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s gunboat diplomacy of 1853–1854 when he forced his demands on leaders of what was then the Ryukyu Kingdom, allowing Americans to land, travel, and trade there. Hawks also provides informative and colorful descriptions of the local residents, architecture, and natural environment.1
A century later, Okinawa commanded all of America’s attention in the spring of 1945 during the last and worst battle of the Pacific War. Two Okinawan immigrants to the United States published autobiographical accounts in English of mid-20th-century Okinawa, including the battle and its aftermath. In “My Story: A Schoolgirl in the Battle of Okinawa,” Masako Robbins describes her long ordeal as the daughter in an impoverished family, sold by her father into prostitution, who barely survived the battle. Jo Nobuko Martin’s novel A Princess Lily of the Ryukyus (1984) depicts the horrifying ordeal of the Princess Lily Student Corps of high school girls, the author among them, and their teachers, who were drafted as combat nurses during the Battle of Okinawa. 237 out of 240 died in the fighting, and several committed suicide, having been told by the Japanese military they would be raped if captured by U.S. soldiers. Writing from the American side of the battle, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ernie Pyle accompanied U.S. forces as a war correspondent. His account in The Story of Ernie Pyle (1950) begins with American battleships’ shelling of Okinawa and ends the day he was killed by a Japanese sniper on the offshore island of Iejima.
More than 12,500 Americans died in the Battle of Okinawa, which took the lives of approximately 94,000 Japanese soldiers and 160,000 Okinawan civilians, between one-quarter and one-third of the prefecture’s population at the time. The widespread devastation left most residents homeless, destitute, or both. During the months that followed, the American military placed thousands in refugee camps, sometimes for more than a year, supplying food, shelter (mostly tents), and medical treatment for the wounded and ill. U.S. occupation personnel supervised the distribution of relief aid and the construction of homes and public buildings; they were also tasked with bringing “democracy”to Okinawa, which many Americans considered feudalistic.
The contradiction between American espousals of democracy and policies imposed top-down under U.S. military rule soon became obvious to Okinawans, and to at least some American military personnel. One of them, Vern Sneider, published a satirical novel, The Teahouse of the August Moon, in 1951. Later adapted into two plays and a film starring Marlon Brando as an Okinawan, it is probably the best-known work of American literature set in Okinawa. Lucky Come Hawaii (1965) by Jon Shirota depicts the experience of Okinawans in Hawaii, focusing on the strained relations among resident ethnic groups following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was the first novel by an Asian American writer to become a bestseller. Among later postwar works, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End by Norma Field (1993) provides retrospectives on the Battle of Okinawa. “Memorial” by Gary Snyder and The Yokota Officers Club (2001) by Sarah Bird depict effects of the grossly disproportionate military presence in Okinawa which continues to this day.
My Story: A Schoolgirl in the Battle of Okinawa
Masako Shinjo Summers Robbins wrote My Story2 in English, which she learned after coming to the United States from Okinawa with her first American husband in 1952. Her account of life in prewar, wartime, and early postwar Okinawa compels the reader to experience the history of this tumultuous era from the perspective of a daughter in an impoverished family. As a child in the 1930s, she was sold by her father to a brothel in Naha, Okinawa’s capital city. Drafted by the Japanese military as a combat medic during the Battle of Okinawa, she barely survived sheltering in a cave that collapsed around her from shelling. After spending several months in a refugee camp at the end of the battle, her family returned to their village to find their home destroyed. Her strength, resourcefulness, and resilience through these horrifying ordeals are nothing short of astounding.
Of her childhood at the family home in the Imadomari section of Nakijin Village on the Motobu Peninsula of northern Okinawa, she writes,
“We were so poor that we didn’t have a decent door to close when we all went to bed.”3
Later, she describes her life after her father sells her to a woman managing what she calls “a house, not a home,” and the fear and disgust she felt when the woman sold her virginity to a wealthy businessman. After U.S. firebombing in October of 1944 destroyed most of Naha City, including the brothel where she worked, she felt relieved that “now [the woman] had no power over me.”4
Six months after the bombing of Naha, U.S. forces invaded Okinawa Island on April 1, 1945. Masako watched from a cave shelter as U.S. Navy ships offshore fired cannon barrages.
“The American ships were so close that, as we lay on the ground watching, we could see sailors moving about on deck, or in the distance a kamikaze attack.”5
After U.S. forces occupied the central and northern regions in fighting that caused heavy casualties on both sides and among Okinawan civilians, Masako and the other women refugees were moved from shelter to shelter by the Japanese army in its long, chaotic retreat under fire to the southern portion of the island in which thousands more soldiers and civilians died. She tells how Japanese soldiers seized food from Okinawan homes, killing a family who tried to hide one cup of rice, and how they killed a baby inside a cave shelter whose crying, they said, might attract the attention of the enemy.
In late June American soldiers captured Masako and a friend from her school days hiding in a sugar cane field.
“We were quickly surrounded by what seemed like fifty American soldiers standing in the sugar cane. All had weapons and they were pointed at us.”6
Civilian refugees in the Battle of Okinawa
Robbins describes the months that followed, most of which she spent in refugee camps where the internees, prohibited from returning to their villages, were fed and sheltered, but where some American soldiers raped young women and girls. Later, she is hired to work in the post-exchange at the Okuma Officers Rest Center in northern Okinawa. This was one of the many installations the U.S. military took over from the Japanese army, greatly expanding them and building vast new bases for their occupation (1945–1972), which lasted twenty years longer than the Allied occupation of mainland Japan. The grossly disproportionate U.S. military presence remains to this day.
Princess Lily of the Ryukyus by Jo Nobuko Martin
In December, 1941, the author was a teenage schoolgirl in Naha when the principal called all students and teachers into the auditorium for an emergency assembly.
“I have an official announcement from Imperial Headquarters,” Mr. Masaoka began . . . He paused about five seconds to prepare us for the news. “We have just declared war on Britain and the United States . . . Our mighty bombers have wiped out an entire unit of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.”7
Soon makeshift military training was added to the school curriculum.
We had no metal for weapons, but bamboo grew abundantly in backyards and in the countryside. Bamboo was light and supple, and made excellent spears; . . . straw dummies with the heads of Churchill or Roosevelt were fashioned.8
Six months after the October 10, 1944, air attack that destroyed the capital city of Naha, U.S. forces landed on the Keramas, just off the coast of Okinawa Main Island, in late March of 1945. Thus began the last and worst battle of the Pacific War, taking some 230,000 lives, more than half of them Okinawan civilians, and destroying most standing structures.
Nobuko, as one of the Himeyuri student medics, had made her way through an “iron tempest” of “falling . . . shells” to the underground field hospital where she’d been assigned.
Wounded men lay on bunk beds lining the walls. In addition to the usual musty odors associated with cave life, there was the stench of putrefying flesh, pus, and medicines. The air was thick with fluffy soot from the many kerosene lamps on the walls . . . In the operating room under a naked electric bulb two masked doctors in white were bending over the operating table. A nurse stood by, holding a tray with gleaming instruments. Their patient groaned in pain. To eyes accustomed to the yellowish light from kerosene lamps, the white, glowing electric light was blinding, and the brightly illuminated operating room contrasted harshly with its shadowy surroundings. The scene reminded me of a horror movie I had once seen, in which a mad doctor was performing an operation on a screaming victim.9
American soldiers and Japanese POW’s
In late June, Nobuko, her classmates, and other refugees heard a loudspeaker announcement in Japanese from a U.S. Navy ship off the coast of southern Okinawa Island. “The war is over. Come out. We won’t hurt you.”
We had been moving northward along the coral beach for fifteen minutes or so when, all of a sudden, there they were—fifty of them, at least—huge men with rifles! . . .
I turned around. Someone took hold of my shoulder . . . “Where are you going?” he asked, in Japanese. It was bookish, heavily accented Japanese, but quite comprehensible.
. . . I stared up at him for a moment. He had blue eyes—blue eyes! . . .10
Later, much later, some of us learned a Japanese officer named Akamatsu had ordered the inhabitants of [Kerama] island to commit mass suicide to avoid being captured . . . Hand grenades were distributed. There was one grenade for twenty to thirty people—Not nearly enough for a clean, instant death for everybody. Those who did not die immediately used clubs, axes, grubbing hoes, razors or rocks to finish each other off.11
Ernie Pyle
In ordering their suicides, the Japanese military had told Okinawans that if they were captured, the Americans would torture them for information, then rape the women before killing all of them. In a dispatch dated April 23, 1945, less than one week before he was killed in the battle, American war correspondent Ernie Pyle described how some civilians reacted after realizing they’d been misled:
After a few days the grapevine carried the word to them that we were treating them well so they began to come out in droves and give themselves up. I heard one story about a hundred Okinawan civilians who had a [Japanese] soldier among them, and when they realized the atrocity stories he had told them about the Americans were untrue, our MPs had to step in to keep them from beating him.12
The Story of Ernie Pyle
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ernie Pyle’s writing about Okinawa, where he accompanied U.S. forces as a war correspondent, starts with a premonition of his own death there. As the American invasion force in navy ships headed for the island, he wrote,
“Sometimes I get so mad and despairing I can hardly keep from crying . . . I worry so much about what might happen to me, I’ve even gotten to brooding about it and sometimes can’t sleep.”13 “On the last day we changed our money into newly manufactured ‘invasion yen,’ drew two days K-rations, took a last bath, and packed our kits before supper. We had a huge turkey dinner. ‘Fattening us up for the kill,’ the boys laughingly say.”14
While the temporary calm prevailed, he recorded his impressions of Okinawa, praising the local scenery in a description reminiscent of Bayard Taylor’s account of Perry’s arrival in Ryukyu ninety-two years earlier. The landscape that had reminded Taylor of “the richest English scenery” impressed Pyle for “the similarity with the villages of Sicily.”
Since this island is the closest to Japan we’ve landed on we seem to feel this really is Japan, rather than just some far outpost . . . There are tropical-like trees . . . All through the country are narrow dirt lanes and now and then a fairly decent gravel road . . . We had read about what a worthless place Okinawa was, but I think most of us have been surprised about how pretty it is.15
Pyle gives his impressions of local residents:
Okinawan civilians we bring in are pitiful. The only ones left seem to be real old or real young. And they all are very, very poor . . . The people here dress as we see Japanese dressed in pictures: women in kimonos and old men in skin-tight pants . . . We found two who spoke a little English. They had once lived in Hawaii. One was an old man who had a son (Hawaiian-Japanese) somewhere in the American Army! . . .
They were obviously scared to death . . . After all the propaganda they’ve been fed about our tortures, it’s going to be a befuddled bunch of Okinawans when they discover we brought right along with us, as part of the intricate invasion plan, enough supplies to feed them, too!16
He writes of American aircraft carriers barraging Okinawa with thousands of shells, and of planes launched from aircraft carries dropping bombs armed with napalm. “The ghostly concussion set up vibrations in the air—a sort of flutter—which pained your ears and pounded upon you as though . . . with invisible drumsticks.”17 His description seems to mirror Masako Robbins’s account from the other side in the battle of “bombing and gunfire from offshore . . . The American ships were so close that, as we lay on the ground watching, we could see sailors moving about on deck.”18 Just before going ashore with Marines in a small landing craft, Pyle again contemplates the possibility that he will not survive the invasion. “There’s nothing romantic whatever in knowing that an hour from now you may be dead.”19
Pyle shared the Marines’ astonishment at the total absence of Japanese resistance to the regiment’s initial landing on the beaches of central Okinawa.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” he wrote. “And we don’t either. It just can’t be true. And yet it is true. The regiment of Marines I am with landed this morning, on the beaches of Okinawa absolutely unopposed, which is indeed an odd experience for a Marine. Nobody among us dreamed of such a thing. We all thought there would be slaughter on the beaches . . . We don’t expect this to continue, of course.”20 And he quotes the first words he heard spoken by a marine on Okinawa. “Hell, this is just like one of MacArthur’s landings!”21
Later, Pyle describes the capture of two Japanese soldiers:
“They were real Japanese from Japan, not the Okinawan home guard . . . Fortunately, they happened to be the surrendering kind, rather than the fight-to-the-death kind, or they could have killed several of us.”22
His observation is important for countering the widespread impression of Japanese soldiers as monolithically committed to joyful “banzai” suicides honoring the emperor to avoid the shame of capture. In fact, although many fought until they were killed, and some strapped explosives on themselves to attack tanks and bunkers, thousands also surrendered in Okinawa and were held in prisoner-of-war camps during and after the battle.
The calm that initially greeted Pyle and the Marines soon ended, and the counterattack began, as it had earlier at Iwo Jima, by Japanese soldiers firing from fortified caves and bunkers. According to the official history of operations in Okinawa, the Seventy-Seventh Marine Division, which had fought on Guam and Leyte in the Philippines, “was to meet the stiffest opposition in its experience.” Pyle biographer Lee Graham Miller quotes a marine officer’s description of the enemy on Iejima Island just off the coast of northern Okinawa:
“He killed until he was killed. He remained hidden until our troops passed him, and then he fired at their backs. He came out of hiding at night, every night, to kill as many Americans as he could before he was cut down; he made a living bomb of himself and threw himself under tanks and into foxholes against groups of GIs.”23
In the six days of fighting on Iejima, the Seventy-Seventh lost 172 killed and 902 wounded. Almost five thousand Japanese died. On April 18, 1945, Ernie Pyle was traveling with four Marines in a jeep. Coming under machine gun fire, they jumped out to take cover in a ditch by the roadside, where he was struck by a sniper’s bullet in the left temple and died instantly.24 A monument stands there today honoring perhaps the best-known American correspondent of World War II.
At This Spot
The 77th Infantry Division
Lost a Buddy
ERNIE PYLE
18 April 1945
The Teahouse of the August Moon
Ernie Pyle was one of more than 12,500 Americans to die in the Battle of Okinawa. It took the lives of approximately 94,000 Japanese soldiers and 160,000 Okinawan civilians, between one-quarter and one-third of the prefecture’s resident population at the time. The widespread devastation left most residents homeless, destitute, or both. During the months that followed, the American military placed thousands in refugee camps, sometimes for more than a year. As Pyle noted, the U.S. invasion force had prepared for this chaotic aftermath, supplying food, shelter (mostly tents), and medical treatment for the wounded and ill. Starting in 1946, the U.S. Congress voted funds for GARIOA, Government Aid and Relief in Occupied Areas, which not only delivered food supplies and materials to rebuild destroyed communities but later provided college scholarships for Okinawans to study in the U.S. However, GARIOA failed to address the hundreds of serious crimes, especially rape, committed by U.S. soldiers, the military’s forcible seizures of farmers’ lands for construction and expansion of American bases, and the daily violations of human rights under U.S. military occupation.
Marlon Brando as Okinawan interpreter in film of “Teahouse of the August Moon”
U.S. occupation personnel supervised the distribution of relief aid and the construction of homes and public buildings, but they were also tasked, as in mainland Japan, with “reforming” Okinawan society, considered by many Americans to be backward and “feudal.” This was to be accomplished by implementing American conceptions of democracy, or “demokurashii,” a word invoked so often in Japanese that it became a punchline for jokes about the occupiers. The contradiction between American espousals of democracy and policies imposed top-down under U.S. military rule soon became obvious to Okinawans, and to at least some American military personnel. One of them, Vern Sneider, was assigned as commander of Tobaru, a village of five thousand in central Okinawa. Based on this experience, he published a satirical novel, The Teahouse of the August Moon,25 in 1951, adapted in 1953 by John Patrick for a Pulitzer Prize–winning Broadway play,26 in 1956 for a film starring Marlon Brando in the role of the commander’s Okinawan interpreter,27 and in 1970 for a Broadway musical, “Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen.”28 The Teahouse of the August Moon, in its four incarnations, is probably the best-known work of American literature set in Okinawa.
The curtain opens on Patrick’s play with a monologue by the interpreter Sakini giving the audience a history lesson in a stereotypical “oriental” patois. From the perspective of today’s sensitivities, it must be remembered that Teahouse is a satire of American images and attitudes and of Okinawan responses to them.
Lovely ladies, kind gentlemen: Please to introduce myself. Sakini by name. Interpreter by profession. Education by ancient dictionary. Okinawan by whim of gods. History of Okinawa reveal distinguished record of conquerors. We have honor to be subjugated in fourteenth century by Chinese pirates. In sixteenth century by English missionaries. In eighteenth century by Japanese war lords. And in twentieth century by American Marines. Okinawa very fortunate. Culture brought to us . . . Not have to leave home for it. Learn many things. Most important that the rest of the world not like Okinawa. World filled with delightful variation. In Okinawa . . . no locks on doors. Bad manners not to trust neighbors. In America . . . lock and key big industry. Conclusion? Bad manners good business. In Okinawa . . . wash self in public bath with nude lady quite proper. Picture of nude lady in private home . . . quite improper. In America . . . statue of nude lady in park win prize. But nude lady in flesh in park win penalty. Conclusion? Pornography question of geography. But Okinawans most eager to be educated by conquerors. Deep desire to improve friction. Not easy to learn. Sometimes painful.29
Yet the “painful” cultural “friction” in Teahouse is felt much more by the occupying Americans than by the occupied Okinawans. At one point, Colonel Wainwright Purdy, the commander of the central island region, who is hoping for a promotion to brigadier general, says in frustration, “My job is to teach these natives the meaning of democracy, and they’re going to learn democracy if I have to shoot every one of them.”30
In one major misunderstanding early on, Captain Jeff Fisby, commander of Tobiki Village and a central character in the story, has unwittingly given permission to Mr. Motomura, a wealthy man from Awasi Village, to reside in Tobiki. Only later does he learn that Mr. Motomura had been expelled from Awasi for corrupt activities. They involved two geisha, whom he now presents to Captain Fisby as a “gift of gratitude” for permission to live in the village.
[He] turned to Sakini. “But I can’t own geishas,” he protested.
Sakini scratched his head. “Don’t understand, boss. A very honorable profession.”
Fisby groped for words, tried to think. Then he smiled. “Well, it’s just not allowed, Sakini. You see, once there was a great man in our country. We called him the Great Emancipator.”
“The great who?”
“Emancipator. And he said that people can’t own other people, so—” Fisby shrugged and eased himself back into the swivel chair, pleased with his explanation.
Sakini considered carefully. “Boss, did the Great Emancipator say you can’t own geishas?”
In self-defense, Fisby edged forward on the chair. “Well, not exactly. In the first place, I don’t think he knew about geishas.”
Sakini nodded slyly. “Everything all right then, boss. You own.31
The two geisha, who, it turns out had been the cause of the breakdown in social order at Awasi, have the same effect in Tobiki. They distract the men from their assigned reconstruction tasks, sew jealousy among the women, and sabotage Captain Fisby’s pet project of constructing a school with U.S.-aid-funded materials and labor, which the villagers vote unanimously must be used instead to build a teahouse for the geisha to entertain. Unable to resist their demands for “democracy,” Fisby resigns himself to arrest and court martial with the visit to Tobiki of Colonel Purdy along with a congressional committee monitoring the expenditure of U.S. aid funds and the progress of occupation policies. Instead, the story ends happily as the congressmen are deeply impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit in Tobiki and “American get-up-and-go in the recovery program.” Besides the success of the teahouse, the villagers are running a lucrative business brewing potato brandy in home distilleries. “The Pentagon is boasting. Congress is crowing. We’re all over the papers,” exults Colonel Purdy.32
Risa Nakayama compares the novel, play, and film versions of “Teahouse” in her article “Perverted Okinawa: De-Okinawanization in the Adaptation of The Teahouse of the August Moon.”33
Because Vern Sneider, the author of the novel, stayed in Okinawa during and after World War II, the way he describes Okinawa and Okinawans is more or less realistic . . . On the other hand the film, and the play adapted by John Patrick, apply a form of slapstick comedy, using stereotyped characters.34
Nakayama notes that the play’s director, Robert Lewis, had initially wanted an Asian actor in the role of Sakini but had settled on David Wayne in “yellow face.” For the film, Brando was chosen over others for his box-office draw (Mickey Rooney was also considered for the role) at a time when it was common for white actors to play Asians in Hollywood films, sacrificing verisimilitude in favor of star power. Nakayama also notes the “juvenilization” of Okinawan characters as one aspect of what today would be called “Orientalism.”35
Author James D. Houston also writes of the “child-like” characters in the play version of Teahouse, but calls it an early breakthrough for literary and dramatic portrayals of Asians by American writers:
In a way it’s a miracle that in 1952 such a play was produced at all: a bilingual production with dialogue in both English and Japanese, with an Asian character in a leading role, an Asian we are actually allowed to like, rather than encouraged to mistrust which had been the norm, in film and fiction, from the days of the Gold Rush onward.36
Lucky Come Hawaii by Jon Shirota
Jon Shirota was born on Maui in 1928, the son of immigrants from Okinawa. His writing depicts the Okinawan immigrant experience in Hawaii, focusing on the strained relations among resident ethnic groups—Caucasian, mainland Japanese, Okinawan, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese, and Native Hawaiian. “Shirota gives his Okinawan characters cultural and ethnic traits that distinguish them from other Japanese,” explains Katsunori Yamazato.
The troubled relations between Okinawa and the rest of Japan have continued since1879, when the Ryukyu Kingdom was annexed by the rising East Asian empire of [Japan]. Even after Okinawans settled in Hawai’i and the United States, they must struggle for an identity of their own, Japanese and yet undeniably Okinawan.37
Lucky Come Hawaii, originally published by Bantam Books in 1965 and reissued by University of Hawai’i Press in 2010, was the first novel by an Asian American writer to become a bestseller. Shirota adapted the story as one of a series of plays produced in Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo. It is set during and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. That day Kama Gusuda, an Okinawan immigrant and the central character, is delivering one of the pigs he raises to a Chinese restaurant in Honolulu. The elderly proprietor Lin Wo suddenly informs a stunned Gusuda, “God-tem Jap-anee! Kill ’em lotsa ’Melican sailah and soldiah, Pear’s Har-bah! . . . You no heah radio, Gusuda?” . . . God-tem Jap-anee! . . . Al’time kill, kill. Kill ’em lotsa Chineee in China. Now kill ’em lotsa ’Melican soldiah and sailah.”38
Shirota portrays reactions to the attack among characters of the various ethnicities, focusing on a split between first- and second-generation Okinawans. Gusuda and other immigrants are proud of Japan’s military successes and expect to benefit from an anticipated Japanese conquest of Hawaii. However, the younger Okinawans born and raised there worry about rising anti-Japanese sentiment and the U.S. government’s interrogations and detentions of local residents wrongly suspected of planning sabotage. Young men soon feel pressures to join the U.S. military in order to prove their loyalty. Another of the older immigrants, Mr. Higa, paints a rising sun flag on his roof so that Japanese planes in the successful invasion he anticipates won’t bomb his house.
“Japanese soldiers are too brave for the Americans,” he explains. “Whenever the ’Merican soldiers come across the Japanese soldiers they’re sure to run.” But, hearing about the interrogations, he hurriedly washes off the flag. Gusuda’s second-generation daughter Kimiko wonders, “How foolish can people be? . . . Those superstitious fools, starting a war! Wanting to die for the Emperor because he was supposed to be a God—a descendant of the Sun.39
Through the characters’ recollections, Shirota portrays the immigrant experience and mainland Japanese prejudice against Okinawans in Hawaii. “The Naichis [mainland Japanese] are always looking down on us, [but] they’re no better . . . Like us, they had to come to Hawaii because they were poor back in Japan.”67Shirota writes that Gusuda recalls “the hardships he himself had gone through back in Ginoza Village in Okinawa. Everyone had always been so poor and hungry there.”40
He arrived in Waipahu, Oahu, near Pearl Harbor in 1905. He had never worked so hard in his life: cutting sugar cane with a heavy bolo knife under the scorching tropical heat . . . six days a week . . . After living in Waipahu for two years, convinced he could never return to Okinawa a wealthy man, he paid a local marriage broker . . . to have a picture bride sent from Okinawa.41
Lucky Come Hawaii concludes with MPs, guns drawn, bursting into the home of a Japanese American family falsely reported to possess a short-wave radio, which turns out to be a phonograph playing children’s songs.
Get your hands up!” the Sergeant bellowed, stabbing his automatic at the frail-looking, middle-aged Japanese man in sleeping kimono, and two pajama-clad girls, about eight and ten . . . A small phonograph on the floor kept on playing soft Japanese music . . . “Peterson, search the house for that radio set,” the Sergeant ordered. “And I don’t give a damn if you wreck the joint finding it.” . . .
“Hey, Sarge,” the driver said . . . “[T]here ain’t no radio set in this heah house. I’ve searched everywhere.” . . . The Sergeant said, “These people ain’t got no business listening to Jap music.” He picked up the record off the phonograph and crushed it over his knee, [then] bent down to grab a handful of other records.42
Among the two thousand men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry arrested, detained, and interned in Hawaii, no evidence of espionage or sabotage was found, and no charges were ever filed.
The author of two other novels, Shirota adapted Lucky Come Hawaii as a play produced in Los Angeles, Hawaii, and New York in the early 1990s. His 1999 play Leilani’s Hibiscus43 was produced in Los Angeles, Hawaii, and New York and, in a Japanese translation by Katsunori Yamazato, in Tokyo and Okinawa. Set in Hawaii during the early postwar period, it features seven characters, two of whom are speaking posthumously at their grave site, who reminisce about their lives filled with hardship as immigrants working on the plantations, as soldiers serving in Okinawa, and as members of a minority facing discrimination.
Fifty-year-old Yasuichi Gusuda immigrated to Hawaii in the 1930s but chose to return to Okinawa in 1941 just before the start of the Pacific War. “Bad timing,” he says.74 He recalls his uncle, who asks, “What happened to her family?” “They all jumped off the cliff: her father, mother, two older sisters and a baby brother,” answers Ichiro, who then reveals for the first time that the girl he rescued is his wife, Mayumi.46
Shirota’s play “Voices from Okinawa” takes place more recently, at the time of the Iraq War.47 As during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the U.S. military used its bases in Okinawa to train troops and store weapons for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The central character, Kama Hutchins, lives in Hawaii and is in Okinawa to trace his family’s roots as part of his PhD thesis on immigration. “I’m one-quarter Okinawan, three-quarters American . . . My grandmother married an American, and her daughter, my mother, married an American.”48
Most of the play addresses the ubiquitous effects of the U.S. postwar occupation and military presence in Okinawa. Kama explains one of its effects to his Okinawan student, Yasunobu Hokama:
Did you know that millions of American military have come and gone through Okinawa since 1945 . . . leaving behind offspring with tall noses and round eyes? The influence of Americans is everywhere today: music, language, clothing.49
Yasunobu explains why he is learning English:
I am barber. My barbershop near Kadena Air Base. Most of my customers GIs. GIs sure talk funny. Always say, “Gotcha.” What they got, I don’t know. Even when speaking to just-a-one man, they say “Y’all.” I come to Naha English School so I can speak like ’Mericans in ’Merica; not on’y like GIs in Okinawa.50
Much of the play’s dialogues are filled with such humor, but when Kama meets his relatives, he learns about the devastating consequences of the sixty-year military presence. His great-aunt tells him how she has been offered “millions of yen” to lease her land for a military base, but that she is determined to stay in the home where she has lived all her life. The woman who is the principal of the English school where he teaches supports her decision. “Lease, sell—what’s the difference? More army camps, more abused young girls.” Referring to the 1995 rape of an elementary schoolgirl by three American serviceman, the principal adds, “She was just twelve years old!”51 In act 2 Kama’s great-aunt tells him a U.S. Army interpreter, a Japanese American soldier, came and threatened to burn her house and sugar cane field if she refused to sign a lease and move out.
“A Monument on Okinawa”
The work of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gary Snyder reflects an immersion in Buddhist spirituality and a devotion to environmental preservation. He lived in Japan for several years and translated Japanese poetry. His 1958 poem “A Monument in Okinawa” on the shrine dedicated to the Himeyuri student nurses (discussed in the section above, Princess Lilies of the Ryukyus by Jo Nobuko Martin) evokes their compulsory suicides during the Battle of Okinawa and shows how militarization of the island has continued.84The families of farmers whose land was seized by U.S. occupation forces for base expansion and construction in the 1950s, as well as many others, were forced in the devastated local economy to find gainful employment in the “military service” sector.
“One hundred twenty schoolgirls
Committed suicide together here.”
Dead now thirteen years,
Those knot-hearted little adolescents
In their fool purity
Died with a perverse sort of grace;
Their sisters who live
Can be seen in the bars—
The agreeable hustlers of peace.52
Devoid of the sentimentality and nationalistic overtones in Japanese films and manga on the Himeyuri schoolgirls, this poem radiates a tone of bitter irony in describing their “fool purity” and the “perverse grace” in their deaths. The irony seems to turn cold when Snyder depicts women, many compelled to work in GI bars by economic circumstances in Okinawa under U.S. military occupation, as “agreeable hustlers.” They might smile agreeably for their customers but could hardly be said to enjoy their work. Perhaps the poem’s ultimate irony is Snyder’s reference to the “peace” in Okinawa, a bastion of weapons, troops, and warplanes for America’s wars in Korea and Vietnam, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Yokota Officers Club
The daughter of an Air Force officer stationed at Kadena Air Base during the Cold War, Sarah Bird has written two novels set in Okinawa. The Yokota Officers Club53 features tumultuously comic scenes of a military family’s life on base and their visits to the adjacent base town (in both senses of the word) Her novel reveals the rigid hierarchy among American officers’ wives that results in bullying of the younger women among them. The story concludes with tense drama when the main character’s father, an air force pilot, narrowly escapes death in a dangerous reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Union.
Returning to the airbase one afternoon shortly after arriving in Okinawa, the family encounters a protest demonstration against B-52s in Okinawa that were flying bombing missions to Southeast Asia.
Back at Kadena, the knot of demonstrators at Gate Three has swollen by several hundred. The new protesters are not the polite suit-jacketed crowd that was there the other day. A Japanese man in Trotsky glasses, his hair in a spiky brush-cut, marches back and forth in front of the demonstrators, yelling into a bullhorn, and beating his fist in the air in time with his message. Like many of the other new demonstrators, he has a look of pasty-faced fanaticism that I recognize from the ringleaders of the protest movement in college. This time many signs are in English.
NUCLEAR NO! U.S. BASE GO! DISMISS B52S FROM OKINAWA.
“Do you think they mean ‘remove’?” [my sister] asks.”54
Bird pointedly contrasts the Okinawan world of crowded streets and cramped living conditions with the wide-open spaces and comfortable living quarters for American military personnel and their dependents on base.
On base, we move from a chaotic, congested world crowded with small vehicles and small people into a world where armored personnel carriers and broad-beamed six-footers roam an orderly, expansive landscape of boulevards, runways, and fields, most of them ringed with white-painted rocks.
Among the most expansive of the many rolling spaces on-base is a parade ground.55
Bird describes what the family sees driving through Koza, Okinawa’s most notorious base town, just outside the largest air force and army bases on the island.
Koza is like a low-rent tropical Bourbon Street populated by roving groups of GIs. The white boys are unmistakable in their newly plucked haircuts, JC Penney Dacron shirts and trousers, and the twitchy air that comes from their effort to channel homesickness and vulnerability into swaggering machismo.
Pawnshops, tattoo parlors, tailor shops, and optical, electronics, and T-shirt shops are scattered among the bars: Ace High, Okay Joe, New Pussycat No. 3, Gentilemans Club, Stateside Bar. Promises of SEXY FLORR SHOW! or GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! or GO-GO SHOW! are illustrated with posters of dark-haired girls—either totally naked or encumbered only with go-go boots, pink baby dolls, and a whip—thrusting out perfect breasts . . .Bar girls flood out of [a] club. My father watches the girls tug the men inside.
“There’s your American fighting man. There’s your sentinel of liberty.”56
Koza, Okinawa, 1960s
Above the East China Sea
Based on her extensive research in Okinawan history and culture, Bird’s Above the East China Sea juxtaposes the horrifying ordeal of Tamiko, an Okinawan high school girl drafted to serve in 1945 as a combat medic during the Battle of Okinawa, with the story of Luz, an American military dependent sent with her family some sixty years later to the vast complex of bases in Okinawa. Both teenagers contemplate suicide. Tamiko is told by Japanese forces to leap from high cliffs to her death in the ocean to avoid capture by the Americans. “The soldiers, either Japanese or American, will kill us as soon as the sun rises.”57Luz is overcome with grief for her sister Codie, the person she is closest to. In a troubled relationship with her mother, Luz feels abandoned when Codie enlists in the air force. On her first deployment, she is killed by mortar fire at an air base in Afghanistan. Luz peers “a hundred feet straight down at the base of the cliffs . . . That’s where I’d land. Death would be instantaneous.”58
The loss of family members in war and Okinawan rituals for communicating with spirits of the dead connect these two narratives that take place in disparate times and cultures, but in the same lush environment of this subtropical island subjected to the continuing violence of militarization by Japan and the United States.
This article is excerpted and adapted from “Okinawa in American Literature” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (2017).
Steve Rabson is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies, Brown University. He was stationed in Okinawa as a U.S. Army draftee in 1967-68., and is an Asia-Pacific Journal contributing editor.
Notes
1 Francis L. Hawks, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000). See Steve Rabson, “Perry’s Black Ships in Japan and Ryukyu: The Whitewash of History,” Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 14, Issue 16, Number 9, August 15, 2016. http://apjjf.org/2016/16/Rabson.html
2 Masako Shinjo Summers Robbins, “My Story: A Schoolgirl in the Battle of Okinawa,” Asia-Pacific Journal 13.8.4, February 23, 2015. http://apjjf.org/2015/13/7/Masako-Shinjo-Summers-Robbins/4286.html
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Jo Nobuko Martin, A Princess Lily of the Ryukyus (Shimonoseki, Japan: Shin Nippon Kyoiku Tosho, 1984), 18-19.
25 Vern Sneider, The Teahouse of the August Moon (New York: Signet, 1956).
26 John Patrick, The Teahouse of the August Moon (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952).
27 The Marlon Brando Collection: Julius Caesar; Mutiny on the Bounty 1962; Reflections in a Golden Eye; The Teahouse of the August Moon; The Formula (Warner Home Video, DVD, 2006).
28 Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen was a musical based on John Patrick’s play and screenplay. After three previews, the Broadway production opened on December 28, 1970, at the Majestic Theatre, where it ran for only nineteen performances.
29 Patrick, Teahouse of the August Moon, 8.
30 Ibid., 23.
31 Sneider, Teahouse of the August Moon, 25–26.
32 Patrick, Teahouse of the August Moon, 174.
33 Risa Nakayama, “Perverted Okinawa: De-Okinawanization in the Adaptation of The Teahouse of the August Moon,” Okinawa Kōgyō Kōtō Senmon Gakkō Kiyo (Bulletin of Okinawa National College of Technology) 5 (2011): 33–43.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 James D. Houston, “Dancing among the Ghosts: An Okinawa Journal,” Manoa 8.1 (Summer 1996): 97.
37 From Katsunori Yamazato, preface to Frank Stewart and Katsunori Yamazato, eds., Voices from Okinawa (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), vii–viii.
38 Jon Shirota, Lucky Come Hawaii (New York: Bantam, 1965), 5–6.
39 Ibid., 90.
40 Ibid., 72.
41 Ibid., 73.
42 Ibid., 75.
43 Ibid., 246-247.
44 Ibid., 63.
45 Ibid., 65.
46 Ibid., 68.
47 Ibid., 94-133.
48 Ibid., 94-95.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 79.
51 Ibid., 110.
52 Gary Snyder, Left Out in the Rain: New Poems, 1947–1985 (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1986).
53 Sarah Bird,The Yokota Officers Club(New York: Random House, 2001).
54 Ibid., 119.
55 Ibid., 120.
56 Ibid., 26-27.
57 Sarah Bird, Above the East China Sea (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 3.
On the crisp autumn afternoon of November 26, 2007, a black car picked up Graham Spanier, then president of Pennsylvania State University, at Dulles International Airport and whisked him to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Using his identification card — embedded with a hologram and computer chip — he checked in at security and was greeted by the chief of staff of the National Resources Division, the CIA’s clandestine domestic service. They proceeded to a conference room, where about two dozen chiefs of station and other senior CIA intelligence officers awaited them.
Spanier was expecting to brief them on the work of the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, an organization he chaired and had helped create, which fostered dialogue between intelligence agencies and universities. First, though, the CIA surprised him. In a brief ceremony, it presented him with the Warren Medal, said to be the agency’s highest honor for nonemployees.
The honor recognized Spanier’s dedication to alerting college administrators to the threat of human and cyber-espionage, and to opening doors for the agency at campuses nationwide. A former family therapist and television talk-show host with an unruffled, empathetic manner and features — round face, white hair, blue eyes—reminiscent of Phil Donahue, Spanier soothed many an academic’s anxieties about dealing with the CIA and the FBI.
Since the intelligence agencies were going to meddle anyway, Spanier reasoned, they should do so with the knowledge and consent of college presidents.
“My feeling was, If there’s a spy on my campus, a potential terrorist, or a visiting faculty member you believe is up to no good, I know you’ll be pursuing it,” he told me in April 2016. “Here’s the deal. Rather than break into his office, come to me — I have top-secret clearance — show me your FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] order, and I’ll have someone unlock the door.”
Spanier’s CIA medal, and a similar FBI award a year later, symbolized a reconciliation between the intelligence services and the academy. The relationship has come full circle: from chumminess in the 1940s and 1950s, to animosity during the Vietnam War and civil-rights era, and back to cooperation after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
US Intelligence and the Universities
Their unequal partnership, though, tilts toward the government. U.S. intelligence seized on the renewed goodwill, and the red carpet rolled out by Spanier and other university administrators, to expand not only its public presence on campus but also covert operations and sponsoring of secret research. Federal encroachment on academic prerogatives has met only token resistance.
The two cultures are antithetical: Academe is open and international, while intelligence services are clandestine and nationalistic. Still, after Islamic-fundamentalist terrorists toppled the World Trade Center, colleges became part of the national security apparatus. The new recruiting booths at meetings of academic associations were one telling indicator. The CIA began exhibiting at the annual convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 2004, as did the FBI and NSA around the same time. Since 2011 the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency have participated on a panel at the Modern Language Association convention titled “Using Your Language Proficiency and Cultural Expertise in a Federal Government Career.”
Today universities routinely offer degrees in homeland security and courses in espionage and cyber-hacking. They vie for federal designation as Intelligence Community Centers for Academic Excellence and National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations. They obtain research grants from obscure federal agencies such as Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. Established in 2006, Iarpa sponsors “high-risk/high payoff research that has the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage,” according to its website. To date, it has funded teams with researchers representing more than 175 academic institutions, mostly in the United States.
While almost all Iarpa projects are unclassified, colleges increasingly carry out secret but lucrative government research at well-guarded facilities. Two years after the 9/11 attacks, the University of Maryland established a center that conducts classified research on language for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. Edward Snowden worked there in 2005 as a security guard, eight years before he joined the government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. and leaked classified files on NSA surveillance.
The center is located off-campus. Like many universities, Maryland forbids secret research on campus, but its transparency stops at the far side of its neatly trimmed lawns.
Other universities have no such compunctions. “Classified research on campuses, once highly controversial, is making a comeback,” VICE News reported in 2015. The National Security Agency in 2013 awarded $60 million to North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the largest research grant in the university’s history, to create an on-campus laboratory for data analysis. Virginia Tech established a private nonprofit corporation in December 2009 to “perform classified and highly classified work” in intelligence, cybersecurity, and national security. Two years later, the university planted its flag on prime intelligence-community turf. It opened a research center in Ballston, a neighborhood in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac River from Washington, brimming with CIA and Pentagon contractors. The center features facilities for, according to the university, “conducting sensitive research on behalf of the national security community.”
The Origins of the Relationship Between Intelligence and the Universities
Academe was present at the CIA’s creation. Its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, founded in 1942, was “half cops-and-robbers and half faculty meeting,” according to McGeorge Bundy, an intelligence officer during World War II and later national security adviser to the presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The OSS was largely an Ivy League bastion. It attracted 13 Yale professors in its first year, along with 42 students from the university’s Class of 1943. A Yale assistant professor, under cover of acquiring manuscripts for the university library, became OSS chief in Istanbul.
When the CIA was established, in 1947, the Ivy influence carried over. Skip Walz, the Yale crew coach, doubled as a CIA recruiter, drawing a salary of $10,000 a year from each employer. Every three weeks he supplied names of Yale athletes with the right academic and social credentials to a CIA agent whom he met at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, in Washington. Although the agency gradually expanded hiring from other universities, 26 percent of college graduates whom it employed during the Nixon administration had Ivy League degrees. The agency helped establish think tanks and research centers at several top universities, such as MIT’s Center for International Studies in 1952.
Almost from its inception, the CIA cultivated foreign students, recognizing their value as informants and future government officials in their homelands. It learned about them not only through their professors but also through the CIA-funded National Student Association, the largest student group in the United States. With only 26,433 international students in the United States in 1950, less than 3 percent of today’s total, the CIA relied on the association to identify potential informants at home and abroad.
The agency, which supported the student association as a non-Communist alternative to Soviet-backed student organizations, meddled in the group’s election of officers and sent its activists, including the future feminist Gloria Steinem, to disrupt international youth festivals.
“In the CIA, I finally found a group of people who understood how important it was to represent the diversity of our government’s ideas at Communist festivals,” Steinem told Newsweek in 1967. “If I had the choice, I would do it again.”
With an assist from the CIA, the number of foreign students in the United States almost doubled from 1950 to 1960.
The Relationship Unravels
Then it all unraveled. Ramparts, a monthly magazine that opposed the Vietnam War, reported in 1966 that a Michigan State University program to train the South Vietnamese police had five CIA agents on its payroll. A year later, Ramparts revealed the CIA’s involvement in the National Student Association, stirring a national outcry. The Johnson administration responded by banning covert federal funding of “any of the nation’s educational or private voluntary organizations” — though not of their individual members or employees.
Privately, Johnson saw the hand of world Communism in both the Ramparts exposé and the antiwar protests, and ordered the CIA and FBI to prove it. FBI penetration and surveillance — including illegal wiretaps and warrantless searches — expanded under President Richard Nixon but failed to turn up evidence of foreign funding.
The government’s crackdown on its campus critics, along with CIA blunders such as the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, in 1961, fractured the camaraderie between intelligence agencies and academe. In 1968 alone, there were 77 instances of picketing, sit-ins, and other student protests against CIA recruiters.
The disaffection was mutual. Just as Ivy League graduates began having doubts about joining the CIA, so older alumni who devoted their careers to intelligence agencies bridled at the antiestablishment campus mood.
“It is not true that universities rejected the intelligence community: that community rejected universities at least as early,” the Yale historian Robin Winks wrote.
Hostility between the intelligence services and universities peaked with the 1976 report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, usually known as the Church Committee, after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho. In the most comprehensive investigation ever of U.S. intelligence agencies, the committee documented an appalling litany of abuses, some undertaken by presidential order and others rogue. The CIA, it found, had tested LSD and other drugs on prisoners and students; opened 215,820 letters passing through a New York City postal facility over two decades; and tried to assassinate the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. The FBI, for its part, had harassed civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War protesters by wiretapping them and smearing them in anonymous letters to parents, neighbors, and employers.
The committee also exposed clandestine connections between the CIA and higher education. The agency was using “several hundred academics” at more than a hundred U.S. colleges for, among other purposes, “providing leads and, on occasion, making introductions for intelligence purposes,” typically without anyone else on campus being “aware of the CIA link.”
Bowing to the CIA’s insistence on protecting its agents, the committee didn’t name the professors or the colleges where they taught. Typically, the academics helped with recruiting foreign students. A professor would invite an international student — often from a Soviet-bloc country, or perhaps Iran — to his office to get acquainted. Flattered by the attention, the student would have no clue he was being assessed as a potential CIA informant. The professor would then arrange for the student to meet a wealthy “friend” in publishing or investing. The friend would buy the student dinner and pay him generously for an essay about his country or his research specialty.
Unaware he was being compromised, the grateful student would compose one well-compensated paper after another. By the time the professor’s friend admitted that he was a CIA agent, and asked him to spy, the student had little choice but to agree. He couldn’t report the overture to his own government, because his acceptance of CIA money would jeopardize his reputation in his homeland, if not his freedom.
The Church Committee and the Attempt to Control CIA Activity on Campus
Morton Halperin knew about this deception and found it “completely inappropriate.” He intended to end it once and for all. The Church Committee’s report showed him the way.
From a bookshelf in his office at the Open Society Foundations in Washington, where he is a senior adviser, Halperin extracts the first volume of the committee report. He opens the thumb-worn paperback to a passage he had underlined 40 years before:
“The Committee believes that it is the responsibility of private institutions and particularly the American academic community to set the professional and ethical standards of its members.”
That sentence sent him on a quest to persuade colleges to stand up to U.S. intelligence agencies and curb covert activity on their campuses. His mission would provoke an unprecedented confrontation between the CIA and the country’s most famous university. Its outcome would shape the relationship between U.S. intelligence and academe and still has repercussions today.
Halperin had Ivy League credentials as impeccable as any CIA recruit’s: a bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a Yale doctorate, followed by six years on the Harvard faculty. A former White House wunderkind who’d taken a top Pentagon post under President Johnson before turning 30 and then joined the National Security Council staff under President Nixon, Halperin had himself become a target of the government’s covert operations, largely because of his misgivings about the Vietnam War. With the approval of his mentor, Henry Kissinger, then national-security adviser, the Nixon administration tapped Halperin’s home phone in 1969, suspecting him of leaking information about the secret bombing of Cambodia to reporters. It also placed him near the top of Nixon’s notorious “enemies list.”
As director of the Center for National Security Studies, a project of the American Civil Liberties Union, Halperin had lobbied Congress to create the Church Committee. He attended its hearings and testified before it, urging a ban on clandestine operations because they bypass congressional and public oversight and are incompatible with democratic values.
Armed with the committee’s recommendation, he approached Harvard and asked it to set rules for secret CIA activity on campus. He expected that any restrictions placed by the nation’s most prominent university would spread throughout academe.
Morton Halperin, Harvard and the CIA
Harvard General Counsel Daniel Steiner, whom Halperin contacted first, was sympathetic, and urged President Derek Bok to take up the issue. As it happened, Bok was already familiar with the Church Committee. Its chief counsel, Frederick A.O. (“Fritz”) Schwarz Jr., was a family friend and former law student of Bok, who admired his political activism, especially on civil rights. As a third-year Harvard law student in 1960, Schwarz had organized a protest in Cambridge to support a sit-in by blacks at the lunch counter of a Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, that refused to serve them.
“I can still remember walking into Harvard Square on a rainy day,” Bok said in a 2015 interview. “There in front of Woolworth’s were Schwarz and another student picketing over Woolworth’s refusal to serve Negroes in the South.”
Bok had also met with Church Committee member Charles Mathias, a Republican senator from Maryland, and staff director William Miller, to discuss whether the committee should call for a federal law banning covert intelligence gathering on campus. Bok knew both of them slightly. Miller had been a graduate student in Renaissance literature at Harvard, while Bok had lobbied Mathias in 1970 against G. Harrold Carswell, whom Nixon had nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court despite an indifferent reputation as a federal district court judge. Mathias had impressed Bok by carefully reviewing Carswell’s record and then bucking a president from his own party and voting against the nomination, which was defeated 51-45.
Universities typically oppose any extension of federal power over academic decisions. Reflecting this view, Bok told Mathias and Miller at their meeting that colleges, not the government, should take the lead in curtailing covert operations. They agreed.
“The integrity of the institutions required it,” Miller said in a 2015 interview. “It could not be imposed from outside.”
Bok appointed four sages to set standards. They included Steiner and Harvard law professor Archibald Cox, who had become famous during the 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre,” when President Nixon fired him as special prosecutor for the Watergate scandal. Steiner met with top CIA officials, including Cord Meyer Jr., who had overseen the agency’s hidden role in the National Student Association. Based on their discussions, Steiner wrote to Meyer, “I would conclude that the CIA feels it is appropriate to use, on a compensated or uncompensated basis, faculty members and administrators for operational purposes, including the gathering of intelligence as requested by the CIA, and as covert recruiters on campus.”
The Harvard wise men disagreed. Their 1977 guidelines prohibited students and faculty members from undertaking “intelligence operations” for the CIA, although they could be debriefed about foreign travels after returning home. “The use of the academic profession and scholarly enterprises to provide a ‘cover’ for intelligence activities is likely to corrupt the academic process and lead to a loss of public respect for academic enterprises,” they wrote.
Also forbidden was helping the CIA “in obtaining the unwitting services of another member of the Harvard community” — in other words, recruiting foreign students under false pretenses. To Bok and his advisers, this perverted the trust between professor and student on which higher education is built. Posing as a mentor, a professor might seek a foreign student’s views on international affairs, or ask about his financial situation, not to guide him but to help the CIA evaluate and enlist him. And, once it snared the student, the agency might ask him to break the laws of his home country — a request that Harvard couldn’t be a party to.
“Many of these students are highly vulnerable,” Bok told the Senate in 1978. “They are frequently young and inexperienced, often short of funds and away from their homelands for the first time. Is it appropriate for faculty members, who supposedly are acting in the best interests of the students, to be part of a process of recruiting such students to engage in activities that may be hazardous and probably illegal under the laws of their home countries? I think not.”
The Harvard committee acknowledged that its new rules made the CIA’s job harder.
“This loss is one that a free society should be willing to suffer,” it said.
Admiral Stansfield Turner saw no reason to suffer. CIA director from 1977 to 1981, he believed that the agency should take advantage of the presence of foreign students on U.S. soil. Since recruiting foreigners in totalitarian countries is difficult, “it would be foolish not to attempt to identify sympathetic people when they are in our country,” he wrote in his autobiography. Turner rejected Harvard’s guidelines — as well as a Church Committee recommendation that the agency tell university presidents about clandestine relationships on their campuses — and made clear that the agency had no intention of following them.
If professors want to help the CIA, Turner argued in correspondence with Bok, it’s their right as American citizens. Harvard’s policy, he concluded, “deprives academics of all freedom of choice in relation to involvement in intelligence activities.”
The CIA promulgated its own “Regulation on Relationships with the U.S. Academic Community,” which remains in effect today. The one-page regulation ratified the status quo, permitting the agency to “enter into personal services contracts and other continuing relationships with individual full-time staff and faculty members.” The CIA would “suggest” that the staff or faculty member alert a senior university official, “unless security considerations preclude such a disclosure or the individual objects.”
Harvard and the CIA bickered with one eye on the audience they wanted to impress: the rest of academe. One university, no matter how prestigious, couldn’t stare down the CIA. But if other universities lined up behind Harvard, the agency would be hard-pressed to resist.
Halperin set out like Johnny Appleseed to sow the Harvard guidelines across the country. To his shock, the soil was barren. Other universities were reluctant to follow Harvard’s lead without documented evidence of covert CIA-faculty relationships, which the Church Committee had suppressed. University presidents wrote to the CIA, asking for particulars about cooperating faculty members, which the agency declined to provide. Some professors complained that Harvard’s rules would infringe on their academic freedom.
Only 10 colleges adopted Harvard’s policy even in diluted form.
Forty years later, Halperin remains perplexed.
“I thought once Harvard did it, everybody else would follow,” he says. “Nobody did. It was a big disappointment. If we had been able to make it the norm on major campuses, it would have had impact. I was befuddled, bewildered, and frustrated. Finally, I just gave up.”
CIA moves to mend the breach with the universities
The CIA moved to mend the breach with academe. In 1977 it started a “scholars-in-residence” program in which professors on sabbatical from their universities were given contracts to advise CIA analysts and made “privy to information that would never be available to them on campus.” In 1985 the agency added an “officers-in-residence” component, which placed intelligence officers nearing retirement at universities at CIA expense.
The effectiveness of the officers-in-residence program was “very mixed,” said the former CIA analyst Brian Latell, who ran it from 1994 to 1998. Before he took over, he said,
“we were sending Dagwood Bumsteads who should have been forced into retirement.”
Some were just hanging around campus with nothing to do. Latell set standards; the officers must have advanced degrees and be allowed to teach. At its peak, the program had officers in residence at more than a dozen universities.
The CIA supplied not only teachers but also students, intervening in a cherished academic bailiwick: admissions. In some cases it arranged schooling for valuable foreign informants who were in danger and had to flee to the United States.
In other instances, the CIA compensated foreign agents by arranging their children’s or grandchildren’s admission to an American college and paying their tuition, typically through a front organization.
“When you’re recruiting a foreigner, you look at, ‘What can I do for this guy?’ Sometimes a guy will say, ‘I want my daughter to go to a good American school,’ ” says Gene Coyle, who went to Indiana University as a CIA officer in residence.
He retired from the agency in 2006 and is now a professor of practice at Indiana.
“The answer may be, ‘We may be able to line her up with a scholarship from the Aardvark Society of Boston.’ Instead of giving Daddy cold hard cash, when he has to explain where he gets it, his daughter gets the Aardvark Society second-born scholarship for people from Uzbekistan.”
While the CIA can pull strings at top universities when it needs to, some informants ask for less selective colleges. “We sent an awful lot of Arabs” to state universities in the Southwest, an ex-officer recalls. “They all wanted to study petroleum engineering. Those schools had a huge Arab population, and they fit right in.”
A generational shift underlies the increasing ties between the intelligence community and academe. Baby-boomer professors who grew up protesting the CIA-aided misadventures of the 1960s began to retire, replaced by those shaped by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the first Gulf War, and 9/11. Younger faculty members are more likely to regard the collecting and sifting of intelligence as a vital tool for a nation under threat and a patriotic duty compatible with — even desirable for — academic research.
Barbara Walter considers it a public service to educate the CIA. The political scientist at the University of California at San Diego gives unpaid presentations at think tanks fronting for the agency, sometimes for audiences whose name tags carry only their first names. When CIA recruiters have visited UCSD, she has helped them organize daylong simulations of foreign-policy crises to measure graduate students’ analytic abilities — and even role-played a CIA official.
She’s aware that some older faculty colleagues frown on those activities.
“My more senior colleagues would absolutely not be comfortable consulting with the CIA or intelligence agencies,” she says. “Anybody who remembers or had exposure to the Vietnam War has this visceral reaction.”
Graham Spanier was the exception to Walter’s dictum. The Vietnam War didn’t prejudice him against intelligence agencies. As an undergraduate and graduate student at Iowa State University, he told me, he had been an “establishment radical.” Spanier, who had student and medical deferments and so didn’t serve in the war, led peaceful, law-abiding demonstrations against it but disapproved of confrontational tactics, such as taking over administration buildings. Once, when a march threatened to turn unruly, he borrowed a police loudspeaker to urge calm.
“I had the greatest respect for law enforcement,” he said. “I was always in the forefront of change, but I believed in working through the system. I wanted to be at the table, making change, rather than outside the building, yelling and having no effect.”
As he advanced in his career, gaining a seat at the table of administrators who hammered out academic policy, he paid little heed to the Church Committee or to CIA and FBI activities. Then, in 1995, he was appointed president of Penn State. Because the university conducts classified research at its Applied Research Laboratory, Spanier needed a security clearance. While he was being vetted, he read newspaper accounts linking a University of South Florida professor, Sami Al-Arian, and an adjunct instructor, Ramadan Shallah, to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an Iran-backed terrorist group. Spanier was struck by USF President Betty Castor’s lament that she’d had no idea of Al-Arian’s alleged fund-raising for terrorists and that the FBI had not given her “one iota” of information.
The soft-spoken Shallah had been named head of Islamic Jihad and vowed war against Israel. The director of the international-studies center at USF was quoted as saying, “We couldn’t be more surprised.”
Spanier made his own vow: Never be surprised. As a university president, he thought, “I want to be the first to know, not the last.”
He convened a meeting in his conference room of every government agency that might conduct an investigation at Penn State, from the FBI and CIA to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (the university does Navy research) and state and local police departments.
“What I said to them is, ‘If there is a significant national-security or law-enforcement issue on my campus, you can trust me. I understand the importance and sensitivity of such matters. I would like you to feel comfortable coming to me to talk about it, rather than sneaking around behind my back.’ ”
They agreed to stay in touch. From then on, an FBI or CIA agent — usually both — would drop by once a month to brief him or ask his advice, typically about counterintelligence or cybersecurity issues involving foreign students or visitors. In 2002, David W. Szady became the FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence. A quarter-century before, he had gone undercover at the University of Pittsburgh, posing as a chemist to befriend Soviet students. Now, like Spanier, he wanted to smooth relations between intelligence agencies and academe. Soon, FBI and CIA officials asked Spanier to expand the Penn State experiment nationwide.
The result was the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board (NSHEAB), established in 2005 with Spanier as its chairman. It consisted, then as now, of 20 to 25 university presidents and higher-education leaders, though some initially were nervous about their membership becoming public, fearing a campus backlash that never materialized. Spanier, conferring with the FBI and CIA, chose the members, primarily from prestigious research universities. At the FBI, Szady says, “nobody thought we could get it up and running,” because academe was perceived as hostile turf.
Board members receive security clearances and go to FBI and CIA offices periodically for classified briefings. The agenda for an October 2013 meeting at FBI headquarters, for example, included the investigation of Edward Snowden for leaking classified National Security Agency documents; the Boston Marathon bombing; Russian threats to laboratories and research; and Department of Defense-funded students abroad “being aggressively targeted” by Iranian intelligence. Afterward the FBI hosted a dinner for board members at a gourmet Italian restaurant in downtown Washington.
“There’s a real tension between what the FBI and CIA want to do and our valid and necessary international openness,” says one board member, Rice University’s president, David Leebron. “But we don’t want to wake up one morning and find out that there are people on campus stealing our trade secrets or putting our country in danger. We might be uneasy bedfellows, but we’ve got to find an accommodation.”
Spanier, the FBI and the CIA
The FBI and Spanier reached an understanding that it would notify him or the board about investigations at U.S. universities. In return for being kept in the loop, Spanier opened doors for the FBI throughout academe. He gave FBI-sponsored seminars for administrators at MIT, Michigan State, Stanford, and other universities, as well as for national associations of higher-education trustees and lawyers. Many of them arrived at his talks “with a healthy degree of skepticism,” he told me. Displaying his American Civil Liberties Union membership card to prove that he shared their devotion to academic freedom, Spanier would assure them that the FBI had changed since J. Edgar Hoover’s henchmen snooped in student files.
He also acted as a go-between for the CIA with university leaders who weren’t on the national-security board:
“What a CIA person can’t do is call the president’s office, and when the secretary answers, say, ‘I’m from the CIA, and I want an appointment.’ It doesn’t work, and it’s not credible.
“Before anybody would do that, I would call the president,” Spanier continued. “The presidents all knew me. They would take my call. … I would say, ‘Someone from the CIA would like to come. There’s no issue on your campus now’ — occasionally there was an issue; most often it was a get-acquainted meeting. Sometimes I would just give the first name. ‘Someone will call your assistant; it’s Bob.’ … That worked 100 percent of the time.”
Spanier facilitated CIA introductions to the presidents of both Carnegie Mellon and Ohio State. A Pittsburgh-based CIA officer began visiting Jared Cohon, Carnegie Mellon’s president from 1997 to 2013, once or twice a year.
“I know there was direct activity with selected faculty,” Cohon says. “They were interested in what the faculty might have observed when they went to foreign conferences. My impression, what I heard from the CIA, was that it was more defensive than offensive. Trying to make sure those faculty weren’t recruited by a foreign power.
“I was uneasy about it, and I am uneasy,” he adds. “I’m a kid of the ’60s, and I remember all the protests on campus. The idea of the CIA being on campus would have turned people crazy. Things have changed dramatically in that regard.”
Spanier frequently traveled abroad, visiting China, Cuba, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other countries of interest to the CIA. On his return, the agency would debrief him.
“I have been in the company of presidents, prime ministers, corporate chief executives, and eminent scientists,” he told me. “That’s a level of life experience and exposure you don’t have as a case officer or even a State Department employee.”
I asked if U.S. intelligence had ever instructed him to gather specific information — in other words, if he had ever acted as an intelligence agent. He smiled and said, “I can’t talk about it.”
His lofty contacts enabled Spanier to steer federal research funds to universities in general and Penn State in particular. When Robert Gates, who as president of Texas A&M University had been Spanier’s “close colleague” on the higher-education-advisory board, became U.S. secretary of defense, in December 2006, they brainstormed about academe’s role in national defense. The result was the Pentagon-funded Minerva Initiative, which supports social-science research on regions of strategic importance to U.S. security.
At meetings with the CIA’s chief scientist or the head of the FBI’s science-and-technology branch, Spanier invariably asked, “What’s your greatest need?” He rarely heard the answer without thinking, We can do that at Penn State. Then he would approach the director of the appropriate Penn State laboratory, explain what the CIA or FBI wanted, and say, “Why don’t you go and talk to them?”
Spanier resigned as Penn State president in 2011 and as chairman of the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board soon afterward, during a firestorm over child sex abuse by Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach. University trustees hired Louis Freeh to investigate. He and Spanier had been friendly for years. Freeh was FBI director when Spanier welcomed the bureau to Penn State. In 2005, Freeh inscribed a copy of his memoir, My FBI, to Spanier with “warm wishes and appreciation for your leadership, vision and integrity.”
Freeh’s 2012 report portrayed Spanier quite differently. It accused him and others of concealing the child-sex-abuse allegations from trustees and authorities and exhibiting “a striking lack of empathy” for victims. Spanier denied the allegations and sued Freeh and Penn State separately, contending that they were scapegoatingd him. The university countersued. In March a jury convicted Spanier of one misdemeanor count of child endangerment for failing to report the abuse. In June he was sentenced to two months in jail, followed by at least two months of house arrest.
The CIA and FBI on Campus since 9.11
Thanks to Spanier, CIA and FBI agents could now stride onto campus through the main gate, with university presidents personally arranging their appointments with faculty members and students. But, except possibly at Penn State, they still slipped in through the back door whenever it suited them, ignoring their pact with Spanier that they would inform university leaders of their campus investigations.
For example, the FBI didn’t notify universities during the 2011 Arab Spring, when it questioned Libyan students nationwide, including Mohamed Farhat, a graduate student at Binghamton University, of the State University of New York.
“I’m a talkative guy,” Farhat told me. “I am very truthful. I don’t like hiding.” Married with three children — the eldest, a daughter, born in Libya, and two sons born in the United States — Farhat grew up in Zliten, a town about 100 miles east of Tripoli. He studied electrical engineering at a technical college, but it bored him, and he discovered that he had an aptitude for English. Within a few years he was teaching English at every level from middle school to college.
When Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, decreed that the Libyan government would provide 5,000 scholarships for study abroad, Farhat seized the opportunity. He arrived in the United States in December 2008 and, after a year of English language study in Pittsburgh, enrolled at Binghamton.
As democratic uprisings sprouted throughout the Arab world in 2011, Farhat canceled his classes for the semester and joined cybergroups opposing the Gaddafi regime. There were about 1,500 Libyan students in the United States, and Farhat knew many of them. Soon friends began calling to let him know that the FBI had interviewed them, and that he, too, should expect a visit.
A worried Farhat contacted Ellen Badger, then director of Binghamton’s international-students office. She was accustomed to rebuffing FBI inquiries. When a university admits a foreign student or visiting scholar, it issues him or her a document required for a visa. It transmits the same information electronically to the departments of State and Homeland Security, but not to the FBI, which, unlike the other two agencies, has no regulatory authority over this population. Unless the FBI had a subpoena, under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act she could provide only “directory information,” which includes basic student data, such as dates of attendance, degrees and awards, and field of study.
“There was a clear understanding they [the FBI] were going to chat with me in the friendliest way and would be happy with any information I could give,” Badger says. “I would respond in the friendliest way and give them nothing. That’s how the dance went.”
She reassured Farhat: The FBI would probably come to her first, and she would take care of it. Instead, the FBI bypassed Badger. Because the CIA was “somewhat blind” regarding on-the-ground intelligence in Libya, the FBI had been assigned to question students about the situation there, one insider told me. Agents were instructed to interview Libyan students off-campus, without alerting professors or administrators. To protect informants from exposure, the bureau wanted to be as discreet as possible.
An agent knocked on the door of Farhat’s apartment in a three-story brick building west of campus, showed identification, and said he wanted to schedule a time to talk with him. It never occurred to Farhat to refuse.
“I have no idea about rights,” he says. “This is not part of our culture. To me, the FBI are the ultimate power.”
Two agents showed up on the appointed morning. They sat at his kitchen table and unfolded a black-and-white map of Libya, asking where he was from. It was the first of five visits from the FBI, each lasting more than an hour, over a period of two months. The same local agent came every time, accompanied by one of two agents with experience abroad; one spoke a little Arabic. At the initial interview, they explained that they wanted to make sure that he wasn’t threatening, or threatened by, any pro-Gaddafi Libyans.
That mission reflected the bureau’s concern that, since most Libyan students in the United States were on government scholarships, some might be loyal to Gaddafi — and planning acts of terror against the United States for supporting the revolution against him. That worry turned out to be misplaced.
“The students hated Gaddafi,” the insider recalled. “I don’t want to say it was a waste of time, but we satisfied ourselves that there was no threat from the Libyans.”
The agents proceeded to their other purpose: gathering intelligence. They asked Farhat about Libyan society and customs and his life from secondary school on. What disturbed him most were the questions about his and his wife’s friends and relatives, from other Libyan students to his uncles in the military. The agents wanted names, email addresses, phone numbers. Because they told him that they knew his email address and Facebook affiliations, he coughed up his most-frequent contacts, figuring that the bureau could track them anyway.
By the fourth visit, Farhat says, “I was annoyed.” The next time, he decided, would be the last. “I will tell them, ‘No more,’ ” he promised himself. As it turned out, he never had to muster the courage to defy them, because on the fifth session they wrapped up, then never returned.
Farhat didn’t tell Badger about the agents until afterward. “My reaction was regret,” she says. “What you want to do in a situation like this is make sure students are informed of their rights. They don’t have to answer any questions. They can decline a visit. They can set terms: ‘I want the director of the international office there.’ ‘I want a faculty member there.’ They have control.
“I never got to give that little speech.”
This is an expanded version of an article that appeared in The Chronicle Review.
This article was first published on February 2, 2017
As the world remains mesmerized by the antics of US President Donald Trump, his national security adviser Michael Flynn brazenly linked Iran to Yemeni fighters who attacked a Saudi warship, as well as cited an Iranian missile test as grounds to reverse course on US rapprochement with Tehran, concluding that Iran was “put on notice.”
Flynn would state:
In these and other similar activities, Iran continues to threaten US friends and allies in the region.
Flynn, who was head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) when a memo was published acknowledging the West, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf monarchs sought the rise of what was at the time called a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria – precisely where the Islamic [Salafist] State [principality] now occupies, is surely aware that America’s “friends and allies in the region” include state sponsors of terrorism, including the state sponsors of the Islamic State itself.
As Flynn furiously flipped through the pages of his statement, he was signifying the predictable betrayal of the so-called “Iran deal,” meant before it was even introduced the public – as early as 2009 – to serve as a pretext not for peace, but for war with Iran.
In it, Brookings explicitly revealed how a “superb offer” would be given to Iran, only to be intentionally revoked in a manner portraying Iran as ungrateful:
“...any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.
The so-called “Iran deal,” introduced during the administration of US President Barack Obama, represents precisely this “superb offer,” with Flynn’s accusations serving as the “turn down” ahead of the “sorrowful” war and attempted regime change the US had always planned to target Tehran with.
In fact, Flynn would seemingly draw almost verbatim from the ploy described by Brookings in 2009, by stating:
Instead of being thankful to the United States for these agreements, Iran is now feeling emboldened … As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.
Flynn’s statement is particularly surreal – considering Yemeni fighters are only targeting Saudi warships because Saudi Arabia is currently waging full-scale war on Yemen. Accused on all sides of war crimes, and with the US itself even restricting weapon sales to Riyadh – if only symbolically – in response to Saudi Arabia’s aggression – Flynn still claims that the attack on Saudi Arabia’s warship constitutes justification for putting Iran “on notice.”
Claiming that Iran is “sponsoring terrorism” throughout the region, when it is currently a major member of the coalition fighting the DIA’s “Salafist principality” in both Iraq and Syria is also surreal.
Another prerequisite mentioned in the 2009 Brookings document was the need to move Syria out of the way. It appears that the US’ attempts at regime change in Syria have reached their final conclusion, failing overall, but weakening Syria significantly in the process. War on Iran – a nation taxed greatly in fighting US, European, and Persian Gulf-backed terrorist organization in Syria – may be perceived now as more preferable than before the 2011 conflict began.
Meanwhile, the political climate in the West has been so expertly manipulated that the public is either so distracted with identity politics that they are unaware and unconcerned with the prospect of war with Iran, or so hysterical over “Islam” that any nation perceived as being Muslim is seen as justifiably a target of US military aggression – regardless of how divergent any of these alternate realities are from actual reality.
Flynn’s statement encapsulates a documented conspiracy drafted under President Bush, implemented under President Obama, and finally coming into full fruition under President Trump, once again illustrating the continuity of agenda that transcends party politics, presidencies, and political rhetoric – driven by immense corporate-financier special interests, not the will of the American public.
All four of the persons selected by U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump for the top U.S. national-security posts are committed to replacing the outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama’s #1 military target, Russia, by a different #1 military target, Iran. Iran has long been the #1 military target in the view of Michael Flynn, the chosen Trump National Security Advisor; and of James Mattis, the chosen Trump Secretary of Defense; and of Dan Coats, the chosen Trump Director of National Intelligence; and of Mike Pompeo, the chosen CIA Director.
Coats’s appointment to become the DNI in Trump’s Administration is a clear indication that Trump intends to refocus American foreign policy away from Russia as being America’s #1 enemy, to Iran as being that. Like Lt. General Michael Flynn, who will be Trump’s National Security Advisor; and like Marine General James Mattis, who has been selected to be the head of the Defense Department; and like the next CIA Director, Mike Pompeo; Dan Coats views Shiite Iran, and not ‘America’s ally’ (the rabidly anti-Iranian) Sunni Saudi Arabia, as being the source of 9/11 and other terrorist acts against the U.S. and Europe. (However, in fact, Al Qaeda is funded mainly by the Sunni-fundamentalist Saudi royal family.) (Al Qaeda is a fundamentalist Sunni armed force, and it condemns Shiites; it is hostile toward Iran, not in any way an extension of Iran.) (ISIS, too, is Sunni-fundamentalist, and kills Shia.) And all four men have said that America should, at least at the start, try to work with Russia against such ‘terrorists’ (meaning mainly against Iran, which actually produces vastly fewer terrorists than America’s Sunni-fundamentalist ‘allies’ do). Russia has long been allied with Iran, and could provide the U.S. government crucial help to conquer Iran. The idea is to persuade Russia to sell-out Iran, instead of for Trump’s foreign policy to start off by continuing to treat Russia as being America’s number-one enemy (such as U.S. President Barack Obama did despite Obama’s having famously mocked Romney’s «Russia, this is, without question, America’s number one geopolitical foe»).
This means that President Trump intends to make a deal with Russia’s President Putin, for Russia to separate from and isolate, and so allow America’s (and/or Israel’s) military to defeat, Iran. (Invasions, after all, can be extremely profitable, for some people.) Also, for Marine General James Mattis and the entire Marine Corps, who have long craved revenge against the Iranian-backed suicide-bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, conquering Iran would be a long-delayed sweet victory. (That terrorist act was against America’s support for Israel against Palestinians, which was one of the very few anti-Western jihadist acts that were Shiite-fundamentalist instead of Sunni-fundamentalist.)
This foreign policy is based upon false assumptions, especially that terrorists are fundamentalist Shiites instead of fundamentalist Sunnis — such as they actually are. (All of the 9/11 hijackers were fundamentalist Sunnis, and 15 of the 19 were Saudis. Virtually all Islamic terrorists except against Israel, are fundamentalist Sunnis. That’s just a fact — but one that the American aristocracy refuse to acknowledge publicly, because America’s aristocracy is allied with the Sauds and other Arabic, fundamentalist-Sunni, royal families: America’s ‘allies’ finance Al Qaeda and other such groups.)
So, this is not a foreign policy that’s actually designed to overcome the terrorist threat against the United States (since jihadism doesn’t come from Iran but does come from America’s Arab ‘allies’), but it is a foreign policy that’s designed to continue the pretext for America’s overspending on the military (very profitable for the U.S. aristocracy). That, more than anything else, is what the U.S. aristocracy (who control the ‘defense’ firms such as Raytheon etc.) demand from their agents in the U.S. Congress and White House. Even conquering Russia (in order to take its oil and gas etc.) isn’t as important to them as keeping the ‘defense’ (i.e., aggression) budget astronomically high. (Obama’s method of meeting the aristocracy’s requirement was to boost strategic nuclear forces against Russia and to claim that he was doing it mainly against Iran and held no hostility against Russia. He lied in order to hide his plan — a plan in cooperation with the Gulf Arab countries and America’s vassal-states in Europe — to conquer Russia.)
Here [with my comments in brackets] is from a speech that Senator Coats, the newly appointed DNI, delivered in the Senate on 17 November 2015:
We, the United States, need to show the world that threats to our principal freedoms are entirely unacceptable. Unfortunately, President Obama continues to fail to provide the American people with the leadership we so desperately need…
President Obama, in a shockingly dismissive tone, doubled down on his so-called strategy to deal with this global threat. What has his strategy to date accomplished? Well, ISIS [the most-fundamentalist of all Sunni sects] has expanded into more than half a dozen countries…
Time after time, the President has shown he simply doesn’t get it. In 2012, he boasted Al-Qaeda was on the path to defeat. In 2014, he dismissed the Islamic State as the «JV team», saying that ISIS «is not a direct threat to us nor something that we have to wade into». Last Thursday he said, «I don’t think [the Islamic State] is gaining strength» and saying «we have contained them». What will it take for this President to wake up and see what is happening around the world as a result of the ever-expanding threat of ISIS terrorism?..
I called for a diplomatic effort to persuade Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar [all three of which were actually allied with the U.S. in supporting Al Qaeda in Syria to overthrow and replace the Russia-allied Syria’s legitimate government, which is headed by the non-sectarian Shiite Bashar al-Assad], and other regions [all being Sunni] to join with us to resist more forcefully ISIS aggression. Last year I called for much greater security assistance for our potential partners in the fight against ISIS… I said we also needed to find effective ways to support and directly arm the reliable, vetted Sunni tribes and Sunni leaders in Iraq who are essential partners in combatting ISIS extremism that ultimately are Sunni Islam’s greatest threat. [This is analogous to asserting that Dominionist fundamentalist Christians are ‘Christianity’s greatest threat’ — the greatest threat to Christianity. One might as well say that Orthodox or fundamentalist Jews are the greatest threat to Judaism. But Coats is himself a Dominionist fundamentalist Christian — a member of the super-secret «The Family» group of Washington insiders who aspire for the U.S. to take over the world for Christians. And he’s not saying that such Dominionist fundamentalist Christians are «Christianity’s greatest threat».] …
We need their engagement. They are in the crosshairs of ISIS. Why haven’t they stepped up? [The reason why is that the Sauds hire jihadists to attack and overthrow only other governments, not their own; same for the Thanis who control Qatar, and for all the other Arabic royal families: to overthrow only foreign governments, not their own.]… As I said, we also need to find effective ways to support the Sunni tribes and Sunni leaders. [He wants only Sunni Muslims as allies; no Shiites — this means that the leadership in both Iran and Syria need to be overthrown, not worked with.]… I have called for increased specialized military action by our own Armed Forces — intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and special forces — not a massive invasion. [This is exactly Obama’s approach.] … Our bombing campaign — this strategy of bombing against ISIS targets — has been far from adequate. [He wants the Obama approach but more intense.]… Contrast this anemic bombing campaign with the bombing campaign before the first Gulf War, which was several thousand sorties a day.[He wants to get those American bomb-factories humming again at full capacity.] …
My bill would… recognize the reality that exists here in terms of abuse of the Visa Waiver Program or the possibility of abuse and inserting terrorists into the United States… When introducing this, I remember the response: Oh, that is too tough. Nothing is too tough these days to keep Americans safe. …
We need a comprehensive, realistic, articulate plan if we are going to destroy ISIS, and NATO action should be part of that plan…
Admiral Stavridis also suggests the possibility of forming some type of a coalition with Russia. We are seeing a strong Russian response today — last evening — once it was determined and proven the Russian airliner was brought down by a bomb and by ISIS. [He deceives there: Russia has consistently opposed jihadists and fundamentalist Islam itself; only the U.S. and its allies have supported jihadism, when it serves to defeat Russia or any government that’s friendly toward Russia. Coats knows this.] ISIS has taken credit for it, and ISIS will receive the wrath of the Russian military as a result [again repeating that lie about Russia], in direct contrast to what we have done for attempts on our own people. I am not a big fan of Putin. I am not a big fan of the current Russia government. I spoke out strongly about Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, and have strongly advocated for Russia’s diplomatic isolation. In fact, I so strongly advocated for it that Russia put me on a list of seven people who are banned from entering Russia for life. Well, I have been to Russia, and I don’t need to go back. So it is no big deal. Apparently it was a big deal to them. But now we are facing an emergency situation. Russian forces are deployed in Syria. Russian efforts need to becoordinated with NATO efforts, if we go the NATO route. We are already coordinating in terms of some of our flights. As we learned in 1941, national emergencies can create strange bedfellows…
In conclusion, let me say this. In 2014, the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, said:
Our last message is to the Americans: Soon we will be in direct confrontation, and the sons of Islam have prepared for such a day. So watch, for we are with you, watching.
This is the enemy we are dealing with. This is not some vague threat; this is a direct threat. We have seen how they carry out their direct threats, and we stand in the crosshairs.
There is no evidence whatsoever that either the Iranian regime, or any other Shia Muslims, participated in, or knowingly assisted, the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 attackers were 100 % Sunni and almost entirely Saudi — and the 9/11 Commission Report devoted only two of its 585 pages (240-241) to the topic, «Assistance from Hezbollah and Iran to al Qaeda» and was unable to find anything against Iran other than the Iranian regime’s attempts pre-9/11 to have cordial relations with both Al Qaeda and the Sauds. (The U.S. government never sought cordial relations with Iran, except when America’s coup-imposed stooge, the brutal Shah, infamous for torturing all opponents, headed Iran.) Those attempts at rapprochement with the Sauds and their agents, bore no fruit. To the contrary, the Sauds, during Obama’s regime in the U.S., increased their hostility against Iran. After 9/11, Iran sided with the U.S. even against Al Qaeda, but the U.S. government has even blamed Iran for 9/11, while covering-up the massive evidence that the Sauds had actually financed the 9/11 attacks. (The U.S., under Obama, even sided with Hitler against Russia and Russians — and even against Jews. Obama was every bit as depraved a liar as was George W. Bush, but depended upon votes from the opposite Party of suckers of the U.S. aristocracy.)
Regarding Mike Flynn, his international-affairs viewpoint is well summarized by the anti-Russian, but even more anti-Iranian, conservative commentator, Michael J. Totten, writing in the neoconservative World Affairs journal, headlining «How Trump’s General Mike Flynn Sees the World», and it’s remarkably similar to the views that were propounded there by Dan Coats. This is more an anti-Iranian neoconservatism, than an anti-Russian neoconservatism (which was backing Hillary Clinton). Flynn is openly anti-Muslim, but that’s only because he erroneously equates what is actually fundamentalist-Sunni Islam, with Islam itself; and then he misattributes Shia Islam — and especially Iran — with that (alleged ‘Muslim’ threat), and he assumes that the jihadists who endanger Americans, the actually fundamentalist Sunnis who are financed actually by the U.S. aristocracy’s allies the Sauds and other fundamentalist-Sunni royal Arabic families, will somehow be able to become destroyed by an alliance between the U.S. government and those actual funders of jihadists (plus perhaps Russia, if Putin will agree to join Trump’s war against IRAN — not against the Saud family etc.). It’s stupid, but apparently it’s sincere — not intended merely to advance Flynn’s career serving the U.S. oligarchy (who are even more obsessed to conquer Russia, like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were hoping to achieve, than they are to conquer Russia). (Thus the U.S. aristocracy hate Trump’s guts even though he himself is a member of America’s aristocracy.)
Marine General James Mattis, whom Trump has chosen to head the ‘Defense’ Department, is similarly focused against Iran and Shia Islam (including Hezbollah) as the main source of jihadism, and as being America’s number-one enemy. Consequently, on 4 December 2016, Mark Perry at Politico headlined «James Mattis’ 33-Year Grudge Against Iran», and he attributed Mattis’s obsessive hatred of Iran to the 23 October 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, by an Iranian, during the Lebanese civil war — an event that had turned the Marine Corps (the entire institution) rabid against Iran. Perry wrote that «It was also this Iran obsession that led Obama to force Mattis’ retirement back in January 2013». Referring to Obama’s National Military Strategy, Perry wrote: «The gravest threat to America, according to the document, is not ‘Iran, Iran, Iran’ [as Mattis insisted], but ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’». Obama would not keep any general who failed to share his hatred of Russia.
At the far-right Heritage Foundation, on 13 May 2015, Mattis delivered a lecture in which he stated that jihadists are mainly Iranian or Shia (actually they’re almost 100% fundamentalist Sunnis, not Shia, and that’s one of several historical falsehoods in Mattis’s lecture). The only other major source of it that he even identified there was «the Muslim brothers in Cairo for a year» — by which he referred to the temporary Muslim Brotherhood rule of Egypt, from 30 June 2013 to 3 July 2013. He didn’t mention there, for example, as being the main Sunni source of jihad, Al Qaeda, or ISIS — he gave as the main Sunni example of what he referred to as America’s number-one enemy, or «political Islam», the one example in which it was democratically elected into power (which jihadist groups never are). He treated that «political Islam» which he identified as America’s top enemy, as being a threat that comes from the masses of Muslims (the Sunni public for example who voted Mohamed Morsi into Egypt’s Presidency) and not at all from the the Sunni elite (the royal families who own the Arabic nations that are allied with the U.S. aristocracy). He mentioned Sunni leaders only as being allies of America. Mattis is targeting only Iran’s aristocracy and public, and their supporters abroad.
As regards the next CIA Director, House Republican Mike Pompeo, Ryan Costello of the National Iranian American Council, bannered on 23 November 2016, «Trump CIA Pick Hyped Facts On Iran, Downplayed Costs Of War», and he wrote: «Pompeo has been a fierce ideological opponent of the Iran nuclear accord and gone out of his way to work to roll back the multilateral agreement. Perhaps most disconcertingly, Pompeo has downplayed the costs of bombing Iran», and «fought tooth and nail to prevent the deal from being struck». Pompeo’s record is clear that he wants the U.S. to invade Iran. Furthermore, «Pompeo’s last tweet prior to his selection as Trump’s future CIA Director stated ‘I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism’». This common neoconservative allegation — that Iran, instead of the Saudi royal family, is ‘the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism’ — contradicts the massive and compelling evidence, but now the U.S. CIA will be tasked to go full-bore ‘documenting’ this vicious, and bloody dangerous, lie.
We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.
Consequently, Donald Trump, like his predecessor, Obama, blames Iran, not Saudi Arabia — not the royal Sauds, who own Saudi Arabia — for Islamic terrorism. Trump, apparently, shares President Obama’s 100% backing of immunity for the dictatorial Saudi royal family’s financing the 9/11 attacks and for their continuing to finance Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups. Obama had said that if the leaders of Saudi Arabia wouldn’t be immune for perpetrating 9/11, then American Presidents could similarly be prosecuted by other nations, perhaps (for example) like for Obama’s bloody coup overthrowing Ukraine’s democratically elected and Moscow-friendly President in 2014. America’s mainstream newsmedia supported him on that immunity for all international leaders, and even Britain’s liberal Guardian also reported favorably on Obama’s support for sovereign immunity (which puts The West now against — for example — the Nuremberg Tribunals, as merely victors’ ‘justice’ in the eyes of The West’s aristocracies today). (Hitler would be pleased.) Obama’s blaming Iran for such jihadists, will thus almost certainly be continued by President Donald Trump, and there will be no ‘draining of the swamp’ accountability, such as Trump had campaigned on.
Maybe the only good thing that one can reasonably say about Donald Trump as U.S. President is that, unlike his electoral opponent Hillary Clinton, he’s not heavily committed to forcing World War III. In fact, unlike her (and President Obama), he’s not (at least not yet) at all committed to conquering Russia. But still, America’s aristocracy rules; only now they’re aiming to conquer Iran, instead of to conquer Russia. They’ve chosen a less dangerous, more vulnerable, target, for the time being.
But as regards destroying jihadists, that’s still not their top foreign-policy, national ‘security’, objective. Conquest is. It’s still a neoconservative regime, just a less dangerous variety of that.
The American people have already been conquered by the American aristocracy. It has been done by lies, and by the public’s tolerance of being lied-to.
So, the people in Iran have sound reason now to be very worried.
Catalan President Carles Puigdemont is more equivocator than decider, failing to formally declare independence from Spain – the overwhelming will of the autonomous region’s voters.
Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy gave him until 10:00AM Monday local time to say yea or nay on independence, nothing in between.
Instead, Puigdemont in a letter to Rajoy said
“(o)ur proposal of dialogue is sincere and honest. Thus, for the next two months, our main objective is to urge dialogue and that all those international, Spanish and Catalan institutions and personalities who have expressed their will to open a path to negotiations have the chance to explore it.”
“My government’s priority is to intensively seek the path to dialogue. We want to talk, just as strong democracies do, about the existing problem that the majority of the Catalan people want to continue the path as an independent country in the European framework.”
“(W)ith good will, recognizing the problem and looking each other in the face, I am sure we can find a path to the solution.”
Spain’s Justice Minister Rafeal Catala called Puigdemont’s response invalid.
Deputy PM Soraya Saenz de Santamaria said
“(t)he government regrets the fact that the President of the Generalitat has decided not to reply to the request formulated by the government last Wednesday.”
“It wasn’t very difficult to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question of whether he had declared independence.”
“I don’t think it was a very complicated answer. All we were and are asking him for is clarity on a very important issue.”
“Prolonging the situation of uncertainty and deliberate confusion only favors those who want to liquidate civic harmony and impose a radical and impoverishing project in Catalonia.”
Puigdemont has until 10:00 AM Thursday, a second deadline Rajoy gave him, to say yea or nay on Catalan independence.
Otherwise, Article 155 of the country’s constitution could be invoked, suspending Catalan autonomy, Puigedemont and other separatist officials removed from office, perhaps arrested and prosecuted for sedition or treason.
New elections could be called to install a new government, subservient to Madrid, how fascist regimes operate.
On Sunday, Belgian PM Charles Michel called for “European or international” mediation if dialogue between Catalonia and Madrid fails – breaking from EU consensus.
He failed to say if he’d support Catalan independence if it’s formally declared. Earlier he condemned referendum day violence by national police and civil guards.
On Sunday, he said
“(t)here is a war of nerves on that must be stopped in order to open the way for political dialogue.”
The same day, Puigdemont addressed Catalans publicly, saying he considers the moment “difficult and at the same time hopeful,” rejecting Rajoy’s threat to suspend regional autonomy, adding the attitude of certain Madrid officials is “contemptible.”
He reiterated his “commitment” to “peace and democracy,” rejecting state “violence, aggression and imposition.”
The regional moment of truth was delayed for another 72 hours. Catalans demand independence.
After 16 days since their overwhelming vote, Puigdemont hasn’t formally declared what he’s obligated to do.
The agreements to sell S-400 missiles and manufacture Kalashnikovs in the Kingdom represent some of Russia’s best practice of “military diplomacy” yet, creating a solid basis for building long-term and strategic relations with Saudi Arabia in the context of their fast-moving and comprehensive rapprochement. However, these moves haven’t been without controversy, of course, since one of the first reactions was from the US when it announced that it would be selling Saudi Arabia $15 billion worth of THAAD anti-missile systems as part of its over $100 billion arms deal that was sealed earlier this year during Trump’s visit to Riyadh. This proclamation was clearly timed to coincide with Russia’s, overshadow it, and create doubts about the Russian-Saudi rapprochement, but it instead demonstrated that the Kingdom is clearly an object of competition between Moscow and Washington in the New Cold War, something which would have been nearly impossible to countenance even a year ago.
On the social media front, the military agreements drew criticism from those who expressed concern about how it could impact on the course of the Saudis’ disastrous War on Yemen, fearing that the Kalashnikov deal in particular could make the violence worse. These specific worries are unfounded, however, because the S-400s are only for defensive purposes, while the automatic rifle factory will take at least a few years to build. However, the auxiliary deals for “Kornet-M anti-tank missiles, TOS-1A “Buratino” heavy flame systems, (and) automatic AGS-30 grenade launchers” could potentially be more immediate, thereby altering the battlefield dynamics. It’s in this vein that it’s relevant to reiterate Russia’s official position to the War on Yemen, because Russian Ambassador to Yemen Vladimir Dedushkin reminded the world just as recently as last March that Moscow considers Hadi to be “the country’s legitimate president”, but it’s just that Russia cautions Saudi Arabia to be more considerate of civilian casualties in its campaign to reinstate the ousted leader.
While one might be worried that the Saudis could go wild with any new Russian weaponry, there’s also the possibility that Riyadh might follow Moscow’s lead in charting a “compromise solution” in Yemen modelled off of Syria’s Astana Peace Process in order to shape the conditions for a “face-saving” withdraw. If this happens, then following the pattern, it could begin by separating “moderate rebels” from terrorists, or in this sense, legitimizing the Houthis by clearing recognizing that they aren’t Al Qaeda or Daesh. Great Power-brokered talks might eventually follow, after which ceasefires and “de-escalation zone” agreements could be put into place prior to drafting a new constitution and holding internationally supervised elections. Adapted to the Yemeni case, however, this might even see an institutionalization of the country’s internal partition through “federalization”, but in any event, such peacemaking developments could take at least a year or two to play out judging by how long it’ll probably take Syria.
No matter how everything unfolds, the fact of the matter is that the Russian-Saudi rapprochement is proceeding at a fast pace, and that the military-political dimensions of this relationship are bound to have important implications for the War on Yemen.
The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday Oct 13, 2017:
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare.
With the onset of winter and the increasing strain on Ukraine’s energy system, the threat of a new nuclear disaster in Central Europe is becoming more than just a theoretical danger. According to analysts from Energy Research & Social Science(ERSS), there is an 80% probability of a “serious accident” at one of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants before the year 2020. This is due both to the increased burden on the nuclear plants caused by the widespread shutdowns of Ukraine’s thermal power plants (the raw material they consumed – coal from the Donbass – is in critically short supply) and also because of the severe physical deterioration of their Soviet-era nuclear equipment and the catastrophic underfunding of this industry.
Should such an incident occur, the EU would not only be faced with the potential environmental consequences, but also – given the recent introduction of visa-free travel – a large-scale exodus of Ukrainians out of contaminated areas.
Let’s start by taking a brief tour of the Ukrainian nuclear industry:
Ukraine currently has four operating nuclear power plants: the Zaporizhia (the largest in Europe, with six reactors and a combined power output of 6,000 MW), the Rivne(four reactors and a combined power output of 2,880 MW), the Khmelnitskiy (two reactors and a combined power output of 2,000 MW), and the South Ukraine(three reactors and a combined power output of 3,000 MW):
TheChernobyl plant with its four reactors was finally shut down for good in 2000.
Of the 15 nuclear reactors currently operating in Ukraine, 12 were brought online during the Soviet era, prior to 1990. All of them rely on the classic type of VVER nuclear reactors that were designed during the 1960s and 1970s at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. Those reactors should have a maximum life expectancy of 30 years. But as of today, 10 of the 15 reactors operating in Ukraine have already outlasted their expected service life.
And all the while, the strain on Ukraine’s crumbling reactors constantly increases due to the dramatic decline in the availability of anthracite reserves from the Donbass at the country’s thermal power plants (by mid-2017, electricity production at Ukraine’s thermal power plants had dropped to almost half of 2013’s output, down to just over 50 billion kWh per year). According to Energoatom, the state company that runs Ukraine’s nuclear plants, in 2016 those plants were operating at only 65.5% of their total capacity, but by January 2017 they were up to 77.6%.During the first half of 2017, Ukraine’s nuclear power plants produced more than 45 billion kWh of electricity (up 13% compared to 2016), which means that they were responsible for 58% – an unprecedented share – of the country’s total energy matrix.
TodayUkraine is desperately squeezing out the last drops of use from its decrepit Soviet-era nuclear facilities.
The situation is being aggravated by Ukrainian energy officials, who are under political pressure to find a substitute for the nuclear fuel made by the Russian company TVEL. Thus at a number of reactors they have made repeated attempts to instead use a product made by the Westinghouse Electric Company, an American-Japanese corporation.
It is astonishing how the Ukrainians have entirely ignored the painful experiences of the Czechs. Back in 1996, the Czech Temelín nuclear plant (built by the Soviet Union) signed a contract with Westinghouse. After the reactors at the plant were fed an American fuel that had been designed to mimic the Russian TVEL product, the plant was forced to repeatedly refuel the reactors ahead of schedule, because the American assemblies leaked and exhibited structural defects. The scientists at Westinghouse could not correct the problem. In addition to the threat of a nuclear accident, the faulty fuel assemblies significantly increased the costs of producing electricity, since the reactors had to be continually shut down to replace the American parts. As a result, after yet another major accident in January 2007, the Czech Republic refused to purchase further fuel from the US and by 2010 Temelín had fully returned to the use of Russian TVEL products.
The Czech Temelin nuclear power station had effectively got rid of the counterfeit Westinghouse fuel by 2010.
Ukraine has been experimenting with American-made clones of Russian fuel assemblies since 2005. That was the year that Energoatom shipped six TVS-WR assemblies manufactured by Westinghouse to the South Ukraine nuclear plant and began their pre-installation inspection. As a result of their experiments, it was concluded that the American fuel assemblies were defective. However, they still decided to proceed to the next stage of the experiment – the annual loading of the reactor using this fuel. In 2008, Energoatom and a Swedish subsidiary of Westinghouse signed an agreement to supply the South Ukraine nuclear plant with enough American fuel for the scheduled annual partial refueling of the three reactors from 2011 to 2015.
However, as early as April 2012, malfunctions in the American assemblies were noted at the reactors of the South Ukraine nuclear plant. In an emergency procedure, all the TVS-WR assemblies were completely unloaded from the reactors after they were found to be damaged, mainly due to structural flaws in the spacer grids. As a result, in 2013, following a thorough inspection, Ukraine’s State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate instituted a total ban on the use of American fuel at Ukrainian nuclear plants.
But the victory of the Revolution of Dignity has once again cleared the path for American TVS-WRs to be used in Ukraine. In April 2014, Kiev carefully reassembled the torn-up scraps of its old contract with Westinghouse and decided to give things another go. The media reported that American fuel was subsequently loaded into reactor no. 3 at the South Ukraine nuclear plant (March 2015), reactor no. 5 at the Zaporizhia nuclear plant (June 2016), and reactor no. 2 at the South Ukraine nuclear plant (August 2017). The consequences were soon evident.
In February 2016 there was an emergency shutdown of reactor no. 3 at the South Ukraine nuclear plant “due to an increase in the level of coolant in the steam generator.” As local residents reported on social media, the area surrounding the nuclear plant was immediately cordoned off by the military. And on March 23, 2016, operations at the South Ukraine nuclear plant were completely suspended for an entire day!
The Zaporizhia nuclear plant has already undergone a dozen emergency shutdowns of its reactors since 2014. For example, in November 2015, military troops in the Zaporizhia region beefed up their safety measures after the reactors at the nuclear plant suffered an emergency power loss – all of the soldiers and officers were issued special equipment to protect themselves from radiation and chemicals. But no official comment was forthcoming about the incident.
Curiously enough, in May 2015 the Guardian published a bombshell report, claiming that over 3,000 spent nuclear fuel rods were being stored in metal casks in an open-air yard on the grounds of the Zaporizhia nuclear plant. Apparently these were Russian TVEL assemblies that had been hastily stored after being replaced with the TVS-WRs. This would seem to indicate that experiments to introduce the defective fuel rods into the reactor cores at the Zaporizhia nuclear plant were being conducted long before the reactor was officially brought online using American fuel in June 2016.
This being the case, the time line of accidents at the Zaporizhia nuclear plant can be viewed in a different light:
Nov. 28, 2014 – There was an emergency shutdown of reactor no. 3 after the automatic system that prevents damage to the core was activated.
July 18, 2015 – There was an emergency shutdown of reactor no. 1 in connection with the automatic shutdown of the pump responsible for cooling the nuclear reactor.
April 11, 2016 – There was an emergency shutdown of reactor no. 6 at the Zaporizhia nuclear plant in connection with the depressurization of the gas system of the turbogenerator. The local media reported a 10-fold increase in radiation levels around the station.
May 18, 2016 – There was an emergency shutdown of reactor no. 4 due to damage to the transformer.
August 14, 2016 – Reactor no. 5, the first at Zaporizhia to have been loaded with the Westinghouse knockoff product, was sent out for repairs.
Sept. 20, 2016 – Reactor no. 6 was taken off-line for “scheduled maintenance” (at the very start of the winter heating season!).
Oct. 24, 2016 – There was an emergency shutdown of reactor no. 2, only two and a half weeks after being overhauled.
In March 2017, at the peak of the energy crisis, that same reactor had to be taken off-line again.
April 18, 2017 – There was yet another emergency shutdown of reactor no. 6.
In early August 2017, reactor no. 4 was taken off-line for “scheduled maintenance work.”
As a result, only two of the six reactors at the Zaporizhia nuclear plant are currently fully serviceable. Overall, the accident rate at Ukraine’s nuclear plants has increased 400% since 2010!
The report from Energy Research & Social Science mentioned above also stressed that “[i]n Ukraine, for example, most nuclear energy accidents and incidents have not been included in databases over the past several years, although state Media confirmed their occurrence.”
In addition to the use of knockoff fuel, the biggest reason for the increased number of incidents at Ukraine’s nuclear plants has been the chronic underfunding of the industry. In the 25 years since the collapse of the USSR, literally not a cent has been invested in that sector. But in the meantime, the reactors that have outlived their 30-year lifespan either need to be closed (which would cost money that Energoatom does not have) or have their service life extended. Naturally, the Ukrainians are pursuing the second option. Ideally, when the operational life of a nuclear plant is extended, that should involve a major overhaul and updates. The estimated costs of extending the lifespan of a single reactor range from $150-180 million. But neither Energoatom nor the government of Ukraine has that kind of money, nor do they expect to find it anytime soon, hence the authorization to extend the operation of the reactors is a pure formality. Judging by publicly-accessible reports, regular 10-year extensions on the service life of Ukrainian nuclear reactors are granted readily and without arguments. However, the internal documents from Energoatom that were released this week by Cyber-Berkut paint quite a different picture.
Cyber-Berkut Documents
Cyber-Berkut obtained access to documents from government offices in Austria, Romania, Moldova, Belarus, Greenpeace, and the Bankwatch network of environmental NGOs, dated from the summer of 2017, which sound the alarm about Energoatom’s plans to prolong the operation of these old reactors.
The most informative of these is a chart drawn up by the Ukrainians listing all the grievances put forth by their foreign partners, plus their own responses (the document is primarily written in Ukrainian).
The first fact that jumps out is that Kiev arbitrarily decided to extend the operation of the reactors back in 2015, but it was not until 2017 – after the fact – that it sent that (pre-approved) program to update the nuclear plants to its neighboring countries and international environmental organizations for study.
This was a simultaneous breach of two UN Conventions that require signatories to obtain public and intergovernmental approval prior to (not after) commencing work at a nuclear power plant: the Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment (the 1991 Espoo Convention) and the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (the 1998 Aarhus Convention). Jan Haverkamp, a recognized expert in nuclear energy and a Greenpeace staffer, writes about this issue specifically:
The Ukrainian response to him (third column) states, “The State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate [the Ukrainian acronym is ДIЯРУ – OR] is an independent body and its actions are not subject to these conventions [!!!-OR]”
Echoing Mr. Haverkamp, Bankwatch’s Romanian representative, Maria Seman, also raises a red flag:
”In accordance with the Aarhus Convention, article 6 (4), public participation (along with a cross-border process to allow public participation in the Environmental Impact Assessment – EIA) should take place when all options are still open. In the case of decision-making processes that happen at many different levels, if there was no public participation in previous decisions, the public should once again be invited to take part in those decisions that were made earlier and they should still be viewed as open. This applies to reactors 1 and 2 of the South Ukraine nuclear power plant and reactors 1 and 2 of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, where updates were made and their license was renewed despite the red flags raised by neighboring countries and Espoo Convention Implementation Committee.”
Ukraine offered a simple, straightforward answer:
“The answer to this question was provided above.”
Following are more of Maria Seman’s contentions about how Ukraine has violated international legislation: Kiev refused to notify stakeholders before making decisions about nuclear plants and now cannot guarantee that all input will be taken into account as the reactors are being updated:
However, Kiev seems relatively unconcerned, offering only mocking answers to the objections made by the foreign investigators:
“Ukraine did not refuse to do anything. A delay occurred. The decisions to extend the licenses were made in accordance with national law and it was not possible to postpone them.”
“There may be a conflict between the laws, but the regulatory body that made the decisions on this matter did not violate national law.”
In other words, the Ukrainians call ignoring the demands of the UN – “a conflict between the laws,” and violating the basic principles of environmental oversight – “a delay.”
Ukraine seems unaware that these conventions were created in order to preclude arbitrary actions by political authorities on questions of nuclear energy. Violations of international law are a matter of concern not just for environmentalists. They are a legal issue that calls for investigation, the identification of the perpetrators, and the correction of the transgressions. Where are the international commissions, where are the criminal cases that have been filed, where are the courts and tribunals that should be avidly defending the letter of the law? Why is the Ukrainian government being allowed to ignore UN treaties that it is bound to observe? The Espoo Convention Compliance Committee and other relevant authorities must respond.
According to Mr. Haverkamp, the authors of the program to extend the licenses of the nuclear power plants do not know the first thing about risk assessment and have not learned the lessons of Chernobyl or Fukushima, because the continued use of the reactors at the South Ukraine and Zaporizhia nuclear plants raises the chance of another nuclear disaster:
In turn, the Romanian government has submitted a whole list of transgressions, omissions, and missing information. Here are just two items:
“The statements [by the Ukrainians] about their policy in regard to nuclear safety are misleading, incomplete, and not supported with pertinent details …”
”The documents submitted by the Ukrainians are missing important information about the assessment of the consequences of potential accidents at the nuclear power plants …”
However, the Ukrainians are not troubled with remorse for their shoddy work – their answer again takes a defiant tone. The experts in Kiev apparently believe that there are not enough qualified investigators in the Romanian government to legitimately request such information:
“This information, in our opinion, may be a subject of interest to suitably qualified experts, but for the discussion of the EIA at the state level, it is superfluous.”
Representatives from other neighboring countries also complain about the lack of data necessary to fully evaluate the program to update Ukraine’s nuclear power plants.
In particular, the Ministry of the Environment of the Republic of Moldova has emphasized that the environmental impact assessment does not take into account the physical aging – resulting from bombardment by neutron fluxes – of either the reactors or the components of their radiation shield.
The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection of the Republic of Belarus has requested “comprehensive information regarding the documents on the basis of which the decision was made to extend the service life of the two reactors at the nuclear power plant, as well as information regarding the updates to each reactor,” and so on.
Ukraine’s reaction: “That answer lies outside the scope of our authority.”
Serious concerns are being raised about the fact that the Ukrainian state agencies responsible for nuclear energy have not yet devised ways to dispose of the spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste, now that the service life of the reactors has been extended and given the fact that Ukraine is refusing to use Russian storage facilities. Maria Seman, for example, has this to say:
“The section on radioactive nuclear waste does not provide enough information on the total quantity of waste generated over the course of a year, nor a detailed plan for handling it, which must include storage. The on-site facilities for storing nuclear waste at the nuclear plants are limited, and the transportation of waste and spent fuel to Russia was suspended once the civil war in eastern Ukraine intensified. It is essential to request this information.”
However, Kiev seems less concerned with problem of how to dispose of radioactive waste than with offering its own rhetoric about events in the eastern part of its country. Instead of providing a substantive answer about what to do with the increasing quantity of spent fuel, the officials advised the Romanian investigator on her choice of newspapers:
“There is no civil war in Ukraine – only the aggression of the Russian Federation [!!!-OR]. The author should find reliable sources of information.”
Among other topics the Europeans raised for discussion with their Ukrainian colleagues: the massive doses that Kiev has decided fall within the bounds of “permissible radioactive contamination,” despite the fact that they are lethal to 50% of the population of the zone that has been thus contaminated; the sources of the funding for the impending programs to take the Ukrainian nuclear power plants off-line in the future; the absence of assessments in Energoatom’s materials regarding the impact of radiation on the rise in leukemia among children living near nuclear power plants; and so on:
Officials in Kiev either evade answering these questions or else play the fool: “What, we should keep records of every case?” (in regard to the incidence of childhood leukemia).
***
All these facts are evidence that Ukraine’s nuclear power plants not only present a genuine threat to Europe’s security, but that given the current economic situation and political instability in Ukraine, they also have no chance of bucking this negative trend. How to effectively cope with this aggravating situation should be a matter of urgent technical and political talks between the Russian and concerned EU states authorities.
All images in this article are from Oriental Review.
Readers at home and around the world want to know what to make of the announcement that China henceforth will conduct oil purchases and sales in gold-backed Chinese currency.
Is this an attack by Russia and China on the US dollar? Will the dollar weaken and collapse from being discarded as the currency in which oil is transacted? These and other questions are on readers’ minds.
Below is my opinion:
The US dollar’s value depends on whether central banks, corporations, and individuals are content to hold their assets or wealth in dollars. If they are, it does not matter what currency is used to transact oil. If they are not, it does not matter if all oil is transacted in dollars. Why?
Because if they don’t want to hold dollars, they will dump the dollars as soon as the transaction is completed and move into other currencies or gold. What China is doing is creating a currency that might be a more attractive currency to hold.
It is possible that the gold-backed Chinese currency is a move against US power, but I see it differently. I see it as a protection against US power. China and Russia are disassociating from the dollar system, because Washington, in its abuse of the world currency role, uses the dollar payments mechanism to impose sanctions on other countries and to threaten them with exclusion from the payments clearing system.
In other words, Washington, instead of operating a fair system, uses its world currency role to dominate other countries. Russia and China are too strong to be dominated, and, thus, are throwing off the dollar system. If other countries follow, the dollar will cease to be an instrument of US control over the rest of the world.
To put it in different words, Bretton Woods gave Washington the responsibility for the world financial system. Washington abused the power entrusted to it by using the dollar system to destabilize other countries, such as Venezuela currently. Washington’s abuse of the world currency role in order to advance American financial and business interests and Washington’s power over the foreign and domestic policies of other countries has set in motion forces that will eliminate the dollar’s role as world reserve currency.
The hubris and arrogance of Washington are destroying American power.
October 16th, 2017 by Mexican Network of Mining Affected People
As Prime Minister Trudeau makes his first official visit to Mexico, writes Mining Watch Canada, “the Mexican Network of Mining Affected People” (REMA by its initials in Spanish) has issued a communiqué to call on Trudeau to live up to his commitments and stop the devastation of Indigenous and campesino communities that has enabled Canadian mining companies to make big profits.
“Canadian investment in Mexico – the principal destination abroad for Canadian mining investment after the U.S. – is expanding precisely in the most deadly places for anyone to get by on a daily basis, let alone speak out in defence of their land and wellbeing. As the future of the North American Free Trade Agreement is uncertain and Trudeau seeks to shore up a bilateral relationship with Mexico, it’s time to put words into action and answer for lives and livelihoods destroyed or at risk around Canadian mine sites.”
The text of the original communiqué follows. Translation by Mining Watch Canada. Footnotes have been converted to embedded links. The original text can be found here.
On the occasion of Justin Trudeau’s state visit to Mexico (12 Oct. 2017), the Mexican Network of Mining Affected People urges Canadian mining company invasion of Mexico to stop and withdraw.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has presented himself on the international stage as a democrat, a supporter of human rights and freedoms, and committed to fulfilling the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.[1] Although on this latter point it is important to mention that the government has taken a weak position, limiting its support for the declaration within the scope of the Canadian constitution, which is not minor, particularly if Canada continues to refuse to ratify Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization[2] and fails to respect the self-determination of Indigenous peoples in practice.
Trudeau’s visit to our country has been announced as an opportunity to strengthen commercial ties between Mexico and Canada, which is bad news for those peoples and communities who have been seriously affected by Canadian mining activities. Today, Canada has become the biggest source of foreign investment in mining around the world and in Mexico, to such an extent that 65 per cent of foreign mining companies in Mexico are listed in Canada. For Canada, Mexico has become the second most important destination for Canadian mining investment abroad, after the U.S., such that 11.3% of Canadian mining assets are in Mexico.
The power that Canadian mining wields in Latin America has been openly and arbitrarily promoted by Canada’s entire diplomatic corp along the lines of its “economic diplomacy” policy through its embassies. Like good colonialists, they continue to propagate racism and hatred toward Indigenous peoples and campesino communities when they encourage mining investment in an area such as Guerrero – where there is tremendous Canadian mining investment – and then issue alerts to Canadian tourists to avoid traveling to the same place, given the violence and risks that people live with there.
The political and financial weight of Canadian mining companies and the government is a reality that has been used to influence the promotion of constitutional reforms, laws and regulations in the extractive sector to help facilitate foreign investment, as well as to weaken and deny redress for harms, tax payments, or any other condition that might affect company profits.
Violating Human Rights
In Mexico, this has led to an unconstitutional legal framework that violates human rights because, among other things, it gives mining priority above all over activities, which despite being undertaken pretty much exclusively by private companies is also considered in the public interest. This has meant dispossession and forced displacement of legitimate landowners, who when they try to defend their rights, these are denied by the very same companies or through the structures of illegal armed groups or in collusion with diverse actors in the Mexican government.
Health harms, environmental contamination and destruction, criminalization of social protest, threats, harassment, smear campaigns, surveillance, arbitrary detentions and the assassination of defenders are the formula for progress and development that Canadian mining investment has brought to our country. To counteract its brutality, in the media and among the spheres of power, companies gloat about their corporate social responsibility, clean industry certification or safe cyanide use, or their adherence to absurd standards of “conflict free gold” that are supported and certified by organizations largely created by the very same corporate sector.
To substantiate claims of dispossession, pillage, displacement and violence caused by Canadian mining companies, it is enough to visit the communities of Carrizalillo and Nuevo Balsas in Guerrero, Chalchihuites and Mazapil in Zacatecas, the northern highlands of Puebla, Tetlama in Morelos, or Sierrita de Galeana in Durango, as well as Chicomuselo, Chiapas, where Mariano Abarca was murdered for his opposition to a Canadian mining company, prior to which the Canadian embassy in Mexico was alerted to the risks he faced as they monitored the conflict.
The abuses of Canadian mining companies have been ongoing, repeated, and have violated human rights such as rights to territory, property, a safe environment, participation, consultation and consent, lawfulness and legal security. For example, we have seen the same company (Goldcorp) break the law repeatedly by purchasing collectively owned lands, first in Carrizalillo, Guerrero and then, three years later, in Mazapil, Zacatecas. Today in Mexico, Canadian companies are operating 65% or over 850 mining projects at different stages from exploration through to construction and extraction.
It is important to mention, Mr. Justin Trudeau, that the only thing that mining investment from your country has ensured for us is dispossession and the risk that thousands and thousands of communities and persons could lose their culture and identity as a result of destruction of their territory; the arrival of organized crime (whether or not companies are signed up to the bombastic conflict-free gold standard); as well as the escalation of violence, repression and criminalization of those who defend their territories and life.
Accumulating Profits Through Dispossession
In this context, REMA calls on the Canadian government to stop institutional and political support provided through your diplomatic apparatus to enable private Canadian companies to accumulate profits through dispossession. We also demand that you stop promoting policies and weak laws that legalize the activities of these mining companies, among them voluntary codes of conduct known as Corporate Social Responsibility, in place of mandatory compliance. Instead, corporate accountability is urgently needed to put a stop to the ongoing atrocities and illegalities that violate the human rights of Indigenous peoples and campesino communities.
In addition, beyond the positive accounts of the business sectors and government officials in defence of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it is important to mention that this pact has only helped to legalize dispossession, enabling more wealth to be accumulated by already wealthy sectors, as well as the gradual displacement of both products and local economies to stimulate a new form of accumulation and control, an increase in the deregulation of land ownership and dilution of protections over the public interest and public good, further enabling private pillage. In sum, the principal objective of NAFTA has been to disappear the countryside and campesino farmers.
Finally, Mr. Trudeau, we would like to remind you that well over a year ago, on April 26, 2016, various organizations including ours sent you a letter in which we requested you to kindly bring your attention to the context of human rights violations of Canadian companies in Mexico and Latin America, just shortly after you had assumed your mandate as Prime Minister when you committed yourself and your party to support human rights. To date, we have never received a response to this letter, nor seen any concrete actions to better protect human rights.
Canadian mining investment is destroying our country
Canadian mining companies violate human rights
We will fight for territories free of mining!
Postscript: Canada’s role in promoting and defending its mining activities in Mexico, in violation of indigenous interests and rights, has not gone unnoticed in that country’s media. See, for example, this article in the Mexican daily La Jornada, October 13: “Justin Trudeau en México: frivolidad y decepción.”
The author concludes: “Sadly, after two years in power Justin Trudeau maintains a complicit inaction regarding the death and destruction provoked by Canadian mining companies, consistently aided in this plunder by the help they receive from a legion of corrupt specialists in the sale of our biocultural patrimony. Faced with this, the road to follow has been traced by many peoples in Mexico who have organized to declare their territories free of megaprojects of death, including mega-mining. We should expect nothing from Justin Trudeau other than huge disappointment.” (R.F.)
Notes
1. See in particular Articles 10, 28 and 32, which require the “free, prior and informed consent” of the indigenous peoples concerned by projects impinging on their lands, territories and resources. The Supreme Court of Canada has ignored this requirement in some recent rulings.
North Korea’s Foreign Minister, Ri Yong-ho, has spoken exclusively to TASS on the occasion of the 69th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Pyongyang and Moscow.
Before taking questions, Ri Yong-ho, who recently delivered the DPRK’s speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations, addressed the current state of relations between his country and Russia:
“Tomorrow, October 12, will mark the 69th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the DPRK and Russia and in this connection I would like to express the hope that friendship and cooperation between our peoples will be growing stronger and that the strategic importance of interaction will grow with the passage of time.
My country today is attaining a victory and acting as a worthy counterbalance to the United States, which refers to itself as the “only superpower.” I believe that having such a strong neighbor by its side quite agrees with Russia’s interests.
Lately, Korean-Russian relations have been not at the desirable level due to internal and external factors and a number of difficulties and obstacles, but we are optimistic about their potential and their prospects, because there is a solid groundwork for the development of bilateral relations, resting upon a long history of friendship and cooperation.
The United States these days is conducting a policy of sanctions against both countries – the DPRK and Russia, trying at the same time to make Russia join the campaign of sanctions against the DPRK with the aim of breeding discord between our countries. I hope that TASS will make all Russians aware of how absurd this policy is and thereby promote stronger friendship between our peoples and peace and security in this region.
I am certain that the leadership and people of Russia will overcome all challenges and difficulties and that Russia will rise again and regain the strength of a great power.
By his belligerent and insane statement at the United Nations Trump, so to say, lighted the fuse of war against us.
Esteemed Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un earlier issued a stern warning: the United States must act sensibly and stop troubling us, if it does not want to be disgraced before the eyes of the world by exposing itself to our strike. He said that our strategic forces, possessing inexhaustible strength not yet known to anyone, will not let America, an aggressor state, go unpunished.
Now it is the United States’ turn to pay, and all of our military servicemen and our entire people insistently demand that final scores be settled with the Americans only with a hail of fire, and not with words.
We have nearly achieved the final point on the way to our ultimate goal, to achieving a real balance of force with the United States. Our nuclear weapons will never be a subject matter of negotiations as long as the United States’ policy of pressure on the DPRK has not been uprooted once and for all.
At the 2nd plenary meeting of the 7thcomposition of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea the Esteemed Supreme Leader said once again that our nuclear weapons are a result of sanguinary struggle for protecting the destiny and sovereignty of our Motherland from American nuclear threats, that it is a deterrent that guarantees peace and security in the region and the right of the Korean nation to existence and development, that it is a sacramental sword of justice, which allows for banishing the dark clouds of nuclear tyranny and ensuring an independent life of the whole of humanity under clear blue skies.
The main reason for the current escalation of tensions in the Korean Peninsula is found inside the United States itself, but at the same time a large share of responsibility is born by the countries that voted for the adoption of the “sanction resolution,” cooked by the United States.
The government of our republic has numerously stated that any attempts to squeeze our throat and stifle us, which are made under the pretext of fulfilling the so-called ‘sanctions resolution,’ are tantamount to an act of aggression and war and that in response we won’t give up the use of our last resorts.
President Putin also acknowledged that the Koreans will never give up nuclear weapons, even if they eat the grass, and stressed that the sanctions and the military hysteria won’t bring anything good.
Neighbouring countries mastered nuclear weapons in the last century at the cost of big losses and ordeals to counter US threats and pressure. And if they try today to stand in the forefront of the campaign of sanctions and pressure against us, then by this they will ruin themselves and get into trouble.
We are consistently implementing the policy towards the parallel development of the economy and nuclear forces, which was mapped out by the respected supreme leader, and we will successfully conclude the historic cause for improving the national nuclear forces.
Along with that, with reliance on the driving force of self-development and scientific and technical potentials, we will achieve a new upsurge in the construction of the socialist economic power, tearing to shreds the hostile policy of sanctions and stifling and turning misfortune into happiness.
We hope that TASS news agency will properly understand the sentiment of our people who has arisen for a fair last battle, will tell the world public the entire truth about our country and make a worthy contribution to ensuring regional peace and security and implementing international fairness”.
Ri Yong-ho then answered a series of questions from a Tass journalist. As part of the question and answer session, Ri explained that the only thing holding Pyongyang back from engaging in dialogue with the US and from engaging in Russia’s tripartite economic proposals, is the fact that Pyongyang refuses to negotiate with any party until the US ceases its military threats against the DPRK.
This helps clarify a position North Korea expressed during the Eastern Economic Forum where Pyongyang’s representatives at the Vladivostok forum stated that they are interested in Russia’s proposals to engage in cooperation with Seoul and Moscow, but only at a later date and under certain conditions. In the Tass interview, Ri explained that those conditions include the US ceasing to threaten his country, as well as South Korea detaching itself from those threats.
In this sense, North Korea has all but formally endorsed the Sino-Russian double-freeze which calls for the US to cease its provocations towards Pyongyang, cease its deliveries of THAAD missiles to South Korea and cease its military drills in the region, all while calling for North Korea to do the same while both sides prepare for direct talks.
Ri also explained that unless the US de-militarises its forces in South Korea and ceases its threats to the DPRK, Pyongyang will work to achieve nuclear parity with the United States. This statement can be interpreted in several ways. While the statement’s literal meaning is that North Korea seeks to ostensibly maintain a nuclear force as large as that of the US, this is patently unrealistic. However, what is very realistic is that North Korea could develop nuclear weapons and the appropriate delivery systems to target the US mainland with a similar ease to that which the US could do in respect of delivering a nuclear weapon to the Korean peninsula. By some estimates, such a development is as close as a few months away or as long as over five years away.
The fact that no nation actually knows the DPRK’s time-frame, in this respect, is another reason that Russian President Vladimir Putin recently cited as a reason why there is no wisdom in the US or anyone else attacking North Korea. Putin also recently cited North Korea’s unwillingness to ever cave to threats from the US, irrespective of how much the US inflicts damage on North Korean society.
With this in mind, here are Ri Yong-ho’s answers in full:
“Russia has developed a roadmap for settling problems of the Korean Peninsula. How realistic is the implementation of this proposal at the current stage, in your opinion?
We give due to the fact that today Russia, like in the previous years, pays much attention to the problems of the Korean Peninsula and is taking active efforts for their settlement.
And we show full understanding for the motives and the goal, under which Russia has developed the roadmap.
In our estimates, the current situation, when the USA resorts to the maximum pressure and sanctions and utmost military threats against the DPRK, is not the atmosphere, in which negotiations could be held.
In particular, our principled position is that we will never agree to any negotiations, at which our nuclear weapons will become the subject of talks.
Under which conditions do you consider it possible to start a dialogue between the DPRK and the USA?
As we have stated on numerous occasions, the USA should abandon its hostile policy and give up a nuclear threat against the DPRK with all their sources and roots.
What do you think about the policy of the new South Korean authorities towards the DPRK?
In his report to the 7th Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea, respected supreme leader comrade Kim Jong-un clearly outlined the tasks for improving inter-Korean relations.
Lately, the South Korean authorities have been proposing to start negotiations between the militaries of the North and the South, organize meetings of divided families, provide humanitarian assistance, etc. However, the problem is that they contradict the principles that “the Korean nation should solve all the issues on its own” and that they blindly follow the US hostile policy towards the DPRK.
As long as they resort to sanctions and pressure against us, following the US line, we see no prospect for improving the inter-Korean relations.
And for this purpose, it is first of all necessary that the South Korean authorities should halt their humble submission to the USA in its hostile policy and the campaign of sanctions and pressure against the DPRK. It is important that they should change their policy in favour of the pan-national interaction and measures to cut short acts of aggression and interference from outside”.
These answers indicate that as Russia and China have suggested, the US remains the largest stumbling bloc to peace in respect of the Korean crisis. North Korea has set its preconditions for direct engagement with the US, South Korea and others. Contrary to what the western mainstream media says about Pyongyang, North Korea’s preconditions are not only reasonable, but are hardly different from those set out in the Sino-Russian double-freeze peace plan. By contrast, Donald Trump has publicly rebuked his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, for suggesting that it is wise to keep the door open to negotiations with Pyongyang.
Even as the Trump administration disintegrates – with the President publicly quarreling with his Secretary of State, and his Chief of Staff forced to deny he is about to resign – the scandal which more than anything else has defined this Presidency has disintegrated into total lunacy.
Consider these facts.
(1) The Mueller investigation
Just a few weeks ago the media was full of reports of how Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation was “closing in” on the President and his campaign team. The focus of media interest was on an early morning search in July of the house of Paul Manafort, the campaign professional who at one time acted as the Trump campaign’s chairman, with lurid headlines that he was about to be indicted, though it was never made clear for what.
Since then there has been nothing, a clear sign that the search of Manafort’s house has come up with nothing, and that the pressure to get Manafort to talk by dangling threats of indictment in front of him have resulted in nothing.
In all other respects a curtain of silence has fallen on Mueller’s investigation, a strong sign that after its failure to “break” Manafort it no longer has a clear strategy of what to do.
(2) The Senate Intelligence Committee
This held a portentous press conference recently to announce the findings of its nine month investigation into the Russiagate allegations. As a result of that press conference we learnt that
…….the committee and its staff have conducted more than 100 interviews, comprising 250 hours of testimony and resulting in 4,000 pages of transcripts, and reviewed more than 100,000 documents relevant to Russiagate. The staff, said Warner, has collectively spent a total of 57 hours per day, seven days a week, since the committee opened its inquiry, going through documents and transcripts, interviewing witnesses, and analyzing both classified and unclassified material.
The result of all this impressive activity? Precisely nothing. Here is what Senator Richard Burr, its Republican chairman, had to say
There are concerns that we continue to pursue. Collusion? The committee continues to look into all evidence to see if there was any hint of collusion. Now, I’m not going to even discuss any initial findings because we haven’t any
(bold added)
The position has been summed up perfectly by President Trump’s spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders
MS. SANDERS: I think more importantly than the President being frustrated, I think the American people are frustrated. The Senate Intel Committee told us yesterday that, after nearly nine months of investigated — that’s included more than 100 interviews, over more than 250 hours, 4,000 pages of transcripts, 100,000 pages of documents, interviewing officials in the intelligence community who wrote the report on Russian election meddling, interviewing relevant Obama administration officials, and talking to every Trump campaign official they’ve requested — it’s literally found zero evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
I think that the American people would like them to focus on some other things. I know that we certainly have said this all along, and we’re glad that as they continue this process they’re coming to the same conclusion.
(bold added)
Notwithstanding this urging “to focus on some other things”, Senator Burr continues to insist that the question of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia – the heart of the Russiagate scandal – is “still open”. One wonders how much more money, time and work it will need before he finally accepts that it should be closed?
(3) Social media
Relentless pressure on the leading social media platforms – Facebook, Google and Twitter – from people like the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Deputy Chair Senator Warner has unearthed a tiny number of advertisements and comments costing in aggregate substantially less than a million dollars which are ‘assessed’ to have ‘some’ unspecified connection to Russia.
Most of these advertisements and comments did not appear during last year’s US Presidential election and were not about it. Some of those which did were pro-Hillary Clinton and anti-Donald Trump. There is however no rhyme or reason to these advertisements and comments, many of which were on non-political subjects, including such momentous matters as puppies.
A reasonable person would conclude that this small number of advertisements and comments could have had no bearing or influence on last year’s US Presidential election, and that they were not intended to have any.
A reasonable person would also conclude that the tiny number of these advertisements and comments – unearthed after frantic and relentless searches by the social media platforms after they were put under intense pressure from the politicians to come up with something – their vague and contradictory material, and their nebulous connection to Russia, in fact proves that there was NO sinister Russian plot to swing last year’s election to Donald Trump by using social media, or even a Russian plot via social media to create doubts about it.
There is however nothing remotely reasonable about the true believers of the Russiagate scandal. On the contrary they have latched onto this material – whose lack of substance in fact proves the absurdity of their claims – not as disproving their claims but rather as vindication that what they have been saying all along about “Russian meddling in the election” has now been proved to be true. A whole stream of strange articles (see for example this one in the Financial Times) has appeared in the establishment media which all but say this.
To which one can only say that when evidence of the non-existence of a conspiracy is taken as proof of its existence it becomes clear that all connection to reality and indeed to sanity has been lost.
(4) Attempted Russian hacking of state voting systems
In some ways this was the most bizarre recent claim of all. It has been thoroughly discussed by Glenn Greenwald and to his commentary I have little to add.
What makes this episode bizarre is that the claim that the Russians hacked or attempted to hack the voting systems of US states is one which has been made repeatedly over the course of the scandal, only to be invariably and repeatedly proved to be false.
The latest iteration of this claim was in an article in USA Today sourced from the Department of Homeland Security which claimed that the Russians had attempted to hack the voting systems of 21 states.
Needless to say the claim was immediately picked up and repeated with enthusiasm by all sorts of people until two of the states involved – Wisconsin and California – categorically denied it, upon which the Department of Homeland Security was forced to issue a retraction.
To which one can only ask: how often does this story have to be refuted before it is accepted as false?
Overall one senses a scandalous story of nefarious collusion and double-dealing between the Trump campaign and Russia which now rests on nothing but hot air as all attempts to prove it true fail one by one.
In the meantime the American public and even parts of the media are losing interest, as shown by the fact that the scandal hardly comes up in White House news conferences any more.
Serious damage however continues to be done.
The scandal has paralysed the foreign policy of the US government as Donald Trump’s signature policy upon which he was elected – rapprochement with Russia – has been blocked because of a concocted scandal with no substance behind it.
The result unsurprisingly is an angry President, resentful at how his signature policy has been blocked, who having no clear idea what to do, is hitting out in all directions, sometimes by behaving spitefully towards his own staff.
Moreover, as the disintegration of the scandal makes it all but impossible for the President to be removed from office through his impeachment (the original intention of those who concocted it), this chaotic and unhappy state of affairs looks likely to continue indefinitely.
Featured image: Mordechai Vanunu in 2004 shows the article for which he was imprisoned. (Source: Voices for Creative Nonviolence)
Mordechai Vanunu was imprisoned in Israel for eighteen years because he blew the whistle on Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. He felt he had “an obligation to tell the people of Israel what was going on behind their backs” at a supposed nuclear research facility which was actually producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. His punishment for breaking the silence about Israel’s capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons included eleven years of solitary confinement.
Yesterday, reading about President Donald Trump’s new strategy on Iran, Vanunu’s long isolation and sacrificial commitment to truth-telling came to mind.
Donald Trump promised to “deny the Iranian regime all paths to a nuclear weapon.” But it is Israel, which possesses an estimated 80 nuclear warheads, with fissile material for up to 200, which poses the major nuclear threat in the region. And Israel is allied to the nation with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal: the United States.
Israel doesn’t acknowledge its nuclear arsenal publicly, nor does Israel allow weapons inspectors into its nuclear weapons facilities. Along with India and Pakistan, Israel refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. And it has used conventional weapons in numerous destabilizing wars which include aerial bombing of Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank.
Vanunu, designated by Daniel Ellsberg as the “the pre-eminent hero of the nuclear era,” helped many people envision nations in the region making progress toward a nuclear weapons-free Middle East.
In fact, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jawad Zarif, spoke eloquently about just that possibility, in 2015, holding that
“if the Vienna deal is to mean anything, the whole of the Middle East must rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.” “Iran,” he added, “is prepared to work with the international community to achieve these goals, knowing full well that, along the way, it will probably run into many hurdles raised by the skeptics of peace and diplomacy.”
Significantly, since the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” pact with Iran was concluded in 2015, the International Atomic Energy Association has steadily verified Iran’s compliance with inspections. Iran has accepted around-the-clock supervision by IAEA officials. What’s more, “Iran has gotten rid of all of its highly enriched uranium,” according to Jessica Matthews, writing for the New York Review of Books. Matthews continues:
It has also eliminated 98 percent of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium, leaving only three hundred kilograms, less than the amount needed to fuel one weapon if taken to high enrichment. The number of centrifuges maintained for uranium enrichment is down from 19,000 to 6,000. The rest have been dismantled and put into storage under tight international monitoring. Continuing enrichment is limited to 3.67 percent, the accepted level for reactor fuel. All enrichment has been shut down at the once-secret, fortified, underground facility at Fordow, south of Tehran. Iran has disabled and poured concrete into the core of its plutonium reactor—thus shutting down the plutonium as well as the uranium route to nuclear weapons. It has provided adequate answers to the IAEA’s long-standing list of questions regarding past weapons-related activities.
What do the Iranians think of the U.S. government? Ordinary Iranians might well think that whatever discontent they have with their own government the U.S. is their most implacable and most immediate enemy. Invective like Trump’s recent words could be a precursor of disastrous invasion. Many Iranians remember the U.S.-backed coup that ended their democracy in 1953, and they remember the fierce U.S. support given to Saddam Hussein in the brutal eight years of the Iran-Iraq war.
Noam Chomsky rightly names the U.S. Shock and Awe attack against Iraq as the greatest destabilizing force at work in the Middle East.
“Thanks to that invasion,” writes Chomsky, “hundreds of thousands were killed and millions of refugees generated, barbarous acts of torture were committed – Iraqis have compared the destruction to the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century – leaving Iraq the unhappiest country in the world according to WIN/Gallup polls. Meanwhile, sectarian conflict was ignited, tearing the region to shreds and laying the basis for the creation of the monstrosity that is ISIS. And all of that is called ‘stabilization.'”
Trump’s record of statements and of cabinet appointments suggests that regime change in Iran is a long-term goal. Despite massive involvement in funding and fomenting terrorism on the part of Saudi Arabia, Trump’s evolving strategy for the Middle East strangely emphasizes Iranian impacts on the region, particularly regarding the conflict in Yemen.
Yemen is entering conflict-driven famine, with a correspondingly lethal cholera outbreak, making it the worst of the region’s “Four Famines,” now widely recognized as collectively the worst starvation crisis in the 72-year history of the United Nations. “In Yemen,” says Trump, “the IRGC, (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp), has attempted to use the Houthis as puppets to hide Iran’s role in using sophisticated missiles and explosive boats to attack innocent civilians in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as to restrict freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.” It is Saudi Arabia and its UAE ally, with crucial U.S. backing, that have been intensely bombing Yemen since 2015 and maintaining a punishing Red Sea blockade against shipments often vital to famine relief. “The Saudi-led coalition’s ships are preventing essential supplies from entering Yemen,” according to an October 11, 2017 Reuters report. The report goes on to assess the dire consequences, for Yemen, caused by blocking and delaying ships carrying food and medicine. It documents many cases in which vessels were thoroughly searched, certified not to be carrying weapons, and still not allowed to enter Yemen.
In a time when 20 million people face starvation, it’s particularly obscene for any country to pour resources into nuclear weaponry.
Mordechai Vanunu took extraordinary risks and endured incredible suffering to rescue the human species from the foolhardiness of building and maintaining nuclear arsenals. I wonder if people worldwide can rise to a level of courage and seriousness needed to simply recognize, and then, where possible, act in response to the world’s real threats. Within the U.S., can several decades of U.S. government bipartisan lying about Iran be overcome with saner, more humane narratives? Can the threat of U.S.. invasion be lifted long enough to allow Iran’s people a window for once again considering democratic reforms? Silence about these issues seems ominous.. But silence can be broken.
We have Vanunu’s courageous example. Let’s not waste the precious time we have in which to follow it.
Kathy Kelly ([email protected]) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence, (www.vcnv.org), a campaign to end U.S. military and economic wars.
At first glance, the decision last week by the Trump administration, followed immediately by Israel, to quit the United Nation’s cultural agency seems strange. Why penalise a body that promotes clean water, literacy, heritage preservation and women’s rights?
Washington’s claim that the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) is biased against Israel obscures the real crimes the agency has committed in US eyes.
The first is that in 2011 Unesco became the first UN agency to accept Palestine as a member. That set the Palestinians on the path to upgrading their status at the General Assembly a year later.
It should be recalled that in 1993, as Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo accords on the White House lawn, the watching world assumed the aim was to create a Palestinian state.
But it seems most US politicians never received that memo. Under pressure from Israel’s powerful lobbyists, the US Congress hurriedly passed legislation to pre-empt the peace process. One such law compels the United States to cancel funding to any UN body that admits the Palestinians.
Six years on, the US is $550 million in arrears and without voting rights at Unesco. Its departure is little more than a formality.
The agency’s second crime relates to its role selecting world heritage sites. That power has proved more than an irritant to Israel and the US.
The occupied territories, supposedly the locus of a future Palestinian state, are packed with such sites. Hellenistic, Roman, Jewish, Christian and Muslim relics promise not only the economic rewards of tourism but also the chance to control the historic narrative.
Israeli archaeologists, effectively the occupation’s scientific wing, are chiefly interested in excavating, preserving and highlighting Jewish layers of the Holy Land’s past. Those ties have then been used to justify driving out Palestinians and building Jewish settlements.
Unesco, by contrast, values all of the region’s heritage, and aims to protect the rights of living Palestinians, not just the ruins of long-dead civilisations.
Nowhere has the difference in agendas proved starker than in occupied Hebron, where tens of thousands of Palestinians live under the boot of a few hundred Jewish settlers and the soldiers who watch over them. In July, Unesco enraged Israel and the US by listing Hebron as one of a handful of world heritage sites “in danger”. Israel called the resolution “fake history”.
The third crime is the priority Unesco gives to the Palestinian names of heritage sites under belligerent occupation.
Much hangs on how sites are identified, as Israel understands. Names influence the collective memory, giving meaning and significance to places.
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has coined the term “memoricide” for Israel’s erasure of most traces of the Palestinians’ past after it dispossessed them of four-fifths of their homeland in 1948 – what Palestinians term their Nakba, or Catastrophe.
Israel did more than just raze 500 Palestinian towns and villages. In their place it planted new Jewish communities with Hebracaised names intended to usurp the former Arabic names. Saffuriya became Tzipori; Hittin was supplanted by Hittim; Muyjadil was transformed into Migdal.
A similar process of what Israel calls “Judaisation” is under way in the occupied territories. The settlers of Beitar Ilit threaten the Palestinians of Battir. Nearby, the Palestinians of Sussiya have been dislodged by a Jewish settlement of exactly the same name.
The stakes are highest in Jerusalem. The vast Western Wall plaza below Al Aqsa mosque was created in 1967 after more than 1,000 Palestinians were evicted and their quarter demolished. Millions of visitors each year amble across the plaza, oblivious to this act of ethnic cleansing.
Settlers, aided by the Israeli state, continue to encircle Christian and Muslim sites in the hope of taking them over.
That is the context for recent Unesco reports highlighting the threats to Jerusalem’s Old City, including Israel’s denial for most Palestinians of the right to worship at Al Aqsa.
Israel has lobbied to have Jerusalem removed from the list of endangered heritage sites. Alongside the US, it has whipped up a frenzy of moral outrage, berating Unesco for failing to prioritise the Hebrew names used by the occupation authorities.
Unesco’s responsibility, however, is not to safeguard the occupation or bolster Israel’s efforts at Judaisation. It is there to uphold international law and prevent Palestinians from being disappeared by Israel.
Trump’s decision to quit Unesco is far from his alone. His predecessors have been scuffling with the agency since the 1970s, often over its refusal to cave in to Israeli pressure.
Now, Washington has a pressing additional reason to punish Unesco for allowing Palestine to become a member. It needs to make an example of the cultural body to dissuade other agencies from following suit.
Trump’s confected indignation at Unesco, and his shrugging off of its vital global programmes, serve as a reminder that the US is not an “honest broker” of a Middle East peace. Rather it is the biggest obstacle to its realisation.
A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
The occupation and destruction of Raqqa, Syria, by Western-supported terrorists, is now transforming itself into a re-occupation by “Kurdish” SDF terror proxies who are taking the place of the previous place-setters — ISIS/Daesh — many of whom are now being re-deployed elsewhere.
As with Mosul, Iraq,1 NATO’s ISIS assets occupied and terrorized the area for years, as Coalition forces illegally bombed the area – pretending to fight ISIS — destroying at will the ancient city, and killing mostly civilians.
As with Mosul, Iraq, the desired imperial outcome of catastrophic destruction and depopulation has been achieved.
But, whereas the endgame of now destroyed Mosul, Iraq has yet to unfold, (apart from ISIS being channeled to Syria), the endgame in Raqqa, Syria, is more transparent.
Permanent Syrian resident Lilly Martin explains the catastrophe in these words:
Oct 14, 2017: Reqaa, Syria was the ISIS headquarters. The US backed Kurdish traitors went in with the pockets full of dollars paid by Saudi Arabia, and their weapons all free from Uncle Sam. They did FREE Reqaa of the ISIS, but in doing so the US backed Kurds have committed genocide and ethnic cleansing, killing and stealing the lands, homes, farms and shops of all the Syrian citizens. Notice that Mosul, Iraq was liberated, and the Iraqi citizens got their city back. But in Syria, the US military is backing some ethnic-killer-militia called SDF, and the unarmed civilians of Reqaa are either dead, maimed or living in a refugee camp, with no hope to return home. Go ask Pres. Trump what that is all about. I can not understand why this is allowed to happen, and the whole world is busy talking about a sex scandal – crime in Hollywood?2
The anti-democratic, ethnic-cleansing SDF — stooges for the illegal US occupiers — are now posing as “liberators”, when in fact they are the new occupiers of Raqqa, Syria.
As with all of the terrorists who have infested Syria for the last seven years, the “Kurds” would not be a military threat without the direct support of the illegal Western Coalition forces occupying and destroying Syria.
Notes
1 Mark Taliano, “The Islamic State as ‘Place-Setter’ for the American Empire. ISIS is the Product of the US Military-Intelligence Complex.” Global Research, 30 August, 2017. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-islamic-state-as-place-setter-for-u-s-empire-isis-is-the-product-of-the-us-military-intelligence-complex/5606371) Accessed 15 October, 2017.
As was expected, President Trump has decertified Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal or, to give it its full name, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), despite the fact that he certified it twice before. As recently as 14 September 2017, Trump also waived certain sanctions against Iran as required under the terms of the deal.
Yet, in an extremely belligerent and hostile speech, he put out his new policy towards Iran.
The certification of the deal is not part of the agreement, but as anti-Iranian hawks in both parties wanted to undermine President Barrack Obama and create obstacles on the path of the deal they required the president to recertify every 90 days that Iran was still in compliance with the provisions of the deal. That certification has no international validity.
Trump provided a long list of contentious issues about Iran’s alleged malign influences in the region and her presumed violation of the JCPOA, while totally ignoring America’s long record of unilateral wars and war crimes and initial support for terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorist groups in the Middle East and beyond.
By law, Congress has 60 days to reimpose sanctions on Iran, which would violate the provisions of the JCPOA, or leave matters as they are. Given the predominance of hawks in Congress, it is likely that they will follow Trump’s lead and will try to kill the deal.
During the campaign, Trump often criticized the deal as the worst agreement in history and promised that he would tear it up. In his inaugural address to the UN General Assembly, Trump proclaimed that the Iran deal “was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States had ever entered into,” even declaring it “an embarrassment to the United States.” He ominously warned that the world had not “heard the last of it, believe me.”
Now, by decertifying Iran’s compliance with the deal, Trump has lived up to his hyperbolic rhetoric about the agreement that was regarded as one of the most remarkable diplomatic achievements since the end of the Cold War.
He is doing this at a time when his administration is in disarray, when none of his major bills has been ratified by Congress, when the threat of terrorism in the Middle East has not yet ended, when US-supported Saudi Arabia’s disastrous war against Yemen is still continuing killing and wounding scores of people in that poverty-stricken country every day, and above all when Trump’s threat of “fire and fury the like of which the world has never seen” against North Korea has not worked and that dangerous standoff still continues.
In the midst of all this, he has decided to add yet another completely unnecessary conflict to the list and to isolate the United States further in the world.
First of all, it is important to point out that the JCPOA is not a bilateral agreement between Iran and the United States that can be unilaterally abrogated by a U.S. president. It was an agreement reached between Iran and all the five permanent members of the Security Council (Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States) plus Germany.
As the result of that landmark deal, Iran has removed two-thirds of its centrifuges and has stopped building more advanced centrifuges that she had started installing. She has altered its heavy-water nuclear reactor to remove its capacity to produce weapons-grade plutonium, has surrendered 98 percent of its nuclear material, has joined the Additional Protocol, and has submitted to intrusive inspections by the IAEA to verify compliance.
Since the implementation of the agreement, on eight different occasions, the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, has certified Iran’s full compliance with her commitments under the deal. After the so-called sunset clauses expire, Iran as a member of the NPT and the Additional Protocol will continue to remain under IAEA inspection and will be prevented from building a nuclear weapon.
In return for that major compromise in her nuclear program, all nuclear-related sanctions were supposed to be lifted, enabling Iran to have normal economic and banking relations with the rest of the world. This landmark non-proliferation deal was achieved without a shot being fired and without another devastating war in the Middle East.
The fact that Trump has probably not even bothered to read or understand the agreement, which was the result of many years of intense and painstaking discussion and debate by the best experts from seven countries, including the U.S. Energy Secretary who is a nuclear expert, is beside the point. Some of those who surround him and write his speeches, and most notably his mentor, the right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, have told him that it was a bad deal and that is enough for him.
Trump’s decision goes against the other five leading global powers, which according to Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to the United States, “will show total disrespect for America’s allies.” (1)
It also goes against the entire EU that sponsored that deal and that has been united in its support for the JCPOA. EU High Representative Federica Mogherini has repeatedly stressed that the deal is delivering and will be implemented as agreed.
Only a day before Trump’s decertification, Ms. Mogherini stressed that the deal was working and the EU would remain faithful to it (2). Trump’s action is also in violation of the U.N. Security Council that unanimously endorsed the deal with Resolution 2231 in 2015.
It is interesting to note that while all European countries and the vast majority of the rest of the world have condemned Trump’s belligerent speech, Israel and Saudi Arabia have been the only two countries that have praised it. Netanyahu congratulated Trump for his “courageous decision”, while Saudi Arabia’s support has been more muted.
When Trump chose Saudi Arabia as the first country to visit after his inauguration to take part in a lavish reception and sign a $400 billion deal on arms and other American goods, and then flew directly to Israel to lavish praise upon Israeli prime minister, it was clear what direction he would take during his presidency.
He has consistently sided with autocrats and regimes that wage wars against their neighbours and has tried to undermine all the democratic achievements of his predecessor.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has put a brave face on Trump’s outburst, saying:
“Today the United States is more than ever isolated in its opposition to the nuclear deal and in its plots against the Iranian people. What was heard today was nothing but the repetition of baseless accusations and swear words that they have repeated for years.”
He said of Trump:
“He has not studied international law. Can a president annul a multilateral international treaty on his own? Apparently, he does not know that this agreement is not a bilateral agreement solely between Iran and the United States.”
However, the speech has definitely strengthened the hardliners in Iran who see Trump’s hostility to Iran as a vindication of their warnings that America could not be trusted. It has also harmed relations between the two countries and has made the Middle East less secure.
As Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the IAEA, has tweeted
“Trump ignoring IAEA inspection findings re Iran’s compliance w/ nuclear deal brings to mind run up to Iraq war. Will we ever learn?”
This is not the first of President Obama’s major achievements that Trump has tried to undermine.
He scrapped the critical health care subsidies to hit Obamacare, while the bill that he sent to Congress was not approved. He has taken America out of the Paris Climate Accord, which is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which 195 members have signed and 168 members have already ratified.
He has taken the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and on 11 October he announced that the US would drop out of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The United States and Israel announced that they would withdraw from UNESCO because of its alleged anti-Israeli bias.
Domestically, Trump has fallen out with American intelligence, comparing them to the Nazis. He has attacked most of the media as “being the greatest enemy of the people” and producing fake news.
He has attacked “the so-called judges” for trying to block his unconstitutional executive order banning Muslim refugees or immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries.
However, we should not lump Trump’s latest decision on Iran with all his other wild policies at home and abroad, because by decertifying the nuclear deal Trump is posing a major threat to international peace and security and violating a Security Council resolution.
There are many people, including many Iranians, who wish to see a change in Iranian policies, especially in its poor human rights record. However, the only meaningful change in Iran will be one brought about by Iranians themselves, not imposed from outside by those with malign intentions and on the basis of concocted excuses.
Nobody wants to see a repetition of US policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Yemen and Syria that have resulted in horrendous bloodshed and have given rise to the terrorist scourge and the refugee problem in Europe.
It is interesting to note that the United States has kept itself immune from the outcome of her violent policies by banning any immigrants from the Middle East, while Europe and the countries in the Middle East have had to bear the brunt of the problem.
The renegotiation of the Iran deal is only a ruse by those who wish to pave the way for war with Iran.
Iranian officials have repeatedly stressed that while they are ready to discuss other issues with the international community, the nuclear deal will not be renegotiated. President Rouhani told NBC News in September: “Every word was analyzed many times by countries involved before its ratification, so if the United States were to not adhere to the commitments and trample upon this agreement, this will mean that it will carry with it the lack of subsequent trust from countries towards the United States.”
There is no doubt that Trump’s new policy towards Iran bears the hallmark of Netanyahu and his supporters in the White House who write Trump’s speeches for him.
There are three main issues at stake.
The first question is whether U.S. politicians are finally prepared to overcome their 40-year hostility towards Iran and resolve their differences through negotiations, as was done with the Iran deal, or whether they persevere with the dream of toppling the Iranian government by violent means.
The second is whether European countries and the rest of the world allow themselves to be held hostage to U.S. and Israeli policies or will they stand up to Trump and safeguard their national interests.
The third and a more fundamental point is whether – for the sake of appeasing Israel’s ultra-rightwing prime minister and his U.S. supporters – they are prepared to drag the Middle East through another devastating war and perhaps start a global conflict, or whether the time has finally come to tell Israel to resolve the Palestinian issue and put an end to this long-simmering conflict, which is at the root of all the other conflicts in the Middle East.
Let us not make a mistake, war is the inevitable logic of Trump’s and Israeli policies, and they will be solely responsible if another conflict breaks out in the Middle East.
Farhang Jahanpour is a British national of Iranian origin. He was a former Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan. He spent a year as a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at Harvard and also taught five years at the University of Cambridge. He has been a part-time tutor at the Department of Continuing Education and a member of Kellogg College at the University of Oxford since 1985, teaching courses on Middle East history and politics. Jahanpour is a TFF board member.
The United States is going to stay in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal despite President Donald Trump’s move not to recertify it, says US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, asserting that Iran is not in breach of the agreement.
“I think right now you are going to see us stay in the deal,” Haley told NBC News on Sunday, two days after Trump’s refusal to certify Tehran’s commitment to the landmark agreement between Iran and six world powers— the US, UK, France, China, Russia and Germany.
“Right now, we’re in the deal to see how we can make it better and that’s the goal,” Haley said, claiming the US was trying to help American people “feel safer.”
Under the deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran agreed to limit parts of its peaceful nuclear program in exchange for removal all nuclear-related sanctions against the country.
While then-President Barack Obama hailed the deal as one of his greatest achievements, Trump has blasted the JCPOA as “the worst deal ever negotiated.”
The Republican president has been desperately trying to undo the agreement, which prevents him from adopting harsher policies against the Islamic Republic.
In his speech on Friday, Trump accused Iran of committing “multiple violations of the agreement,” a claim repeatedly rebuked by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), America’s European allies and even officials within his own administration.
The billionaire-turned-politician added that he would no longer make regular certifications that the lifting of sanctions under the deal had been in US interests.
Iran ‘partially’ committed
In a separate interview with ABC News, the UN ambassador was struggled to give a clear response when asked whether “decertifying” meant Iran was in breach of the JCPOA.
“We are not saying they are in breach of the agreement,” she said. “No they are doing exactly what they claim to do.”
“No, decertifying implies that all of those other things that are in the UN resolution are not happening, “Those are total violations,” Haley said, referring to the UN Security Council Resolution 2231 that endorsed the deal. She did not clarify what parts of the resolution had been violated.
The Trump administration says Iran’s development of ballistic missiles for defensive purposes and its support for “terrorist groups” amount to violations of the nuclear deal.
Late on October 15, Iraqi government forces launched a military operation to take back the area of Kirkuk from the Peshmerga, the military force of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
According to Iraqi sources, the 9th Armoured Division, the Federal Police and Iraqi Special Operations Forces, widely known as the Golden Division, entered Kirkuk city, K1 Airbase and the Khaled military camp as well as some oil fields in the city’s countryside.
The Kurdistan Region Security Council (KRSC) released a statement saying that the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) are involved in the operation. The KRSC also claimed that the Peshmerga destroyed at least 5 Humvees belonging to the PMU.
On October 16, Lieutenant Colonel Salah el-Kinani, of the 9th Armoured Division, told Reuters that the objective of the army advance is to take control of the K1 Airbase.
Pro-Kurdish sources denied any gains by the government forces.
Earlier, the KRG-linked media claimed that PMU units deployed near Kirkuk are embedded with the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Last Friday, the US designated the IRGC a terrorist group. So, KRG authorities may seek to gain more support from the US with these claims.
Formally, the multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk and its oil-rich countryside are not a part of the Kurdish autonomous region. However, KRG forces seized it in 2014 when Iraqi forces were facing setbacks in the war again ISIS. Now, the KRG clearly aims to include the area in a Kurdish state that it is seeking to proclaim using the September 25 independence referendum as a pretext.
Trump hates the international nuclear deal with Iran. The agreement put temporary restriction of Iran’s nuclear program and opened it up to deeper inspections. The other sides of the deal committed to lifting sanctions and to further economic cooperation. Trump wants to get rid of the deal; but he is unwilling to pay the political price.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was negotiated and signed by the five permanent UN Security Council members (U.S., Ch, Ru, UK, F), Germany, the EU and Iran. If the U.S. defaults on the deal it will be in a lone position. The diplomatic isolation would limit its abilities to use its influence on other issues.
Trump has little knowledge of Iran, the nuclear deal, the Middle East or anything else. What he knows comes from Fox News and from Netanyahoo and other Zionist whisperers who get to his ear. All he heard is that the deal with Iran is bad. Therefore, he concluded, it must end.
The White House handed a paper to the media which is supposed to describe President Donald J. Trump’s New Strategy on Iran. But there is no strategy in that paper. It list a number of aims the Trump wants to achieve. But it does no explain how he plans to do that. It is a wish list, not a program to follow.
The “Core Elements of the Presidents New Iran Strategy” are:
The United States new Iran strategy focuses on neutralizing the Government of Irans destabilizing influence and constraining its aggression, particularly its support for terrorism and militants.
We will revitalize our traditional alliances and regional partnerships as bulwarks against Iranian subversion and restore a more stable balance of power in the region.
We will work to deny the Iranian regime and especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) funding for its malign activities, and oppose IRGC activities that extort the wealth of the Iranian people.
We will counter threats to the United States and our allies from ballistic missiles and other asymmetric weapons.
We will rally the international community to condemn the IRGCs gross violations of human rights and its unjust detention of American citizens and other foreigners on specious charges.
Most importantly, we will deny the Iranian regime all paths to a nuclear weapon.
The list is full of factual mistakes:
Iran stabilized Iraq when the Islamic State was only days away from taking over Baghdad. Iran also helps to stabilize Syria and to defeat the Islamic State.
Ballistic missiles are not “asymmetric weapons”. Iran’s neighbors Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have such missiles. Iran’s missiles are no threat to the United States.
The IRGC is the equivalent of the U.S. special forces. It is funded by the state. It does not “extort the wealth of the Iranian people”. (The IRGC’s pension funds (bonyads) hold significant industrial assets. But they are different entities.)
The IRGC does not detain American citizens.
Iran has repeatedly declared that it rejects all nuclear weapons out of religious reasons. It signed several international agreements which prohibit and prevent it from seeking such weapons.
The White House list of aims, “the strategy”, is followed by “background” information on Iran and its alleged behavior. Some White House intern must have copied it from a neoconservative version of Wikipedia. It is a conglomeration of general talking points which lack a factual basis.
When the JCOPA deal was closed, Congress legislated that the White House must certify every 90 days that Iran sticks to the deal. Trump will now stop to certify Iran’s compliance even as everyone, including the White House, acknowledges that Iran is fulfilling all its parts. The White House claims that non-certification is not a breach of the agreement. The issue now falls back to Congress which might re-introduce the sanctions on Iran which the agreement had lifted. If it does that Trump will say that it is responsible for all consequences.
It is not clear if or what Congress will do. Senators Corker and Cotton are pushing for legislation that amounts to an unilateral change of the nuclear deal. It would introduce new sanctions if Iran does not accept their demands. Trump seems to support that.
But it is not going to work. It is an unilateral breach of the contract and no other country involved in deal will support it. Trump may introduce new economic sanctions on Iran but why would Iran care? Unless all other countries follow Trump’s lead, it can simply buy and sell elsewhere.
The EU countries were again craven and offered to push against Iran’s ballistic missiles if Trump does not completely break the JCPOA deal. This was utterly stupid negotiation behavior. Why offer concessions to Trump even before he makes a self defeating move? Still – they will not support breaking the deal.
Iran will not give up to its rights and it will not disarm. Obama pushed sanctions onto sanctions to make Iran scream. But the country did not fold. Each new U.S. sanction step was responded to with an expansion of Iran’s nuclear program. In the end Obama had to offer talks to Iran to get out of the hole he had dug himself.
Now Trump is saying that stopping Iran from getting nukes is the priority. And that Obama was wrong to focus on it. The result is a bungled policy which will have either catastrophic, or no consequences at all.
Global Research is an independent organization that is funded exclusively through the support of its readers. It does not accept public or private funding. Every contribution helps us continue to bring you the up-to-date, incisive information that you count on.
If you are unable to make a donation, you can help us by cross-posting and/or forwarding Global Research articles, sending them to your friends on your e-mail lists, posting them on internet blogs, etc. This will help us reach a broad readership.
The US government secretly established “Manhattan project”, and the scientists and the corporations involved managed to make three pieces of such weapon, i.e., atomic bombs before the end of the World War II. One was used to test its effectiveness in New Mexico, and the remaining two were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The results were devastating, killing hundreds of thousands instantly and flattening the entire cities.
Bad deals. Very bad – unless, of course, they are minted in the United States, with Make America Great Again credentials. Hardly the stuff of presidential clout and oratorical flair, but the US president is making good his word to rain on the Iran nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with an overbearing enthusiasm.
It is important to stress that US military action directed against the DPRK was part of a broader Cold War military agenda against the PRC and the Soviet Union, the objective of which was ultimately to undermine and destroy socialism. As early as 1945, “the Pentagon had speculated that it would take a few hundred atomic bombs to subdue Russia”.
Henry Kissinger, seemingly returned from oblivion, has been in the ear of “old friend” Trump since mid-primary season, just after Trump declared himself open to negotiation with North Korea. Since that moment, Trump’s stance and rhetoric have veered inexorably toward war.
Iran has been accused of violating if not the actual terms of the deal then the spirit of the agreement, by supporting militant groups in the region and developing long-range missile technology.
A petition on the government’s official page about holding a SECOND BREXIT REFERENDUM about the terms of the final deal with the European Union has reached 100,000 signatures – this means that the government is obliged to debate discuss it in parliament.
We, the undersigned, call upon HM Government to give the people of this country the final say on the Brexit deal negotiated by the UK and EU. This would be done through a referendum that would take place prior to the April 2019 exit date.
The referendum would allow for three options:
(1) To revoke Article 50, thereby keeping Britain in the EU (2) To reject the UK-EU deal and leave the EU (3) To accept the UK-EU deal and leave the EU
If no agreement has been negotiated by the UK and EU before the date of the referendum, then the third option could be removed. If all three options remain, it may be necessary for the vote to take place using a Single Transferable Vote to ensure no option is disadvantaged.
Regardless of whether individuals voted to remain or leave the EU in the June 2016 EU referendum, everyone should have a chance to decide their future based on the final agreement negotiated between the UK and EU.
Although the government’s response makes it clear that they are committed to not offering a second referendum, they are now legally obliged to discuss it.
On 23 June 2016 the British people voted to leave the European Union. The UK Government is clear that it is now its duty to implement the will of the people and so there will be no second referendum.
The decision to hold the referendum was supported by a clear majority in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. On 23 June 2016 the British people voted to leave the European Union. The referendum was the largest democratic mandate in UK political history. In the 2017 General Election more than 85% of people voted for parties committed to respecting that result.
There must be no attempts to remain inside the European Union, no attempts to rejoin it through the back door, and no second referendum. The country voted to leave the European Union, and it is the duty of the Government to make sure we do just that. Rather than second guess the British people’s decision to leave the European Union, the challenge now is to make a success of it – not just for those who voted leave but for every citizen of the United Kingdom, bringing together everyone in a balanced approach which respects the decision to leave the political structure of the EU but builds a strong relationship between Britain and the EU as neighbours, allies and partners.
Parliament passed an Act of Parliament with a clear majority giving the Prime Minister the power to trigger Article 50, which she did on 29 March in a letter to the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk. As a matter of firm policy, our notification will not be withdrawn – for the simple reason that people voted to leave, and the Government is determined to see through that instruction.
Both Houses of Parliament will have the opportunity to vote on the final agreement reached with the EU before it is concluded. This will be a meaningful vote which will give MPs the choice to either accept the final agreement or leave the EU with no agreement.
The people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, but we are not leaving Europe. We want a deep and special partnership with the EU. We aim to get the right deal abroad and the right deal for people here at home. We will deliver a country that is stronger, fairer, more united and more outward-looking than ever before.
“There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.” – Buffalo Springfield 1967
It’s not supposed to be clear, now or then. If you’re confused by the news you’re hearing, you should be. They want you to be. They try to make you be. But you don’t have to be.
Who are “they”? They are the corporate mainstream media (MSM) that serve as mouthpieces for the power elites, who are connected through an intricate system of institutions and associations, both obvious and shadowy. They run the show that the media produce for the masses. To paraphrase the illustrious American propagandist, Edward Bernays: This is the engineering of the consent of the ignorant herd by the intelligent few.
That this has been going on for a long time should be obvious. That such propaganda is surround-sound today is a fact. It is total and non-stop. Even its critics are often seduced as they are horrified.
But I utter the obvious to explore the obscure. In particular, the ways the elites try to manage the public mind by confusing contradictions, half-truths, multiple and conflicting narratives, and revelations proffered to conceal more fundamental facts.
The basic way people’s thinking is controlled today is by confusing them and creating a perpetual state of mental vertigo. Muddled and disordered by double-speak, illogical reporting, and a kaleidoscopic merry-go-round of conflicting reports, the average person is reduced to a mental mess.
“To the average man who tries to keep informed,” writes Jacques Ellul in Propaganda, “a world emerges that is astonishingly incoherent, absurd, and irrational, which changes rapidly and constantly for reasons he can’t understand.”
Take Donald Trump. He is regularly castigated by the media for his endless stream of tweets and contradictory statements. He is called a moron, mentally imbalanced, and a clown. But what these critics fail to grasp is that he is beating them at their own game of sowing confusion. He is our modern mythic Johnny Appleseed, wildly spewing seeds of bedlam to incite and confound. He is no anomaly. He has stepped out of our celebrity reality-TV screened world to carry on the media’s task of what Orwell said was a necessary task for the rulers in a totalitarian society: “to dislocate the sense of reality.”
The mainstream media do this daily. Think of their reporting of some recent news and ask yourself what exactly have they said – Russia-gate, the Iran agreement, the Las Vegas massacre, Catalonia, health insurance, etc. Gibberish piled upon gibberish, that’s what they’ve said. A salmagundi of contradictory verbiage that leaves a half-way sentient person shaking one’s head in astonishment. Or leaves one baffled, devoid of any sense of the truth.
While the gross Harvey Weinstein, buddy to Democrat politicians who took large sums from his deep pockets, dominates the MSM’s spotlight, as if his exploits suddenly appeared out of nowhere, the U.S. war against Syria and so many other countries “isn’t happening,” as Harold Pinter put it in his Nobel acceptance speech when he said the systematic crimes of the United States have been disappeared behind “a highly successful act of hypnosis.” The nuclear threats to Russia and China aren’t happening. It doesn’t matter right now anyway. We might get back to that next week or next month, if we are finished with Weinstein by then or if Stephen Paddock’s autopsy report isn’t back from Stanford where they are studying his brain tissue to find the cause and manner of his death – you know what deep secrets brain tissue can reveal. And yes, we will be exploring a question a brilliant reporter asked the Las Vegas authorities:
“Do you think Paddock did it because he could?”
In 2003 the Bush administration blatantly lied about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction in order to wage a barbaric and criminal war against Iraq. Then Obama glided in on the giddy fantasies of liberals, the same people who supported Clinton’s savaging of Serbia in 1999. He smiled and smiled and spoke articulately about the need for war, drone assassinations, the bailing out of Wall Street and the big banks, the need to confront Russia over his own administration’s engineered Ukrainian coup, and a crackdown on whistleblowers. For decades the media echoed the blatant deceptions of these men. From slick to obvious to slick went the propaganda. And then the shock and awe of Mr. Trump’s election. How to deal with one of their own, one spawned from the entertainment-media-news complex? Trump accused them of creating fake news. He relentlessly attacked them, as if to say: you hypocrites; you accuse me of what you do. Then he continued to tweet out his messages meant to confuse and inflame. He continued to make statements that were then contradicted. What were the poor media to do except one-up him. This they have done.
We have now entered a new phase of propaganda where sowing mass confusion on every issue 24/7 is the method of choice.
But therein lies hope if we can grasp the meaning of Oscar Wilde’s paradoxical statement:
“When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.”
Bad deals. Very bad – unless, of course, they are minted in the United States, with Make America Great Again credentials. Hardly the stuff of presidential clout and oratorical flair, but the US president is making good his word to rain on the Iran nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with an overbearing enthusiasm.
In doing so, the JCPOA joins a growing cupboard of potentially obsolete and endangered agreements of varying benefit and quality, be it the Paris climate accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, or the North American Free Trade Agreement. Nationalists, populists, and activists of all creeds are floundering to find meaning in such gestures.
The Friday speech was filled with customary Trumpist goodies, including the ultimate point that certification of Iranian compliance and general all round good behaviour would not be forthcoming. Instead, President Donald Trump gave a speech shot through with rhetorical punches, ignoring such positions as that taken by Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic agency. Iran, claimed Amano, actually had one of the world’s “most robust nuclear verification regime.”[1]
Central to the Trump barrage were various claims. Among them was the padding of the al-Qaeda link, suggesting that Iran had its share of blame for the September 11, 2001 attacks, irrespective of what ideological underpinnings and differences might have existed.
“The regime remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and provides assistance to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist networks.”
All of these show neat compression, with political interests and differences avoided before the all driving monolithic force of Teheran, the designated supreme bogeyman in regional Middle Eastern politics.
The Trump speech was also insistent that softening the moves on Iran had been a mistake. The regime, he insisted, was starving of oxygen when President Barack Obama went soft. (It was not, but that hardly ruffles feathers in Trumpland.)
“The previous administration lifted these sanctions, just before what would have been the total collapse of the Iranian regime, through the deeply controversial 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.”
Figures receive their fictive gloss; amounts are given a curious dressing. The deal, argues Trump, saw a “massive cash settlement of $1.7 billion from the United States, a large portion of which was physically loaded onto an airplane and flown into Iran.” Other monies also supposedly fell into Iranian coffers: the “immediate financial boost and over $100 billion its government could use to fund terrorism.”
Considering that much of this involved simply thawing and ultimately releasing Iranian assets frozen by the US to begin with, the point is a moot one. The fact-checking wizards have also made the point that the $1.7 billion cash claim involved a decades old claim between Washington and Teheran that was ultimately settled.[2]
The tables are being turned from the Iranian capital. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif argued that the speech itself violated the agreement, in spirit if not the letter. If there was a breaker of rules and engagements, it was the US, lauding over what had been agonising negotiations.
“I have,” claimed Zarif, “already written nine letters (to EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini) listing the cases where the United States has failed to act on or delayed in its commitments under the JCPOA.”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani retorted that Trump’s views were formed on “baseless accusations and swear words.” New sanctions directed at Teheran’s missile programme were also deemed unconscionable. “Our achievements in the field of ballistics,” claimed a disapproving Zarif, “are in no way negotiable.”
Other powers are left in a bind. With decertification happening from Washington, what are allies and other negotiating partners to do? The UK’s foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, was bound to be unpredictable, but insisted that his country needed “to keep that deal going – it’s been a great success for UK diplomacy.” Whatever Trump’s ramblings, the deal lived “to fight another day, and that’s a good thing.”[3]
In the final analysis, it may well turn out that Trump is simply firing the first blows against an arrangement that ultimately conceals legitimate Iranian ambitions to acquire a nuclear option. In the current climate, where North Korea is rubbing US noses in the dirt of desperation with each ballistic missile test and defiant nuclear run, officials might be biding their time.
Trump, interestingly enough, seems to want it, to push the incentive rather than drive any disincentive.
“We will not continue down a path whose predictable conclusion is more violence, more terror and the very real threat of Iran’s nuclear breakout.”
No surprise, then, on Trump’s reference in the speech about an alleged, if unsubstantiated claim of collusion between the DPRK and Iran.
“There are also many people who believe that Iran is dealing with North Korea.”
Belief, for some, is truly all that matters.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
Sociedade polarizada pega-se em ódio, alimentado também pela mídia em geral; Luiz Inácio tenta, prcariamente, retomar aspecto de “esquerda” enquanto, nos bastidores da politicagem mais baixa, alia-se a velhos algozes. Alguém já viu chihahuas e iorque-cháiars perdidos pelas vias públicas, lambendo as botas de quem os chuta? Não, porque só os vira-latas fazem isso – e a “esquerda” brasileira esclerosada, esquecendo-se na prática de sua retórica do “mais fino pedigrí”. Novo autogolpe do PT prenuncia naufrágio ainda mais profundo da frágil democracia no país do vira-latismo mais gritante onde “todo mundo faz” – e pior, espera-se que todos se conformem e até apoiem esta velha jogatina canalha.
Enquanto a sociedade brasileira literalmente se pega, fortemente polarizada cujo “racha” é intensificado pela “esquerda” que embarca, oportunisticamente, no maniquesísta discurso “ou estão ao nosso lado, ou estão contra nós”, eis que não a mídia “alternativa”, mas a grande mídia noticiou no último dia 8 que o Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) pretende abrir mão do lançamento de candidatos próprios a governador em até 16 estados nas eleições de outubro do ano que vem, para apoiar inclusive partidos como PMDB, PTB e PSB, que atuaram para derrubar a ex-presidente Dilma Rousseff no golpe jurídico-parlamentar-midiático-empresarial do ano passado.
Tudo isso em nome da “luta contra a ofensiva da direita”, e para que o “gênio político”, Luiz Inácio, tenha espaço em palanques regionais. Que maravilha! Afinal, todo mundo faz, não é mesmo? Além do mais, a estrutura social, política e econômica brasleira – os críticos incautos não entendem nada disso, são ingênuos ou oportunistas! – não permite decência na política, enfim, é assim mesmo no Brasil! E ainda: como o dito-cujo é nordestino, origináro da roça, torneiro mecânico aposentado, sem estudo (apesar de todas as oportunidades e tempo livre que teve ao longo das muitas décadas, e ainda tem), seu partido ostenta “trabalhadores” no nome cuja bandeira é vermelha, não deve se tratar, aqui, de politicagem mais baixa como quando a oposição está em questão nas análises, é claro: preconceito ao revés? Pois é!
Este primeiro malabarismo do “esquerdista” arrependido de hoje que, na Presidência, arrancava aplausos e gargalhadas de auditório oligárquico ao achincalhar mentalidades exatamente de esquerda, qualificando-as de enfermas, vem confirmar as impressões expostas há alguns meses nesta página: O PT hoje recusa autocrítica, como sempre fez, mais que por mentalidade rasa: o autogolpe impossibilita encontro com a consciência; e mais: o caminho deve permanecer livre para as jogatinas políticas, que seriam inviabilizadas exatamente com a autocrítica que a presidente do partido, Gleise Hoffmann, rejeitou logo que assumiu a direção do PT em junho deste ano, alegando que “forneceriam armas ao inimigo”. Nada mais maquiavélico, e aí estáo as evidências, semana a semana, de que nada mudou no neo-oligárquico PT cujo único “projeto” é angariar votos e retomar o poder – entre o povo, que se peguem em nome de “esquerda”-direita! Direita sem aspas, aliás para quem ainda não entendeu, pois esta, com toda a sua baixeza moral e intelectual, consegue ser bem menos indecente com os seus…
A justificativa de que alianças indecentes são fundamentalmente necessárias por “não haver outro jeito no Brasil”, são o ápice do denominado vira-latismo ao assumr que o Brasil é “assim mesmo”, irremediavelmente corrupto legitimando o “todo mundo faz”. Alguém já viu chihahuas e iorque-cháiars, perdidos pelas vias públicas, lambendo as botas de quem os chuta? Não, porque só os vira-latas fazem isso – e a “esquerda” brasileira esclerosada, esquecendo-se na prática de sua retórica do “mais fino pedigrí”. E este cenário sombrio, que sempre esteve na cara que nunca mudaria envolvendo tal setor, evidencia também que a defesa disso tudo tem sido a uma pessoa, jamais a ideias e projetos (= personalismo).
Outro argumento em defesa desta politicagem de praxe do PT, embarca no mito democrático criado no Brasil valendo inclusive o patético titulo de “gênio político” a Luiz Inácio por parte de militantes, e “jornalistas” simpatizantes a este partido de centro-direita que engana cada vez menos gente: democracia não é isso, “negociar” com o que existe de pior na política, cedendo a suas promessas eleitoreiras traindo, assim, seu eleitorado; democracia nada mais é que o sistema da participação popular e da criação de direitos. Neste caso específico, o que o neo-oligárquico PT menos faz, é dar ouvidos ao que pensa e deseja a sociedade para a vida política de seu país. Portanto, em uma democracia autêntica inclusive alianças políticas devem encontrar limites,com base na coerência e na decência.
Posto isso, trata-se no mínimo de muito cinismo alegar que as únicas culpadas pela falta de interesse e até ojeriza da sociedade à política são as classes dominates do País, incluindo a grande mídia: com toda a razão, muitos basileiros estão fartos desta bandalheira desgraçada disfarçada de democracia repleta de demagogias, nas quais Luiz Inácio e seu PT de centro-direita são mestres.
Quanto à observação no início, de que a notícia foi dada apenas pela grande mídia, não se trata de observação em defesa desta, muito pelo contrário; porém, mais uma constatação de que, na maioria dos casos, a “moeda midiática” brasileira é uma só, possuindo nada mais que duas faces diferentes. E a ferocidade da briga politiqueira é bem mais acentuada do que se imagina, havendo inclusive muitos jornalistas empesteando a mídia “alternativa” entre negócios pessoas com o PT enquanto jornalista realmente independente neste País, geralmente, é um morto de fome em potencial vivendo, se não bastasse, entre o fogo cruzado da raivosa sociedade, polarizada também pelo combustível deste setor midiático oportunista com seu apelo maniqueísta. A que ponto anda-se chegando no Brasil, em nome de interesses político-partidários, não?! Que clamorosa vergonha!
O segundo malabarismo politiqueiro de Luiz Inácio na semana que passou, mais um político que nada tem a dizer a não ser palrar muita persuasão precariamente elaborada em laboratórios de márquetim político, deu-se em nome do “feminismo”: nada mais oportuno nesta hora em que o cão (de pedigrí) arrependido voltou a ser de esquerda, após a farra diante dos privilégios do poder. Mais um ato de redenção do fllho pródigo da “esquerda” nacional, no último dia 7, acabou desagradando até as militantes petistas (não havendo espaço, evidentemente, na mídia “mais democrática” deste País): tentando jogar a bola para a mulherada, o grande heroi da “esquerda” tupiniquim disse que “a palavra ‘cuidar’ é mais pertinente [do que ‘governar’]”, disse Lula, para quem um partido como o PT deve “cuidar do povo. Enquanto governante, em um Estado de direito, deve representar, eis aí mais um exemplo da mescla de falta de noção política deste “gênio político” aos setores afins, demagogia e o próprio personalismo observado mais acima.
O incômodo das militantes feministas começou a mudar quando Luiz Inácio afirmou que o Estado deve fornecer creches às mulheres, para que trabalhem e façam política. Notando mal-estar na plateia, que qualificou a fala de machista, o ex-presidente retomou o rumo dizendo que, conforme a mulher conquistou espaço no mercado de trabalho, “falta o homem conquistar espaço na cozinha”. Ao dizer que a mulher tem mais jeito para a política porque sabe “cuidar” – algo que, para ele, “vem da maternidade” -, uma militante reclamou “tá piorando”.
“Como a gente vai despertar na cabeça da mulher [a participação política]?”, disse Lula. Mulheres que estavam ao fundo se queixaram, dizendo que não é preciso despertar a cabeça delas. Para a militante do movimento social de mulheres Irani Elias, do Recife, a falta de participação da mulher na política é uma questão de estrutura do poder, não de voluntarismo. “Tem coisas que a gente não concorda com a fala dos homens e isso também inclui o presidente Lula”, disse ela, que tentou interromper o discurso aos gritos diversas vezes.
Diante do “estão ao nosso lado ou contra nós”, eis que esta reportagem decidiu, então, atravessar o globo e contactar alguém completamente fora da questão, socialista e devidamente feminista: Friba, líder da Associação das Mulheres Revolucionárias do Afeganistão (RAWA, na sigla em inglês), para comentar estas palavras de Luiz Inácio noticias pela Folha de S. Paulo em dezembro d 2006:
“O presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) arrancou, na noite desta segunda-feira, risos e aplausos de uma platéia formada por empresários e intelectuais ao, de certa forma, desmerecer a esquerda brasileira. Segundo ele, trata-se de uma ideologia típica da juventude.
“‘Se você conhece uma pessoa muito idosa esquerdista, é porque está com problema’ [risos e aplausos]. ‘Se você conhecer uma pessoa muito nova de direita, é porque também está com problema’, afirmou o presidente depois de receber o prêmio ‘Brasileiro do Ano’ da revista IstoÉ.
“Lula explicou que, em sua opinião, as pessoas responsáveis tendem a, conforme amadurecem, abrir mão de suas convicções radicais para alcançar uma confluência. Tal fenômeno ele classificou de ‘evolução da espécie humana’.
“‘Quem é mais de direita vai ficando mais de centro, e quem é mais de esquerda vai ficando social-democrata, menos à esquerda. As coisas vão confluindo de acordo com a quantidade de cabelos brancos, e de acordo com a responsabilidade que você tem. Não tem outro jeito'”.
Friba classificou este “parecer”, lá da capital afegã de Cabul, de “vergonha total!”. Pois será que o mundo todo perdeu, completamente, a noção da realidade, restando apenas à nossa “esquerda dálmata” o pleno entendimento de teoria política? Se sim, por que nos encontramos nesta situação, não? Freud explicaria mais esta exótica matemática à brasileira, diante de uma “esquerda” que insiste em se vitimizar da maneira mais cínica? E será que algum “esquerdista moderado” brasileiro, um dentre essa gente tão “briosa” e “lutadora”, acusará Friba que, no Afeganistão, luta contra os talibans, contra os senhores da guerra e contra o Exército estadunidesnse, de “reacionária antipetista”?
Enfim, não resta mais nada à “esquerda” tupiniquim senão engolir, bem quietinha como tem tentado fazer na medida do possível, os pimolhos do MBL de péssimo nível intelectual, pois se acentuarem o tom nas críticas estarão, naturalmente, enfiando-se ainda mais profundamente no boeiro da história ao reconhecer, implicitamente, não possuir condições morais nem intelectuais de apresentar nada melhor, em cujo vácuo o grupelho se meteu enquanto a tal de “esquerda” ocupa-se em seus interesses político-partidários, com suas mesquinharias trancafiada em teorias políticas (de péssimo gosto), tentando ainda justificar os históricos abraços em aliança de Luiz Inácio em Sarney, Collor, Maluf, Temer entre tantas figuras tétricas nada aprazíveis á democracia brasileira – e recentemente até em Calheiros!
A tempo: não apenas o brucutu Bolsonaro, mas o próprio MBL de péssimo gosto é bem menos indecente com os seus, que Luiz Inácio e grande parte da “esquerda” tupiniquim. Repita-se hoje e sempre: se nunca houve nenhuma dúvida entre morrer de pé ou viver de joelhos, mas este último setor optou por morrer de joelhos, não esperem unanimidade agora. Foi sua opção não apenas sem hesitar, mas outorgando-se ainda o direito de atacar ferozmente todas as críticas que garantiam, ao longo de quase uma década e meia, que se daria com os burros do poder n’água.
Este novo autogolpe petista que se desenha claramente nos nebulosos céus brasileiros, e que vai se intensificar especialmente se o poder for retomado (jogatina que se intensificará, inclusive, em comparação aos mandatos petistas anteriores), acabará mal, de novo…
I agree that the official Las Vegas story seems to be unraveling. A public mass shooting should be transparent, not opaque. I think we explored the story long enough to discover that without knowing the facts, we cannot arrive at an explanation with confidence.
It is time to move on to another unraveling—that of US/Russian relations. This unraveling is far more serious as it threatens life on earth. I have warned of the consequences of Washington threatening Russia’s security by breaking agreement after agreement, by placing missile bases on Russia’s borders, by orchestrating anti-Russian coups in former Soviet provinces, and by a continuing volley of false accusations against Russia. There is no act more reckless and irresponsible than to make one nuclear power fear nuclear attack from another.
Alert observers have become aware of the mounting danger. Canadian professor Michel Chossudovskywrites that Washington has taken nuclear war from a hypothetical scenario to a real danger that threatens the future of humanity.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who worked with President Ronald Reagan to end the Cold War and the threat of nuclear Armageddon, has appealed to President Trump and President Putin to hold a summit meeting and bring an end to the rising tensions. Gorbachev wrote in the Washington Post that “it is far from normal that the presidents of major nuclear powers meet merely on the margins of international gatherings.” This is especially the case as “relations between the two nations are in a severe crisis.”
Gorbachev’s warning could be an understatement. Last March, General Viktor Poznikhir, the deputy commander of the Russian military’s Operation Command expressed concern that Washington could be preparing a surprise nuclear attack on Russia. See this and this and this.
Had any such statement from the Russian high command been issued anytime during the 20th century Cold War era, the President of the United States would have immediately contacted the Soviet leader and given every assurance that no such plan or intentions toward Russia existed. As far as I can tell, the Trump White House let this ominous announcement pass unremarked. If this is the case, it must have provided confirmation to the Russians’ conclusion.
For some time I have pointed out that the entirety of the West, both the US and its vassal states, continue to ignore very clear Russian warnings. Gilbert Doctorow has made the same point.
Perhaps the most clear of all was Putin’s public statement that “Russia will never again fight a war on its own territory.” If Washington’s EU vassals did not hear this clear warning that they are courting their nuclear destruction—especially the Poles and Romanians who have mindlessly hosted US missile bases—they are as deaf as they are stupid.
One Russian official told the idiot British government to its face that if the British threat to first use nuclear weapons is directed at Russia, if such an attempt is made, Great Britain will disappear from the face of the earth.
There is no doubt that that would be the case.
So why do Washington’s impotent vassals talk tough to Russia, a government that only desires peace and has threatened Britain in no way. Nor has the Russian government threatened France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, or any of the former Eastern European vassals of the Soviet Union that exchanged their captivity to the Soviet Union for captivity to Washington. Russia has not even threatened Ukraine, which Russia could wipe out in a couple of minutes. Why are all of these countries, apparently led by mindless, gutless two-bit politicians, aligned with Washington’s false propaganda against Russia?
The answer is money. The vassals are paid to go along with the lies. As Alain of Lille said as long ago as the 12th century, “not God, not Caesar, but money is all.”
What are the forces driving Washington’s provocation of Russia? There are three, and they comprise a vast conspiracy against life on earth.
One is the Neoconservatives. The Neoconservatives were convinced by the Soviet Collapse that History has chosen not the proletariat but American “democratic capitalism” as the socio-politico-economic system for the world, and that this choice by History conveys on America the status of the “indispensable, exceptional” country, a status that places America above all other countries and above international law and, indeed, America’s own laws.
America is so exceptional that it can torture people in total violation of both US law and international law. The government in Washington can, on suspicion alone without presentation to a court of evidence and conviction, confine US citizens indefinitely, torturing them the entire time, and can assassinate them at will without due process of law. This is the definition of a total police state tyranny. Yet Washington represents America as a “great democracy,” whose endless wars against humanity are “bringing democracy to the world.”
America is so exceptional that it can bomb other countries indiscriminately without officially being at war with those countries.
America is so exceptional that the separation of powers prescribed in the American Constitution can be totally ignored by the executive branch as, the Neoconservatives claim, the President has “unique powers” not limited by the Constitution, which, of course, is just another lie.
Russia, China, and Iran are targets of the Neoconservatives, as were Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and provinces of Pakistan, because these countries have/had independent foreign policies and are/were not Washington’s vassals.
The Neoconservative doctrine states that it is the “principal goal” of US foreign policy “to prevent the rise of Russia or any other state” that can serve as a constraint on Washington’s unilateralism.
The New York Times under this headline on March 8, 1992, explains the Wolfowitz doctrine:
U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop A One-Superpower World
WASHINGTON, March 7 In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting phase, the Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union.
A 46-page document that has been circulating at the highest levels of the Pentagon for weeks, and which Defense Secretary Dick Cheney expects to release later this month, states that part of the American mission will be convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.
The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.
Every state with an independent foreign policy is a constraint on Washington, especially states with nuclear capabilities such as Russia and China.
A second interest with incentive to provoke Russia is the US military/security complex. President Eisenhower, a five-star general, warned Americans in 1961 that the “military-industrial complex” was a threat to American democracy. Today the military/security complex is much more than a mere threat to American democracy. It has already taken over the US government and the Trump administration, which is run by generals, and it now threatens all life on earth.
The military/security complex has an annual budget of one thousand billion dollars. This sum is larger than the Gross Domestic Products of all but a handful of countries on earth. Such an immense budget conveying such power desperately needs a dangerous enemy for its justification. Russia has been assigned this role. Given the power of the military/security complex, the role assigned to Russia cannot be mitigated by Russian diplomacy. Moreover, the interests of the military/security complex and the Neoconservatives are in agreement.
The third powerful interest group leading to conflict with Russia is the Israel Lobby. In Washington the Israel Lobby is extremely powerful. If the Israel Lobby puts legislation or a resolution before Congress, it usually passes almost unanimously, as anyone who votes against it is likely to be eliminated in the next election.
The Israel Lobby is closely linked to the Neoconservatives, the principal figures of which are Zionists tightly allied with Israel. Some are joint US/Israeli citizens. The Israeli influence in Washington is so strong that the Vice Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank is the former chairman of the Israeli Central Bank. Israel is so powerful in Washington that it even runs US economic policy.
The Zionists in Israel want to expand. Their doctrine is “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” That is the Zionist claim of the land that God gave to the Chosen People.
In pursuit of this goal, Israel twice sent the Israeli Army into southern Lebanon to occupy that part of the country in order to seize the Litani River, water resources that Israel desires.
However, twice the Hezbollah militia drove out the vaunted Israeli Army. Israel now fears to send the army again. Instead, Israel is using its power over the government in Washington to use the US military to put Syria and Iran in the same chaos as exists in Libya and Iraq. The reason is that Syria and Iran are the supporters of the Hezbollah militia. Deprived of support, Hezbollah can be defeated by Israel.
It is Israel, not the US government per se, that is driving the US to war with Iran. Israel, which almost always gets its way in Washington, is encountering difficulties. Washington’s EU vassals are opposed to renewing conflict with Iran. Europe is overwhelmed with problems, many of which stem from Washington’s wars, and doesn’t need the Iranian one again. Neither does the US military, defeated in Syria and unable to win in Afghanistan after 16 years against a few thousand lightly armed Taliban. Washington’s defeat in Afghanistan on top of the defeat in Vietnam has destroyed any fear of Washington’s conventional forces, which is why Russia and China expect the next war to be nuclear.
Moreover, if Russia will not tolerate Washington’s overthrow of Syria, Russia certainly will not tolerate Washington’s overthrow of Iran. And it is unlikely that China will either as, according to reports, China gets 20% of its oil from Iran. Indeed, the Russian and Chinese interest in Iran is so strong that it is inexplicable that the Israel Lobby thinks it is so strong that it can drive Washington into war with Iran. The hubris and arrogance of the Neoconservatives and the Israel Lobby are the greatest the world has seen since Hitler marched off into Russia.
If the dumbs***ts in Washington repeat this folly, the lights on Earth will be turned off.
I have an aunt who lives in paradise – Paradise, California, that is. But in 2017 it has been anything but, as the communities surrounding Paradise have been evacuated on two separate occasions due to natural disasters and crumbling infrastructure. In February, torrential downpours caused the Oroville Dam to fail, washing out homes, businesses, memories and lives. And now they are dealing with devastating wildfires that have killed dozens, displaced thousands, and are being fought by firefighters, some of whom are only making minimum wage and working 70 straight hours.
The fires in California are just the latest natural disaster to inflict suffering on Americans, as the people in Puerto Rico, Florida and Texas can attest, following massive hurricanes over the summer.
The destructive California wildfires are predicted to cost the US economy $85 billion. The costs of recovery post-Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria are estimated to be a minimum of $65 billion, $25 billion and $45 billion, respectively. The combined estimated cost of the recent natural disasters is $220 billion which is just a fraction of the $700 billion the US will spend on the military in 2017.
In fact, Congress appropriates more than 70 times the amount of money for the military as it does for the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s (FEMA)Disaster Relief Fund:
If the US allocated disaster relief funds to its own citizens as religiously as it allocated tax payer dollars to US wars abroad, everyone in affected areas could easily be provided the help they need to get back on their feet.
For example, instead of spending $1.25 trillion dollars to modernize the US nuclear arsenal, and $566 billion to build the Navy a 308-ship fleet, wouldn’t Americans prefer to have that money available to rebuild Southeast Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and California?
Wouldn’t this military allocation be better utilized by modernizing our infrastructure, building more disaster relief centers, and hiring more firefighters and first responders? Or earmarked to groups like Team Rubicon, a veteran-led organization that trains disaster relief volunteers?
Instead of spending money on war, which leads to destruction, we should spend money in the US to help Americans whose lives are destroyed by natural disasters.
We can’t prevent natural disasters but we as a country can fund the improvement of infrastructure and services so that after a natural disaster hits, the outcome is less devastating to the American people.
Chris Ernesto is the webmaster and co-founder of St. Pete for Peace, a non-partisan antiwar organization providing peace oriented education events and services to the Tampa Bay, FL community since 2003.
A woman by the name Kymberley Suchomel, 28, who attended the Oct. 1 Route 91 Harvest Music Festival, passed away Monday at her Apple Valley home just days after she had survived the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history unscathed, reports say.
Suchomel, who posted her eyewitness account of the Las Vegas massacre in astonishingly vivid detail to her Facebook page on Oct. 4, subsequently passed away in her home on Oct. 9 from what reports are claiming were ‘natural causes.’
Shockingly just days before her death, Suchomel posted key details about the shooting to Facebook contradicting the official narrative that Stephen Paddock is a lone gunman.
“From about 50 feet in front of us, and a little to the right, fire crackers were set off. Let me repeat that… FIRE CRACKERS WERE SET OFF. I verbally stated “some asshole just shot of fire crackers in close proximity to so many people”. I was literally pissed off. You could see Jason Aldean look to his left kind of startled by it, but he was also clearly irritated. I would say about 15 seconds later, the first volley of gunfire was released,” the eyewitness wrote.
She went on…
It was a shorter volley than any of the others, and the gunfire was not as close together either. EVERYONE looked up, down, around. We thought it was more fire crackers at first, but then Ricky reached over, told us all to put our boots on, quickly. And the volley ended. Then people started to panic. The gentlemen behind me looked at me as I was putting on my boots, half laying down, and said “calm down crazy, its just fireworks, jeez”. That is when the 2nd volley went off, Ricky yelled at us all to get down, flat, & we immediately knew there was someone shooting at us. I remember getting down, but I didn’t lay flat for some reason, thinking- oh my gosh, I need to get flatter than I am now, but my body just wouldn’t let me. That was the 2nd volley. At the end of that volley ( I am still struggling to get my boots on), we turned and tried to run, but the people behind us still weren’t moving. I yelled at the lady “RUN! ITS GUNFIRE! RUUUUUUUUUNNNNN!!!”
Third volley of gunfire hits astroturf
According to Suchomel, the shooting was ‘close’ and felt like a ‘literal hell.’
“[When] the 3rd volley hit… and it was close. Very, very close to us. I could physically see the impact of the bullets on the astro-turf, I could feel the warmth & the passing of bullets. Once that 3rd volley was over, Casie linked her arm into mine, and we decided at that moment we weren’t stopping- we were getting the Hell out of there. And I do mean Hell. We were in literal Hell. The gentlemen that mocked me stating it was just fireworks fell to the ground, and he never got back up. The lady behind me (who was now in front of me) who was terrified as I told her to run, never got back up. I actually had to physically step over her body to run (something I am still struggling with, so please don’t attack me. I was absolutely in flight-or-fight mode). There was another person to my right who also wasn’t moving. We ran. I don’t know what direction we ran, I don’t know towards which landmark we ran. We just ran. It was at this time our group got split up. Casie & I were together. Ricky, Cassie & Mendy were together.”
Soon after, according to her account, she started to panic when she had realized with ‘one-hundred percent’ certainty that there was indeed more than one shooter and that multiple gunmen were, in fact, in the crowd!
“We were rounding some sort of corner maybe- and I looked to the right and I saw this large cowboy sitting down with his legs spread, holding a blood-soaked woman. I thought to myself “we NEED to hide”, but as I looked quickly for somewhere to go, the gunfire once again got closer and closer. We couldn’t hide because they (and I do mean THEY) were chasing us. That exact moment is when I started to really panic. That is the exact moment in which I thought this was it, I was going to die, I was never going to see my family again. So, as we are running, we approach this fence where men are throwing women over, and we ran up to it as they had knocked It down, so we were able to get out. As we crossed the threshold of the venue, my mind went straight to other mass shootings and hearing the victim’s families in my head talk about how they never got to say goodbye. I did not want this for my husband (who was at work) & my grandma (who had my daughter, Scarlett). So, at10:07 pm I called my husband [frantically] leaving him a voicemail- telling him that I loved him and was in the middle of a shooting & I wasn’t sure if I would make it out alive,” she explained.
“Next, while still running, I called my grandma to tell her the exact same thing. But the gunfire wasn’t stopping this whole time. It wasn’t ceasing. It wasn’t slowing down. And It was directly behind us, following us. Bullets were coming from every direction. Behind us, in front of us, to the side of us. But I know, I just know, that there was someone chasing us. The entire time I felt this way,” she explained “The farther we got from the venue, the closer the gunfire got. I kept looking back expecting to see the gunmen- and Isay MEN because there was more than one person. There was more than one gun firing. 100% more than one.”
“As we were running, we kept changing direction, because it felt like no matter what direction we took, we were being followed. So we ended up running in a weird triangular path. The first place I remember getting to was a parking lot, and I told Casie (who was slightly in front of me) we needed to get under one of the trucks. She turned to me and started her way back to me, and that is when the gunfire got even CLOSER than ever before. It was RIGHT THERE. It was within the parking lot,” the eyewitness explained. “Everyone around us was panicking once again. So we ditched the idea of getting underneath a vehicle, and we continued the run for our lives. If you know me, you know I am a big girl, who is out of shape, and who definitely does not run for any reason. But I can tell you I ran like I have never run before.”
She continued on with her post, writing:
The 2nd place I remember going by was Hooters- which is where we met back up with the rest of our small group. We ran towards the entrance thinking we could take cover there, but as we got closer, a stampede of people ran out, terrified. We could only conclude that there was another gunman inside of that hotel. This made us even more scared- we had nowhere to go- no one to trust. At some point, we ended up at the airport & even entered the building for safety. Everyone as we entered were screaming at the staff “IS IT SAFE IN HERE?” but we weren’t getting anyone to answer us, so after running about 30 feet into the building, not getting the answers we so desperately needed, we decided it, too, wasn’t a safe spot, so we got out of there quickly and continued running.
After all this running, we were tired, sore & having to stop to cough, gag and even vomit. We ran across an intersection & us & another group of people pleaded with a limo driver to let us in and get us out of there. He was clearly confused & didn’t understand what was going on, so he didn’t let us in. Next, we ran to a taxi van & she was willing to let us in, but she told us her van only held 4 people & she wasn’t going to let the 5 of us in, so we said screw it and continued running. At one point, we ran passed a small liquor store where they so graciously gave us water bottles. We passed UNLV as well.
‘Smaller Hispanic woman’ taunts victims minutes after shooting
Additionally, the eyewitness reported that she was running with her group alongside “Tropicana Avenue” when a ‘dark-colored SUV’ slowed and a ‘smaller Hispanic woman’ emerged from the window to “taunt” her group.
“[She] leans out the window, and she yells something we couldn’t understand in a clearly taunting manner. It really freaked us out, because again, we didn’t know who we could and could not trust,” the eyewitness explained.
Eight days later Suchomel was found dead in bed by her grandmother who arrived at Schomer’s residence at 8:30 a.m.
According to an Oct. 9 report confirming Suchomel’s death, Suchomel “was taking medication for a pituitary tumor and feared to fall asleep at night after being heavily traumatized by the Oct. 1 massacre.
Headlining “‘More US troops at our borders’ – Russian Defense Ministry”, Russian Television (whose U.S. broadcasts the U.S. Government is considering to ban) reported, on Friday, October 13th, that “On Thursday, the U.S. announced the presence of a second [U.S.] regiment in the already very tense Baltic region, and Poland, and that’s a move which Moscow claims violates that fundamental peace treaty signed between Russia and NATO.”
NATO reiterates that in the current and foreseeable security environment, the Alliance will carry out its collective defence and other missions by ensuring the necessary interoperability, integration, and capability for reinforcement rather than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces. Accordingly, it will have to rely on adequate infrastructure commensurate with the above tasks. In this context, reinforcement may take place, when necessary, in the event of defence against a threat of aggression and missions in support of peace consistent with the United Nations Charter and the OSCE governing principles, as well as for exercises consistent with the adapted CFE Treaty, the provisions of the Vienna Document 1994 and mutually agreed transparency measures. Russia will exercise similar restraint in its conventional force deployments in Europe.
The key phrase there is “permanent stationing,” and, as is common in treaties, it isn’t defined. Russia had wanted it to be defined, but the U.S. refused.
“This document was elaborated by all countries that are members of the Russia-NATO Council, and can only be amended collectively. Unilaterally, it is possible only to withdraw from the act, but this would apply only to the country that makes this decision. Declaring that ‘I, a single country, have decided to amend a collective document signed by 28 nations’ is not entirely appropriate, either legally or politically.”
“Eastern European countries, including Poland, have pushed for permanent troops in their territory, but Western allies, including Germany, have resisted, citing the 1997 NATO Founding Act, an agreement with Russia that they argue limits permanent deployments in former Warsaw Pact nations.”
So: the U.S. is doing it regardless of what the leadership of Germany or any other NATO-member-nation want. The U.S. had been behind the East European regimes that want to go to war against Russia, and it’s providing them the men and materiel in order to lead them in that invasion. Russia is in no position to be able to respond in-kind against the United States, because not only does Russia no longer control the nations that are on and near its own borders, but it doesn’t have, and never did have, control over any of the nations that are on or near America’s borders, except for tiny Cuba, back when both Cuba and the U.S.S.R. were communist. The current U.S.-NATO buildup along and near Russia’s borders would be more similar to a Russian buildup along America’s borders with Canada and Mexico, which Russia wouldn’t be able to do, even if Russia’s Government wanted to.
The American news-site Newsweek (formerly a major glossy magazine but now only online) headlined on October 12th, “U.S. Military Sends Troops to Russian Border, Officials Say They Want ‘Peace, Not War’ With Russia”, and noted that though Russia said the NATO Founding Act prohibited this deployment, “Since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula amid political unrest in neighboring Ukraine in 2014, however, NATO has significantly expanded its military presence near Russia, especially among the three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — and Poland. These four nations were designated by the U.S. last year to host NATO battle groups, but the multinational coalition has expanded its forces beyond these countries, drawing further Russian fury.” In other words: the U.S. designated these countries, on and near the Russian border, to precipitate the final war, which the U.S. intends to finish. And the U.S. then approved even more countries, for the task.
In a significant move to deter possible Russian aggression in Europe, the Pentagon is poised to store battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons for as many as 5,000 American troops in several Baltic and Eastern European countries, American and allied officials say.
The proposal, if approved, would represent the first time since the end of the Cold War that the United States has stationed heavy military equipment in the newer NATO member nations in Eastern Europe that had once been part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine have caused alarm and prompted new military planning in NATO capitals.
What had actually happened is that starting by no later than 2011, the Obama Administration was planning a coup to overthrow the democratically elected Ukrainian President who had been elected in 2010, and the resulting coup — which was carried out in 2014 by Ukraine’s two racist-fascist or ideologically nazi political Parties, the Right Sector, and the Svoboda Party (the latter of which Party was renamed from its original “Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine” name, at the demand of the CIA) — was very violent and bloody, and terrified the residents in the Ukrainian regions that had voted over 75% for the elected President (whom Ukraine’s nazis had just overthrown), especially Crimea and Donbass, so these supporters of the elected President (these people being Russian-speakers) clamored for Russian protection, and Russia provided it. (Here is what Russia was protecting them against in Crimea; and, here is what Russia was protecting them against in Donbass.) By no later than two days after the coup was over, the top officials of the EU knew that it had been a coup and was not a ‘democratic revolution’ such as was being publicly reported. They kept silent about it, and the regimes in the former Warsaw Pact nations have prevented their publics from knowing that Ukraine had suffered a nazi-executed and U.S.-financed coup; and, so, the people in those Eastern European countries think that the imperialistic nation is Russia (like the former Soviet regime was), and not the U.S. (which in recent decades was taken over by fascists, America’s oligarchs).
And, so, since the U.S. Government is gearing up for war with Russia, Russia is preparing to defend itself — against the U.S., and against at least the nations that are bordering or close to Russia (maybe including Ukraine itself), which are providing the military bases and allowing the missiles and other weapons to be installed there (in the participating countries) for the invasion. If and when the invasion happens, it will be completed within less than an hour, the idea being to destroy Russia’s retaliatory weapons by a blitz-attack before they can be fired and before their warheads can reach their destinations, for which reasons Lockheed Martin’s ABM (or BMD) system (called “Aegis Ashore”) is being deployed around Russia’s borders: to nullify all retaliatory capability (as if that were even possible to do).
Anyway, regardless of whether Russia violated the NATO Founding Act by its having accepted the 90%+ plebiscite results in Crimea on 16 March 2014 favoring to become again a part of Russia (as they had been until the Soviet dictator transferred them to Ukraine in 1954), there can be no question that, under U.S. President Obama, and now continuing under U.S. President Trump, the NATO Founding Act has itself been nullified, and there is no longer exists what had been the only peace treaty that the U.S. ever signed with Russia. We’re now in not the Cold War, which was accepted on both sides as being a balance of terror in order to maintain the peace (Mutually Assured Destruction or “MAD”); we’re in the situation where the U.S. Government believes instead in “Nuclear Primacy”, or America conquering Russia. If that weren’t the case, then America wouldn’t have been doing what it has been doing since 2011.
The US-Turkish “visa war” began when Ankara arrested a US consulate employee on terror charges over his suspected connections with the Gulenists, which served as the pretext for the US to do what it had apparently been considering for some time, and that’s effectively block Turks from visiting the US by de-facto including them for the indefinite future on Trump’s “travel ban”. Turkey, keen on retaining its dignity, followed suit with a reciprocal measure for Americans, and the entire episode might serve as a prelude to the official, albeit long-expected, worsening of relations and maybe even potential sanctions.
The US is being careful to not make its moves appear “unprovoked”, hence why it sought to disguise its latest actions as being a “response” to something that Turkey did, because it doesn’t want to push Turkey any closer to the Multipolar World Order than it already has ever since the failed pro-American coup attempt last year saw Erdogan dramatically improve his ties with Russia, Iran, and even the SCO in response. That being said, what’s really happening here is that the US is punishing Turkey for precisely just that, as well as more recently for Erdogan’s remark the other day that “the West’s shadow” is behind all terrorist groups in the world, including the Gulenists, the PKK, and even Daesh.
Furthermore, the US thinks that it is unacceptable that Turkey, which is nominally a NATO member, decided to buy Russia’s S400 state-of-the-art anti-air missile system and is even militarily cooperating with Moscow in an anti-terrorist capacity in Syria, especially in the latest Idlib Operation to implement the “de-escalation zone” that was recently agreed to at the last Astana meeting. Another thing which has contributed to the US’ animosity against Turkey is the country’s vastly improved military relationship with Iran, particularly over the Kurdish issue in recent weeks but with the original breakthrough being made through the Moscow Declaration at the end of last year.
The most immediate implication of the American-Turkish “visa war” is that it will worsen the perception that each country’s people have of the other. Turks will see that this confirms what Erdogan has implied for over a year about how the US is the enemy of the Turkish people, while Americans will be manipulated via decontextualized Mainstream Media reporting into thinking that Erdogan is a rogue anti-American dictator whose country is in urgent need of a “democratic regime change”. Both of these interlinked outcomes will probably contribute to the forecasted deterioration of official relations which might take a multidimensional form in creating serious economic, political, and possibly even military fallout, the latter of which could see the US more openly commit to the Kurds and Gulenists.
The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday Oct 13, 2017:
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare.
President Donald Trump met with top defense officials Tuesday morning — including Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair General Joseph Dunford — in the White House Situation Room, to discuss potential options for responding to any North Korean “aggression” as well as how to prevent North Korea from threatening the United States with nuclear weapons.
The meeting, which was later confirmed by the State Department and a White House press release, came a day after Mattis instructed the U.S. Army to stand ready if North Korea diplomacy fails, and less than a week after Trump’s cryptic “calm before the storm” comments about a previous meeting with top military commanders. Some have noted that the decision to have the meeting in the Situation Room, sometimes called the War Room, was significant, as it is often used to hold secure meetings regarding disasters, military conflicts, and other major crises both domestic and global.
While most reporting gave some context to Trump’s most recent meeting with top defense officials on tensions with Pyongyang, hardly any mentioned that the meeting had been immediately preceded by another. This meeting, also on the topic of North Korea, was held between the president and former Secretary of State and unindicted war criminal Henry Kissinger.
“Henry Kissinger has been a friend of mine,” he added. “I’ve liked him. I’ve respected him. But we’ve been friends for a long time, long before my emergence into the world of politics, which has not been too long.”
Tuesday’s meeting was not the first occasion Trump has met with Kissinger since becoming a fixture in American politics. The pair’s first meeting after Trump’s rise to political prominence took place in May of 2016. That meeting occurred a day after then-candidate Trump said he would open dialogue with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un if elected President. Since that initial meeting, Kissinger and Trump met last November and have already met twice this year.
After their November meeting, Kissinger remarked that Trump would likely not be keeping all his campaign promises, as he was undergoing “the transition from being a campaigner to being a national strategist.” This apparently included his promise of opening dialogue with North Korea.
Despite overseeing such actions, Kissinger ended up being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in the same year as the Chilean coup, for his role in bringing “peace” to Vietnam and ending the Vietnam war, though he had actually worked to extend it. The choice of Kissinger was so outrageous that several members of the Nobel committee resigned in protest. Kissinger is also credited with transforming U.S. foreign policy into one of perpetual, undeclared war – a policy that continues today and one that Trump has embraced since becoming President.
Given Trump’s bellicose rhetoric and threats towards North Korea – as well as his rejection of diplomacy in resolving the crisis despite both Pyongyang’s and his own State Department’s apparent willingness to attempt it – Kissinger’s timely guidance to the President during “the calm before the storm” should give the American public considerable cause for concern.
Watch | Henry Kissinger on his 2016 meeting with Donald Trump
Two months into the new Trump administration, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif warned that Washington’s behaviour towards the nuclear deal threatened to “render the entire bargain meaningless,” according to a copy of a letter obtained by Middle East Eye.
“Iran cannot afford to keep implementing the deal unilaterally while a key participant persists in its systematic violation of key provisions of the JCPOA by invoking irrelevant, extraneous and unfounded excuses,” he wrote, referring to the deal, which is formally referred to as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Zarif’s letter, addressed to European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, stands in stark contrast to a celebratory letter sent by Hassan Rouhani to US President Barack Obama after the deal was implemented in early 2016 and also revealed by MEE for the first time.
The two trace the breakdown of ties between the two countries with Trump’s rise to power and show the dangerous fallout of his confrontational approach towards Iran, ratcheted up again today.
Iran has been accused of violating if not the actual terms of the deal then the spirit of the agreement, by supporting militant groups in the region and developing long-range missile technology.
However, the general consensus among most observers – and the rest of the countries which participated in the P5+1 nuclear agreement – is that the current Iranian leadership posed the best opportunity for a deal that would keep the country nuclear-free.
The two letters also illustrate, say analysts, just how far the Iranian side may have been willing to go diplomatically and how the US had squandered opportunities.
“The change in tone from Rouhani to Zarif’s letter demonstrates a proven flexibility in Iran’s position that this administration refuses to acknowledge,” said Reza Marashi, research director at the Washington, DC-based National Iranian American Council.
“I always tell people I’m as nice as you let me be and I believe that’s Iran’s policy towards the United States.”
“He clearly has a willing partner in Tehran to test the proposition of resolving problems through sustained diplomacy. Now it’s going to be really hard to get there after nine months of Trump poisoning the well, publicly and privately.”
The letters, which were leaked to MEE in advance of Trump’s speech on Friday, fit the descriptions of correspondence which several analysts said they had heard about, but had never seen in full until now.
Rouhani to Obama
In his letter sent to Obama last year after the implementation of the nuclear deal on 16 January, Rouhani says he is “very pleased” that the agreement is coming to fruition.
The agreement “proved that even the most complex of global issues can be resolved through dialogue, negotiation and constructive engagement,” he writes.
“I believe that the ‘win-win’ approach which governs the JCPOA can serve as a good model for the resolution of other disputes and international and regional crises, especially in the tumultuous Middle East – which is unfortunately slipping deeper into the mire as each day passes.”
He ends the two-page letter thanking Obama and expressing his appreciation “in advance for the appropriate instructions coupled with the timely and necessary actions that you will issue and undertake to ensure its full implementation”.
“Please accept the assurances of my highest consideration,” he wrote.”
Model for future deals?
The most striking feature of Rouhani’s letter, said Mahan Abedin, an Iranian political analyst and director of Dysart Consulting, is just how hopeful he is that the deal will lead to resolving other issues.
“That lends credence to what some of his internal opponents were saying in 2015 and 2016, especially before Trump came to power,” Abedin said.
He noted that they claimed that Rouhani saw the deal as a model for future deals which might see Iran give up its missile technology or support for Hezbollah. “This really does come out in the letter,” he said.
Also worth noting, said Abedin, is Rouhani’s tone.
“It shows he had genuine respect for Obama, and I think it also reflects his confidence in the integrity of the negotiation process,” he said.
“He’s surveyed the whole thing very closely, he had full confidence in it, and he was really pleased with the outcome and sees it as his baby,” Abedin said.
Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said the letter stands in stark contrast to those sent in recent years by Iran’s Supreme Leader to Obama – which US officials described to him – and others sent by Iranian members of parliament to US senators which he had read.
Those letters “were just a long list of complaints with one or two sentences with a small opening,” Parsi said.
Rouhani’s letter “is nothing like that. There is not complaint. There is no going back into the history. It’s not relitigating the last 50 years … It tells you how far the US and Iran came under Obama to interact with each other in a normal way.”
Zarif to Mogherini
Just 15 months later, Zarif’s letter to Mogherini, dated 28 March 2017, accuses the US of violating the nuclear deal and treating it with open hostility that threatens “to render the entire bargain meaningless, unbalanced and unsustainable”.
The Obama administration’s implementation of the deal may have been “lacklustre,” but two months into the new administration, he writes that it is evident that the US government “has maliciously intended – since the very beginning – to prevent normalisation of trade with Iran and to deprive Iran from the economic dividends clearly envisaged in the JCPOA”.
Further proposed sanctions against Iran and reviews of sanctions already in place, he says, have created “indefinite uncertainty and fear in the global economic community about the future of economic relations with Iran,” which he says are a clear violation of the deal.
“This in fact has significant detrimental consequences,” Zarif says, specifically pointing out the difficulties of non-US firms to operate in his country as a result of US policies following the agreement.
Zarif also raises concerns about “provocative statements” that senior US administration officials – whom he doesn’t name – that threaten the deal by “further diminishing the atmosphere which is indispensable for successful implementation of its sanctions-lifting provisions”.
“These statements not only disrespect the established principles of international law … but also contravene the provisions of the JCPOA,” he writes, citing the agreement’s paragraph 28, which calls on senior officials on all sides to support the implementation “including in their public statements”.
“Iran reserves the right to take necessary measures in response to any action or omission which could in effect jeopardise the balance of ‘the reciprocal commitments’ as enshrined in the JCPOA and adversely affect its ‘balanced’ implementation,” Zarif concludes.
Quick off the mark
The issues raised in the letter are no surprise to those following the nuclear deal closely. What’s new, however, is what it reveals about Iran’s current strategy.
“In public, they are not going as aggressive on [the violations discussed in the letter], and I don’t think it’s because they don’t think they have a case,” Parsi said.
“I suspect that they have decided to play the reasonable party by not making too much noise about Trump’s actual violations in public, but instead let Trump shoot himself in the foot.”
It also, Abedin and Marashi said, shows just how quickly the Iranians started to work around the assumption that Trump was serious about his campaign threats to attempt to end the deal.
“What this letter tells you is that they anticipated this scenario that’s unfolding now and they had made preparations six months before. So Iran will be well-prepared at least diplomatically about what’s about to hit them,” Abedin said.
“The Iranians figured it out faster than the Europeans did,” Marashi said. “I talked to Iranians after Trump’s election. Within a month and a half, two months in, they knew what they were dealing with. Only now are we hearing from the Europeans.”
Marashi points out, he waited three months before privately conveying his concerns.
“That demonstrates a level of restraint predicated on keeping the deal alive,” he said.
But given the political dynamics in Iran – including continued financial restrictions – Zarif no longer had the luxury not to take a tougher stance, Abedin said.
“He’s making it clear that they weren’t happy with the Obama administration either because they were also very slow in easing the sanctions,” he said. “What’s going to happen now – now that Trump is about the decertify? People need to take strong diplomatic positions.”
MEE contacted Zarif and Mogherini’s offices for comment, but neither had responded by the time of publication.
It’s been commonplace throughout tinseltown’s history. The so-called casting couch has been around for the past century, producers and other industry executives demanding sexual favors for roles in films, aspiring actors and experienced ones pressured to submit.
The Harvey Weinstein scandal is no aberration. Countless other film executives act the same way, now and earlier throughout the industry’s history, the tip of the iceberg alone reported.
Hollywood moguls want sexual abuse incidents suppressed. Amy Berg’s 2014 documentary “An Open Secret” discussed film industry underage victims of sexual exploitation, minors especially vulnerable to predatory vultures, powerful men believing they can get away with anything and usually do.
Stories of abuse the film recounts represent the tip of a sordid iceberg. Most victims are too ashamed to go public, others not sure they’ll be believed.
Berg said “(w)hen you meet the victims and see how prevalent this problem is, it’s difficult to ignore” the sexual abuse they and many others endured, adding:
“(W)hat I found really disturbing was the number of convicted pedophiles who are still being hired on set, on kids’ shows. These are people who technically should be nowhere near children. That was really upsetting.”
The earliest industry sex scandal occurred in 1921. Actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s rape of actress Virginia Rappe led to her death from a ruptured bladder.
He was charged with murder, downgraded to manslaughter, then acquitted after three trials.
Errol Flynn had a two-year affair with Beverly Aadland, beginning when she was aged-15. Earlier he was accused, then exonerated of raping two underage girls.
Aadland recounted her ordeal, saying
“(h)e was just too strong for me. I cried. At one point he tore my dress. Then he carried me off to another room, and I was still carrying on. What was going through my head was, what was I going to tell my mother?”
In her autobiography, actress Joan Collins explained she lost the lead role in “Cleopatra” to Elizabeth Taylor for refusing to sleep with 20th Century-Fox’s studio head, saying:
“I had tested for ‘Cleopatra’ twice and was the front-runner. He took me into his office and said, ‘(y)ou really want this part?’ And I said, ‘Yes. I really do.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘then all you have to do is be nice to me.’ “
“It was a wonderful euphemism in the Sixties for you know what. But I couldn’t do that. In fact, I was rather wimpish, burst into tears and rushed out of his office.”
At age 12, Shirley Temple said an MGM producer exposed himself to her during their first meeting. She laughed nervously. He threw her out of his office – after she signed a contract.
Marilyn Monroe said she knew numerous Hollywood lechers.
“I met them all,” she explained. “Phoniness and failure were all over them.”
“Some were vicious and crooked. But they were as near to the movies as you could get. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes – an overcrowded brothel, a (sexual) merry-go-round…”
Judy Garland said she was pawed and propositioned by study bosses and others from aged-16. She called MGM founder Louis B. Mayer a notorious harasser, her biographer saying:
He “would tell her what a wonderful singer she was, and he would say ‘you sing from the heart,’ and then he would place his hand on her left breast.”
Comedian/actor Bill Cosby faces numerous accusations of sexual assault – more than 50 women saying he molested them from 1965 to 2008. He denies wrongdoing.
He faces numerous lawsuits. Attorney Gloria Allred represents 33 women, saying others requested her help. Cosby faces retrial for one incident next year. If convicted, he could be imprisoned. He’s now aged-80.
Two women accused actor Casey Affleck of sexual abuse, both claims settled out of court. Affleck denied charges against him.
Actress Theresa Russell said producer of “The Last Tycoon” Sam Spiegel propositioned her during a casting session. His biographer explained he made liberal use of the casting couch.
Producer Julia Phillips’ book “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again” discussed much about Hollywood’s sordid history, including commonplace casting couch abuses.
Writer Peter Keough called Hollywood “a town where everyone is selling body and soul for fame and fortune and all – especially women are considered commodities.”
Actor Woody Harrelson said
“every (acting) business I ever entered into in New York seemed to have a casting couch…I’ve seen so many people sleep with people they loathe in order to further their ambition.”
Actress Goldie Hawn accused cartoonist Al Capp of propositioning her, adding he exposed himself to her when she was aged-19. She rejected his advances.
Producer Chris Hanley claimed
“almost every leading actress in (his) 24 films has slept with a director or producer or a leading actor to get the part that launched her career.”
Actress Gwyneth said early in her career, a film producer explained a business meeting should end “in the bedroom.” She accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment.
Actress Susan Sarandon described what she called a “really disgusting” casting couch experience in New York.
Cher tweeted about a “scary experience” with a film producer. Jane Fonda said she was once fired for refusing to sleep with her boss.
Instances of casting couch sexual abuse are endless. Hollywood is a virtual den of iniquity. The silver screen hides what goes on behind the scenes.
“Fire and Fury” was not invented by Donald Trump. It is a concept deeply embedded in US military doctrine. It has characterized US military interventions since the end of World War II.
What distinguishes Trump from his predecessors in the White House is his political narrative at the UN General Assembly.
President Truman was a firm advocate of “Fire and Fury” against the people of both North and South Korea.
What most people in America do not know –and which is particularly relevant when assessing the alleged “threats” of the DPRK to World peace– is that North Korea lost thirty percent of its population as a result of US led bombings in the 1950s. US military sources confirm that 20 percent of North Korea’s population was killed off over a three period of intensive bombings. Every single family in North Korea lost a loved one in the course of the Korean War.
Pyongyang 1953
The criminal bombings of Pyongyang in 1951 ordered by president Truman, were opposed by General Douglas MacArthur who was commander of allied forces in Korea:
“A defiant Douglas MacArthur appeared before Congress and spoke of human suffering so horrifying that his parting glimpse of it caused him to vomit.
“I have never seen such devastation,” the general told members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. At that time, in May 1951, the Korean War was less than a year old. Casualties, he estimated, were already north of 1 million.
“I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man,” he added, “and it just curdled my stomach.” (quoted by the Washington Post, August 10, 2017)
The DPRK’s Foreign Minister’s Cable to the United Nations Security Council confirms the nature of the atrocities committed by the US against the people of North Korea under the banner of the United Nations:
See original below.
“ON JANUARY 3 AT 10:30 AM, AN ARMADE OF 82 FLYING FORTRESSES LOOSED THEIR DEATH-DEALING LOAD ON THE CITY OF PYONGYANG. …
HUNDREDS OF TONS OF BOMBS AND INCENDIARY COMPOUND WERE SIMULTANEOUSLY DROPPED THROUGHOUT THE CITY, CAUSING ANNIHILATING FIRES. IN ORDER TO PREVENT THE EXTINCTION OF THESE FIRES, THE TRANS-ATLANTIC BARBARIANS BOMBED THE CITY WITH DELAYED-ACTION HIGH-EXPLOSIVE BOMBS WHICH EXPLODED AT INTERVALS THROUGHOUT FOR A WHOLE DAY, MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE PEOPLE TO COME OUT ONTO THE STREETS. THE ENTIRE CITY HAS NOW BEEN BURNING, ENVELOPED IN FLAMES, FOR TWO DAYS. BY THE SECOND DAY 7,812 CIVILIANS’ HOUSES HAD BEEN BURNT DOWN. THE AMERICANS WERE WELL AWARE THAT THERE WERE NO MILITARY OBJECTIVES LEFT IN PYONGYANG. …
THE NUMBER OF INHABITANTS OF PYONGYANG KILLED BY BOMB SPLINTERS, BURNT ALIVE AND SUFFOCATED BY SMOKE IS INCALCULABLE, SINCE NO COMPUTATION IS POSSIBLE. SOME FIFTY THOUSAND INHABITANTS REMAIN IN THE CITY, WHICH BEFORE THE WAR HAD A POPULATION OF FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND.”
It was all for a good cause, the fight against “evil communism”. The doctrine of fighting communism acted as a powerful ideological instrument during the Cold War era.
Our message to US military servicemen and women at all levels of the military hierarchy.
Reverse the course of History. Abandon the Battle Field, Refuse to Fight!
For complete text of the cable addressed to the UN Security Council click UN Repository
First published by Global Research in March 2012. Edits to the title, ISIS and terminology updates
Al Qaeda-ISIS concepts, repeated ad nauseam have potentially traumatic impacts on the human mind and the ability of normal human beings to analyze and comprehend the “real outside World” of war, politics and the economic crisis. Al Qaeda constitutes a stylized, fake and almost folkloric abstraction of terrorism, which permeates the inner consciousness of millions of people around the World.
* * *
There is something disturbing in the nature of post 9/11 public discourse. Incessantly, on a daily basis, Al Qaeda is referred to by the Western media, government officials, members of the US Congress, Wall Street analysts, etc. as an underlying cause of numerous World events. Occurences of a significant political, social or strategic nature –including the US presidential elections campaign– are routinely categorized by referring to Al Qaeda, the alleged architect of the September 11 2001 attacks.
What is striking is the extent of media coverage of “Al Qaeda related events”, not to mention the mountains of op eds and authoritative “analysis” pertaining to “terror events” in different part of the World.
Routine mention of Al Qaeda [ISIS] “fanatics”, “jihadists”, etc. has become –from a news standpoint– trendy and fashionable. A Worldwide ritual of authoritative media reporting has unfolded. [On May 20, 2016, ISIS had 225 million entries, the “Islamic State” has 46 million entries, Daesh 18 million on Google.]
A panoply of Al Qaeda [and ISIS/ISIL Daesh] related events and circumstances is presented to public opinion on a daily basis. These include terrorist threats, warnings and attacks, police investigations, insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, country-level regime change, social conflict, sectarian violence, racism, religious divisions, Islamic thought, Western values, etc.
In turn, Al Qaeda – War on Terrorism rhetoric permeates political discourse at all levels of government, including bipartisan debate on Capitol Hill, in committees of the House and the Senate, at the British House of Commons, and, lest we forget, at the United Nations Security Council.
All of these complex Al Qaeda related occurrences are explained –by politicians, the corporate media, Hollywood and the Washington think tanks under a single blanket “bad guys” heading, in which Al Qaeda is casually and repeatedly pinpointed as “the cause” of numerous terror events around the World.
Human Consciousness: Al Qaeda and the Human Mindset
How does the daily bombardment of Al Qaeda related concepts and images, funnelled into the Western news chain and on network TV, affect the human mindset?
Al Qaeda concepts, repeated ad nauseam have potentially traumatic impacts on the human mind and the ability of normal human beings to analyze and comprehend the “real outside World” of war, politics and the economic crisis.
What is at stake is human consciousness and comprehension based on concepts and facts.
With Al Qaeda, however, there are no verifiable “facts” and “concepts”, because Al Qaeda has evolved into a media mythology, a legend, an invented ideological construct, used as an unsubtle tool of media disinformation and war propaganda.
Al Qaeda constitutes a stylized, fake and almost folkloric abstraction of terrorism, which permeates the inner consciousness of millions of people around the World.
Reference to Al Qaeda has become a dogma, a belief, which most people espouse unconditionally.
Is this political indoctrination? Is it brain-washing? If so what is the underlying objective?
People’s capacity to independently analyse World events, as well as address causal relationships pertaining to politics and society, is significantly impaired. That is the objective!
The routine use of Al Qaeda to generate blanket explanations of complex political events is meant to create confusion. It prevents people from thinking.
The American Inquisition
The notion of Al Qaeda [ISIS] –“the outside enemy” which threatens Western civilization– is predicated on “an inquisitorial doctrine”. The Homeland Security State personifies what might be described as the “American Inquisition”.
As in the case of the Spanish Inquisition, the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) consensus cannot be challenged.
Reference to Al Qaeda as a central paradigm used to understand the world we live in is ultimately intended to instil fear and insecurity. In the words of Britain’s comedy group Monty Python: “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…fear and surprise…. Our two weapons are fear and surprise…and ruthless efficiency…. Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency…and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope….”
Unconditional submission to the Homeland Security State in today’s America is not dissimilar from the process of “fanatical devotion” prevailing under the Spanish feudal order. What is at stake in our contemporary World, in the words of Monty Python, is “fear and surprise” and the unconditional compliance to the “ruthless efficiency” of a dominant political, economic and military order.
The American Inquisition redefines the entire legal and judicial framework. Torture and political assassinations are no longer a covert activity as in the heyday of the CIA, removed from the public eye. They are “legal”, they are the object of extensive news coverage, they are sanctioned by the White House and the US Congress. Conversely, those who dare confront the “War on Terrorism” consensus are branded as “terrorists”. Upholding true justice by challenging America’s “holy crusade” against Al Qaeda becomes an outright criminal act.
A new threshold in US legal history has unfolded. High ranking officials within the State and the Military no longer need to camouflage their crimes. In fact, quite the opposite. Torture of Al Qaeda suspects is a public policy with a humanitarian mandate:
“Yes we did order torture, but it isn’t really torture, its not really war, because these people are terrorists and “we must fight evil”. And the way to uphold democracy and freedom is to “go after the bad guys”, “wage war on the terrorists”. “Its in the public interest.”
Moreover, anybody who questions our definition of “fighting evil” (which of course includes torture, political assassination and concentration camps directed against “the bad guys”) is by our definition also “evil” and can be arrested, tortured and sent to concentration camps. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Spanish Inquisition, Made in America, Global Research, 2004,
Al Qaeda is presented to public opinion as the terror instrument of “radical Islam”, which threatens the Homeland, undermining Western civilization and moral values. Everybody must comply; nobody dares to question “the American Inquisition”.
Al Qaeda and the “Big Lie”
The Al Qaeda Legend sustains the “Big Lie”. It turns realities upside down. It creates both a perception and a belief which cannot be questioned. It permeates US foreign policy and the conduct of international diplomacy. Al Qaeda and the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) constitute a central component of US military doctrine.
“Al Qaeda did this”, “Al Qaeda did that” statements provide a simple and trouble-free elucidation of complex events, while disguising and concealing “the real reasons”, namely the unspoken and forbidden truth behind these events.
Nobody seems to take the time to examine “who is this elusive enemy Al Qaeda”, which has succeeded, with limited military means, in confronting America’s multibillion dollar war machine.
The Al Qaeda blanket explanation not only overshadows the normal channels of human comprehension, it also precludes a move to the next step of rational explanation, which consists in saying: if Al Qaeda is “the cause” as stated in numerous press reports, then: “What is Al Qaeda?” and “Who is behind Al Qaeda?”
But these are questions which in the post 9/11 era are rarely addressed. To investigate “Who is behind the terrorists” has become unmentionable, a political taboo, despite evidence pertaining to the historical role of US intelligence in creating and promoting the Islamic jihad.
Today, if Al Qaeda were to be revealed for what it really is, –e.g in the context of a specific false flag terrorist attack– the legitimacy of the “war on terrorism” and those officials in high office who support it, would collapse like a deck of cards.
While the identity of Al Qaeda is fully documented, including its links to US intelligence, the truth has not trickled down to the mainstay of public opinion.
Ronald Reagan meets Afghan Mujahideen Commanders at the White House in 1985 (Reagan Archives)
Al Qaeda and the Role of Western Intelligence
Acknowledged by the CIA, the Islamic jihad “was” a US sponsored “intelligence asset” going back to the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-1989).
The intelligence community admits, yes we created the Mujahideen, we set up the training camps and the koranic schools together with Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). Acting on behalf of the CIA, the ISI was involved in the recruitment, training and religious indoctrination of the “jihadists” described by President Ronald Reagan as “Freedom Fighters”.
From the outset of the Soviet-Afghan war in 1979 to the present, various Islamic fundamentalist organizations became de facto instruments of US intelligence and more generally of the US-NATO-Israel military alliance.
Unknown to the American public, the US spread the teachings of the Islamic jihad in textbooks “Made in America”, developed at the University of Nebraska:
… the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books,..
The White House defends the religious content, saying that Islamic principles permeate Afghan culture and that the books “are fully in compliance with U.S. law and policy.” Legal experts, however, question whether the books violate a constitutional ban on using tax dollars to promote religion.
… AID officials said in interviews that they left the Islamic materials intact because they feared Afghan educators would reject books lacking a strong dose of Muslim thought. The agency removed its logo and any mention of the U.S. government from the religious texts, AID spokeswoman Kathryn Stratos said.
“It’s not AID’s policy to support religious instruction,” Stratos said. “But we went ahead with this project because the primary purpose . . . is to educate children, which is predominantly a secular activity.”
… Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtun, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska -Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $ 51 million on the university’s education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994.” (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)
Who is behind Al Qaeda, documented in Michel Chossudovsky’s 2005 international best-seller Order Online directly from Global Research Publishers
“ON JANUARY 3 [1951] AT 10:30 AM, AN ARMADE OF 82 FLYING FORTRESSES LOOSED THEIR DEATH-DEALING LOAD ON THE CITY OF PYONGYANG. …
“THE NUMBER OF INHABITANTS OF PYONGYANG KILLED BY BOMB SPLINTERS, BURNT ALIVE AND SUFFOCATED BY SMOKE IS INCALCULABLE, SINCE NO COMPUTATION IS POSSIBLE. SOME FIFTY THOUSAND INHABITANTS REMAIN IN THE CITY, WHICH BEFORE THE WAR HAD A POPULATION OF FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND.” [UN Repository]
With tension ever mounting in the Korean peninsular, all the higher every year with US bombers conducting annual drills over South Korea within direct strike range of North Korea, it is notable and deeply regrettable the West has lost all sight and memory of the enormous destruction inflicted on the Korean people in the Korean War 1950-53.
How can we ever in the West begin to understand the large scale militarisation of North Korea if, in the US and UK in particular, political assessment and judgement takes no account of Korean history?
North Korea was as a matter of historical fact through the Korean war carpet bombed for three years by US bombers. There was, after the first months of the war, mounting air defences in northern most North Korea bordering China, including Russian MIG fighters but, none-the-less, US B29s bombing was for most of the war free-range over the whole peninsular.
To quote from testament from both sides,
“The US airforce destroyed every town and village in north Korea”. “The destruction was enormous”.
In the words of Air Force General Curtis LeMay:
“We burned down every town in North Korea …. over a period of three years or so we killed – what – 20 percent of the population”.
And this including the very worst of it large scale use of napalm. To quote Senator John Glenn, then a major in the US air force before becoming an astronaut:
“We did a lot of napalm work dropping fuel tanks loaded with napalm, flying in low, called a Nape Scrape”.
Napalm, jellied petroleum and phosphorus. No-one likes to spell it out but people quite simply burn to death.
In all some 600,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the towns and villages and cities of the country. That is well over a million concussion bombs, along with 40 million gallons of high octane napalm. And to add to this, in the final stages of the war, mass bombing (1,514 sorties) of Sui-ho hydro-electric and irrigation dams (the world’s fourth largest) on the Yalu River then flooding and destroying huge areas of northern farmland and crops.
“Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans.10 Only emergency assistance from China, the USSR, and other socialist countries prevented widespread famine”. [Asia-Pacific Journal 2009]
In the words of Professor Charles Armstrong, Director of the Centre for Korean Research, Columbia University:
“The physical destruction and loss of life on both sides was almost beyond comprehension, but the North suffered the greater damage, due to American saturation bombing and the scorched-earth policy of the retreating UN forces”.
That then is the horror of the brutal Korean war. Over two million Korean civilians died including many tens of thousands of children. On US pilot testament destruction was “indiscriminate”.
Is it then any wonder North Korea turns out a highly militarised state, deeply loathing the “Yankees”, raining bombs and death and destruction on their towns and villages for three years ?
No-one can deny the one-party state authoritarianism of North Korea but then we surely have to ask how much of this huge militarisation has been created by the horrors of warfare, all the more so large scale bombing impacting on civilian populations. As also not to forget, until the end of WW2, Korea suffered 35 long years of brutal occupation by the Japanese. Over one million forced deportations, suppression of Korean culture and identity, deaths in Japanese labour camps estimated at over half a million.
In all Korea was a long suffering country for many decades, the very worst not forgotten by the Koreans the enormous destructive US bombing ’50-53.
International Perspective – East or West trauma is not forgotten.
The US, and New York in particular, were devastated by the attack on the Trade Centre towers in 2001. Terrible shock traumatic destruction with 2,996 deaths and 6,000 injuries. And that huge and deep trauma living on to this day and for whole lifetimes in those directly affected, all who lived and live in New York, and indeed in the consciousness of the whole of the US, and the world.
But the West forgets and is oblivous or indifferent to the suffering inflicted on the Korean people 1950-53. And that is bombing and destruction and loss of life of many thousands of Trade Centre attacks. Not loss of life from air attacks on armies in combat but bombing of civilian populations in towns and cities to “terrorise” a country into submission. That was, on all the evidence, in the face of huge Chinese troop influx into the peninsular, US military policy.
It is then impossible to see how it could be clearer, for those who will look, the actions of the US and West have played a hugely determinate role in the creation of the deeply alarming militarised state of Korea the West not only condemns but has listed (George W. Bush 2002) as part of an “Axis of Evil”. On this view not a breath of recognition that three years of carpet bombing, following 35 years of repression under Japanese occupation, surely provides an understandable rationale why any country would become formidably militarised. Defence of the country the all-consuming priority.
For the people of North Korea the mass killing and destruction of civilians a holocaust against their people. For them, United States enormous war crimes and atrocities never brought to any court of justice.
Instead the hugely admired US East Asia commanding general of the time, General Douglas MacArthur, returned home in 1951 to a huge New York ticker-tape heroes welcome. Not condemnation from the US public (as arose in the Vietnam war) but celebration. But then the general US public of that time new very little of the real consequences of the war on the country. For instance that MacArthur and many in higher US military circles advocated dropping atomic bombs on Chinese cities to get the war over and unite Korea.
“His [MacArthur’s) plan was to drop between 30 and 50 atomic bombs-strung across the neck of Manchuria, and spread behind us, from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea – a belt of radioactive cobalt for at least 60 years there would be no invasion of Korea from the North.” [B-29s Over Korea – Wayland Mayo]
History Repeating – self same military mind-sets gathering again.
And now we have history on the brink of repeating yet again. The whole situation enormously high risk and dangerous with Secretary of State Tillerson indicating in his view, as he did in discussion April 12th with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov over Crimea and Syria, “history is not the issue”. What matters, as Tillerson said, is dealing with “current threats”. In a stroke Mr Tillerson excluding all relevance of historical causes and motivations why North Korea is so vehemently anti-American.
Foreign Minister Sergy Lavrov:
“As far as Syria is concerned and Bashar al-Assad, we talked today about the history, and Rex [Tillerson] said that he was a new man and is not interested so much in history; he wants to deal with today’s problems. But the world is so constructed that unless we look at what’s happened in the past, we won’t be able to deal with the present”. [US Dept of State – Lavrov-Tillerson meeting 12th April]
Since then the Secretary of State has made clear, in the UN Security Council 28th April, “the time for strategic patience is over”. And all the more deeply alarming telling the Council there will be “no negotiations” until North Korea “first” takes “concrete steps” to shut down all missile activity and “de-nuclearise”. For Tillerson, and UK Foreign Secretary Johnson, in considerable contrast to the views of China and Russia, the reasons why North Korea has become one of the most militarised states in the world are not relevant. The Korean War with 3 million dead not counted in contemporary political calculus.
And so it is the West makes no effort to understand another nation’s history then history repeats. But then in the US and in the UK the Korean war is known as the Forgotten War. Forgotten for one reason as in burying memory of large scale war crimes against civilian populations. Horror for civilian population, horror for combatant troops. The West in so many ways in denial of a war that is very distant “long ago” but then, for the Koreans, as alive today as terror and fear of the US and West as sixty years ago.
And from the side of the West, to face up to responsibility for the huge numbers of civilian casualties from bombing of Korean towns and cities as US governments would, as at Nuremberg, face the self same charges the West brought against the Nazi regime after WW2: Crimes against Humanity. War crimes against civilian populations.
Understanding the other side – understanding ourselves.
Such Human Rights courts of justice not on any agenda anywhere in the West a very good start to ease tension would be, as is being called for by China and Russia, high level meetings between all major parties. And in this respect, at the heart of the whole current tension, it is of the deepest concern that in the West it is rarely brought to light that the US has repeatedly turned down North Korea offers to end nuclear weapon development.
That will come as a shock to many but negotiation records show that offers have been put forward by North Korea back to the Clinton administration in the 1990s but then rejected by the US as, in return, North Korea asks that the US and South Korea end annual large-scale “warfare exercises” on their borders. The most recent offer 2015:
“North Korea announces offer to suspend nuclear testing …in exchange for the United States and South Korea calling off annual joint-military exercises slated for spring 2015. The United States rejects the offer.” [Arms Control Association]
These offers rejected US military build-up as of May 2017 in warfare exercises includes the newly installed US anti-missile THAAD system, low flying bombers within minutes’ strike range of North Korea, together with an aircraft carrier battle fleet, including who knows how many nuclear strike submarines, in Korean off-shore waters.
North Korea finds all this US “menace”, as both China and Russia have repeatedly emphasised, hugely threatening (as indeed do the Chinese). And one would think, if it was our own country, terrifying. For UK just compare the 1940 blitz with cities across the UK from London to Liverpool ablaze. British people do not forget. And for the US, missiles on Cuba in the early ’60s and that very nearly leading to world nuclear war. But on the North Korean offers to de-nuclearise the US repeatedly refuses quid pro quo de-escalation with parallel negotiations.
On scores for belligerence the US, and others in the West including the UK, could surely not be higher. On four counts : enormous destruction of North Korean civilian population by vastly superior US air forces 1950-53 (albeit bannered under the “UN”) ; repeated US refusal of North Korea’s offers of quid pro quo de-esculation of forces on both sides; US bringing even more over-whelming military force into South Korea and off-shore seas ; US and UK calling for and indeed demanding, through the UN, imposition of more and more powerful sanctions, most crippling closing international access to sources of financial exchange. This then closing off (blockading) routes for trade driving North Korea into deeper isolation and poverty.
Threats mounting on both sides, racking up more and more tension and fear. As in all conflicts so much mirroring, of behaviour, both sides then condemning the other. Defence and survival on one side seen by the other as threat and belligerence. In the case of North Korea desperation leading who knows where.
The enormous tragedy for Korea – for all Korean people.
In all an enormous tragedy for all Koreans. Bitterly and deeply ironically both sides in Korea want to unite, as one Korea. Huge loss of life and huge casualties, three years of war with estimates of over three million dead, both sides fighting to “unite their country”, only to end up summer 1953 exactly where they started on the 38th parallel. Such utter futility. The pity and insanity of war at its most tragic.
As matters stand now, with increasingly intense US and South Korean military exercises each year, in the face of ever increasing North Korean nuclear strike capacity, the latest missile launch 14th May getting closer to a full-fledged long range ICBM strike capability, the whole situation is clearly becoming progressively more precarious year by year. High level careful communication is clearly needed, as repeatedly promoted by the Chinese. Not warships and missiles, from either side, ending up mirroring each other into destruction. With tensions ever mounting, it is then encouraging that newly elected South Korean president , President Moon Jae-in, wants to talk with the North. And it is understood wants to see the THAAD missile system removed.
And for the North Koreans, from the Western view, however hollow we view their society, however much it appears or indeed is a sham, the people clearly have enormous pride. In so many ways (the great buildings in Pyongyang, military parades, and missiles) showing to the world how much they have achieved, and that is achieved from ground zero 1953 total destruction of their country.
And this achievement in huge contest and rivalry, with powerful national jealousies, between North and South. The two sides the great misfortune to end up on the world’s most volatile tectonic plates between communism and capitalism. Both sides showcasing what their “side” has achieved: the South hosts the Olympics and FIFA World Cup, the North parades and launches missiles. This whole complex psychological cauldron is what the West needs to understand and respect.
Respect Fuche – self-reliance – the founding ideology of the country. However badly from the West we view the regime, to the country’s credit they have made huge and heroic and enormous progress providing universal education, health care, and housing, for their population. And that is universal and free health care and education up to university level. No massive student debts for North Korean students. No sick and uninsured with no medical health care in this country. Their system has huge holes, as we do in the West, but its not all bad, unless we in the West will only see it that way : esse est percipi – thinking makes it so. There is much we might learn, if we negotiate, not wrack up mounting war menace and threats.
SOURCES:
Interviews and Transcripts
Korean War – Part 19 – Use of Napalm … Senator John Glenn – in 1950 a major in US Air Force : “We did a lot of napalm work … dropping fuel tanks loaded with napalm .. we call it a Nape Scrape” “You could strafe them, bomb them, napalm them. Quite a variety of weapons.
Korean War – Part 22 – bombing of North Korea .. the United States Air Force destroyed every town and city in Norht Korea. Kim Un Sun – factory worker – “Lets make bullets of revenge to give to the Americans”.
North Korea Remembers US War Crimes – what the West wants to forget … the view of North Korea : “Brutal atrocity of US Imperial Aggressors”.
B-29s Over Korea – US Planned to A-Bomb N. Korea: [MaArthur’s] plan was to drop between 30 and 50 atomic bombs-strung across the neck of Manchuria, and spread behind us, from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea- a belt of radioactive cobalt for at least 60 years there would be no invasion of Korea from the North
Attacks on the Sui-ho Dam … the hydroelectric targets were subjected to attacks totalling 1,514 sorties.
Asia-Pacific Journal 2009: Professor Charles Armstrong “Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans.10 Only emergency assistance from China, the USSR, and other socialist countries prevented widespread famine”.
The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea – 2009: Professor Charles Armstrong, “The US Air Force estimated that North Korea’s destruction was proportionately greater than that of Japan in the Second World War, where the US had turned 64 major cities to rubble and used the atomic bomb to destroy two others. American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea — that is, essentially on North Korea –including 32,557 tons of napalm”.
“The DPRK government never forgot the lesson of North Korea’s vulnerability to American air attack,…”
Arms Control Association – 2015: North Korea announces offer to suspend nuclear testing …in exchange for the United States and South Korea calling off annual joint-military exercises slated for spring 2015. The United States rejects the offer.
US Dept of State – 12th April 2017 Tillerson Lavrov Transcript: Foreign Ministr Lavrov : “As far as Syria is concerned and Bashar al-Assad, we talked today about the history, and Rex said that he was a new man and is not interested so much in history; he wants to deal with today’s problems. But the world is so constructed that unless we look at what’s happened in the past, we won’t be able to deal with the present”.
Global Research 2010 – Professor Michel Chossudovsky: “It is now believed that the population north of the imposed 38th Parallel lost nearly a third its population of 8 – 9 million people during the 37-month long “hot” war, 1950 – 1953.” “US Sources acknowledge 1.55 million civilian deaths in North Korea”.
Boundless – World History – Korea under Japanese Rule: The 1910-1945 Japanese occupation of Korea was marked by the suppression of Korean culture and heritage, mass exploitation of the Korean labor, and violent repressions against the Korean independence movement.
Vox – Max Fisher August 2015 – Americans have forgotten what we did to North Korea: You can glimpse both the humanitarian and political consequences in an alarmed diplomatic cable that North Korea’s foreign minister sent to the United Nations .. in January 1951 : THE NUMBER OF INHABITANTS OF PYONGYANG KILLED BY BOMB SPLINTERS, BURNT ALIVE AND SUFFOCATED BY SMOKE IS INCALCULABLE, SINCE NO COMPUTATION IS POSSIBLE. SOME FIFTY THOUSAND INHABITANTS REMAIN IN THE CITY, WHICH BEFORE THE WAR HAD A POPULATION OF FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND.
Jeff Williams – CGFTC Marine Electronics; BA (Philosophy) Sothampton University UK; PGCE post-grad teaching diploma London Uni. Career: marine radio Merchant Navy officer P&O cruise lines; college lecturer UK Merchant Navy college; Off-shore oil industry systems control engineer; Technical Editor consumer electronics industry. Now an independent writer – interests in environment, global politics, monetary system, off-shore tax havens.
Venezuela’s ongoing crisis is not driven by political ideology – it is not a battle of socialism versus capitalism or dictatorship versus democracy – it is the result of two centers of political power possessing opposing interests and colliding geopolitically.
The nation of Venezuela is currently under the control of Venezuelans who derive their support, wealth, and power from Venezuela itself – its people and its natural resource. This political order also receives aid and support from Venezuela’s economic and military partners both in the region and around the globe.
The opposition opposed to the current political order and seeking to supplant it represents foreign interests and more specifically, the United States and its European allies.
The Opposition is Pro-Washington, Not “Pro-Democracy”
As early as 2002, US-backed regime change targeting then Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, sought to violently overthrow Venezuela’s political order and replace it with one obedient to Washington. Current leaders of the opposition were not only involved in the 2002 failed coup, many are documented to have received political and financial support from the United States government ever since.
Maria Corina Machado, founder of Sumate, an alleged Venezuelan election monitoring group, funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), meeting with US President George Bush who presided over the failed coup attempt seeking to oust President Hugo Chavez. (Source: Land Destroyer Report)
This includes several founders of the opposition party, Primero Justicia (Justice First), including Leopoldo Lopez, Julio Borges, and Henrique Capriles Radonski. The latter of the three has been prominently featured in Western media coverage lately.
US State Department documents reveal that the department itself along with US-funded fronts posing as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been providing Venezuela’s opposition with support.
This includes a report titled, “Status of Capriles and Sumate Cases,” referring to the above mentioned Henrique Capriles Radonski and Sumate, a US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded front posing as an election monitor.
Currently, NED’s own website features an extensive list of activities it is engaged in within Venezuela’s borders. It includes leveraging human rights for political gain, electoral manipulation, building opposition fronts, and expanding pro-opposition media. While each activity is labelled with benign titles, it is clear that none of these activities are done impartially, and as State Department documents reveal, these activities are done specifically for the benefit of the US-backed opposition.
Wall Street and Washington’s Open Conspiracy
After the death of Chavez in 2013, US-based special interests openly conspired to finally overturn the political order he built. Corporate-financier policy think tank, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) created a checklist of US foreign policy goals it sought to achieve in Venezuela. They included:
The ouster of narco-kingpins who now hold senior posts in government
The respect for a constitutional succession
The adoption of meaningful electoral reforms to ensure a fair campaign environment and a transparent vote count in expected presidential elections; and
The dismantling of Iranian and Hezbollah networks in Venezuela
In reality, AEI is talking about dismantling entirely the obstacles that have prevented the US and the corporate-financier interests that direct it, from installing a client regime and extracting entirely Venezuela’s wealth while obstructing, even dismantling the geopolitical independence and influence achieved by Chavez in Venezuela, throughout South America, and beyond.
The think tank would continue by stating:
Now is the time for US diplomats to begin a quiet dialogue with key regional powers to explain the high cost of Chávez’s criminal regime, including the impact of chavista complicity with narcotraffickers who sow mayhem in Colombia, Central America, and Mexico. Perhaps then we can convince regional leaders to show solidarity with Venezuelan democrats who want to restore a commitment to the rule of law and to rebuild an economy that can be an engine for growth in South America.
By “Venezuelan democrats,” AEI means proxies created, funded, and directed by Washington, including Primero Justicia and the street mobs and paramilitary units it commands.
More recently, another Wall Street-Washington policy think tank, the Brookings Institution, would publish in a paper titled, “Venezuela: A path out of crisis,” a 5-point plan toward escalating the crisis in Venezuela (emphasis added):
1. The United States could expand its assistance to countries that until now have been dependent on Venezuelan oil, as a means to decrease regional support for and dependence on the Maduro government.
2. The United States could increase monetary assistance to credible civil society organizations and nongovernmental organizations able to deliver food and medicines to Venezuelans. By doing so, the United States should make clear that international pressure aims to support democracy, not punish the Venezuelan people.
3. The United States could support efforts by the opposition in Venezuela to build an “off-ramp” that would split moderate elements of the government away from hardliners, encouraging the former to acquiesce to a transition to democracy by lowering their costs of exiting government.
4. The United States could coordinate with international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to offer financial incentives for holding free and fair elections in 2018, and for the opposition to unify and compete in those elections. Such coordination would also involve developing and publicizing a credible plan to restart Venezuela’s economy.
5. As a last resort, the United States could consider raising economic costs to the government through an expanded sanctions regime that aims to limit Venezuelan earnings from oil exports and block further financing.This policy is risky, given that the Maduro government would be able to more credibly shift blame for the economic crisis onto the United States, and should be accompanied by well-publicized efforts to deliver humanitarian aid through credible civil society and nongovernmental organizations.
While the Western media attempts to frame Venezuela’s crisis as a result of “socialism” and “dictatorship,” it is clear by reading the West’s own policy papers that it is owed instead to a systematic assault on Venezuela’s sociopolitical stability and economic viability, spanning decades.
Venezuela is not the first nation in South America that the United States has sought to overturn by undermining its economy.
Within the CIA’s own online archives under a section titled, “CIA Activities in Chile,” it is admitted that in the 1970s, similar tactics were used to undermine and overturn the government of Chile. It states specifically: (emphasis added):
According to the Church Committee report, in their meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms and Attorney General John Mitchell on 15 September 1970 President Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, directed the CIA to prevent Allende from taking power. They were “not concerned [about the] risks involved,” according to Helms’ notes. In addition to political action, Nixon and Kissinger, according to Helms’s notes, ordered steps to “make the economy scream.”
These Cold War attitudes persisted into the Pinochet era. After Pinochet came to power, senior policymakers appeared reluctant to criticize human rights violations, taking to task US diplomats urging greater attention to the problem. US military assistance and sales grew significantly during the years of greatest human rights abuses. According to a previously released Memorandum of Conversation, Kissinger in June 1976 indicated to Pinochet that the US Government was sympathetic to his regime, although Kissinger advised some progress on human rights in order to improve Chile’s image in the US Congress.
Considering America’s extensive list of interventions, wars, and occupations it is currently involved in worldwide and the manner in which each was presented to the public – with ideology and humanitarian concerns used to manipulate public perception, and considering Venezuela’s opposition is a documented recipient of US support, it is clear that yet another intervention is under way, this time in South America.
Unipolar vs Multipolar
In a world moving toward multipolarism and greater decentralization on all levels, Venezuela’s collapse and a victory for Washington would undo an increasingly balanced distribution of geopolitical power – both in South and Central America, as well as across the world.
As a major oil producing nation, US control over its people and natural resources would further allow the US and its allies to manipulate energy prices toward achieving future goals – particularly in terms of encircling, isolating, and dismantling other centers of political power dependent on oil production for economic prosperity.
One needs not be a fan of “socialism” to understand that the ultimate outcome of Venezuela’s collapse will be a further concentration of power in Washington and Wall Street’s hands. Such power, regardless of whatever ideology it is superficially wielded behind, will always be abused. Regardless of the alleged form of government a nation may take, as long as it is a step away from unipolar globalization, it is a step in the right direction.
The crisis in Venezuela is not one of socialism versus capitalism or dictatorship versus democracy – it is one of hegemony versus national sovereignty, of centralized unipolar power versus an increasingly multipolar world.
A sovereign and independent Venezuela allowed to pursue its own destiny is one in which its own people will naturally seek to decentralize and distribute power. While the current government may not provide the ideal conditions to accomplish this, conditions under a US client regime – as US-wrecked Libya, Afghanistan, or Iraq prove – would be significantly less ideal.
For geopolitical analysts, moving away from ideological talking points and examining the actual government and opposition, their interests, associations, and funding, as well as their base motives reveals a much simpler and consistent narrative, one that any analyst could discern, and a discernment that will stand the test of scrutiny and time. Those entrenched in left/right ideology risk being betrayed by the government’s floundering desperation and the true nature of an opposition that most certainly is not “capitalist” or “pro-democracy.”
Many on the Left have been deeply critical of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) since before it was fast-tracked into law by former President Bill Clinton in 1994. Now, President Donald Trump’s current plan to renegotiate NAFTA is poised to make the massive trade deal even worse.
In late May, a loose coalition of civil society groups gathered in Mexico City to discuss this upcoming renegotiation. Participants included the AFL-CIO, Canadian Labour Congress and over one hundred other labour, environmental, and immigrant rights organizations from across Mexico, the United States and Canada. The meeting produced a joint declaration opposing a Trump-led NAFTA renegotiation and marked the kickoff of the latest international campaign against free-trade deals that benefit corporations and political elites at the expense of workers, communities and our shared environment.
Two questions follow from this judgment: What can we do to stop Trump, and how can we use the moment to challenge the powerful interests that he represents?
The Dangers of a Trump-led Renegotiation
Trump campaigned and won the U.S. presidential election in no small part due to his anti-free-trade positions. He galvanized millions of voters for whom the considerable promises of globalization have long since given way to the stark realities of rising inequality and declining living standards.
After assuming the presidency, Trump decided it was politically necessary to kill off the wildly neoliberal Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to appease his popular base. This decision was met with dismay by nearly all big corporations and elites from both political parties.
But now, in an act of political judo, Trump is trying to use the same anti-establishment, pro-American rhetoric from his campaign to craft a neoliberal NAFTA renegotiation that will include everything demanded in the recently scuttled TPP – and more. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, as well as others in Trump’s administration, have been surprisingly straightforward about these intentions.
Source: Socialist Project
Formal notice of the intent to renegotiate was submitted to Congress on May 18. Following an obligatory 90-day “consultation period,” negotiations are expected to commence in the second half of August. A draft list of the Trump administration’s priorities, submitted to Congress in late March, gives us a window into what we should expect.
A Trump-led renegotiation will mean a strengthening of heinous Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms, which allow corporations to sue governments that “infringe” on profit-making opportunities, for example, by daring to introduce anti-tobacco legislation. It will mean stronger copyright and intellectual property laws, in case you’re not already spending enough on your medications. It will also mean further privatization of the internet, greater corporate control of e-commerce, and most likely a new broadside against net neutrality.
Meanwhile, “investor incentives” will increase the liberalization of capital flows and lead to the offshoring of many thousands of jobs, in the ongoing global race to find the most exploitative labour conditions possible. And, of course, this ceremony will be sealed with the ritual sacrifice of labour, human rights and environmental regulations in each of the three signatory countries.
And let us not forget that, while the TPP accounted for 40 per cent of the world’s GDP, NAFTA still represents approximately 25 per cent. In 1994, NAFTA set the standard for two decades of terrible international trade agreements, and power brokers across the world hope this renegotiation will restore business as usual and set a new standard for decades to come.
Given the power of the United States vis-à-vis its negotiating partners, this panorama might at first glance appear depressing. But we also should not forget the insurgent campaign of Democratic primary challenger Bernie Sanders, which brought together millions of people in opposition to these types of free trade deals. While there are major differences between Trump and Sanders voters, there is real agreement that these corporate-led deals are bad for ordinary people.
Herein lies a real political opportunity that absolutely terrifies elites on both sides of the aisle. Around the NAFTA renegotiation there exists a genuine possibility, in an otherwise badly fractured political landscape, for a bipartisan consensus against corporate and elite power.
Throwing Sand in the Gears
Knowing that the renegotiation of NAFTA may well die at the ballot box – just as TPP and TTIP were killed off by popular demand in the past year – the main goal for its proponents is to conclude talks as quickly as possible. This has been stated clearly by lead trade representatives in each of the three countries. Now, the first major challenge comes not from the United States, but from Mexico.
Mexican general elections are scheduled for July 2018, with primaries and the accompanying political jockeying beginning this fall. With President Enrique Peña Nieto’s approval ratings sinking below 20 per cent, the position of his “institutional revolutionary” PRI, which has dominated Mexican politics for nearly 100 years, is considered vulnerable.
The early frontrunner for the upcoming presidential race, popular former Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has staked out a populist, anti-establishment position that places greater emphasis on labour and environmental rights, as well as national sovereignty. As his campaign advances, he is widely expected to take aim at a U.S.-led NAFTA renegotiation as a winning political wedge issue.
In this context, progressive groups opposed to a corporate-led NAFTA renegotiation must adopt the same strategy that was so successful in the battle against the TPP: throwing sand in the gears. While it was Trump who dealt the TPP its death blow, it was the hard work of progressive civil society that shed light on this secretive deal, slowed its advance and ultimately entangled it in the 2016 election – correctly anticipating that popular consensus would reject the agreement.
In Mexico, this aim can be achieved by emphasizing Trump’s calls to “build the wall,” as well as his racist characterizations of Mexicans as rapists, criminals and job stealers. It can be done by pounding the suddenly-vulnerable Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) as a bunch of robber-baron elites who are looking for one last score before they are flushed from power.
In Canada, a similar strategy can be pursued by emphasizing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s tendencies towards a politics of symbolic resistance and substantive acquiescence. In this style of governance there exists a gap that civil society can exploit. Trudeau very much values his carefully cultivated public image, but Canadians have seen the material impacts of NAFTA on their country, and they now oppose the deal by a four-to-one margin.
In the United States, at least for now, the focus should be on the tremendous lack of transparency that has characterized early negotiations. 500 corporate trade advisors and TPP veterans are being actively consulted, while labour and civil society organizations remain completely shut out of the process. And of course, there is the historically unpopular figure of Trump himself.
As Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division, has argued:
“Trump’s conflicts of interest and self-dealing opportunities with NAFTA renegotiation are not hypothetical; the sprawling Trump business empire has 14 Canadian and two Mexican investments. Some of Trump’s clothing line is made in Mexico. Trump won’t divest his business holdings or release his tax returns, so unless he reveals his full Mexican and Canadian business dealings, we won’t even know in whose interest these NAFTA talks are being conducted.”
Forging a New Progressive Consensus
These are some of the early strategic lines for opposing NAFTA and contesting a Trump-led renegotiation. But to build a more integral politics beyond mere opposition, it behooves us to go a step further. If you accept the argument that trade policy could become a fertile terrain for growing new coalitions, it is only by articulating positive alternatives that we will be able to make these coalitions take root.
We must begin with a political frame that creates space for Trump’s supporters without making any concessions around the xenophobic rhetoric that the President has thus far employed. This is not about Mexicans, or anybody else, stealing U.S. jobs. It is rather about big corporations and political elites excluding the rest of us – from all three countries – from our fair share of the pie.
To create this broad space for political convergence, we must demand an open consultation process. This requires that labour and climate justice groups, rank-and-file workers, immigrants, farmworkers, and small and mid-sized business owners have an opportunity to weigh in with their concerns. In addition to these formal consultations, civil society should help to amplify these voices of concern through people’s tribunals and other public hearings. And this input should form the basis of an alternative vision for cooperation between the three countries.
We should not meekly request that NAFTA’s unenforceable side agreements on labour and environmental standards be strengthened around the edges. Rather, we must demand that worker and climate justice in all three countries be built into the foundations of all subsequent commercial agreements.
In addition, we must call for the deeply unpopular ISDS mechanisms to be either eliminated or opened up so that community groups, individuals and governments can bring lawsuits against corporations for labour and environmental malfeasance. Consumer protection must replace corporate interests as the principal factor in the renegotiation of intellectual property laws, as well as the coming regulation of e-commerce. Investor incentives should be vanquished, and instead of simply requesting that we “buy (corporate) American,” we should demand that all three countries “buy union,” that they buy sustainably, and that they support local, social and solidarity economies when possible.
Prominent labour, fair trade and environmental groups have outlined these and other demands in great detail. Crucially, these proposals are broadly popular with the majority of people in all three countries. The upcoming NAFTA fight thus presents an opportunity to deal a blow to Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric and neoliberal blueprint – and to begin the hard work of forging a new progressive consensus.
He is the inimitable, true political ugliness, the bad boy with a mistimed punch. While not quite professorial in his lunacy (that honour will have to go to Pauline Hanson of One Nation, whose sincere bigotry remains pungent), he aspires to it with a greater sense of reason.
This Exocet missile of Australian politics continues to direct his power and magic into the vessels of the Turnbull government, hoping that his relevance will resume form. His victories, gained from the right wing of the Liberal-National coalition, have been significant, effectively trimming the efforts of the government.
Tony’s never so immaculate releases always tend to rumble. Before an audience at the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London this week, Abbott was very clear:
“Primitive people once killed goats to appease the volcano gods.”[1]
The societies of now were certainly more “sophisticated” but for all that progress humans were still characteristically delusional, a superstitious lot “sacrificing our industries and our living standards to the climate gods to little effect.”
Environmentalism had become a dangerous dogma rather than an indispensable pursuit for a healthier earth.
“Environmentalism has managed to combine a post-socialistic instinct for big government with a post-Christian nostalgia for making sacrifices in a good cause.”
This was not all. A heated earth was something to relish not abhor.
“In most countries, far more people die in cold snaps than in heatwaves, so a gradual lift in global temperatures, especially if it’s accompanied by more prosperity and more capacity to adapt to change, might even be beneficial.”
In this calculus of death, Abbott’s point is distorting. True, cold is a natural killer of the infirm and elderly, and generally, more effective on current figures. But then again, excessive heat is set to catch up in its reaping potency.
According to the World Health Organisation, the middle of the century will see malaria, diarrhea, heat stress and malnutrition gathering up an extra 250,000 people a year.[2]
“Areas with weak health infrastructure – mostly in developing countries – will be the least able to cope without assistance to prepare and respond.”
Abbott, in the true spirit of a climate insurgent, adopts a two pronged approach. Even if climate change was happening (which it’s not, being the science of “absolute crap” in his charming terms), it could hardly be a bad thing even if it was. Having looked at photographs of Manly beach over a century, he saw no signs of rising sea levels. (Such a scientifically inquiring mind!) But surely, a heated earth was far better than a frozen one?
Beneath the currents of the Abbott show was a sense that the science, and scientists, could not be trusted.
“The growing evidence that records have been adjusted, that the impact of urban heat islands have been downplayed, and that data sets have been slanted in order to fit the theory of dangerous anthropogenic global warming does not make it false; but it should produce much caution about basing drastic action upon it.”
The coalition government’s response back in Australia was that Abbott had become a mind changer. If they were consulting the politician who greeted world leaders at the G20 summit in Brisbane in 2014, this was certainly the case. Then, as prime minister, Abbott felt duty bound to make the case that there was such a grave thing as climate change. Climate change scepticism was tantamount to Holocaust denial, and Abbott was playing along, so much so he endorsed the Paris Climate Agreement. But before his audience in Westminster, he suggested that he had always had doubts.
During the Turnbull tenure, Abbott has become the spear thrower for the climate change deniers, manoeuvring himself into territory that embraces both unalloyed radicals and resident nutters. There is much to admire about this suicidal tendency, which is purely political rather than scientific or environmental. It is the pursuit of self-interest and national interest, a view that suspects, combats and dismisses. Few Australian politicians could ever do it and get away with it.
The coalition government, however, risks being outflanked yet again. On Thursday night, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop vented on the ABC’s 7.30 Report, suggesting that the former PM had lost the plot.
“It is up to him to explain the differences between his opinion [as prime minister] and his opinion now.”[3]
In an effort to douse the flames of doubt now engulfing the ministry, Bishop insisted that “the important thing is the government’s position and under Prime Minister [Malcolm] Turnbull we are working hard to come up with a plan that delivers affordable and reliable energy that will meet with our international obligations.” A plan, in short, that did everything.
Prime Minister Turnbull had hoped that the Finkel Report would fireproof him against the next Abbott surge and finally put the climate change voodoo to bed. But the Abbott war against Turnbull is taking place in several theatres, all of which have shown Turnbull to be a modern Maginot line.
On climate, Turnbull’s embrace of the Finkel recommendations, largely because of sceptics within his own party, remain limited, centred on the idea of a Clean Energy Target Abbot regards with satanic scorn. Abandoning it will be Abbott’s prize, and a sign of a government gazing further over the precipice of electoral annihilation.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
In the early 2000s, Left activists the world over looked to Venezuela and its charismatic Head of State Hugo Chavez, as championing a new model of “socialism for the 21st century” and a heroic ally in the resistance to the neoliberal economics sweeping much of the world and particularly the Global South in recent decades. [2][3]
Venezuela, once the heart and soul of the new Bolivarian Revolution, is today in chaos.
According to recent estimates from the International Monetary Fund’s most recent World Economic Outlook report, Venezuela’s rate of inflation has sky-rocketed over the last two years and is on track to reach 2300% by next year. Unemployment is closing in on 30 percent. New York City based Human Rights Watch, and press agencies like PBS, are reporting on a humanitarian crisis spurred on by shortages of food and medicine. [4][5][6]
Violence between opposition-led protesters and Venezuelan security forces has resulted in over 124 deaths and hundreds of injuries. [7]
The right-wing opposition within Venezuela’s National Assembly are blaming President Maduro for the country’s woes and are calling for his ouster. The governments of the US and Canada are likewise holding Maduro to task and have subjected the nation to targeted sanctions affecting key officials. [8][9]
President Maduro’s attempt to resolve these crises supposedly through the election of a National Constituent Assembly in July appears to have only further antagonized his critics at home and abroad.
All eyes are now on the October 15th regional elections. According to authoritative opinion polls, the opposition is expected to secure big wins on Sunday. A substantial deviation from such a result would likely be interpreted in some quarters as attributable to fraudulence of some kind (Russian-sponsored or otherwise).
For all their flaws, the governments of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro represent an important node of regional resistance to the Anglo-American project for the corporate plunder of the South American continent. This reality provides vital context for US and Canadian condemnation of the Venezuelan government, as well as a necessary backdrop for this week’s Global Research New Hour radio program.
Lucas Koerner is based in Caracas and a staff writer for venezuelanalysis.com. In the first half hour, he provides a local perspective of the rationale behind the National Constituent Assembly vote, the opposition protests, and the prospects of further destabilization of the country leading to another coup.
We next hear from Julia Buxton. A Professor of Comparative Politics at the Central European University’s School of Public Policy and Senior Research Associate at the Global Drug Policy Observatory, Swansea University Buxton is a specialist on Latin America and an expert on Venezuela. This interview, recorded in September at the University of Manitoba, provides some background on the evolution of Venezuelan politics over the past two decades, including the role of Chavez himself, the failure to address corruption and social violence in its program of progressive economic and restorative change, the role of the US and agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy in sabotaging the Venezuelan project, and the political and economic consequences of the country’s strategic alliances with China.
Finally, we hear from Henry Heller. He is a Winnipeg-based scholar and professor at the University of Manitoba’s Department of History. In the final conversation of the hour, Professor Heller talks about the sanctions against Venezuela recently announced by the Canadian government, and the true motivations behind it. He also talks about the public discussion he is co-organizing on Neoliberalism and Revolt in Latin America, to take place the evening of October 14th at Broadway Disciples United Church (396 Broadway Ave.) in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . The show can be heard on the Progressive Radio Network at prn.fm. Listen in everyThursday at 6pm ET.
Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:
CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT
Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.
It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.
Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.
Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 10am.
Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday Morning from 8:00 to 9:00am. Find more details at www.caperradio.ca
A Pew poll published on May 2nd was headlined “Why people are rich and poor: Republicans and Democrats have very different views”, and it reported that, “Most Republicans link a person’s financial standing to their own hard work – or the lack of it. Most Democrats say that whether someone is rich or poor is more attributable to circumstances beyond their control.” The partisan difference on this issue was stark: “By about three-to-one (66% to 21%), Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say hard work, rather than a person’s advantages, has more to do with why someone is rich. By nearly as wide a margin, Democrats and Democratic leaners say the opposite: 60% say a person is rich because they had more advantages than others, while just 29% say it is because they have worked harder.”
So, I decided to look at the data regarding this question.
• Men experience sharply higher rates of upward economic mobility than women.
• Blacks experience dramatically less upward economic mobility than whites.
• Rates of upward economic mobility are highest for white men, followed by white women, black men and, finally, black women.
For example, the report said, “women born to parents in the fourth and top quintiles [richest 40%] are more than twice as likely as men to fall to the bottom quintile [poorest 20%].” In other words: upper-income girls in America are “more than twice as likely as” upper-income boys are, to become poor adults.
And: “Only 21 percent of [Blacks] who start in the top income quintile remain there as adults.” By contrast, for Whites, the latter figure is not “21 percent,” but instead “39 percent of the children in [White] families in the top income quintile remain in the top quintile” as adults. That’s almost twice the percentage (39% as compared to 21%) who stay rich as adults. Thus, rich-born Blacks have a much more precarious financial future (almost twice as precarious), than do rich-born Whites, and a generally similar situation pertains also for girls as compared to boys: the girls have a much more precarious financial situation than do the boys.
Of course, whether a person is or isn’t a male, or a White, are obviously “circumstances beyond their control.”
The linked 48-page report there, also titled “Upward Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the United States”, was written by Pew’s Dr. Bhashkar Mazumder, who is one of the top experts concerning U.S. economic mobility, and he notes that this study is the first ever to include a crucial set of data that’s called the “National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort (NLSY),” which had been neglected by most previous studies “despite having several attractive features,” which Mazumder then listed. So, his was the most comprehensive study until at least 2008.
The results, from combining the NLSY data with other data, are:
Consistent with the previous findings of the Economic Mobility Project, the NLSY shows strong “stickiness” in both the bottom and top quintiles of the income distribution. A sizeable number of children who grew up in the bottom fifth remained there as adults, and the same was true of those who grew up in the top fifth. Overall, fewer than 40 percent of individuals who start in the bottom half of the income distribution move to the top half of the distribution as adults.
That last statement is quite striking. If, instead, that finding had been “Overall, 50 percent of individuals who start in the bottom half of the income distribution move to the top half of the distribution as adults,” it would be meaning: half of the individuals who start in the botton half, rise from the bottom half into the top half as adults. And, yet, even that doesn’t seem to be anything like the American dream (of being ‘the equal-opportunity society’), though it’s better than the reality. The actual finding was that “fewer than 40 percent of individuals who start in the bottom half” rise. On page 18 of the pdf is given the racial breakdown of this particular finding: “While 46 percent of whites who are born to parents below the median will surpass the median [the average], the comparable figure for blacks is only 22 percent.” So: even for Whites, the overall U.S. is a somewhat classist society; but, for Blacks, U.S. class-rigidity is outright depressing. And, both girls and Blacks face especially precarious financial lifetime prospects, as compared to boys and to Whites.
Obviously, equal opportunity is a myth in the United States. This doesn’t come from me — it comes from the data. Republicans are up against the data, when they deny that “whether someone is rich or poor is more attributable to circumstances beyond their control” than it is to “their own hard work.” In fact, the data make obvious that the reality is the opposite of what Republicans are assuming — the data show that in order for an American child to have a rich adulthood, that child is going to have to work much harder if it’s a Black or a girl, than if it’s a White or a boy. This is America’s reality, stripping away the very-predominantly-Republican (but more generally the conservative) myth. The reasons why this is the case, aren’t necessarily entirely discrimination against Blacks and against girls; but, to explain such findings without acknowledging the fact that discrimination (prejudices, bigotries) constitutes a severe economic-and-justice problem in this country, and without acknowledging that this problem would need to be eliminated in order for the U.S. to become anything like what Republicans think America is (i.e., an equal-opportunity society), would be extremely unreasonable, under the existing circumstances, as shown in the data.
Furthermore, reader Will Dippel was kind enough to point out, in a comment to the present article’s posting at Washingtonsblog, that an August 2016 study, “The Ever-Growing Gap”, has found that during 1983-2013, wealth increased 85% among Whites, 69% among Latinos, and 27% among Blacks; so, the unequal-opportunity problem in America is rapidly getting even worse than it already is. The trend, in other words, is atrocious; and, so, Republicans’ downplaying of this problem is extremely destructive, in addition to being extremely unreasonable.
A 23 August 2017 Quinnipiac poll asked Americans “How serious a problem do you think that prejudice against minority groups is in the United States today; a very serious problem, a somewhat serious problem, a not so serious problem, or not a problem at all?” 76% of Democrats said “Very serious.” 21% of Republicans did. 26% of Republicans said “Not so serious.” 11% of them even said “Not at all” serious. (Those same respective figures amongst Democrats were only 4% and 1%.) Republicans are thus starkly oblivious to the glaring inequality-of-opportunity problems in the United States; and, so, Republicans’ economic-and-justice proposals ignore an enormous part of American reality.
On 10 June 2014, Carter C. Price, at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, headlined “Patterns of economic mobility in the United States”. It’s a really terrific report (48 pages long in its linked pdf version), which summarizes lots of previous studies related to this question. For example, the opening of this report shows that the physical location where a given person lives within the U.S. is a crucial determinant of that individual’s likelihood of being able to draw a higher annual income than that person’s parents did. Some parts in the U.S. have remarkably low class-rigidity, whereas other U.S. regions have stunningly high class-rigidity, more like a caste system than like any sort of equality-of-opportunity or democracy.
Not only is the U.S. a nation of extremes, but it’s a nation where some areas are, regarding class-rigidity, close to embodying the Republican view of the entire nation (i.e., exhibit remarkably low class-rigidity), and other parts of the country are extremely not (i.e., they have exceptionally high class-rigidity). This disparity is made shockingly clear in the map of the U.S. shown on Price’s page 8 (and also — and more clearly — here). The biggest “extremely not” region (i.e., with very high class-rigidity) extends (and here is a U.S. map showing the outlines of each state) all the way from Michigan, down to Florida, and this area is also very wide, extending from Louisiana in its southwest, to Virginia in its northeast, thus encompassing both the rustbucket states plus almost all of Old Dixie.
But the largest “very yes” (i.e., with highly equal-opportunity) region, where the traditional American dream of intergenerational mobility is almost a reality, extends from the Dakotas and Minnesota, down through Nebraska and Iowa, to Kansas. Remarkably, both of those two large extreme regions, the “extremely not” and the “very yes,” are overall heavily Republican. Whereas in the “very yes” region, Republicans might be overwhelmingly endorsing the view that America is an equal-opportunity society on account of what they are seeing within their own states (which is remarkable equality of opportunity), there is simply a mystery as to why Republicans in the “extremely not” states (Old Dixie) are likewise overwhelmingly endorsing the view that America is an equal-opportunity society — because those Republicans live in areas that are anything-but equal-opportunity regions. (A hypothesis on this matter might be that Old Dixie happens also to be known as the Bible Belt — it’s famous for the residents’ extraordinarily high amount of faith; and this means that believing counter-factual things is especially easy for these individuals; empirical evidence is ignored if it conflicts with any item of faith; indeed, in their high-faith culture, faith is highly honored by them; and this could explain why Republicans in Old Dixie think that they live in an equal-opportunity society.)
Furthermore (p. 19 of the document), Price’s study summarizes “the work of University of Ottawa economist Miles Corak, who produced estimates for the intergenerational earnings elasticity for several countries.” Price’s report goes on:
According to Corak’s data, the United States has an intergenerational earnings elasticity of 0.47, indicating that nearly half of future earnings differences among children are associated with differences in parental earnings. This means that according to this measure the United States has much lower economic mobility than many developed economies in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and lower also than Pakistan.
Using data from the World Bank on the Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, Corak found a strong inverse relationship between inequality and mobility [i.e., high mobility went with high equality]. Princeton economist and former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Alan Krueger used the term the “Great Gatsby Curve” to describe this relationship.50 This curve has sparked a great deal of debate, particularly because the United States stands out among wealthy nations for its high inequality and low mobility. (See Figure 7.)
(That boldface is added by me, to emphasize this glaring contrast between Republicans’ views of America, versus the data-demonstrated reality of America.)
Corak’s ranking of 22 countries on “Intergenerational earnings elasticity” is shown by Price (also on p. 19), and the U.S. rank there is #15. Numbers 1, 2, and 3, are Denmark, Norway, and Finland. Numbers 20-22 are Brazil, China, and Peru (at the very bottom). Immediately above the U.S. in the rankings is #14, Switzerland; and immediately below the U.S. is #16, Argentina. Virtually all of Western Europe, plus Japan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, ranked higher than the U.S.
Applying a very different methodology, a January 2013 World Bank study, “Inequality of Opportunity, Income Inequality and Economic Mobility: Some International Comparisons”, ranked “Inequality of economic opportunity index” for 41 countries, and showed the U.S. as being #24 of the 41, with Norway #1, and Guatemala at the very bottom, as #41. The Index itself “ranges from 2% in Norway to 34% in Guatemala” and is around 18% for the U.S. So: the U.S. is somewhat midway between Norway and Guatemala. Republicans wouldn’t be able to find this America, on their conceptual map of the world. The real America is far from being number-one, in these global rankings
Thus: the U.S., as a whole, is not (even if it might have been in the past, at least for male Whites) an equal-opportunity society; it isn’t that even for male Whites — and definitely not at all, for Blacks, nor for women.
That doesn’t necessarily mean lazy Americans can become wealthy, but this also does happen to be true, and it’s true even around the world, not just in America: Lazy individuals can be, and sometimes are, extremely wealthy. The children of billionaires can become billionaires simply by inheriting it (or having it gifted) from their parents. That can happen even if the heir doesn’t work a day in his or her life. It can happen almost entirely by good luck. And, in order to become one of the world’s wealthiest individuals, inheritance from wealthy parents is all but essential. For examples of this important fact:
Consider the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest individuals in 2010.
#1 on the list was Mexico’s Carlos Slim. His father Julian was a real estate millionaire in Mexico City, and taught business and investments to all his children. Two sons of Carlos, who were Carlos Slim Domit and Patrick Slim Domit, led America Movil, which was the Western Hemisphere’s largest wireless carrier, and the largest subsidiary of Carlos’s own Grupo Carso conglomerate. A third son, Hector Slim Seade, led Telmex, Mexico’s phone monopoly.
#2 was America’s Bill Gates, the son of William Gates II, cofounder of the giant law firm, Preston Gates & Ellis.
#3 was America’s Warren Buffett, son of the wealthy stockbroker and congressman, Howard Buffett, who was one of the founders of America’s libertarian movement, and who had an article published in the second year’s edition of the founding magazine of libertarianism, New Individualist Review, in 1962, where the other writers included Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Ralph Raico. Howard Buffett was also a founder of the John Birch Society. His son Warren felt politically alienated from him even as a child, but Warren’s focus on investing still was taught to him by his father.
#4 was Indian Mukesh Ambani, son of the millionaire founder of Reliance Industries, Dhirubhai Ambani, of whose corporation Mukesh was now the Managing Director.
#5 was Indian Lakshmi Mittal, son of Mohan Lal Mittal, the founder of the steel manufacturing company Nippon Denro Ispat.
#6 was American Lawrence Ellison, who truly had risen from the middle class, after his adoptive father, Louis, made a fortune in Chicago real estate, and lost it during the Great Depression.
#7 was Frenchman Bernard Arnault, founder of Ferret-Savinel Corp., renamed Ferinel Corp. The book From Predators to Icons, notes (p. 146) that his parents were extremely wealthy.
#8 was Brazilian Eike Batista, whose father, Eliezer Battista da Silva, headed the Brazilian mining giant, Vale Corp.
#9 was Spaniard Amancio Ortega Gaona, fashion magnate, who authentically came from a working-class background.
#10 was German Karl Albrecht, founder of the Aldi supermarket chain, who also came from a working-class background.
So, of the world’s ten wealthiest individuals in 2010, 8 were sons of millionaire founders of major corporations and organizations. 1 was middle-class, and 2 were lower-class. And, the two lower-class ones were at the bottom of the top-ten list, and both of them weren’t Americans. Among the top 8, all but 1 (Ellison) were from extremely rich parents.
The advantage that being born to wealthy parents produces is enormous: The children of the very rich constitute only a tiny minority of the population, less than 1%, but they included, in 2010, 70% of the world’s ten wealthiest individuals. Eike Batista was typical of the group in proudly saying “All my businesses started from zero. … I made my own connections.” But even he had to admit, after turning $6 million he had made in gold-trading commissions into only $300,000 and then taking the gamble of buying a gold mine with it, “Thank God, the mine was idiot-proof. Only an extremely rich mine could have withstood all the mistakes I made. I was lucky.” So, the general formula for becoming extremely wealthy is to have the luck to be born rich, and then to have luck yourself in business (or else in the performance of your portfolio). Just being a “brilliant” businessperson works for very few, and it fails for virtually everyone else who is “brilliant.” But having wealthy parents who teach you their trade will increase enormously your likelihood of success. The top key to being on the world’s wealthiest list was to be born rich. (Many hard-working geniuses are like Mozart, or Turing, or van Gogh — they die poor.) Hereditary wealth was the most important feature (70%) of the top ten members of the global aristocracy, in 2010.
On 13 March 2013, Bloomberg News headlined “Brazil’s Richest Family Forging $13 Billion Niobium Dream”, and reported, “In 1965, U.S. Navy Admiral Arthur W. Radford persuaded Walther Moreira Salles, a Brazilian banker and former Ambassador to the U.S., to back a venture to produce something called niobium. At the time, there was no market or commercial use for the powdery element – just studies suggesting that tiny amounts of it could make steel stronger.” Ambassador Salles thus learned crucial information that had been discovered by U.S. Government researchers. “Moreira Salles decided to buy a majority stake in the operation, and the bet paid off. … The Moreira Salles family’s wealth is almost three times that of Eike Batista, who was Brazil’s No. 1 until November.” That good luck came to Ambassador Salles by way of information he had received from his friend, U.S. Navy Admiral Radford, whose profession had enabled him to know the great importance that Niobium would have. Knowing ‘the right people’ helps enormously. What children are raised with the most of that particular advantage, of ‘the right friends’? The children of the very wealthy, of course.
This inherited-wealth basis of the aristocracy has deep implications regarding public policy, and perhaps the most immediate one is estate taxes, which Republicans prefer to call “death taxes,” as if more than 1% of estates have any federal estate tax on them at all — which is not true. 99% of estates in the U.S. have no federal estate taxation of them at all. To call the estate tax, as Republicans do (because their heroes who are Republican aristocrats do), a ‘death tax’, is a lie (at least on the part of those aristocrats, even if not among the Republican mass who crave to become clones of their Party’s aristocrats, and who might thus more properly be called “suckers” than “liars,” though Republican aristocrats are indeed liars on this matter).
Taxes, of any sort, are, in the final analysis, ultimately about distributing the burden of financing government. Should laborers pay taxes at a higher rate than heirs, as they now do? Heirs don’t pay any federal tax at all on their inheritance (unless the estate is among the wealthiest 1% — and, even then, the rate of taxation usually ends up being far below the rate that’s charged on earned income), but workers pay tax on all of their earnings that they draw from their sweat (not only income above the meager income-tax exempt amount but also in the sales and other taxes they spend even on their using the portion of their wages that’s below the tax-exemption — which exemption currently is set at around $4,000 that’s untaxed per person). Is this low an estate-tax fair?
It’s theft from the earned, and it’s transferring this theft as booty to the unearned. It’s what the propaganda from aristocrats (who own the major ‘news’ or propaganda media who pump continually against ‘the death tax’) has caused millions of American suckers to favor, even while it actually robs these people of what they earn. But the conservative mass accept this status-quo because they think that, somehow, they’re going to compete against the aristocrats and win — and, that when they win, they will benefit from there being no taxation of unearned income their children will receive from them as gifts and as inheritances. Maybe the odds on that happening are about as good as the odds that these people will win the lottery; but, at least the lottery can be a reasonably fair game, and this real life situation certainly is not. And one reason it’s not, is that unearned income is taxed far lower than earned income is.
The deceptionists portray estate taxes as being theft from everyone who dies. But it’s not taking, at all, from people who are dying; it’s instead taking from their often-useless heirs (at the time when the asset is being transferred to them) and only if the deceased was enormously wealthy (was above the level of wealth at which a federal estate tax exists); and this taking is not theft at all, because an heir, by definition, hasn’t done a thing to earn whatever it is he or she is inheriting — it’s purely a windfall to him or her, which rewards that person’s good luck to have been born rich, and which turns this good luck into good luck squared, and at the expense of all workers, who have actually earned their keeps and paid taxes on all of it.
The people who are being robbed by this are everyone who isn’t so phenomenally lucky — and their bad luck thus becomes bad luck squared, because they’re being saddled with the burden of financing a government that gives to heirs (and provides tax-supported services to them such as training their employees so that they’re literate, and building the highways on which a billionaire’s corporation transports its goods, etc.) without taking anything at all from them (unless the estate they inherit happens to have been among the largest 1%, and even then the taxation-rate at present in the U.S. is usually lower than what an actual laborer pays).
By rights, all inheritances should be taxed at a 100% rate, because it’s all unearned money. (Otherwise, it would be pay, which is taxed.) To enforce that requirement, however, would entail draconian penalties against tax-evasion, and against exporting wealth as a means of avoiding that 100% tax on all (gifts and) inheritances that exceed modest amounts. Consequently, those changes would first need to be made. However, certainly, the taxes on estates that are over a million dollars, which are currently subject to estate taxation, should be taxed at far higher rates than they are — not taxed zero as Republicans and conservative Democrats urge. The only big problem is the current excessively low taxation-rate on the estates of the very wealthy. Estate-taxation of those estates needs to be increased enormously, in order for an equal-opportunity society to be able to exist at all — for it even to be able to come into existence here.
Why are gifts tax-free, whereas earned assets (such as salaries) are not? Earned receipts are taxed, but unearned ones are not. That’s simply vile, but the aristocracy has bamboozled the public to think it’s terrific. No such society is actually committed to equality of opportunity. It’s committed instead to the reverse. The aristocracy has the public by the throat. To be more accurate, they’ve got it by the mind. And they need the so-called “experts” on morality in order to do this con-job for them. That’s largely the clergy who peddle the morality that promotes aristocracy – God, after all, has selected God’s People to be God’s People – and the ‘news’ media do the remainder of this scam, for the aristocracy, by peddling the ‘social blessedness’ of extreme wealth (‘philanthropy’ and other means of leaving a decedent’s asset under private control, instead of transferring it to public control — control by the government, which would help reduce everyone else’s taxes). Other than the clergy and the ‘news’media who peddle this line, the peddlers for the aristocracy on this are the professors who teach the ‘classics’ that were written by Plato and by other agents of the aristocracy in former times, which (no coincidence) ‘justify’ (though sometimes on a non-religious basis) the existing enormous inequality of wealth. We’re all taught, throughout our lives, this inequality of personal rights, as being, somehow, ‘democratic’.
On 5 June 2006, the Republicans’ aristocratic Tax Foundation headlined “Poll Questions on the Estate Tax”, and reported that 68% of respondents wanted “completely eliminating the estate tax – that is, the tax on property left by people who die.” The question was a lie, because only about 1% of “people who die” were wealthy enough for their estates to be taxed at all under then-current federal law. Honest wording would have been “tax on property left by millionaires when they die.” But on 16 December 2010, Paul Waldman headlined in the liberal (or: the Democratic Party’s) American Prospect, “The Oddly Unpopular Estate Tax”, and he said that a poll he had done showed that even when the question was honestly phrased, the public support for abolition “was only lower by about 10 points.”
The American public wants the estate tax eliminated and the burden transferred onto workers. But Republicans especially do. And, thus, they favor actually the opposite of the equal-opportunity society. And, so, the 2 May 2017 Pew poll found that Republicans especially believe in the myth that America is an equal-opportunity society. Their heads are in a fantasyland. Unfortunately, they vote. But so too do Democrats, and their vision of reality is only marginally more realistic. Clearly, the American public are heavily deceived by the American aristocracy, so as to consent to the existing regime and to want it to become even worse (by either eliminating or else lowering estate and gift taxation).
What, then, is the difference between the Republican and the Democratic Parties? The level of hypocrisy is even higher amongst the Democratic Party’s billionaires and their agents, than amongst the Republican Party’s billionaires and their agents. In the Democratic Party, the line is: Don’t worry really about America’s extreme inequality of wealth, but only about America’s inequality of opportunity.
Larry Summers, the chief economist for President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama, is an archetypal aristocratic agent in the Democratic Party, and so he represents very well the line of that Party’s billionaires. On 15 June 2012, Bonnie Kouvassi at Huffington Post, bannered “Larry Summers: We Need To Focus On Inequality of Opportunity”, and she presented a video of him teaching at Harvard, saying,
“I think we can accept, I think we should accept inequality of results, recognizing that those who earn more are in a better position to contribute more to support society.”
He attacked those who criticized America’s extreme inequality of wealth, and he praised at length “those who are in a better position to contribute more to support society.” Summers’s aristocrat-enhancing view was that, even in a nation of such extreme wealth-inequality as America, inequality of opportunity can be reduced without also reducing inequality of wealth. It’s not just false, but absurdly false: In a country with such extreme wealth-inequality, inequality of opportunity is largely the result of inequality of wealth. Addressing the former without also addressing the latter is doomed to fail. One side of that whole cannot be attacked without simultaneously attacking the other side of it. As a reader at a blog phrased the matter, on 29 September 2013:
“The privileges of wealth grow exponentially with each generation in no small part because of the greater educational opportunities the children of the rich have – with less distraction from needing to work their way through school and less debt with which to begin the ‘rat race’.”
If anyone should know about that, it’s the former Harvard president Summers. However, Summers routinely displayed enormous respect for wealthy people, and contempt for the poor. He was quoted in Ron Suskind’s 2011 Confidence Men as saying in 2009 (p. 197),
“One of the challenges in our society is that the truth is kind of a disequalizer. … One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way they’re supposed to be treated.”
In other words: he holds that the enormous and increasing inequality of wealth in America reflects more than in prior eras the enormous inequality of worth among individual citizens: the super-rich are just super-terrific, and the poor are just super-terrible, in his view. He authentically reflects classical writers such as Quesnay, Smith, and Pareto — agents of the aristocracy in their own time (and they all despised the poor, just as Summers does). But those same classical writers are also implicit in the Republican aristocracy’s agenda. The big difference between the two Parties, is that, though both are essentially the same (one-party — aristocratic-party) rule, over the country, the Democratic Party’s aristocracy and their agents (the Democratic wing of the aristocratic party) are far better at hypocrisy. They pretend to care about the public’s interest. Whereas the Republican Party’s aristocracy (the Republican wing of the aristocratic party) rely upon ‘tough talk’ and a ‘hard-nosed’ approach, the Democratic Party’s (wing) rely instead upon ‘equality of opportunity,’ but both sides of the aristocracy are actually pumping the same basic lie. And, of course, the Democratic Party’s mass of voters haven’t got a clue to that reality. But, neither do the Republican Party’s. The voters, in both, are deceived, by different sides, of the same con-operation.
Consequently, it’s obvious that discrimination exists not only on the basis of race, and not only on the basis of gender (etc.), but also — and universally — on the basis of wealth.
And, the policy-implications of this, extend far beyond merely such issues as estate-taxation (though that’s absolutely essential in order to address discrimination on the basis of wealth), but also need to countervail the other forms of bigotries (not only against the poor). For example: the August 12th Charlottesville Virginia racist attacks represent, in an extreme form, the far more widespread common bigotry against Blacks. Such blaring and bleeding headline events as this (and their prosecutions or lack of same) are open sores in a cultural disease that extends far wider, and deeper, than just that bleeding skin-surface of events. In an oligarchically controlled country, politics will inevitably focus only upon that skin-surface (especially when it’s bleeding), but the cause of the chancre is far more important.
The public are suckered by the agents for the billionaires. This happens even more to Republicans than to Democrats, as is shown in the polling-numbers. Whereas, at the bottom, amongst the masses, there are enormous differences between Republicans and Democrats on some issues; there is, at the top, amongst the billionaires who fund the Party and its organs (such as the Democratic aristocrats’ American Prospect), very little real difference. But Democratic aristocrats are far more-skilled hypocrites than Republican aristocrats are. It’s like in Britain, where Labour’s Tony Blair was a hypocritical imperialist, but the Conservative Margaret Thatcher had been an overt one (and not nearly as aggressive a one as Blair turned out to be). And, so, the two aristocratic groups, Republican (or conservative) and Democratic (or liberal), sound different from one-another; and, that’s the political competition between America’s two Parties. That’s the level of political debate, in this (and almost every) country. And, it has been proven that America’s aristocracy rule the nation, behind the scenes — the U.S. is no democracy. Whereas a few countries might possibly be classified reasonably as a “democracy,” the U.S. certainly isn’t one of those.
Furthermore, some Republican politicians even give Democratic politicians competition in the hypocrisy department. For example, the Christian-fundamentalist-pandering Republican Judge Roy Moore, who recently won the U.S. Senate nomination to fill U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s vacated Senate seat from Alabama, was revealed on October 10th to have lied and engaged in tax-evasion. Moore, who is famous for posting the Ten Commandments at his court as the Chief ‘Justice’ of Alabama’s Supreme Court, should have known that one of those Commandments was “Thou shalt not steal” (including steal from the government that’s paying his salary), and that another was “Thou shalt not bear false witness” (including against his detractors who had earlier tried to publicize Moore’s fakeries). Both Parties are con-operations for the aristocracy.
America has an actually one-party Government, with two contrasting sales-pitches to it, and those two sales-pitches are the programs of the two nominal Parties. One sales-pitch, the pitch that’s directed to Republican voters, depends upon that mass’s conservatism; the other sales-pitch, to Democratic voters, depends upon deceiving that mass of voters, to think this Party to be the opposite of conservative — that the Democratic Party is progressive — when it’s actually not. (The Democratic Party, which was progressive when FDR led it, gradually became merely liberal — fake ‘progressive’ — after he died. It’s now more conservative than it is progressive.)
So: Do Democrats understand what produces wealth in America? Polls show that the mass of Democratic voters have a far more-realistic idea of this than Republican voters do; and, that’s just a fact. Perhaps it’s also the reason why, in the research for my book They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, I found that Democratic Presidencies (and, to a lesser extent, Democratic Congresses) have produced far better economic results for the nation than did Republican ones. Democratic politicians, in order to retain their voting-base, need to hew at least a little to the Party’s economic hypocrisies about its concern for “the little guy.” This doesn’t fully anchor the Party’s policies to economic reality, but Democratic politicians can’t afford to make a fetish of denying economic reality, nearly to the extent that Republican ones can, and do. (The Republican Party, after all, proudly declares itself to be conservative; they don’t even try to hide the fact.) And that’s the difference — it’s a very real difference at the voting-base of each Party, but not at the billionaires’ level, which actually controls things and produces the bipartisan (neoconservative-neoliberal) dictatorship that rules America, behind two screens of deceits: one to manipulate conservatives, and the other to manipulate progressives.
On October 7th, the neoconservative-neoliberal (that’s the single ideology of the U.S. aristocracy) New York Times, headlined its lead frontpage Sunday print-edition story, “The ‘Resistance,’ Raising Big Money, Upends Liberal Politics”, and reported that Democratic billionaires such as fund-manager George Soros and “the San Francisco mortgage billionaire Herbert Sandler, the New York real estate heiress Patricia Bauman and the oil heiress Leah Hunt-Hendrix” were “posing an insurgent challenge to some of the left’s most venerable institutions — and the Democratic Party itself.” That news-story linked to “Document: Here’s the Democracy Alliance’s ‘Resistance Map’,” and this ‘Resistance’ turns out to consist of groups which those same billionaires, and other billionaire Democrats, had donated heavily to, and which had supported Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaigns. It’s now calling itself collectively the ‘Resistance’, in the Democratic Party; but, what it is the ‘resistance’ to, is not made at all clear. The presumption of the story’s writer, and the newspaper’s editors, seems to be that the Party’s voters won’t be sufficiently intelligent to have suspicions about the honesty, of that ‘resistance’, and of that news-report about it. This type of presumption, this trust by the public, has always worked for the aristocracy in the past; but, maybe, someday, it no longer will. Perhaps there is a limit to how many times the public can be fooled, before they start to understand the game.
During the American Revolution, Americans finally came to understand the game, and overthrew and replaced the British aristocracy. Perhaps some day, Americans will overthrow and replace the American aristocracy. But, as of yet, no way is clear as to how that could be done. If it ever happens, it will be the Second American Revolution. However, one thing is very clear: if it ever happens, no American aristocrats will be donating to it, nor assisting the American people in any other way, to gain freedom. The aristocracy are maybe the top .01%, but they control this country, more than the bottom 99.99% do, and won’t relinquish that control voluntarily. And there is no way that it would be able to happen under the rules that they have established for this country. No more would that be the case, than it was the case regarding the First American Revolution. (That’s why it is called a “Revolution.”)
No such ‘Democracy Alliance’ is going to do such a job. It might do a job, but that wouldn’t be the job which is necessary, not even if they’re promising to do that job. Behind the scenes, they’re already committed to not doing the job that needs to be done. But, obviously, some people think that it’s the job that needs to be done, or else the New York Times wouldn’t be positioning this puff-piece as the lead story in their Sunday newspaper, in order to promulgate, to the public, the organization’s propaganda-line, that these people intend to do the job that needs to be done. This free publicity for those billionaires’ effort wouldn’t be donated to that organization if the Times management didn’t think it would help the cause of the people who control the corporation, which is an important propaganda-vehicle for the Democratic Party.
Right now, we’re stuck with a highly unequal-opportunity system, which is getting more unequal-opportunity, instead of less; and (mixing metaphors here) the Republican Party are the bulwark for it, while the Democratic Party plays the ‘good cop’ ‘resistance’, against that ‘bad cop’ bulwark, in this kabuki show, which has been set up by the aristocracy, for the ‘entertainment’ (deception) of the American public.
Because hypocrisy is so essential in order for Democratic aristocrats to be able to control their voters, there is, in the Democratic Party, a far larger separation between the aristocracy and its voters, than is the case in the Republican Party. Whereas, in the Republican Party, there is no progressivism, not even in pretense (since conservatism itself is the opposite), there is substantial progressivism within the Democratic Party’s electorate; and — since none of the aristocracy are progressive — the potential tensions between the electoral base and the money-base are far larger within the Democratic Party, than within the Republican Party. For example: on October 5th, Pew headlined “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider” and reported that, whereas 71% of Democratic Party voters believe that “Government should do more to help the needy,” only 24% of Republican Party voters do. Obviously, no billionaire supports that position, because doing so would entail that person’s donating everything to a U.S. Presidential campaign and to Congressional campaigns, backing only candidates who honestly do support that position (placing first the interests of the needy, and last the interests of the greedy), which would constitute the Second American Revolution, if it won control. And, likewise obviously, no such Revolution has, as of yet, occurred, which means that there apparently are no billionaires who even want it to occur.
The Counter-Revolution against the American Revolution has succeeded, and it is continuing still further, to succeed even more than it already has. That’s the American reality, today. Neither the Democratic Party, nor the Republican Party, nor any other party that will be funded by the U.S. aristocracy, will admit this fact, no matter how much the data might happen to back it up.
Multiple wars ravage the Middle East. Turkey has inserted itself into the middle of most of these regional conflicts and ended up a loser.
Under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has intervened and formed alliances with a rogue’s gallery of imperial warlords, terrorists-mercenaries, Zionist expansionists, feudal potentates and obscure tribal chiefs, with disastrous economic, political and military consequences for the Turkish nation.
In this paper we will discuss Turkey’s domestic and foreign policies and behavior over the past decade. We will conclude with lessons for middle range powers, which might help in future decisions
President Erdogan’s Domestic Disasters
Throughout the early decade of the 21st century, Erdoğan made a strategic alliance with an influential semi-clandestine organization led by a cult-leading cleric, Fethullah Gülen, who was conveniently self-exiled in the US and under the protection of the US intelligence apparatus. This marriage of convenience was formed in order to weaken the leftist, secular and Ataturk nationalist influenced opposition. Armed with the Gülenists’ treasure trove of forged documents, Erdoğan purged the military of its Ataturk nationalist leadership. He proceeded to marginalize the secular Republican Party and repressed leftist trade union, social movements and prominent academics, journalists, writers and student activists. With support from the Gülenists movement, ‘Hizmet’, Erdoğan celebrated his successes and won multiple election and re-election victories!
Initially, Erdoğan failed to recognize that the Gülenists/Hizmet operated as a subversive political organization, which permeated the state apparatus through a dense network of bureaucratic, military, judicial, police, and civil society organizations, with ties to the US military/CIA and friendly relations with Israeli policy makers.
By 2013, Erdoğan felt intense pressure from the Gülenists/Hizmet which sought to discredit and oust his regime by revealing multi-million dollar corrupt practices involving him and his family in a ‘Turquoise Color Revolution’ – remake of other ‘regime changes’.
Having discovered his internal vulnerability, Erdoğan moved to curtail the power and reach of the Gülenists/Hizmet controlled media. He was not yet prepared to deal with the immense scope and depth of the elite links to Gülenists/Hizmet. A Gülenists-led military coup was launched in July 2016, with the tacit support of the US military stationed in Turkey. This was foiled by a major popular mobilization with the support of the armed forces.
Erdoğan then moved to thoroughly purge the followers of Hizmet from the military, public administration, schools, business, the press and public and private institutions. He extended his purge to include secular and nationalist political leaders who had always opposed the Gülenists and their attempted coup d’état.
As a result of the coup attempt and the subsequent purge, Erdoğan weakened and fractured every aspect of the state and civil society. Erdoğan ended up securing control of a weakened state with a degraded business, educational and cultural world.
The Gülenists coup was authored and led by its supremo Fethullah Gülen, ensconced in his ‘secret’ private estate in the United States. Clearly the US was implicated in the coup and they rejected Erdoğan’s demands to extradite him.
Erdoğan’s subservience to the US/NATO leadership have undermined his attempts to strike at the roots of the coup and its internal and external power structure. The US/NATO military bases still operate in Turkey and retain influence over its military.
In the aftermath of the coup, the decline of Gülenist influence in the economy contributed to economic reversals in investments and growth. The purge of the military and civil society reduced Turkey’s military preparedness and alienated the democratic electorate. Erdoğan had already nearly lost his bid to the presidency after his earlier purges in 2014.
Erdoğan’s Foreign Policy Disasters
Perversity is when a ruler weakens its military and represses its citizens and launches a series of risky foreign adventures: This is exactly what Erdoğan has done over the past several years.
First Erdoğan backed a terrorist uprising in Syria, providing arms, recruiting overseas ‘volunteers’ and providing them with unrestricted passage across the Turkish border. Many of the terrorists proceeded to join forces with Syrian, Iraqi and Turkish Kurds in establishing military bases on Ankara’s borders.
Secondly, Erdoğan ran a scurrilous electoral campaign among the millions of ethnic Turks living in Germany – violating that powerful nation’s sovereignty. As a result, Erdoğan increased tensions and animosity with what had been its closest ally in its quest for EU membership – effectively terminating the process.
Thirdly, Erdoğan backed NATO’s invasion and bombing of Libya, killing President Gadhafi, who had been an independent voice, capable of serving as a possible ally against imperial intervention in North Africa.
Fourthly, Erdoğan backed the brief government of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood after its electoral victory in 2012 following the ‘Arab Spring’ uprising in Egypt of 2011. He backed a formula similar to his own Turkish policy of excluding the secular, democratic opposition. This led to a bloody US-backed military coup led by General Abdel Sisi in July 2013 – a lesson not lost on Erdoğan.
Fifth, Erdoğan’s de facto friendly relations with Israel – despite verbal criticism – in the face of Tel Aviv’s assassination of nine non-violent Turkish protestors trying to break the starvation blockade of Gaza – undermined relations with the pro-Palestine Arab world and nationalists in Turkey.
Sixth, Erdoğan developed lucrative ties with Iraqi Kurd dictator-warlord, Masoud Barzani, facilitating the flow of oil to Israel. Erdoğan’s own illicit oil deals with Barzani strengthened the cause of Kurdish separatism and exposed the widespread corruption of Erdoğan’s family dealings.
Seventh, Erdoğan provoked military tensions with Russia by shooting down a warplane in Syria. This led to an economic boycott, which reduced export earnings, devastated the tourism sector and added Moscow to his list of adversaries, (Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, US, Germany, Hezbollah and Iran).
Eighth, Erdoğan backed the tiny oil-state of Qatar, sending supplies and soldiers to oppose a threat from Saudi Arabia, the other royal oil statelets and Egypt, US allies and followers.
Despite his many disastrous domestic and foreign policies, Erdoğan learned nothing and forgot nothing. When the Israelis backed the Iraqi Kurds in organizing an independence ‘referendum’ aiming to ultimately annex the rich oil fields of Northern Iraq, Erdoğan took no action despite this threat to Turkish national security. He merely made verbal threats to cut off the Kurd’s access to Ankara’s oil pipelines. He took no concrete steps. Erdogan preferred to pocket transit taxes from the oil, antagonizing Iraq and Syria and strengthening the links between Kurdish Iraq and its secessionist counterparts in Syria and Turkey.
Because of Erdoğan failure to close down the US military base following its support of the Gülenist-led coup, the Turkish army is still heavily under US influence, opening the possibility of another uprising.
Erdoğan’s lip-service to ‘nationalism’ has served mainly as a political tool to repress domestic democratic political parties and trade unions and the Kurdish and Alevi communities.
Erdoğan’s initial support and subsequent opposition to the jihadi terrorist groups seeking to oust the secular-nationalist government in Damascus has caused ‘blowback’ – with ISIS terrorist cells bombing civilian targets Istanbul and Ankara with mass casualties.
Conclusion
Erdoğan’s unprincipled, opportunistic and pro-imperialist NATO alliance demonstrates the inability of an aspiring regional power to find a niche in the US Empire.
Erdoğan believed that being a loyal ‘ally’ of the US would protect Turkey from a coup d’état. He failed to realize that he had become a disposable pawn in US plans to instill more servile rulers (like the Gülenist) in the Middle East.
Erdoğan’s belief that Turkey’s collaboration with the US to overthrow Syria’s President Bashar Assad would lead to a successful territorial grab of Northern Syria: instead Erdoğan ended up serving the US-backed Syrian Kurds tied to the Turkish Kurds. By working to break up Syria and destroy its state and government, Erdoğan strengthened Kurdish cross border expansionism.
Erdoğan failed to recognize the most basic rule of imperial policy: There are no permanent allies there are only permanent interests.Erdoğan thought Turkey would be ‘rewarded’ by acting as a US surrogate with a share of power, wealth and territory in the Middle East. Instead, as a ‘normal’ imperial power, the US used Turkey when it was convenient and would then dispose of Erdoğan – like a used condom.
Anti-imperialism is not just an ideal and moral/ethical principle – it is a realistic approach to safeguarding sovereignty, democratic politics and meaningful alliances.
Late on October 12, the Turkish Army started deploying troops and vehicles in Syria’s Idlib province. According to reports, at least 30 Turkish vehicles entered Idlib via the Atme border crossing and deployed in an area between it and Darat Izza town.
Some sources speculated that the deployment was coordinated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) that is the most powerful group in the militant-held Idlib province. However, this has not been confirmed by any evidence so far.
It’s interesting that the area of deployment allows Turkish forces to operate against both radicals Islamists in Idlib province and Kurdish militias in northern Aleppo.
Earlier, Turkish National Defense Minister Nurettin Canikli once again repeated that Ankara believes that weapons supplied to Kurdish-dominated US-backed forces in Syria will be used against Turkey.
In Deir Ezzor province, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) liberated Kusham Fawqani village and consolidated its gains north of Deir Ezzor. This allows to develop operations further in order to liberate Deir Ezzor city.
At the same time, government forces, led by the SAA Tiger Forces, further outflanked al-Maydin city and de-facto encircled it, according to pro-government sources. Clashes are ongoing in the urban area.
ISIS terrorists attacked the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) at the Jafrah oil fields and forces the SDF to retreat from the area, according to the ISIS-linked news agency Amaq. The SDF has not shown any photos or videos that allow to debunk Amaq’s claims.
Meanwhile, the SDF has reportedly captured the villages of Hasf Tall, Ghayran, Jarbus, Tabaraya and Husayn at the al-Suwar road preparing to push towards al-Busariyah.
Just as it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that ISIS/Daesh are Western proxies/strategic assets in Syria, so too has it been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt the myriad illicit ways in which the terrorists enrich themselves to the detriment of Syria, and beyond.
Not only do NATO terrorists engage in organ harvesting[1], for example, but they engage in sex slavery as well. Author and human rights activist Ewelina U. Ochab reports the following:
During my recent trip to Iraq, I was shown a document, dated October 16, 2014, listing the prices for the purchase of Yazidi and Christian girls and women. The prices ranged from 75,000 Iraqi Dinar (about $64) for a thirty- to forty-year-old woman, to 200,000 Iraqi Dinar (about $170) for a girl between one and nine years old. Overall, the younger the girl or woman was, the higher the price to be paid – the sight of such prices being paid for babies and young children filled me with unimaginable horror at the pain they n would go through.[2]
Since the White Helmets are al Qaeda auxiliaries, again, proven beyond a reasonable doubt, it follows that we should be viewing their videos with a critical eye.
Given what we know of the terrorists’ illicit operations, if videos or other media products feature children, as they so often do, the following questions need to be asked:
Where are the parents?
Who are the parents?
If there are no parents in the video, why not?
Where is the follow-up? What happened to the featured children?
Are children being exploited to create a pretext for more NATO war crimes?
Are images of children being “recycled”?
If medical procedures are being performed on children, are correct medical protocols being followed?
A more subtle (but effective nonetheless) example of child exploitation, instrumentalized to promote war and terrorism, involves 8 year old Bana Alabed, whose parents are al Qaeda affiliated. “Bana’s” alleged tweets, taken in their entirety, serve as propaganda to advance the goals of her terrorist-affiliated parents who lived in a terrorist-occupied area of East Aleppo from which terrorists launched gas cannister bombs —- filled with explosives and shrapnel (i.e. nails) — onto innocent civilians in Aleppo.
Prof Tim Anderson’s Facebook commentary that,
(i)t must be one of the greatest propaganda achievements of modern times that Washington (with its embedded media) has succeeded in convincing millions of apparently educated people in western cultures that it has “NOT” been conducting a war against Syria for the past seven years,[3]
attests not only to the power of Western propaganda, but also to the urgency for Western populations to become more critical media consumers.
The impacts of the Western-imposed war on Syria will resonate for many generations.
Notes
1 Mark Taliano, “Syria: Disappeared Voices by Western Corporate Media.” Global Research. 9 October, 2017.( https://www.globalresearch.ca/voices-from-syria-disappeared-voices-by-western-corporate-media/5612525) Accessed 13 October, 2017.
2 Ewelina U. Ochab, “Sexual Violence As A Weapon Of War: The Story Of Daesh And Boko Haram.” Forbes. 2 March, 2017.( https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2017/03/02/sexual-violence-as-a-weapon-of-war-the-story-of-daesh-and-boko-haram/#318118e06a17) Accessed 13 October, 2017.
US domestic law takes precedence over international law, just as it was recently decreed is the case for Russia as well, so no matter how controversial it may be that Washington is pulling out of the globalist body for naked political reasons, it nevertheless has the sovereign right to do so in pursuing its interests as it sees fit.
The Mainstream and even Alternative Medias are in uproar over the US’ decision to withdraw from UNESCO, with the former slamming it for being a violation of globalist principles while the latter is opposed to its stated pro-“Israel” reason in boycotting an organization that supports Palestine. According to State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert:
“On October 12, 2017, the Department of State notified UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova of the US decision to withdraw from the organization … This decision was not taken lightly, and reflects US concerns with mounting arrears at UNESCO, the need for fundamental reform in the organization, and continuing anti-Israel bias at UNESCO.”
From this terse statement, it’s clear that the US is also doing this in order to pressure the UN to submit to Trump’s “’Lead From Behind’ reforms” in having other members do more of the “heavy lifting” (in this case, simply pay more), as well as of course hoping that this move will compel the body to reconsider its support of Palestine. As the clichéd saying goes, “money talks”, and by suspending approximately 22% of the organization’s funding, Washington wants to force its Security Council and G20 counterparts to either pay much more for the indefinite future in compensating for this sudden budgetary deficit, or to submit to its political will in order to “turn the tap back on”.
Trump, being the consummate businessman and author of “The Art of the Deal”, has emphasized on numerous occasions that he will no longer tolerate the US’ partners, and especially the UN for that matter, refusing to “pay their fair share” in whatever multilateral organization it may be and depending on the US to “foot the bill” for them instead. With this in mind, it makes sense why he wants to hit UNESCO where it hurts by withdrawing 22% of its funding, just like what happened in 2011 in protest against the group admitting Palestine as a full member. At that time, Reuters reminded their audience that:
“U.S. legislation prohibits funding to any UN agency that grants full membership to any group that does not have “internationally recognized attributes” of statehood.”
This is significant to keep in mind because it forms the “legal” basis for the US’ actions. The US considers that its domestic law takes precedence over international law, and while this principle was neglected and sometimes outright violated by previous administrations, Trump is trying to make sure that it’s abided by as a means of promoting the US’ interests. To this end, although it may be unethical and immoral for the largest funder of an international organization to withdraw nearly a quarter of the said group’s annual budget as a power play for advancing its own agenda, the fact remains that this is the reality in which the decision is playing out, and the US does indeed desire to shape UNECO according to its own designs by virtue of the country being the body’s largest funder.
No value judgement is being made about this observation, but it deserves to be mentioned that the US isn’t the only country which places its domestic law above international one. President Putin signed legislation at the end of December 2015 decreeing that the Russian Constitution is more important than whatever international agreements Moscow had previously entered into in response to the “European Court of Human Rights’” politicized decision to “award” former jailed billionaire and energy tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Yukos over $2 billion. As RT reported at the time:
“President Vladimir Putin has signed into law the bill allowing the Constitutional Court to overrule the decisions of international courts if such decisions contradict the principle of supremacy of the Russian Constitution.
The new act published on the government website on Tuesday reads that the Constitutional Court will look into every decision of any intergovernmental body based on an international treaty and find if it matches the Russian Constitution and the rights and freedoms guaranteed by it. Upon such consideration the Constitutional Court can allow the decision to be executed in Russia, in full or in part, or ban its execution – also in full or in part. The ban would automatically cancel any national acts allowing the execution of the unconstitutional ruling.
The law has been developed and drafted in order to fulfill the mid-July ruling of the Russian Constitutional Court reading that the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) must be individually approved and only carried out if they do not contradict basic Russian law.
In late 2013, the Russian Constitutional Court ruled that it had the right, but not an obligation to decide on the execution of contradictory ECHR decisions in Russia. The July decision expanded the supremacy of the Constitutional Court over foreign judiciaries and international treaties, and established the priority of the Constitution in general.”
This pro-sovereignty move proves that Russia also pursues its own national self-interests at the perceived expense of its supposed international “commitments”, which is similar in a sense to the US’ move to withdraw from UNESCO for related reasons. Moscow, however, wasn’t in a position to essentially blackmail the ECHR when it refused to abide by its decision, unlike Washington’s power in being able to do just that to UNESCO in crippling the organization. In this sense, Russia’s actions didn’t have any tangible “collateral damage” in the state-to-state international sense, while the US’ deliberately seeks to inflict such consequences in order to pressure its counterparts to do its bidding.
This is a crucial distinction to make, as it means that Russia’s execution of pro-sovereignty decisions in the framework of international bodies isn’t aimed against any of its state peers and carries with it no pecuniary punishment against them, whereas the US’ employment of the same appears in this case to be an exercise in international blackmail. Nevertheless, both Russia and the US have the sovereign right to formulate policy based on the presumption that national law takes precedence of its international counterpart, with neither action being objectively “good” or “bad”, but being simply an expression of the Neorealist paradigm of International Relations in proceeding from the basis that the only true motivator of state behavior is self-interest, however it’s subjectively perceived and ultimately plays out.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) together with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network revealed a scheme of weapons supply to the terrorists of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra.
There is no secret that the U.S. provides the so-called moderate opposition and Kurdish militia in Syria with arms and ammunition most of which are the weapons remained after the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact disbanded.
The U.S. DOD, through U.S. SOCOM, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, as well as Picatinny Arsenal, American military research, and manufacturing facility located in Dover, New Jersey, acquired arms in some Eastern European countries including Ukraine for their further sending to Syria. The procurement volume has already exceeded $700 billion.
Kiev used the logistical scheme elaborated by Washington to export arms and weapons from the Ukrainian armed forces weapons depots. The deal is estimated at $110 billion.
Between June 5 and September 15, the United States sent 1,421 trucks loaded with weaponry to the “moderate” opposition, including 596 trucks (more than 40 %) from Ukraine. Most of them ended up in ISIS’ hands.
The General Staff of Ukraine took advantage of Oktyabrsk seaport located 25 kilometers southeast to Mykolaiv and Kiev air transport hub to supply weapons to the Middle East.
The transportation of weapons by air was the most effective procedure in terms of delivery speed. The weapons were transferred from ammunition depot No. 48 of Central Missile and Artillery Directorate situated in the Ukrainian town of Vinnytsia to Gavrishovka Airport and then delivered by 456 brigade jets to Kiev’s Boryspil International Airport.
Earlier, the Ukrainian authorities might have delivered arms and weapons through ammunition depot No. 65 located in Kharkiv’s Balakliya.
To cover up the illegal supplies, a series of deliberate arsons were organized at the military depots. The incident in Vinnytsia provoked the public outcry. According to the Ukrainian media, more than 40 tons of artillery shells were allegedly destroyed. In fact, this represents a basis of weapons sold and delivered to ISIS.
The similar cases won’t stop as Kiev needs to hide grand larceny and illegal arms sales from the public eye.
Sophie Mangal is a special investigative correspondent and co-editor at Inside Syria Media Center where this article was originally published.
The West has effectively preyed on the Kurds’ internal divisions and has used some factions to fulfill an imperialist goal of dividing and weakening the Near and Middle East. The Kurdish people are diverse, and in recent years, aspects of their culture and customs have been discussed in mainstream media. But the behavior of some of their more corrupt factions must also be addressed.
A history of human rights abuses
Separatist Kurdish factions have a vested interest in claiming Arab, Assyrian or Armenian history as their own. However, at times when they have failed in that endeavor, they have resorted to destroying any relevant history pertaining to the areas they are trying to claim altogether. In this aspect, they operate in a similar manner to Daesh/ISIS.
Assyrian Artifacts Vandalized in Kurdistan Region of Iraq
Recent reports show Kurdish flags painted on Assyrian reliefs in Dohuk, not once, but twice in quick succession. There is evidence of hammering and chiseling taking place, as well as numerous suspected bullet holes. The Kurdistan Regional Government have not condemned these acts or committed any resources to watching over and protecting Assyrian heritage.
Every time the Kurds failed in an attack against Turkey, they would migrate to Syria and try to claim Syrian land as their own. For instance, they tried to claim the Syrian city of Ayn al Arab, naming it “Kobani/Kobane.” The origin of the name is the word “company,” a reference to a German railway company that built the Konya-Baghdad railway. The Kurds also claimed Al Qamishli, another Syrian city, as their illegal capital and renamed it Qamislo/Qamishlo.
It’s worth mentioning that Kurds are not even a majority in the land they claim as theirs in northeast Syria. For example, in the governorate of Al Hasakah, they amount to about 30 to 40 percent of the population. That number has decreased since the outbreak of the current Syrian conflict, as many Kurds have left for European countries.
Most of them have fled to Germany, where their numbers are about 1.2 million, a little less than the number of Kurds living in Syria. However, they do not seem concerned about seeking autonomy there. They only seek it in the Middle Eastern countries that have provided them with refuge all of these years – these are the countries they want to stab in the back instead of thanking them for their hospitality.
Amnesty International’s many refutable allegations against the Syrian government and the Syrian Arab Army cannot be taken at face value in the absence of other corroborating reports. In some cases, however, they do report truthfully, such as when they released a report in 2015 accusing the YPG, the militia of Syria’s Kurdish population, of a range of human rights abuses.
“These abuses include forced displacement, demolition of homes, and the seizure and destruction of property,” the group wrote. “In some cases, entire villages have been demolished, apparently in retaliation for the perceived support of their Arab or Turkmen residents for the group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS) or other non-state armed groups.” Amnesty International has also documented the use of child soldiers, according to Lama Fakih, a senior crisis advisor for the group.
Some Kurds claim that their “Kurdistan” is “multicultural and multi-religious,” which is disingenuous when you consider that those additional cultures consist of people now dwelling amongst a Kurdish majority in lands the Kurds took by force. On September 25th, these minorities were faced with the prospect of casting meaningless votes for the KRG Referendum in Iraq since, even if they all voted “no,” they would nonetheless be outvoted by the Kurdish “yes” majority and as a result would still find themselves subject to a Kurdish government and agenda, if the Iraqi government recognized the referendum.
British Parliament addresses Kurds illegal confiscation of Assyrian lands (Kurds Stealing Assyrian Land). https://t.co/C6RuBHTIsU
Finnish investigative journalist Bruno Janttidescribed his experience working in Iraqi Kurdistan while investigating Daesh:
“When working in Iraqi Kurdistan, I was struck by the prevalence of regressive attitudes, including racism and sexism. I returned recently from Iraqi Kurdistan where I spent a couple of weeks investigating the Islamic State (IS) group. Working mostly in the vicinity of Sulaymaniyah and Dohuk, I could not help but notice a great many societal and cultural characteristics that somewhat surprised me.
Considering what is happening right next door in Syria, the level of anti-Syrian racism did catch me off guard. I came across such prejudice almost daily. A taxi driver quipped in Sulaymaniyah: ‘These Syrians are ruining our country.’ Another taxi driver was quite upset at Syrian kids who were washing car windows and selling tack. ‘These are dirty kids.’ he said. It was all but unusual that internally displaced persons of Iraqi or Syrian Arab descent who had fled to Iraqi Kurdistan were discussed using such language.It wasn’t just taxi drivers. In the Sulaymaniyah governorate building, an officer deemed it appropriate to prep us for our interviews in refugee camps in the area. She told me, verbatim, that Syrian refugees ‘complain about everything.’ In another city, a police chief was astonished and disappointed that my colleagues and myself were applying for a permit to work in a camp inhabiting Syrian refugees. The police chief stated: ‘But these are Syrian refugees!’ There was no shortage of contempt in his voice.
I had been fully aware that Kurdish nationalism flirts with highly questionable portrayals of Arabs, Persians, and Turkish people. In Iraqi Kurdistan, I was surprised at how prevalent some of those attitudes seemed to be.”
#Qamishli : The young Man, Ali Faisal al-Khuzaim killed by the Kurdish militias because he broke away from them and joined Syrian army #SAApic.twitter.com/2sewnx6EBv
Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and political commentator. Focused on exposing the lies and propaganda in mainstream media news, as it relates to domestic and foreign policy with an emphasis on the Middle East. Contributed to various radio shows, news publications and spoken at forums. For media inquiries please email [email protected].
Although many are still stunned in the aftermath of the Route 91 Festival tragedy – a series of unanswered questions persist following what has been described by media as the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.
The motive for the Las Vegas mass shooting crime still remains unclear.
The Imprint of Mass Tragedy
The recent mass shooting involving the Las Vegas Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, marks the return of heavily politicized mass shootings in America. Although America has seen a host of smaller, less sensationalized mass shootings throughout the course of 2017, including the bizarre Fort Lauderdale Airport Shooting, this latest high-profile calamity has resuscitated the trauma inducing imagery so prevalent in the post-9/11 War On Terror era. Likewise, because its unlikely aspects, combined with the sheer spectacle of the drama – one might surmise that this Las Vegas event is akin to something like “the 9/11 of Mass Shootings.”
Over the past several years, 21WIRE has chronicled many bizarre shootings andmass casualty incidents that have rippled across America and Europe. These events have become a new kind of ritualized ‘crimescape’ that has injected the masses with a host of socio-political concerns over race, religion, gun reform and security, while obscuring and obfuscating the forensic reality of the crimes themselves.
As we’ve stated before, all too often there’s a heavy emphasis on the theatrical stage-like persona of any alleged attacker or killer being touted as hard evidence. This aspect of the narrative also clouds the alleged modis operandi and can later be presented in sensationalized media as circumstantial evidence of an apparent crime, despite the fact any so-called evidence would likely result in many hours of analysis and debate, potentially without an ultimate conclusion, even if the evidence eventually reached a court room setting.
The Las Vegas mass shooting story appears to be no exception….
‘ROOM WITH A VIEW’ – Mystery shrouds the Las Vegas shooting – why is there no eye-witness testimony from guests on the 32nd floor? (Image Source: twitter)
Over a week after one America’s largest mass shootings, we have yet to see any CCTV footage of the alleged killer’s “sniper’s nest” or his whereabouts leading up to the tragedy, as he moved in and around Las Vegas. We’re told the alleged shooter outfitted cameras around his hotel room and door, a room supposedly filled to the brim with a military arsenal. As the investigation continues to simmer, confusion over major parts of the official story, has led to powder keg of pressure that has resulted in heavy criticism from members of the public and new independent media alike.
QUESTION: Why would hotel staff not be alerted to the mounting of cameras and the massive amount of gear being brought to the room prior to the shooting massacre and why is there no footage of the apparent shooter using the freight elevator as is now claimed?
In this report we will attempt to address some of the main questions and unlikely coincidences surrounding the Las Vegas shooting. We’re told that this tragic shooting attack was carried out by one individual without a criminal past – but is there more to the story?
Shooting Timeline Revised
Following a brand new press conference this week, Las Vegas sheriff Joseph Lombardo revealed a complete change in the official timeline of the October 1st Las Vegas mass shooting.
The LA Times explains the major chasm in the official narrative:
“In a timeline released last week, investigators said Paddock had stopped firing at the concert across the street at 10:15 p.m., and the first police officers arrived on the floor at 10:17 p.m. and encountered the wounded Campos at 10:18 p.m., who directed the officers to Paddock’s suite.
Police were not in a hurry to enter Paddock’s suite because the security guard’s arrival had halted the shooting, police implied in previously describing the timeline. Paddock had killed himself by the time officers entered the room, they said.
In a news conference Wednesday, Lombardo said it was his “assumption” that Paddock stopped his shooting spree because the gunman, using his spy cameras, “observed the security guard, and he was in fear that he was about to be breached, so he was doing everything possible to figure out how to escape at that point.”
All of this has transpired as media reports now state that Stephen Paddock first checked into the Mandalay Bay hotel room 135 on September 25th, not the 28th as previously reported by the police and FBI. You have to wonder what happened over those 72 hours leading up to one of America’s deadliest mass shootings, as well as question the shift in details concerning the hotel check-in date.
QUESTION: Why have authorities misled the public about the Las Vegas shooting timeline – and why did it take a so long to breach the hotel suite after police knew much earlier that a shooting had taken place inside the hotel?
The updated timeline is a major shift in the official story, as it raises questions about why law enforcement took so long to respond to the shooter’s hotel room. Furthermore, it exposes the Mandalay Bay security guard’s heroic back story that suggested he stopped the shooter from continuing his shooting massacre. In the early days of this investigation this part of the story was gleefully parroted by mainstream media.
According to authorities, the Mandalay Bay hotel security guard Jesus Campos “was alone and unarmed” when he discovered the purported shooter, facing some 200 rounds in the process, somehow surviving the massive gunfire with a minor leg injury. Based on the amount reported gunfire, the public would have likely seen heavy damage inside the hotel hallway and outside the suite in at least several areas of the 32nd floor, not to mention there would also be additional witnesses within earshot of the shooting. This is something that would have resulted in multiple 911 calls to police.
The new report concerning Campos and the shooting timeline, now puts Las Vegas officials in the hot seat, as they now have no known reason why the alleged shooter would have stopped his rampage.
Not only do these new details challenge police response time but the very nature of how the shooting started, a stark contrast to police and FBI press conference details from the beginning of this investigation. Another major aspect is the 6 minute time frame Mandalay Bay recognized a shooting occurring inside their hotel prior to the concert mass shooting. Speculation and confusion has enveloped the Campos story, as mainstream reports now state there’s an armed private security guard outside of the Mandalay Bay security guard’s home following the Las Vegas shooting.
Interestingly, the Mandalay Bay security guard previously hailed as a hero remains completely absent from any TV interviews.
*Update* – New reports state that Campos, who was scheduled for at least five TV interviews, abruptly disappeared prior to those appearances. One such interview included a FOX News interview with Sean Hannity. This new twist in the Las Vegas shooting adds another bizarre aspect to an already strange case. Here’s FOX News below:
“The Mandalay Bay security guard shot by Stephen Paddock in the moments leading up to the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history was set to break his silence Thursday night with five television interviews, including one on Fox News, Campos’ union president said.
Except when the cameras were about to roll, and media gathered in the building to talk to him, Campos reportedly bolted, and, as of early Friday morning, it wasn’t immediately clear where he was.
“We were in a room and we came out and he was gone,” Campos’ union president told reporters, according to ABC News’ Stephanie Wash.”
QUESTION: What is going on with the main eye-witness in this case?
*Update*
Adventurous independent reportage by former Project Veritas operative Laura Loomer, reveals that the Campos family has a gag order over the Las Vegas shooting case.
This follows yet another major shift in the Las Vegas shooting timeline.
Amazingly, police have once again revised timeline details associated with Mandalay Bay security guard Jesus Campos and the alleged shooter – now stating that the guard’s encounter with the suspected gunman started near the same time as the concert mass shooting. The noticeably agitated Las Vegas sheriff Joseph Lombardo, now claims that the 9:59 time frame is when Campos supposedly investigated a nearby door alarm on the 32nd floor as previously reported.
Interestingly, according to a published article at the LA Times this week, a Mandalay Bay spokeswoman appeared to challenge elements of this latest Las Vegas shooting timeline but did not elaborate:
“A spokeswoman for the company that owns Mandalay Bay seemed to dispute the police timeline given to The Times on Tuesday but did not explain why.
This remains an ongoing investigation with a lot of moving parts. As evidenced by law enforcement briefings over the past week, many facts are still unverified and continue to change as events are under review,” MGM Resorts International spokeswoman Debra DeShong said in a statement. “We cannot be certain about the most recent timeline that has been communicated publicly, and we believe what is currently being expressed may not be accurate.
DeShong added, “It is not appropriate for us to comment further at this time on what remains an open matter for law enforcement.”
Here’s a look at Las Vegas sheriff Joseph Lombardo giving an emotive and evasive press conference on October 9th as FBI agent Aaron Rouse looms in the background…
Days ago, after several online theories emerged suggesting possibility that multiple shooters were involved in the Las Vegas shooting, Lombardo entertained the idea that Paddock may not have been alone in the hotel suite. Since then he’s updated this theory after the October 9th press conference stating that there was “no second shooter.” This follows a week of shifting narratives, red herrings and misinformation, as its now stated police do not believe anyone else entered Paddock’s hotel suite.
In spite of the new change to the timeline, Clark County Assistant Sheriff Tom Roberts maintainsthat
“…the hotel dispatched its own armed security team to the 32nd floor, which arrived “right around the same time” as Las Vegas police, who officials have said arrived on the floor at 10:17 p.m. But the gunman had already fired his final shots out his hotel window at 10:15 p.m.”
It’s important to note, at 10:12pm or 10:13 pm, an officer on the 31st floor reported hearing “fully automatic” gunfire one floor above him.
By 10:24 pm authorities located Paddock’s hotel suite with SWAT and remained outside the suspected gunman’s room. Interestingly, at 10:28 pm reports state there may have been a second gunman on the 29th floor but this was later believed to be an “erroneous” account according law enforcement.
At 11:20 pm, police explode the suspected gunman’s door, locating a body on the floor supposedly dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Based on Roberts claim above, there would have been a full 56 minutes before the hotel suite breach was said to taken place.
QUESTION: Will there be additional revisions in the official timeline to come – as this story continues to go sideways?
Here’s a screen shot of the first official timeline of the shooting in the first 24-48 hours after the incident. You have to wonder why the story has been altered so dramatically since then…
Todayreported the following updated information concerning the Las Vegas shooting. Watch asToday interviews a second eye-witness at the hotel suite:
“Stephen Schuck was one of the first people to encounter Paddock when he went to check out a faulty fire exit door on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay and Casino on Oct. 1, according to a new timeline of events.
“I was about a third of the way down the hallway and I started to hear shots go off,” he told TODAY in an exclusive interview Wednesday.
Schuck then saw hotel security guard, Jesus Campos, stick out his head from a doorway.
He yelled at me to take cover, and as soon as I started to go to a door to my left, the rounds started coming down the hallway,” Shuck said. “I could feel them pass right behind my head. Something hit me in the back and I took cover.
“I tried to think, how I could get to Jesus because I could that see he was shot in the leg, and I just told myself, wait for him, he’s going to have to stop shooting some time. It was kind of relentless.”
According to reports, Schuck “calmly” called police over his radio following the apparent start of the mass shooting.
Here’s Today‘s Matt Lauer interviewing the second hotel eye-witness, Mandalay Bay hotel maintenance man Stephen Schuck…
As a barrage of media speculation continues in any high-profile case, a series of formulaic polarizing political points become an echo chamber in its tragic aftermath. This is something that rapidly descends into wild speculation which only serves to magnify any emotionally driven aspect that might later be presented as a definitive motive to carry out a crime. Very often, we’ve seen the discovery of a seemingly ready-made manifesto, laundry list of hateful rhetoric or collected material from an alleged killer retained as ironclad proof of a crime. However, current analysis of the alleged Mandalay Bay shooter has failed to yield any such results, in spite of a chorus of overzealous and misinformed reportage from both mainstream media and alternative media there has not been any concrete material linked to Paddock thus far.
It should be mentioned that there have been a bevy of accusations suggesting various political and terror affiliations from certain alternative media circles, as mainstream media continues to float the idea that Paddock may have been radicalized, due to evidence revealing a series of cruises taken the Middle East in recent years by the alleged Las Vegas shooter. But so far these claims remain unconfirmed by authorities.
Time will tell if this line of conjecture is perhaps a red-herring meant to corral and ensnare the public by way of an overtly politicized emotional appeal.
In cases such as the Las Vegas shooting, one should be careful to not jump to any conclusions, as we’ve reached the slow drip phase by which information is being conveyed by authorities and media. While law enforcement looks to tie up loose ends and shore up any early holes or bizarre theories, its possible that a more through analysis of all the forensic data in the case will be pushed into the background, as new information may be introduced to steer critics of the official story.
It is ironic that the investigation into the Las Vegas shooting, one of the largest mass shootings in the history of America, there’s been an eerie absence of conclusive evidence concerning a number of details.
Below is an inside look at the reported hotel suite that appears oddly intact considering the massive amount of gunfire said to have taken place inside on the 32nd floor area…
Adding to that, there was a delayed release concerning a mysterious document left on a table near the alleged killer’s body that contained only numbers andno letters – this was something that introduced a cryptic backdrop into the compelling crime scene.The suspicious nature of the document then became a “psychic driver” to increase speculation while introducing another unexplained element from the crime scene.
The whole circumstance took on a theatricality that could push the viewer out of a critical investigative mode and into a partially synthetic frame of thinking regarding the murky contents of the alleged communiqué.
Over this past week, reports suggested that the document at the scene may have contained calculations used by the shooter for maximum firearm accuracy. On the surface, this would appear to lend itself to the official story but in reality all it does is lead to more questions, as contradictory claims over exactly how the dramatic shooting occurred would also seem to contradict analysis of ballistics, as the amount of victims wounded or killed would most likely have been far more significant if the shooting was based on sniper-like calculations that may have made use of hundreds to thousands of either .223 or 308 caliber rounds – not to mention the possibility of a belt-fed machine gun scenario using other caliber rounds.
In recent years, 21WIRE has documented that frequently there is much more involved behind-the-scenes when it comes to high-profile attacks in America, particularly of those said to be ‘lone wolf’ variety. The incidents themselves are quickly taken out of the forensic realm despite early police reportage, eye-witness testimony or statistic improbability. In this way, the narrative gives way to a hyper-realized account that defies logic and reason.
Other recent reports reveal that the well-known casino mogul Steve Wynn, self serving or not, has shed light on the particular protocol carried out by casino employees. Below is a passage from the NY Post on this aspect of the story:
“Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn suggested Sunday that Stephen Paddock would have set off alarm bells at his properties had he tried launching his mass murder from one of them.
Wynn, after whom the glitzy Wynn Las Vegas on the Strip is named, said his housekeeping staff is trained to do a visual inspection any time they enter a room, adding that a “Do Not Disturb” sign on a door for longer than 12 hours is investigated.
“The scenario that we’re aware of would have indicated that [Paddock] didn’t let anyone in the room for two or three days,” Wynn told “Fox News Sunday.” “That would have triggered a whole bunch of alarms here.”
Below is the scanner audio shortly after the crime was reported to police…
Moreover, many conspiratorial claims that have yet to still be fully explained or even be appropriately addressed by authorities have exploded on the internet. This has led to a growing speculation that has only deepened the mystery behind this America’s latest mass tragedy. As authorities have yet to uncover a clear motive for the crime, police scanner audio, along with eye-witness testimony, has suggested that multiple shooters may have been at the scene.
The amount of independent examination regarding this case thus far is fairly staggering and in the wake of any multilayered event, one must proceed with caution when reviewing the available evidence, as the doorway for a ‘trial by media’ frenzy in both mainstream media and alternative media could be used to derail sincere analysis.
Although the scanner audio is chaotic, the police dispatch communication appears to reveal some startling information contradicting the official story surrounding the Las Vegas mass shooting. While any event contains its share of confusion, the specific acknowledgement of an apparent active shooter or shooters within the fairgrounds of the concert venue, point to a deeper more complex methodology used to carry out the attack. Rather intriguingly, the scandal plagued NY Times published sections of these scanner recordings for public inspection, which could be an attempt by mainstream media to diminish or control any information regarding potential multiple shooters.
In spite of ongoing media meddling, there’s been some compelling accounts suggesting that there may have been gunfire from multiple locations by law enforcement and citizens alike. While the authenticity of these claims could be a matter of debate, these unexplained accounts have been larger ignored by mainstream media.
*WARNING* – Graphic content in the video below.
Here’s a forensic analysis from YouTube user Genesis CNC investigating the auditory anomalies at the Las Vegas shooting…
Below is episode #205 of the Sunday Wire, listen as ACR’s Hesher, Jay Dyer of Jay’s Analysis and myself, discuss larger historical themes concerning the Las Vegas mass shooting, while taking a look at the available ballistic evidence, as well as exploring the possibility of multiple shooters and other strange anomalies surrounding the case…
Other questions have emerged regarding the absence of witness accounts from anyone who stayed on the 32nd floor, although there’s been some testimony from other floors of the hotel, the citizen analysis below raises a few interesting points…
Let’s look even further into one of America’s deadliest mass shootings…
‘DEAD MAN’S HAND’ – The purported Mandalay Bay Shooter 64 year-old Stephen Paddock. Reports have made a vague mention of prescription medication – look for this to be a focal point when this story is revisited by mainstream media. (Image Source: kbc.co.ke)
The Las Vegas Shooter?
On October 1st, authorities revealed that 64 year-old Stephen Paddock was the suspected gunman in the Las Vegas mass shooting that claimed the lives of at least 58 people and injured as many as 527 (later downgraded to 489) at an outside concert venue on the strip. The alleged “lone wolf” assailant apparently fired down from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel at concert goers nearly 400 yards away at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival while Jason Aldean performed his headlining set on the final night of the event. Additional media coverage has suggested that the number of those said to be initially injured had decreased by at least twenty victims due to “double counting” at nearby local hospitals by October 3rd.
We’ve been told the apparently well-to-do Paddock, a well-known high stakes gambler among Las Vegas casinos, had been an accountant who was hunting enthusiast, a licensed pilot who had at least two planes and a boat, in a life filled with luxury cruise vacations.
‘ABOVE VIEW’ – This image displays the distance of the entire crime scene.
Reports have also revealed that at the hotel crime scene, Paddock was supposedly equipped with at least 23 weapons, including two tripods used to shoot out of two different windows from inside his two-room hotel suite. In addition, the LVMPD suggests Paddock loaded “in excess of 10” suitcases up to his room in the days leading up to the Route 91 concert. A raid on Paddock’s properties put the overall firearm total at 47 guns, as law enforcement also recovered a large amount of explosive material from inside his vehicle at the resort hotel. Incidentally, its worth mentioning in a week where FBI combed through one of Paddock’s properties in Reno, there was a reported break-in.
NOTE – Reports of Paddock scouting other locations prior to the apparent shooting, takes public attention away from the lack of CCTV footage, the shaky timeline details and the lack of motive in the Las Vegas mass shooting crime…
Rather intriguingly, Paddock is stated to have previously been an internal auditor for the predecessor company of Lockheed Martin during the mid 1980’s. Lockheed Martin is of course among the world’s largest defense contracting companies and has been tied to other high-profile American mysteries such as the JonBenét Ramsey case. The defense contracting and intel linked giant has not disclosed exactly which predecessor employed Paddock but the Maryland-based defense contractor was formed during the merger of Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta in 1995.
The discovery of Paddock’s employment history and his personal wealth has added confusion to the high stakes shock and awe shooting event that took place in Las Vegas this week.
Official reports also state that Paddock was the owner of a residence some 80 miles outside of Las Vegas in Mesquite, Nevada. In addition to that, according to public records, appeared live at an apartment complex he owned in Mesquite, Texas, while residing at retirement community in Reno with his girlfriend 62 year-old Marilou Danley. All in all, according media, the apparent “multimillionaire” Paddock, lived a transitory life, supposedly having some 27 different residences throughout the US.
“The 64-year-old’s friends and family said they never suspected Paddock of planning a shooting, and Las Vegas police said he was not on their radar prior to him committing the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.”
Continuing, reports alsostate that
“…He [Paddock] also worked as a letter carrier for the US Postal Service in the ’70s, as an IRS agent from 1978 to 1984, adding to the obtuse profile of the suspected lone gunman.
On a strange note, the Las Vegas shooting story seemed to echo elements of a shooting that took place at a hotel and casino in the Philippine capital, Manila in June of 2017. What are the chances of this very odd coincidence?
‘WORLD TRAVELER’ -Paddock on an overseas trip believed to be the Philippines in April of 2013. (Image Source: ghananews)
As the media stylized profile of Paddock and those around him has grown, the FBI, police and media diverted the public’s attention to Danley, Paddock’s girlfriend, a former casino hostess who was supposedly out of the country in the Philippines at the time of the Mandalay Bay shooting. Danley’s trip was paid for by Paddock, who is stated to have also wired $127,000 to her family reportedly to buy a home.
Adding to the evidence concerning wired funds, intense scrutiny surrounded a suspicious claim that a mysterious woman allegedly gave a dire warning to concert goers some 45 minutes before the last night of the Route 91 Festival. The overlapping narratives were said not be related according to police, nevertheless the two different aspects were conflated, prompting Danley to be named a “person of interest” who was then flown back to the US for additional FBI questioning. Interestingly, some critics have questioned the validity of the warning prior to the concert due to the nature of the televised interview.
The search for Danley’s whereabouts prior to the Las Vegas shooting spanned some seven countries dating back to mid September and according to neighbors, she hadn’t been seen since August.
Here’s a passage from CNNthatrevealed the following details:
“Danley, 62, who travels on an Australian passport, arrived in the Philippines from Tokyo on September 15, then left for Hong Kong on September 22 and flew back to the Philippines on September 25, said Maria Antoinette Mangrobang, a spokeswoman for the Philippine Bureau of Immigration.”
The confusing dynamic prompted Danley and her attorneys to later issue a statement claiming she had no prior knowledge of the mass shooting.
“CBS News senior investigative producer Pat Milton reports authorities were continuing to comb through Paddock’s electronic devices — including a laptop and cellphone — at the FBI crime lab in Quantico, Virginia. So far, none of the devices point to a motive for the shooting rampage.”
This added to new details suggesting Paddock’s vague use of a freight elevator, something according top casino owner Steve Wynn, wouldn’t have happened at his property.
Here’s a second interview with Eric Paddock, the alleged shooter’s brother, who creates his own theory as to how Paddock may have gotten weapons up to the Mandalay Bay suite. Watch and listen to his baffling interview with media…
Other background information revealed that Patrick Benjamin Paddock (left photo), Paddock’s father, was apparently arrested in 1961 for robbing a Valley National Bank in Phoenix in 1960 – something which later landed the elder Paddock on the FBI’s most wanted list after escaping a 20-year prison term at Federal Correctional Institution at La Tuna, Texas. In 1978, Patrick Paddock was arrested in Oregon where he was running a bingo parlor under assumed identity Bruce Werner Ericksen.
The crystallization of Paddock’s surreal and hard to believe ancestral lineage creates a criminal hall of mirrors all the way from the mind bending counter-culture of the 1960’s to today’s Las Vegas mass shooting.
Very often with hyper-real crimes, there’s a stark portrait that emerges regarding any suspected killer and in the case of Paddock this was no exception. The man named as the Mandalay Bay shooter had no previous criminal record and was described as a quiet, generous man by family members and one alleged neighbor, as other media reports painted the apparent killer as someone who may have had trouble controlling his behavior, even suggesting he may have had an abusive personality in the past.
However, what seems to be missing in most of these cases, is a more balanced psychological profile of these “solo actors,” as there is usually an incomplete picture that makes little to no sense at all after only a handful of people who knew the purported murderer speak with media. Furthermore, you have to wonder why years of business associates and more acquaintances and friends have not come forward with any additional information.
Additionally, there have other suspicious sidebars concerning the Las Vegas shooting. One such story was posted on the message board and popular hacker hangout site, 4chan. The story in question was also discussed on Reddit, and was near carbon copy of story that transpired prior to the Oregon shooting at UCC.
Here’s a passage from a 21WIRE report regarding the October 1st, 2015 UCC shooting which was exactly two years to the day of the Las Vegas mass shooting:
As evidence of advanced knowledge of the Oregon shooting event surfaced on 4chan, many have become concerned and even suspicious of the claims.
The following is passage is from Salon.com that discusses the suspicious alert prior to the UCC campus shooting:
“Federal officials announced they were investigating a recent 4chan exchange that appeared to predict the rampage. In a cryptic post on the /r9k board on Wednesday, an anonymous poster with an image of Pepe the Frog holding a gun reportedly posted, “Some of you guys are alright. Don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the northwest. happening thread will be posted tomorrow morning. so long space robots.”
4chan has been rife with controversy since its inception, as some critics think it may indeed be a limited hangout for the intelligence community. And due to the suspect nature of the website, a bevy of internet researchers have questioned the highly orchestrated law enforcement response in the aftermath of the UCC shooting via the apparent 4chan warning.
During this same time, SITE Intelligence injected an ‘ISIS meme’ into this event without revealing any solid evidence. This then prompted an apparent ‘official’ statement that echoed those dubious claims from ISIS. So far, these claims linger though they’ve failed to produce any connection to ISIS.
As we’ve noted numerous times here at 21WIRE, the intelligence monitoring group called SITE, has ties to both the CIA and Israeli intelligence. The group has also had ethical concerns raisedover the nature of their intel gathering in the last decade and according to the group’s founder, Rita Katz – they’ve managed to the release terror related material linked to ISISprior to the group itself.
Kip Herriage a former financial advisor and venture capitalist from Wall Streetpublished a reportexamining suspicious trading involving MGMon a sister site linked to his website Virtual Research Advisory. The startling passage below suggests that there was an excessive amount of shares sold off by MGM CEO/Chairman in the weeks leading up to the Las Vegas shooting.
We at 21WIRE cannot verify all of Herriage’s claims but given his background and pedigree, this post should be reviewed for further consideration, as it appears to be another strange element revealed in the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre:
“We will examine the share price movements of two gun manufacturers (American Outdoor Brands and Sturm Ruger) and the share price movement of MGM (which owns Mandalay Bay). We will also examine additional financial events surrounding MGM, including what can only be referred to as massive levels of insider selling in the shares of MGM, by the CEO/Chairman and MGM officers/directors. As you’ll see, more than $200 million in MGM shares were sold in the weeks leading up to the attack.”
On October 2nd, there were reports that shares for Las Vegas casinos took a significant fall after the October 1st shooting.
“MGM Resorts International, which owns the Mandalay Bay hotel near where the shooting occurred, fell 5.6 percent Monday. Wynn Resorts slipped 1.2 percent. Las Vegas Sands fell as much as 2.1 percent before closing higher.”
‘LIVE DRILL’ – Las Vegas has been at the forefront of active shooter training. ( Image Source: sinclairstoryline)
Las Vegas Active Shooter Drills
Back in 2014, during another high-profile Las Vegas shooting, 21WIRE revealed that Nevada officials sought to increase their budget to thwart potential terror related activity for 2014, according to KoloTV in Las Vegas:
“Nevada’s Homeland Security Commission on Thursday approved a grant allocation plan that will increase funding for the region’s fusion center to nearly $1.1 million, up from $750,000 this year.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports Las Vegas was ranked too low on a threat assessment list to receive federal funding in the current federal budget, a move that brought swift criticism from Nevada officials.
For the coming fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, Las Vegas will receive $950,000 in the special funding. That’s on top of statewide counter terrorism funding totaling $3.5 million.”
Later it was learned that funds were said to have been allocated for 20 additional ongoing programs throughout the state.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal revealed the city’s longtime practice of active shooter scenarios started in 2009 in the wake of a series suspicious intelligence linked attacks in Mumbai, India.
“Emergency responders in Las Vegas have spent years training to respond to a mass casualty event such as Sunday night’s massacre, officials said Thursday.
We knew what to do,” Clark County Fire Department Chief Greg Cassell told reporters. “It was much grander than we ever envisioned. However, we were able to handle it because of our people, our training, our professionalism and our equipment and our relationships.”
The report continued, with a focus on specific locations for shooter drills:
“Our job is to work with all first responding agencies and coordinate a response,” Clarkson said.
After the plan was developed, emergency responders ran drills at hospitals, hotels, schools and malls.
“Because that’s where historically these things are taking place,” Cassell said.”
Here’s footage of a Las Vegas Active shooter drill taking place at City Hall in August of 2016…
Interestingly, the night of the Las Vegas shooting there have been other claims surrounding additional information concerning active shooter related activity, which could support other theories and suspicious activity said to have taken place the same night as the tragic events unfolded at the Route 91 Festival.
COINTELPRO, Gangs and Counter-gangs
Some questions have emerged from the ether of the internet concerning the FBI and the Las Vegas shooting.
QUESTION: Is it possible the FBI or any or intelligence agency played some part in the Las Vegas massacre – whether inadvertently or otherwise?
In the search for answers regarding the investigative tactics of various intelligence agencies that have come into question, there’s none perhaps more dubious than the Newburgh FBI sting that resulted in the entrapment four men who participated in a fabricated event created by the bureau.
Here’s a 2011 passage from The Guardiandescribing how a FBI informant named Shahed Hussain coerced four others into a fake terror plot:
“The “Newburgh Four” now languish in jail. Hussain does not. For Hussain was a fake. In fact, Hussain worked for the FBI as an informant trawling mosques in hope of picking up radicals.
Yet far from being active militants, the four men he attracted were impoverished individuals struggling with Newburgh’s grim epidemic of crack, drug crime and poverty. One had mental issues so severe his apartment contained bottles of his own urine. He also believed Florida was a foreign country.
Hussain offered the men huge financial inducements to carry out the plot – including $250,000 to one man – and free holidays and expensive cars.
As defence lawyers poured through the evidence, the Newburgh Four came to represent the most extreme form of a controversial FBI policy to use invented terrorist plots to lure targets. “There has been no case as egregious as this. It is unique in the incentive the government provided. A quarter million dollars?” said Professor Karen Greenberg, a terrorism expert at Fordham University.”
The reputation of the FBI has suffered greatly in the recent past as well as over the past couple of decades. Following the 1993 WTC bombing, the FBI was revealed to have been ‘handling’ Emad A. Salem,a former Egyptian army officer who was a prized undercover operative thrust into confidential informant status and person who played a key role in the bomb plot.
Domestically in America, it has been well documented that the FBI created a counter-intelligence program known as COINTELPRO, not only as a way to influence, but also a way to disrupt and coerce political factions from the inside out. The FBI program infiltrated countless groups and movements across the political spectrum.
According to reports these groups included but were not limited to the following,
“The Black Panther Party, The Communist Party of America, the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, the New Left, the Students for a Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, the Chicano Movement, the Puerto Rican Liberation Movement, Communist groups, anti-war organizations, Hollywood stars sympathetic to these groups, and civil rights leaders.”
On March 8th 1971, “secret files” from the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, were allegedly stolen and subsequently released to media organizations, revealing for the first time the scope of the FBI’s domestic spying and infiltration on political and protest groups in America. After two months of planning, a group calling themselves “The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI,” decided to break-in to a small town FBI office the same night as the first historic bout between heavyweight boxers Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden.
Some of the Citizens’ Commission members involved in the Media office burglary were never revealed and rather strangely, the case was never solved – even though 200 FBI agents had worked the case. In fact, “there were no alarms, surveillance cameras, or locks on most of the filing cabinets,” at the FBI office in Media.
The courts later ordered the FBI to reveal part of their counterintelligence program, disclosing six operations run by FBI field offices throughout the country. The documents also revealed a specific emphasis to funnel covert aid to “White Hate Groups,” from 1964-71, that largely diverted those funds to the KKK, as long as they choose COINTEL PRO targets. Similarly, FBI efforts to infiltrate New Left groups and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) fixating on ant-war, student and feminist causes.
Between 1956 and 1971 the FBI’s controversial program influenced and radicalized hundreds of left-wing and right-wing groups to control and neutralize political dissidents across America.
Also throughout the 1960’s and the 1970’s the CIA’s Operation CHAOS “collected substantial amounts of information on domestic dissidents from 1967 to 1973,” as admitted by the CIA. The secretive intelligence operation was also related to the overseas Phoenix Program (Operation Phoenix) which was used in Vietnam to tear apart the political infrastructure through the use of informants, agent provocateurs, and targeted assassinations.
Interestingly though, the prototype for modern deep state intelligence programs goes back to the formation of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) an intelligence propaganda agency in 1941 that was succeeded by Office of Strategic Services (OSS) a wartime intelligence apparatus created in 1942 that focused on psychological warfare. OSS agents also worked closely with British Security Coordination (BSC).
Similarly, on a global scale, NATO’s paramilitary-style stay-behind-armies were said to have comprised Operation GLADIO. The origins of GLADIO have been well documented and the secretive counterintelligence operation has been linked to a wave of right-wing ‘false flag’ terror attacks across Europe throughout the 1950’s into the 1980’s. The anti-communist organizational designs were directly connected to that of the CIA and MI6 in particular, with the US and British special forces reportedly facilitating the training.
From this, we can view global operations like GLADIO in addition to the post-9/11 “War On Terror” security surge as a form of ‘power politics’ used to aggressively influence the foreign policy of other nations through the use of covert militarization.
Below Dr. Daniele Ganser discusses his seminal 2005 book (above left photo), NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. Ganser asserts that covert armies were used to subvert the political interests of various nations through the implementation of a Cold-War era ‘strategy of tension’…
Here at 21WIRE, we’ve kept a running report on ‘known wolf’ actors involved in many attacks on Western soil, here’s another look at other suspicious intelligence informant and terror cases that have held that distinction over the years:
Following America’s previous most deadly mass shooting in Orlando were reports revealing that the FBI had a close relationship with the suspected attacker through the use of a well-known confidential informant. Similarly, recent reports state that “FBI, court filings have revealed how the agency allowed an alleged ‘home grown’ ISIS attack to take place in Garland, Texas.” 21WIRE previously uncovered suspicious elements in the cartoon event in Garland back when it happened.
QUESTION: Could this have been this case in the Las Vegas shooting, or was something else at play?
Shortly after the Pulse nightclub shooting attack in Orlando, it was revealed that the suspected gunman Omar Mateen had been attending services at a Mosque, meeting with a known FBI informant named Marcus Dwayne Robertson (see left – also played role in 1993 WTC bombing). Robertson was a former US Marine turned bank robber turned radical imam. Here’s this passage fromFox Newsdescribing Robertson’s role in backdrop of the Orlando shooting saga:
“It is no coincidence that this happened in Orlando,” said a law enforcement source familiar with Robertson’s history of recruiting terrorists and inciting violence. Mateen was enrolled in [Robertson’s online] Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary.
Robertson and several associates were rounded up for questioning early Sunday, according to law enforcement sources, a development his attorney refused to confirm or deny.”
Back in June of 2016, here at 21WIRE, we discussed how the most important aspect of the FBI supplied 911 transcript had gone virtually unnoticed – as there was nothing in the contents of the transcript that discussed an actual shooting occurring inside of the Pulse nightclub.
While the report was a basic outline of ‘America’s largest mass shooting‘ it failed to account for any of the shootings said to have occurred within the interior of Pulse. There was no mention of bar patrons being shot or reportedly shot at in the FBI’s official narrative. It’s as if the mainstream media and authorities left out the biggest piece of the investigation, as the implications of who shot who and when are extremely significant forensically speaking.
Even though the circumstances are different in Las Vegas and in the case of Orlando, in both events, law enforcement struggled to piece together a timeline, quickly followed by a series of revisions in the official story.
Strange Profile, Strange Coincidence?
As mainstream media and police dance around certain details that may or may not be associated with the man said to be responsible for the Las Vegas mass shooting, a mixture of raw public analysis, military expertise and online investigative work has shed light on a compelling case that could be discussed for sometime.
Here’s an interesting section from an article about two Twin Cities professors that are studying the psychological patterns of mass shootings. Here’s a passage from a recent MPR news report that suggests that Paddock’s killer profile is very unusual when compared with more than hundred case entries:
“Jillian Peterson, a Hamline University assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice, and James Densley, an associate professor of criminal justice at Metropolitan State University, hope to better understand why mass shootings happen and identify ways to prevent them.
This shooter is a little different, compared to the data we have,” said Peterson, a forensic psychologist. “He’s significantly older than average, the average age is mid-30s. Social media presence is also something we usually see, some sort of radicalization on social media or wanting to go viral on social media. In this case the shooter was not active on social media, didn’t seem to have any social media accounts.”
While some have attempted to make sense of the Las Vegas shooting tragedy, there are reports of a heavy revamp of security in the hospitality industry through the use of gunfire detection systems, X-ray, body scanners and facial recognition in the wake of this confusing, if not partly manufactured event.
The concept of a lone wolf killer in today’s world has reprogrammed the public mind just as the serial killer phenomenon did decades ago. This new fear-based saga has ushered in improbable Hollywood-style scenarios, inducing a frozen apathy across the masses – rather than looking deeply at crime scene forensics or pour over piles of collected data, these Daily Shooter crimes hold the public psyche hostage until the next unexplained mass tragedy.
Undoubtedly, modern America’s most deadliest mass shooting has left a number of questions in its wake.
***
21WIRE associate editor Shawn Helton is a researcher and writer, specializing in forensic analysis of high-profile crime scene and counter terrorism investigations, and the deconstruction and analysis of the mass-media coverage surrounding those cases. He has compiled an extensive body of work covering a number of high-profile events since 2012.
Global Research is a small team that believes in the power of information and analysis to bring about far-reaching societal change including a world without war.
Truth in media is a powerful instrument. As long as we all keep probing, asking questions, looking through the disinformation to find real understanding, then we are in a better position to participate in creating a better world in which truth and accountability trump greed and corruption.
When US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, stated of North Korea (4th September 2017): “When a rogue regime has a nuclear weapon and an ICBM pointed at you, you do not take steps to lower your guard. No one would do that”, she unwittingly put her finger on why the DPRK has been conducting missile tests and stating that they have ever bigger, better and longer range capabilities.
Amid accelerating US preparations for conflict with North Korea, yesterday’s night-time flight by two B-1B bombers over the Korean Peninsula was designed to provoke a North Korean response that could be used as the casus belli for all-out war.
Just one week after uttering his now-infamous “this is the calm before the storm” statement to the press ahead of a dinner with military leaders, we now learn that President Trump has dispatched a second nuclear aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, filled with 7,500 marines, to the Korean Peninsula.
Carter wrote that his more than 20 years’ worth of experience in dealing with the North taught him that what the country’s leadership wants more than anything is direct talks with the U.S. that would lead to a permanent peace treaty.
The revelation that North Korea hacked into South Korea’s military secrets and found U.S. plans for a preemptive “decapitation” of Pyongyang’s leadership explains its rush to build a nuclear deterrent, says Nicolas J S Davies.
Washington has systematically worked against North-South Peace Relations. The October 4 agreement as well as the broader Sunshine Policy between the two Koreas was boycotted by the US in favor of continued militarization.
When US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, stated of North Korea (4th September 2017): “When a rogue regime has a nuclear weapon and an ICBM pointed at you, you do not take steps to lower your guard. No one would do that”, she unwittingly put her finger on why the DPRK has been conducting missile tests and stating that they have ever bigger, better and longer range capabilities.
There is no certainty that either of the latter is the case, but the tiny country has been subject to nearly seventy years of vilification and ever more threatening behavior from the US and allies, with the language of Donald Trump, from near day one of his Presidency of the US regime reaching ever more apocalyptic heights.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has stressed that dialogue and communication are vital:
“Confrontational rhetoric may lead to unintended consequences … The solution must be political. The potential consequences of military action are too horrific.”
One can only hope “diplomat” Haley – who told the UN Security Council:
“The time has come to exhaust all of our diplomatic means …” and that North Korea was “begging for war” – was listening.
This of a country which in living memory had every town, village and its capital city near erased from the map by the United States and lost at least twenty percent, some estimates state nearer thirty percent, of it’s population of then just nine million people.
Pyongyang 1953. totally destroyed
Pyongyang rebuilt today (Trump Doesn’t like it, competes with Trump Tower?)
In 1953 when the US had destroyed all and there was nothing left to bomb they turned to bombing the dams, flooding the rice fields and causing starvation. North Korea’s government and the country’s collective and inherited memory have not forgotten and are simply attempting to insure such a horror never again afflicts their small nation.
There has been no empathy, knowledge of history, compassion in the Trumposphere. The five times draft dodger, has threatened “fire and fury” along with legality-detonating assassination of the Head of State, referring to him as “Little Rocket Man”, adding that he and his government: “won’t be around much longer.”
Kindergarten Level Rhetoric
Trump is also threatening generating the potential extinction of life on earth. His obsession with “if we’ve got nuclear weapons why don’t we use them” argument goes back decades – but his kindergarten level rhetoric shows a frightening disconnect from statesmanship, diplomacy – and reality. This is not conjecture. Twenty seven eminent psychiatrists have put their reputation on the line writing in the just published book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” (1)
“that he is dangerously mentally ill and presents a clear and present danger to the nation … (exploring) Trump’s symptoms and potentially relevant diagnoses (they) find a complex, if also dangerously mad, man.”
When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told journalists whilst on a recent visit to Beijing that the State Department had: “a couple of, three channels open to Pyongyang” and “We can talk to them … we do talk to them”, Trump tweeted: “save his energy” as “we’ll do what has to be done!”
“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” wrote the President from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
How cheap human life is to a man who has never witnessed, indeed five times evaded, seeing the carnage even one bullet can do. In context, it has just come to light (3) that:
“President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room …
“According to the officials present, Trump’s advisers, among them the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were surprised. Officials briefly explained the legal and practical impediments to a nuclear buildup and how the current military posture is stronger than it was at the height of the build-up. In interviews, they told NBC News that no such expansion is planned.
“The July 20 meeting was described as a lengthy and sometimes tense review of worldwide U.S. forces and operations. It was soon after the meeting broke up that officials who remained behind heard Tillerson say that Trump is a ‘moron.’ “
Trump has vociferously denied the report, predictably falling back on his seemingly miniscule vocabulary and calling it “fake news”, even threatening the broadcaster’s licence. So far he hasn’t threatened to nuke their New York headquarters.
Back to North Korea and the President’s chilling ignorance. On 1st October he tweeted:
“Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I won’t fail.”
Kim Jong-un is thirty three and was formally announced as his father’s successor on 26th December 2011. He has thus been power just short of six years. Twenty five years ago he would have been eight years old.
In the last such manoeuvres in August one South Korean defense official told the newspaper Chosun Ilbo that this year’s exercises would include: “a nuclear war game for the first time.”
USS Theodore Roosevelt Dispatched to the Korean Peninsula, October 12
Currently, in addition to the massive war games, the US has been overflying North Korea with B-52 bombers, with further exercises taking place in and with South Korea and in the last days also with Japan. It should also be remembered that the US has in the Pacific (3):
Total military personnel
87,000
US 7th Fleet
50-70 ships and subs including …
Up to 14 destroyers and cruisers
1 aircraft carrier
Up to 12 nuclear powered submarines
140 aircraft
In South Korea
23,468 personnel
300+ tanks
In Guam
3,831 personnel
B52 bombers and fighter jets
In Hawaii
40,000 military personnel
200 ships including …
5 aircraft carriers
1,060 aircraft
Moreover, as has been pointed out (4):
“In Donald Trump’s first six months in office, he dropped over 20,650 bombs in approximately seven countries, which killed thousands of civilians. By comparison, Kim Jong-un bombs the ocean.”
The same source makes a vital point, ignored by media and politicians:
“The media’s insistence that North Korea will never give up its weapons systems is completely disingenuous when one reads the entire context of the statements offered by Kim Jong-un’s government. On July 4, Kim’s statement read as follows:
“The DPRK would neither put its nukes and ballistic rockets on the table of negotiations in any case nor flinch even an inch from the road of bolstering the nuclear force chosen by itself unless the U.S. hostile policy and nuclear threat to the DPRK are definitely terminated.”
Indeed – and with arch hawk retired Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters writing an op-ed in the New York Post (4th September): “Better a million dead North Koreans than a thousand dead Americans” and with the Pyongyang government and people well aware of what happened to Libya which was persuaded to give up its weapons programme and Iraq which had done the same after 1991. Of course Kim Jong-un and his colleagues are going to try to persuade that they can give as good as they fear getting in hope of avoiding annihilation.
Given the reckless rhetoric of Trump and others, as the New York Times puts it (5):
“Congress has been sufficiently alarmed to consider legislation that would bar the president from launching a first nuclear strike without a declaration of war by Congress.
“ … As things stand now, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, passed when there was more concern about trigger-happy generals than elected civilian leaders, gives the president sole control. He could unleash the apocalyptic force of the American nuclear arsenal by his word alone, and within minutes.”
Moreover:
“A New York Times analysis found the U.S. could use 1,103 nuclear warheads and decimate China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Libya, Iraq, and Syria … and still have 2,897 left.”
Given that the man who tweets casually about “fire and fury” and smirks as he talks of “calm before the storm”, took the nuclear “football” (briefcase) down to his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort and allowed its minder to have “selfies” taken with it, him and guests, it seems pretty clear that the current incumbent of the White House still resides in the fantasy land of reality shows with no grasp of the potential global pyromaniacal armageddon he jokes about unleashing.
Twenty seven eminent psychiatrists of course, have far more disturbing diagnoses.
Apparently he likes watching movies.
Perhaps someone should give him a copy of “The Day After.”
When US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, stated of North Korea (4th September 2017): “When a rogue regime has a nuclear weapon and an ICBM pointed at you, you do not take steps to lower your guard. No one would do that”, she unwittingly put her finger on why the DPRK has been conducting missile tests and stating that they have ever bigger, better and longer range capabilities.
There is no certainty that either of the latter is the case, but the tiny country has been subject to nearly seventy years of vilification and ever more threatening behavior from the US and allies, with the language of Donald Trump, from near day one of his Presidency of the US regime reaching ever more apocalyptic heights.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has stressed that dialogue and communication are vital:
“Confrontational rhetoric may lead to unintended consequences … The solution must be political. The potential consequences of military action are too horrific.”
One can only hope “diplomat” Haley – who told the UN Security Council:
“The time has come to exhaust all of our diplomatic means …” and that North Korea was “begging for war” – was listening.
This of a country which in living memory had every town, village and its capital city near erased from the map by the United States and lost at least twenty percent, some estimates state nearer thirty percent, of it’s population of then just nine million people.
Pyongyang 1953. totally destroyed
Pyongyang rebuilt today (Trump Doesn’t like it, competes with Trump Tower?)
In 1953 when the US had destroyed all and there was nothing left to bomb they turned to bombing the dams, flooding the rice fields and causing starvation. North Korea’s government and the country’s collective and inherited memory have not forgotten and are simply attempting to insure such a horror never again afflicts their small nation.
There has been no empathy, knowledge of history, compassion in the Trumposphere. The five times draft dodger, has threatened “fire and fury” along with legality-detonating assassination of the Head of State, referring to him as “Little Rocket Man”, adding that he and his government: “won’t be around much longer.”
Kindergarten Level Rhetoric
Trump is also threatening generating the potential extinction of life on earth. His obsession with “if we’ve got nuclear weapons why don’t we use them” argument goes back decades – but his kindergarten level rhetoric shows a frightening disconnect from statesmanship, diplomacy – and reality. This is not conjecture. Twenty seven eminent psychiatrists have put their reputation on the line writing in the just published book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” (1)
“that he is dangerously mentally ill and presents a clear and present danger to the nation … (exploring) Trump’s symptoms and potentially relevant diagnoses (they) find a complex, if also dangerously mad, man.”
When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told journalists whilst on a recent visit to Beijing that the State Department had: “a couple of, three channels open to Pyongyang” and “We can talk to them … we do talk to them”, Trump tweeted: “save his energy” as “we’ll do what has to be done!”
“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” wrote the President from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
How cheap human life is to a man who has never witnessed, indeed five times evaded, seeing the carnage even one bullet can do. In context, it has just come to light (3) that:
“President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room …
“According to the officials present, Trump’s advisers, among them the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were surprised. Officials briefly explained the legal and practical impediments to a nuclear buildup and how the current military posture is stronger than it was at the height of the build-up. In interviews, they told NBC News that no such expansion is planned.
“The July 20 meeting was described as a lengthy and sometimes tense review of worldwide U.S. forces and operations. It was soon after the meeting broke up that officials who remained behind heard Tillerson say that Trump is a ‘moron.’ “
Trump has vociferously denied the report, predictably falling back on his seemingly miniscule vocabulary and calling it “fake news”, even threatening the broadcaster’s licence. So far he hasn’t threatened to nuke their New York headquarters.
Back to North Korea and the President’s chilling ignorance. On 1st October he tweeted:
“Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I won’t fail.”
Kim Jong-un is thirty three and was formally announced as his father’s successor on 26th December 2011. He has thus been power just short of six years. Twenty five years ago he would have been eight years old.
In the last such manoeuvres in August one South Korean defense official told the newspaper Chosun Ilbo that this year’s exercises would include: “a nuclear war game for the first time.”
USS Theodore Roosevelt Dispatched to the Korean Peninsula, October 12
Currently, in addition to the massive war games, the US has been overflying North Korea with B-52 bombers, with further exercises taking place in and with South Korea and in the last days also with Japan. It should also be remembered that the US has in the Pacific (3):
Total military personnel
87,000
US 7th Fleet
50-70 ships and subs including …
Up to 14 destroyers and cruisers
1 aircraft carrier
Up to 12 nuclear powered submarines
140 aircraft
In South Korea
23,468 personnel
300+ tanks
In Guam
3,831 personnel
B52 bombers and fighter jets
In Hawaii
40,000 military personnel
200 ships including …
5 aircraft carriers
1,060 aircraft
Moreover, as has been pointed out (4):
“In Donald Trump’s first six months in office, he dropped over 20,650 bombs in approximately seven countries, which killed thousands of civilians. By comparison, Kim Jong-un bombs the ocean.”
The same source makes a vital point, ignored by media and politicians:
“The media’s insistence that North Korea will never give up its weapons systems is completely disingenuous when one reads the entire context of the statements offered by Kim Jong-un’s government. On July 4, Kim’s statement read as follows:
“The DPRK would neither put its nukes and ballistic rockets on the table of negotiations in any case nor flinch even an inch from the road of bolstering the nuclear force chosen by itself unless the U.S. hostile policy and nuclear threat to the DPRK are definitely terminated.”
Indeed – and with arch hawk retired Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters writing an op-ed in the New York Post (4th September): “Better a million dead North Koreans than a thousand dead Americans” and with the Pyongyang government and people well aware of what happened to Libya which was persuaded to give up its weapons programme and Iraq which had done the same after 1991. Of course Kim Jong-un and his colleagues are going to try to persuade that they can give as good as they fear getting in hope of avoiding annihilation.
Given the reckless rhetoric of Trump and others, as the New York Times puts it (5):
“Congress has been sufficiently alarmed to consider legislation that would bar the president from launching a first nuclear strike without a declaration of war by Congress.
“ … As things stand now, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, passed when there was more concern about trigger-happy generals than elected civilian leaders, gives the president sole control. He could unleash the apocalyptic force of the American nuclear arsenal by his word alone, and within minutes.”
Moreover:
“A New York Times analysis found the U.S. could use 1,103 nuclear warheads and decimate China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Libya, Iraq, and Syria … and still have 2,897 left.”
Given that the man who tweets casually about “fire and fury” and smirks as he talks of “calm before the storm”, took the nuclear “football” (briefcase) down to his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort and allowed its minder to have “selfies” taken with it, him and guests, it seems pretty clear that the current incumbent of the White House still resides in the fantasy land of reality shows with no grasp of the potential global pyromaniacal armageddon he jokes about unleashing.
Twenty seven eminent psychiatrists of course, have far more disturbing diagnoses.
Apparently he likes watching movies.
Perhaps someone should give him a copy of “The Day After.”
It’s been five years since terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, leaving four Americans dead. Last week, as CIA officers disguised in wigs and mustaches testified in court about the predawn ambush on the diplomatic compound, four other American soldiers were killed in neighboring Niger.
Most Americans may not even be aware that approximately 800 U.S. troops are stationed in Niger, a West African nation where jihadist groups have taken root. As part of the never-ending war on terror, the United States has also set up a drone base in Niger’s capital city of Niamey. Contrary to his focused commitment to reverse every policy put in place by his predecessor, President Donald Trump has decided to carry on with the construction of a second drone base in Niger commissioned by Barack Obama.
American forces have never been sanctioned to an official combat mission in Niger, a landlocked West African nation about twice the size of Texas with a population of just over 20 million people. But they have long been fighting against Islamic extremists in the country and surrounding region. On Oct. 4, four Green Berets were killed and two more injured after their group of a dozen U.S. soldiers were ambushed while conducting a joint patrol with about 40 Nigerien soldiers.
The New York Times reported that when the soldiers were ambushed, no American helicopters came to their rescue. Although Congress has never authorized the mission in Niger — as is required by the Constitution — the military’s Africa Command asked lawmakers for more help months before the attack, the Times also reported.
It remains unclear which terror group carried out the ambush, but there are reports that a new wing of the Islamic State that calls itself the Islamic State in Greater Sahara (ISIS-GS) had a hand in the deaths of the Special Forces troops — the first U.S. casualties in Niger.
Identified as Staff Sgt. Bryan Black of Washington state, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Johnson of Ohio, Sgt. La David Johnson of Florida and Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright of Georgia, the four dead Americans, part of the Third Special Forces Group based at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, haven’t received much attention. The White House said Trump was notified about the attack in Niger shortly after it happened last Wednesday night. A week later, he still hasn’t sent one tweet or released any official statement about the death of four Americans. He has written more than 60 tweets about Benghazi, another terror attack in the same region of Africa that resulted in four dead Americans.
Benghazi is bigger than Watergate. Don’t let Obama get away with allowing Americans to die. Kick him out of office tomorrow.
The White House has remained curiously mum about this terror attack, exactly the sort of event it would normally use to score political points. Even though he sent Vice President Mike Pence to Indiana — at great taxpayer expense — to showboat over the flag at an NFL game on Sunday, Trump couldn’t be bothered to head to Dover Air Force Base to greet the flag-draped coffin of one of the soldiers he claims to honor on Monday. Instead, the president was busy playing golf with Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Recall how much was made of President Obama’s round of golf after stopping to address the beheading of American James Foley by ISIS? Or the hours of cable news coverage devoted to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s supposedly disingenuous statement to the grieving families three days after the Benghazi attack?
Republicans were quick to accuse the Obama administration of crafting a faulty political narrative in the aftermath of Benghazi. Fox News told its viewers for years that Obama may have “sacrificed Americans” as part of a “political calculation” to win re-election.
Now that such an attack has happened on Trump’s watch, where are the specious accusations of a stand-down order?
Kris “Tanto” Paronto, one of the surviving U.S. security contractors who were on the ground in Benghazi during the terrorist attack, slammed Clinton for lacking a “sense of urgency.” Just one week before the Niger ambush, Paronto suggested in a tweet that Clinton failed to stop the attack because she didn’t consider the consulate staff American:
Wish u had that sense of urgency while u were watching the ISR feed during our 5th firefight in B-ghazi ?or did u not consider us Americans? https://t.co/Fb0BlftP1J
Donald Trump used a similar talking point frequently on the campaign trail.
Noting that U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens, a personal friend of Clinton’s, was among the victims, Trump said in a June 2016 speech:
“What she did with him was absolutely horrible. He was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed.”
Trump has remained so silent on Niger that Breitbart News was successfully duped over the weekend by a parody account that tweeted presidential condolences. The sadly remarkable truth that the Trump-loving conservative media is burying is that these soldiers’ commanding officers have made statements — but their commander-in-chief has not.
While it was immediately apparent that conservative outrage over the Benghazi attack was rooted in politics, we now know that much of its reaction was also a projection of what they would have done in power. The response to the ambush in Niger makes clear that Benghazi was never about embassy security, just as the revelation that both Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have used personal emails while in the White House showed that conservative outrage over Hillary Clinton’s emails was never about secure government communications.
Not one prominent figure in the Republican Party would dare suggest that Trump’s neglect of the ambush serves to further a political narrative — one that claims one ISIS’ reign of terror is in decline on his watch.
Following the ambush in Niger, Fox News has failed to mention the infamous terror group in its few on-air reports of the four dead Americans. Instead, the conservative cable news network reported on Monday that U.S. troops were on the verge of successfully running ISIS out of Iraq. On Tuesday, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld delivered a monologue demanding that Trump be given the credit.
Bombing the crap out of them, killing everyone they know — it seems to work. Who would have thought? Oh, yeah, President Trump. It’s something for which he gets no credit. He’s literally ending ISIS … So laugh all you want about the tired phrase, “There’s a new sheriff in town.” I think ISIS got that message. And while we have to careful of the “mission accomplished” syndrome, what is undeniable is that ISIS is off the front pages and on their last legs.
Behold the mythmaking in action
Fox News producers no doubt know that Niger could be Trump’s Benghazi because they created the media and political spectacle of Benghazi out of nearly nothing. While the president has kept his detractors distracted with petty drama, Fox is helping him sweep a real scandal under the rug.
Sophia Tesfaye is the Deputy Politics Editor at Salon.
Featured image is from Anurake Singto-on/Shutterstock.
Amid accelerating US preparations for conflict with North Korea, yesterday’s night-time flight by two B-1B bombers over the Korean Peninsula was designed to provoke a North Korean response that could be used as the casus belli for all-out war.
The supersonic bombers were joined by Japanese and South Korean fighter jets for the first joint night-time training exercise that involved practicing air-to-ground missile drills in waters off the east coast of South Korea, then off the west coast. This rehearsal for war with North Korea followed another first when two B-1B bombers late last month flew the furthest north along the North Korean coast since the start of this century.
At the same time, the Pentagon is assembling a naval armada off the Korean Peninsula. The nuclear attack submarine USS Tucson arrived off South Korea on Saturday. The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and its strike group of cruisers and destroyers is due to arrive later this month for joint exercises with the South Korean navy. Two Australian frigates are also en route to Korean waters.
The Trump administration’s relentless campaign of bellicose threats and military provocations makes clear that the danger of a catastrophic war, which could drag in major powers such as China and Russia and escalate into a nuclear exchange, is real and imminent. As he faces a mounting political crisis at home, the US president may see a war with North Korea as a means of shoring up his administration and crushing domestic political opposition.
From the standpoint of military logic, the US has deliberately placed the Pyongyang regime in an impossible situation. In his fascistic rant at the UN last month, Trump declared that North Korea confronted “total destruction” unless it capitulated completely to US demands. He flatly ruled out any negotiations with Pyongyang when he rebuked Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for “wasting his time” in sending out diplomatic feelers.
North Korea’s foreign minister responded to Trump’s UN speech by declaring that it amounted to a declaration of war and warned that his country had the right to take countermeasures, including the shooting down of US strategic bombers in international airspace. Yet the Pentagon has continued to send B-1Bs to conduct war games in close proximity to North Korea.
Confronted with the most powerful military on the planet armed to the teeth with thousands of nuclear weapons, the Pyongyang regime could conclude that it has to attack first, including with its limited nuclear arsenal, before its military is totally destroyed. Each B-1B flight poses the immediate question to the generals in Pyongyang: is this another drill, or the start of an all-out attack?
In Washington, the military is being prepared and primed for war against North Korea. In a keynote speech to top army officers on Monday, Defence Secretary James Mattis insisted that the military had to be “ready to ensure we have military options that our president can employ if needed.”
The Army Association paraphrased General Robert Abrams, commander of US Army Forces Command, who spoke at the same event as saying,
“Sending American forces to fight a World War II-style all-out war would mean facing a harsh reality: Troops will die, and in large numbers. “
Mattis and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Joseph Dunford met with Trump on Tuesday to review military options, including “to prevent North Korea from threatening the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons.” In other words, the Trump administration is on the brink of an illegal war of aggression on the pretext that North Korea’s small nuclear arsenal poses a threat to the US.
A US attack on North Korea would inevitably lead to a confrontation with China and Russia, which have repeatedly called for an easing of tensions and a return to negotiations. A war on their borders and the installation of a US puppet regime in Pyongyang cuts directly across their strategic interests in Asia. Moreover, the subjugation of North Korea is part of Washington’s far broader ambition to undermine, encircle and, if necessary, go to war with China to ensure American hegemony in Asia and the world.
Trump has accelerated the Obama administration’s so-called “pivot to Asia” against Beijing on every front—diplomatically, economically and militarily. He has strengthened US ties throughout the region, threatened China with trade war and confronted Beijing militarily, not only on the Korean Peninsula but also in the South China Sea. On Tuesday, a US navy destroyer carried out another provocative intrusion near China’s Paracel Islands to challenge Beijing’s “excessive maritime claims.”
The US drive to war is not simply the product of the fascistic President Trump. Rather, he is the expression of the deepening political, social and economic crisis of American imperialism, which has sought to arrest its historic decline through its aggressive use of military might. Having created one disaster after another in the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa, Washington is upping the ante and preparing for a direct conflict with its major rivals, China and Russia in the first instance.
The danger of war is further heightened by the immense turmoil and conflicts within the American political establishment, including in the White House, and more broadly, popular opposition to war and austerity. Trump is publicly at odds with both Tillerson and Mattis, who have suggested that diplomatic efforts need to be exhausted before any attack on North Korea—not because they are opposed to war, but because they fear the immediate eruption of a mass anti-war movement in the event of undisguised US aggression.
The bitterness of the infighting was underscored when a well-sourced NBC article last week revealed that Tillerson had threatened to resign and called Trump “a moron” following a top-level Pentagon meeting.
On Wednesday, NBC reported that what prompted Tillerson to make that remark was a proposal by Trump to increase the number of US nuclear weapons ten-fold, which would put the US in violation of all existing nuclear treaties and effectively render it a pariah state.
In a chilling expression of the type of crackdown that could be imposed in the context of a further escalation against North Korea, Trump threatened in a tweet to suspend NBC’s broadcasting license over the story.
The deep divisions in American ruling circles that are fuelling speculation about Trump’s impeachment were summed up in a Washington Post editorial on Tuesday headlined “What to do with an unfit president.”
Far from halting the drive to war, the political crisis only adds to the danger. Beset with conflict at home, Trump is being propelled to extricate himself by seeking to project political and social tensions outwards against a foreign foe. His critics and opponents are not opposed to war—many are criminally culpable for the US acts of aggression over the past 25 years. The differences are purely tactical—how to attack and who to attack first.
Without the development of a mass anti-war movement of the working class in the United States and internationally, war is not only possible but inevitable. Such a movement cannot be based on appeals to the powers-that-be, but rather on a revolutionary socialist perspective to abolish the diseased capitalist order that threatens to drag humanity into the abyss.
This week it was announced that China has established a ‘payment versus payment‘ (PVP) system to clear Chinese yuan and Russian ruble transactions. The aim, we’re told, is to to “reduce risks and improve the efficiency” of its foreign exchange system.
The new mechanism, which could rival the long-held monopoly of the US SWIFT inter-bank payment system (allowing for simultaneous settlement of transactions in two different currencies) was launched on Monday after receiving approval from China’s central bank, according to a statement by the country’s foreign exchange trading system.
However, financial oligarchs in Wall Street will view this move as an act of aggression in challenging the preeminence of the US dollar as the planet’s global reserve currency – which is inextricably tied and nearly completely dependent on the US ‘Petrodollar’ to prop-up the value of the US fiat currency. Georgetown University scholars note here:
Since petrodollars and petrodollar surpluses are by definition denominated in U.S. dollars, then purchasing power is dependent on the U.S. rate of inflation and the rate at which the U.S. dollar is exchanged (whenever there is need for convertibility) by other currencies in international money markets. It follows that whenever economic or other factors affect the U.S. dollar, petrodollars will be affected to the same magnitude. The link, therefore, between the U.S. dollar and petrodollar surpluses, in particular, has significant economic, political, and other implications.
First, the placement of petrodollar surpluses of the Arab oil exporting nations in the United States may be regarded politically as hostage capital. In the event of a major political conflict between the United States and an Arab oil-exporting nation, the former with all its military power can confiscate or freeze these assets or otherwise limit their use.
China to Buy Saudi Oil in Yuan
This breaking development coincides with other recent moves, including news that China will “compel” Saudi Arabia to trade oil in yuan. If this happens, the rest of the global oil market could follow suit, which would spell catastrophe for the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
These two stories are absolutely linked. This is full-frontal challenge to the Anglo-American World Order.
Russia and China are also working behind the scenes to shore-up their precious metal/gold trading standards, possibly in preparation of a new ‘gold-backed’ currency valuation initiative.
CFETS said it plans to introduce PVP systems for yuan transactions with other currencies based on China’s Belt and Road initiative, and complying with the process of renminbi [Yuan] internationalization. Russia, however, is a top priority: the world’s biggest oil producer recently became the largest source of oil for China, the world’s top energy consumer.
To be sure, the monetary convergence between Beijing and Moscow is hardly new. The most notable recent development took place in April, when the Russian central bank opened its first overseas office in Beijing on March 14, marking a step forward in forging a Beijing-Moscow alliance to bypass the US dollar in the global monetary system, and to phase-in a gold-backed standard of trade. As the South China Morning Post reported at the time, the new office was part of agreements made between the two neighbours “to seek stronger economic ties” since the West brought in sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis and the oil-price slump hit the Russian economy.
At the time, Vladimir Shapovalov, a senior official at the Russian central bank, said the two central banks were drafting a memorandum of understanding to solve technical issues around China’s gold imports from Russia, and that details would be released soon, to which we said that If Russia – the world’s fourth largest gold producer after China, Japan and the US – is indeed set to become a major supplier of gold to China, the probability of a scenario hinted by many over the years, namely that Beijing is preparing to eventually unroll a gold-backed currency, increases by orders of magnitude.
***
Expect that the West not to take this major financial challenge by China and Russia lying down. Washington may use its North Korea, Myanmar or Philippines cards – as a means to increase its leverage in Asia, in an effort to extract Chinese concessions, and head-off China’s new financial ascendancy.
Hurricanes Maria and Irma caused vast destruction in Puerto Rico, creating humanitarian crisis conditions for millions.
Instead of massive amounts of vitally needed aid and debt relief, the Trump administration requested House and Senate members authorize a $4.9 billion loan to the island as part of $36.5 billion in disaster relief – plus a $150 million loan, matching FEMA grants, increasing its unrepayable indebtedness instead of responsibly cancelling it.
Funds loaned are intended for maintaining basic government operations, nothing for devastated Puerto Ricans.
Most on the island still lack power. They have limited access to food, fuel and clean drinking water.
Estimated hurricane damage is around $95 billion, according to Governor Ricardo Rossello.
“Puerto Rico is on the brink of a massive liquidity crisis that will intensify in the immediate future,” he said.
House legislation provides emergency funding for hurricane and wildfire relief – earmarked for business interests, not devastated Texas and Florida residents, or Californians affected by wildfires.
Legislation includes $18.7 billion for FEMA’s disaster relief fund, another $16 billion to replenish the flood insurance program.
House members passed legislation on Thursday, Senate members taking up similar legislation next week.
Puerto Rico is insolvent. Its indebtedness is around $74 billion – plus another $50 billion in pension obligations. Last May it declared quasi-bankruptcy.
Creditors were unwilling to grant concessions. Pensioners and workers nearing retirement may lose out altogether.
Before hurricane devastation, Trump said they’ll be no “bailout” for Puerto Rico. Unlike US counties, cities and other municipalities, states and US territories can’t declare Chapter 9 bankruptcy, allowing them to restructure debt.
Puerto Rico faces a long, painful struggle ahead, debt-entrapped by creditors, ill-served by uncaring Washington, mismanaged by corrupt officials, a deplorable situation, affecting its poor and most vulnerable hardest – compounded by hurricane devastation and uncaring US officials.
Economist Mark Weisbrot explained cancelling Puerto Rico’s debt and providing significant federal aid is its only chance to recover. Its residents are US citizens. Its political status denies them legal rights.
They’re treated like colonial subjects, enduring crushing austerity because of the island’s insolvency. They pay federal taxes without congressional representation, getting back pathetically little in return.
They suffer from mismanagement, political greed, widespread corruption, deplorable social services, and monied interests exploiting them, enforced by police state harshness.
Debt-entrapped, Puerto Rico is forced to pay bankers and other creditors at the expense of responsibly serving its residents.
Recovery under favorable conditions will take years. Given federal indifference to the island’s misery, devastation in large parts of it could go unaddressed indefinitely.
Featured image: Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Vladimir Putin at the funerals of late Uzbekistan president Islam Karimov, December 2016
Uzbekistan’s new leader has spent his first year in office undoing his predecessor’s legacy, implementing an Erdogan-like “Zero Problems With Neighbors” approach mixed with a Deng Xiaoping-inspired “economic opening” in order to turn his geostrategically positioned Central Asian state into a New Silk Road powerhouse.
Shavkat Mirziyoyev was chosen by the Uzbekistani elite to replace long-running but suddenly deceased President Islam Karimov in early September 2016, with his appointment being legitimized by the people in a nationwide election that December. Contrary to what could have been expected given the country’s severe vulnerability to Hybrid War, the political transition in this “national democracy”went off without a hitch, which demonstrates that the Uzbekistani powerbrokers in the economic, clan-based, and security spheres were able to come to a pragmatic agreement in the interest of national stability. Bearing in mind the political-economic reforms that Mirziyoyev has initiated since entering into office, it can be reasonably presumed that they selected him because they saw an historic opportunity to modernize a rigid system in order to flexibly adapt their country to the New Silk Road reality of 21st-century multipolar geopolitics.
It’s with this in mind that Forbes writer Kenneth Rapoze published his well-researched September 2017 piece titled “Eurasia’s Latest Economic Reboot Can Be Found In Uzbekistan”, which does a surprisingly good job documenting the changes that the Central Asian state has undergone since the passing of Karimov. Many of these have gone unnoticed to all but the most astute observers because of the landlocked state’s traditional opacity and the lack of interest that its more mundane developments have generated from most Mainstream Media outlets, but the political-economic reforms taking place in Uzbekistan right now are nevertheless very important in the general scheme of things because they’re positioning the country to become a powerhouse along the New Silk Road. To that effect, Rapoze spoke about two main trends that are guiding the state’s policy in this regard, and the present analysis will briefly highlight the key points that he brought up, add some additional insight to them, and then conclude with an assessment of the Hybrid War risks that could offset the country’s geostrategic destiny.
“Zero Problems With Neighbors”
The Forbes writer correctly notes that Mirziyoyev has sought to repair the damaged regional relations that he inherited from his predecessor by visiting three of the four former Soviet Republics surrounding his country and symbolically allowing direct flights to the capital of neighboring rival Tajikistan. What the writer didn’t include in his analysis is that President Putintravelled to Uzbekistan for Karimov’s funeral, and that Mirziyoyev then returned the heartfelt gesture by visiting Moscow earlier this spring. The rapprochement between the two wayward partners continued apace and recently saw them commence their first bilateral military exercises in 12 years. Syncretizing all of these positive moves into a single policy, it appears as though Mirziyoyev is applying Erdogan’s former approach of “Zero Problems With Neighbors”, albeit in a more sincere manner than the Turkish leader did prior to 2011 and without the threat of a “deep state” (in Turkey’s case, Gulenist) conspiracy to offset it.
Uzbekistan’s new Turkish-modelled policy is designed to boost its regional standing and solidify its status as a crucial New Silk Road transit state, taking advantage of the fact that the country has Central Asia’s largest population (and therefore market potential) and strongest military. It already provides secure transit for several Chinese-Turkmen pipelines, and could in the future become the central node along a Central Asian high-speed railway connecting the People’s Republic of China with the Islamic Republic of Iran. In terms of north-south connectivity, it could also function as Russia’s gateway to Afghanistan, just as it did during the Soviet era, and should the Central-South Asian state eventually stabilize in the future, then Uzbekistan could become the middleman in facilitating Russian-Pakistani overland trade. Therefore, this strategically positioned country is poised to play an irreplaceable role in competitive connectivity projects, though in order to do that, it needs to reform its monetary system first.
“Opening Up”
Rapoze’s article interestingly compares Mirziyoyev to China’s famous economic reformer Deng Xiaoping in highlighting just how transformational his fledgling presidency is already shaping out to be. The writer notes how the most important domestic structural change that’s taken place thus far in Uzbekistan is Tashkent’s implementation of a currency convertibility system to be fully in place by 2019. This, he remarks, will facilitate foreign direct investment and transition of the “informal economy” into the formal sphere. This move shouldn’t be underestimated by any observers because it lays at the basis of Uzbekistan’s economic renaissance and has the potential to transition from being an agricultural-exporting economy to a more diversified one in providing manufacturing, logistical, energy, mineral (includinguranium), service sector, and other capacities to Eurasian clients all along the New Silk Road, be it across the east-west horizontal or the north-south vertical.
To explain, the inclusion of previously “black market” activities into the formal economy could instantly improve Uzbekistan’s macroeconomic indicators, which in turn could attract more foreign direct investment that would in and of itself be facilitated by the country’s long-overdue currency convertibility system. Taking into consideration Uzbekistan’s prime geostrategic location and impressive labor-market potential (as derived from its large population), the cumulative effect of all of these reforms would be to position the state into becoming the all-around regional leader, which was Karimov’s vision all along despite the shortcomings in his policy applications. Tashkent’s emulation of Beijing’s late-1970s “opening up” policy pioneered by Deng Xiaoping provides the much-needed stimulus in systematically stabilizing Central Asia by removing the socio-economic risks which had previously made Uzbekistan susceptible to poverty-exploited Color Revolutions and jihadist recruitment. That said, there are also certain Hybrid War vulnerabilities that can’t be ignored.
Can “Oʻzbekiston” Be Offset?
“Oʻzbekiston”, as it’s referred to in the Turkic-related Uzbek language, faces the risk of having its exciting Silk Road future offset by Hybrid Wars and an Afghan conflict overspill. There’s always the lingering and latent risk that an unexpected Color Revolution (potentially “crypto”-Tajik-linked) could develop and transition into a Hybrid War, one that could be exacerbated by a sudden bout of elite infighting/rivalry (possibly between the security services) and which might seek to exploit the country’s clan-based society. This could happen independently or concurrent with an overspill of the Afghan conflict into Uzbekistan’s southern Surxondaryo Region, whether in “hard” terms such as through armed fighters or through “soft” ones such as the dissemination of radical ideologies. Along the lines of the Afghan tangent, Tashkent is thought to have close ties to Afghan Vice President Abdul Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, who’s an extremely polarizing figure in Afghanistan because of his heavy-handed military methods, and it can’t be discounted that simmering discontent against this de-facto exiled politician might eventually manifest itself in ethnic violence against his compatriots in sparking an Uzbek-Afghan crisis that might tempt Tashkent into a “humanitarian intervention”.
The above scenarios are of course speculative but based on reasonable risks and previous political patterns elsewhere, though upon seriously considering them, it seems like the chances of them happening anytime soon are minimal, barring of course some unforeseen events. Accepting that Uzbekistan appears to be stable, albeit still Hybrid War-susceptible, state, there are legitimate grounds for optimism about its future, though provided that it continues along its present trajectory and forthcoming (possibly even political-electoral) reforms are carried out properly. Tashkent needs to ensure that the socio-economic disparity between its majority-impoverished populace and comparatively wealthier elite doesn’t continue to widen to the point where it foments more anti-government sentiment and is subsequently exploited by foreign forces. In the same vein, attention should be paid to the revised power relations between clans and the emergence of new political-economic(-ethnic?) elite following the country’s “opening up” and the rapid changes that this is expected to entail, as an unintended consequence could be that it shakes up the existing power structure in the country and inadvertently destabilizes it. To preempt this, the Uzbekistani security services might follow their Myanmarese counterparts in attempting to regulate this process.
Concluding Thoughts
Uzbekistan is on the cusp of fast-moving, but not necessarily uncontrollable, change because of the ambitious political-economic reforms undertaken during newly inaugurated President Mirziyoyev’s first year in office. By following in Turkish President Erdogan’s footsteps with his “Zero Problems With Neighbors” foreign policy and learning from former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s economic policy of “opening up”, Mirziyoyev is proving that he and the (largely unseen) powerbrokers behind him acutely understand the need for fundamentally redirecting the course that previous President Karimov had put Uzbekistan on, and this determination couldn’t have come at a better geostrategic time. Karimov was actually very good for Uzbekistan in the overall sense considering the difficult domestic, regional, and global circumstances in which he had to rule, and when remembering the threat that the Islamist-fueled Tajik Civil War and “Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan” terrorist group posed to his country’s existence at the time, it can be said that he tried (key word) to choose the most pragmatic (albeit admittedly very controversial) path possible in all ways, though this naturally had its multidimensional shortcomings and had to eventually change sooner than later.
Karimov behaved as a strict steward during the post-Cold War era of unpredictable unipolarity and the early-2000s incipient emergence of multipolarity, which made him a masterful player in the “Balance of Power” rearrangements that were taking place during that time. The late Uzbekistani President, however, was ill-equipped for adapting to the Silk Road Century that China is pioneering through its One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and his country would have been unable to properly manage its domestic and regional affairs under these game-changing conditions because of the near-impossibility that he would have had the personal humbleness to essentially admit that his former policies were insufficient for dealing with this new paradigm. Therefore, his passing couldn’t have happened at a more “opportune” time because it opened the door for the country’s elite to finally enact the necessary changes for integrating Uzbekistan into the Silk Road Century as one of its most indispensable states, starting off with a “clean slate” unencumbered by the “heavy (political) baggage” of the Karimov era. Although somewhat belated, these reforms are more timely than ever and being initiated under the “proper” circumstances.
So long as Mirziyoyev continues channeling Erdogan in the foreign policy manner through his “Zero Problems With Neighbors” approach and Deng Xiaoping via the late Chinese leader’s economic one of “opening up”, then Uzbekistan has a very positive future ahead of it in the emerging Multipolar World Order, but its security services will need to keep an eye on the country’s Hybrid War vulnerabilities and take a proactive stance in preempting any forthcoming conflicts if Uzbekistan is to retain its Karimov-era stability amidst the exciting and fast-moving changes of the Mirziyoyev period.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare.
