Earlier today North Korea published pictures of its leader Kim Jong Un admiring a thermonuclear device or H-bomb. Hours later it tested such a bomb in an underground explosion. The North Korean news agency announced:
Pyongyang, September 3 (KCNA) — Respected Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un guided the work for nuclear weaponization on the spot.He was greeted by senior officials of the Department of Munitions Industry of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) and scientists of the Nuclear Weapons Institute before being briefed on the details of nuclear weaponization.
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He watched an H-bomb to be loaded into new ICBM.
Saying that he felt the pride of indomitably bolstering up the nuclear forces at a great price while seeing the Juche-oriented thermonuclear weapon with super explosive power made by our own efforts and technology, he expressed great satisfaction over the fact that our scientists do anything without fail if the party is determined to do.
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The H-bomb, the explosive power of which is adjustable from tens kiloton to hundreds kiloton, is a multi-functional thermonuclear nuke with great destructive power which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP attack according to strategic goals.
The Walter Cronkite of North Korean TV, Ri Chun Hee, showed more pictures from the visit (vid) the visit and later announced the nuclear test.
Some analyst nicknamed the new device the Peanut. The bomb type obviously differs from the implosion type Disco Ball of March 2016. The “Junche orientation” component, which presumably guarantees the ideological conformity of the device, seems to be the round white box on the left.
(More seriously: Juche refers to self-sufficiency – i.e. North Korea made the components and built the device by itself.)
A graphic in one of the pictures shows the peanut within the warhead bay of a Hawsong-14 Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile.
An hour after the above release, earth-quake detection monitors in south Asia went off. A seismic event of 6.1 to 6.3 magnitude on the logarithmic momentum magnitude scale was detected in the area of Punggye-ri. Like earlier North Korean nuclear weapon tests in the same area, the event happened exactly on the half hour mark (at 12:00am local time). The magnitude points to a large device with an explosive power between 100 kilotons and 1 megaton TNT equivalent. (All previous North Korean nuclear tests were in the low kiloton range.) Some detection stations found another seismic event of 4.6 magnitude shortly thereafter. If confirmed it was likely caused by a “cave-in” of the sub-terrain test chamber. It will take some time to assess the data and to come to more precise estimates, but the qualitative different size of this test compared to previous ones is undeniable.
Added: A later statement by the North Korean news agency confirmed a successful test of a two-stage thermonuclear device. It claimed that no radiation was released to the atmosphere.
One must now assess that North Korea has the capability to make, launch and deliver staged thermonuclear weapons up to megaton size at ICBM ranges. Most of China, Japan and at least the U.S. west coast are in reach of such a weapon. With this warhead size the somewhat dubious accuracy of North Korean missiles has much less relevance.
Before the U.S. and South Korea started this years invasion maneuver Ulchi on August 22, North Korea had warned that it would test-launch four Hawsong-12 mid range ballistic missiles towards the large U.S. base on Guam if, and only if, the U.S. would continue to use “strategic equipment” around its borders. This referred to B-1B nuclear bombers and aircraft carriers.
The U.S. understood and scaled back the planned maneuver. No “strategic equipment” was used.
On August 28, when the maneuver had ended, North Korea launched a test of a single Hawsong-12 medium range missile into the Pacific. The missile crossed over Japan at a height of 550 kilometer. (It thereby did NOT violate Japanese air-space.) Earlier tests had been flown in unrealistic steep trajectories to avoid such an overflight. This test was likely designed to prove to the U.S. the capability to reach Guam.
On August 31 the U.S. flew another “show of force” with B-1B bombers and F-35 stealth fighter planes over South Korea. The planes trained precision bombing with live bombs at a South Korean training area. These plane types are “strategic equipment” and the training makes only sense in a “preemptive strike on North Korea” scenario.
One can understand today’s nuclear test as a response to these continuing U.S. provocations. The U.S. will of course claim that only North Korea is “provoking” here and it itself is only “responding”. But such a hen-egg discussion and juvenile tit-for-tat is not only useless but dangerous. History tells us that the U.S. completely devastated North Korea and killed some 20% of its population, not vice versa. So far only North Korea had to fear nuclear destruction. That has now changed into a more balanced situation. A preventive or preemptive war on North Korea is no longer an option.
Today’s event should convince even the dumbest of the doubters that North Korea’s claimed capabilities are real. It should also demonstrate to the White House that verbal “fire and furry” insults, tit-for-tat shows of force and further economic sanctioning of North Korea and/or China are, as predicted, only worsening the situation.
Phillipe notes in the comments that today is the opening of a BRICS summit in Xiamen in China. Xi Jinping is giving a big speech. He will not like this disruption. China strongly condemned the test but there is little else it could reasonably do.
North Korea has offered several times to negotiate with the U.S. towards a peace agreement. (As the Korea War only ended in a ceasefire the nations are still at war.) It offered to stop all its nuclear and missile testing if the U.S. stops the large scale maneuvers in South Korea. Russia, China and South Korea have long urged the U.S. to pick up on that offer. The U.S. could have done so every day since the offer was first made years ago. Not doing so has only created the current situation and today’s events.
One September 9 North Korea will celebrate its Independence Day. Such occasions are often used to demonstrate new capabilities. Today’s first KCNA statement included the lines:
[Kim Jong Un] watched an H-bomb to be loaded into new ICBM
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[which] can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP attack
A strong nuclear explosion at great height can cause an Electro-Magnetic-Pulse which does not directly kill people on the ground but creates some damage to unprotected electric and electronic equipment. The EMP threat is largely exaggerated but a hobby horse of many fear- and war-mongers in Congress. North Korea surely knows this and the statement thereby touches a sensible point. I find it unlikely that North Korea would go with such an unproven concept. This is mere trolling. But a September 9 ICBM missile test, on a realistic trajectory and with a simulated nuclear load, is definitely a possible next step to up the pressure towards new negotiations.
I for one feel no urge to witness a full Hawsong-14 ICBM test with even a dud megaton nuclear device on board. If the White House feels the same it must NOW stop further provocations and immediately agree to open-ended talks with North Korea.
Good afternoon! It is my great pleasure to have all of you with us in the beautiful city of Xiamen, renowned as the “Egret Island”. The BRICS Summit will be held tomorrow. On behalf of the Chinese government and people and the people of Xiamen, and also in my own name, I warmly welcome all of you to the Business Forum.
Xiamen has been a trading port since ancient times as well as a gateway of China’s opening up and external cooperation. Embracing the vast ocean, the city has hosted visitors from around the world. On a personal note, Xiamen is where I started off when I came to Fujian Province to take up a new post in 1985. Back then, being one of the earliest special economic zones in China, the city was at the forefront of China’s reform and opening up endeavor and was brimming with development opportunities. Three decades later, Xiamen has become well known for its innovation and entrepreneurship, with burgeoning new economic forms and new industries, robust trade and investment and easy access to the world with air, land and sea links. Today, Xiamen is a beautiful garden city with perfect harmony between man and nature.
There is a popular saying here in southern Fujian, “Dedicate yourself and you will win,” which embodies an enterprising spirit. Xiamen’s success is a good example demonstrating the perseverance of the 1.3 billion-plus Chinese people. In close to 40 years of reform and opening up, under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, we Chinese have forged ahead, fearless and determined, and we have successfully embarked on a path of socialism with distinctive Chinese features. We have encountered difficulties and challenges on the way forward. But we have persevered and kept pace with the times. With dedication, courage and ingenuity, we are making great progress in pursuing development in today’s China.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Friends,
BRICS cooperation has now reached a crucial stage of development. In assessing its performance, it is important to bear two things in mind: the historical course of global development and evolving international landscape and the historical process of development of the BRICS countries, both individually and collectively, in the context of which BRICS cooperation is pursued.
We are in a great era of development, transformation and adjustment. Although conflict and poverty are yet to be eliminated globally, the trend toward peace and development has grown ever stronger. Our world today is becoming increasingly multipolar; the economy has become globalized; there is growing cultural diversity; and the society has become digitized. The law of the jungle where the strong prey on the weak and the zero-sum game are rejected, and peace, development and win-win cooperation have become the shared aspiration of all peoples.
Against such a backdrop, a large number of emerging market and developing countries have come to the fore, playing an ever greater role in international affairs. BRICS cooperation is a natural choice made by our five countries, as we all share a desire for peace and development. In the past decade, we BRICS countries have surged ahead and become a bright spot in the global economy.
— The past decade has seen the BRICS countries making headway in pursuing common development. The sudden outbreak of the 2008 global financial crisis left the world economy reeling, which is yet to fully recover. Facing the external shock, our five countries have held the ground by strengthening the domestic economy, boosting growth and improving people’s livelihood. In the past ten years, our combined GDP has grown by 179%, trade by 94% and urban population by 28%. All this has contributed significantly to stabilizing the global economy and returning it to growth, and it has delivered tangible benefits to three billion and more people.
— The past decade has seen the BRICS countries advancing results-oriented and mutually beneficial cooperation. Leveraging our respective strengths and converging interests, we have put in place a leaders-driven cooperation framework that covers wide-ranging areas and multiple levels. A number of cooperation projects have been launched that are in keeping with our five countries’ development strategies and meet the interests of our peoples. In particular, the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement have provided financing support for infrastructure building and sustainable development of the BRICS countries, contributing to enhanced global economic governance and the building of an international financial safety net.
—The past decade has seen the BRICS countries endeavoring to fulfill their international responsibility. Committed to multilateralism, fairness and justice, our five countries have staked out our positions on major regional and international issues and made our proposals to address them. We have promoted reform of global economic governance to increase the representation and say of emerging market and developing countries. As a champion of development, we have taken the lead in implementing the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals, and engaged in close dialogue and cooperation with other developing countries to pursue development through unity.
As an old saying goes, the construction of a tall building starts with its foundation. We have laid the foundation and put in place the framework of BRICS cooperation. In reviewing the past progress of BRICS cooperation, I believe there are three important practices that should be carried forward.
First, treating each other as equals and seeking common ground while shelving differences. In terms of BRICS cooperation, decisions are made through consultation among us all, not by one country alone. We respect each other’s path and model of development, accommodate each other’s concerns and work to enhance strategic communication and political mutual trust. Given differences in national conditions, history and culture, it is only natural that we may have some differences in pursuing our cooperation. However, with strong faith in cooperation and commitment to enhancing trust, we can achieve steady progress in our cooperation.
Second, taking a results-oriented, innovative approach to make our cooperation benefit all. BRICS is not a talking shop, but a task force that gets things done. Our goal is to build a big market of trade and investment, promote smooth flow of currency and finance, improve connectivity of infrastructure and build close bond between the people. In pursuing this goal, our five countries are engaged in practical cooperation across the board, covering several dozen areas, including economy, trade, finance, science, technology, education, culture and health, thus giving concrete expression to the endeavor of building a new type of international relations featuring win-win cooperation.
Third, developing ourselves to help others with the well-being of the world in our mind. Having gone through an arduous course of development, we BRICS countries share the agony of those people who are still caught in chaos and poverty. Since the very beginning, our five countries have been guided by the principle of dialogue without confrontation, partnership without alliance. We are committed to observing the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, international law and basic norms governing international relations in conducting state-to-state relations. When developing ourselves, we are ready to share development opportunities with other countries. The philosophy of BRICS cooperation has gained growing appreciation and endorsement, and it has become a positive energy in the international community.
All this is what the BRICS spirit is about. It is the shared value that has bound us in the past decade’s cooperation. This spirit, constantly enriched over the years, has not only benefited our peoples but also enabled us to make a difference in the world.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Friends,
Reviewing past progress helps us forge ahead in the right direction. Currently, the global economy has resumed growth, with emerging market and developing countries delivering a strong performance. A new round of technological and industrial revolution is in the making, and reform and innovation are gaining momentum. We have enough reason to believe that our world will be a better place.
On the other hand, more than 700 million people are still living in hunger; tens of millions of people are displaced and become refugees; so many people, including innocent children, are killed in conflicts. The global economy is still not healthy enough and remains in a period of adjustment featuring weak growth, and new growth drivers are yet to emerge. Economic globalization is facing more uncertainties. Emerging market and developing countries find themselves in a more complex external environment. The long road to global peace and development will not be a smooth one.
Some people, seeing that emerging market and developing countries have experienced growth setbacks, assert that the BRICS countries are losing their luster. It is true that affected by complex internal and external environments, we BRICS countries have encountered headwinds of varying intensity. But the growth potential and trend of our countries remain unchanged, and we are fully confident about it.
It is time to set sail when the tide rises. Going forward, we BRICS countries have a major task to accomplish, which is growing our economies and strengthening cooperation. We should build on past success, chart the course for future cooperation and embark on a new journey to jointly usher in the second “Golden Decade” of BRICS cooperation.
First, we should boost BRICS cooperation to create new impetus for economic growth of our five countries. In recent years, thanks to our strengths in terms of commodities supply, cost of human resources and international market demand, our five countries have driven global growth. As our five economies continue to grow, however, issues concerning resources allocation and industrial structure have become more acute. At the same time, the global economic structure is going through profound changes, evidenced by shrinking global demand and rising financial risks. All this has posed challenges to the traditional strengths of the BRICS economies, taking us to a crucial stage where we must work harder to overcome difficulties.
How should we get through this stage? Growth rate alone is not the answer. Instead, we should, on the basis of our current conditions and bearing in mind the long-term goal, advance structural reform and explore new growth drivers and development paths. We should seize the opportunity presented by the new industrial revolution to promote growth and change growth model through innovation. We should pursue innovation-driven development created by smart manufacturing, the “Internet Plus” model, digital economy and sharing economy, stay ahead of the curve and move faster to replace old growth drivers with new ones. We should eliminate impediments to economic development through reform, remove systemic and institutional barriers, and energize the market and the society, so as to achieve better quality, more resilient and sustainable growth.
Despite different national conditions, we BRICS countries are at a similar development stage and share the same development goals. We should jointly explore ways to boost innovation-driven growth. This requires us to improve macroeconomic policy coordination, synergize our respective development strategies, leverage our strengths in terms of industrial structure and resources endowment, and create value chains and a big market for shared interests, so as to achieve interconnected development. Basing ourselves on our own practices of reform and innovation, we should blaze a new path which may also help other emerging market and developing countries to seize opportunities and meet challenges.
Economic cooperation is the foundation of the BRICS mechanism. With this focus in mind, we should implement the Strategy for BRICS Economic Partnership, institutionalize and substantiate cooperation in various sectors, and continue to enhance the performance of BRICS cooperation. This year, we have made progress in the operation of the New Development Bank and Contingent Reserve Arrangement, and in e-commerce, trade and investment facilitation, trade in services, local currency bond issuance, scientific and technological innovation, industrial cooperation and public-private partnership, thus expanding and intensifying economic cooperation. We should continue to implement agreements and consensus already reached and better leverage the role of current mechanisms. We should also actively explore new ways and new areas of practical cooperation and strengthen our ties to ensure durable and fruitful BRICS cooperation.
Secondly, we BRICS countries should shoulder our responsibilities to uphold global peace and stability. Peace and development underpin and reinforce each other. People around the world want peace and cooperation, not conflict or confrontation. Thanks to the joint efforts of all countries, global peace has reigned for more than half a century. However, incessant conflicts in some parts of the world and hotspot issues are posing challenges to world peace. The intertwined threats of terrorism and lack of cybersecurity, among others, have cast a dark shadow over the world.
We BRICS countries are committed to upholding global peace and contributing to the international security order. This year, we have held the Meeting of High Representatives for Security Issues and the Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs/International Relations. We have put in place the regular meeting mechanism for our permanent representatives to the multilateral institutions, and convened the Foreign Policy Planning Dialogue, the Meeting of Counter-Terrorism Working Group, the Meeting of Cybersecurity Working Group, and the Consultation on Peacekeeping Operations. These efforts aim to strengthen consultation and coordination on major international and regional issues and build synergy among the BRICS countries. We should uphold the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and basic norms governing international relations, firmly support multilateralism, work for greater democracy in international relations, and oppose hegemonism and power politics. We should foster the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, and take a constructive part in the process of resolving geopolitical hotspot issues and make our due contributions.
I am convinced that as long as we take a holistic approach to fighting terrorism in all its forms, and address both its symptoms and root causes, terrorists will have no place to hide. When dialogue, consultation and negotiation are conducted to create conditions for achieving political settlement of issues such as Syria, Libya and the Palestine-Israel conflict, the flame of war can be put out, and displaced refugees will eventually return to their homes.
Thirdly, we BRICS countries should contribute to enhancing global economic governance. Only openness delivers progress, and only inclusiveness sustains such progress. Due to sluggish global growth in recent years, such issues as uneven development, inadequate governance and deficit of fairness have become more acute, and protectionism and inward-looking mentality are on the rise. The global economy and global economic governance system, having entered a period of adjustment, face new challenges.
We should not ignore problems arising from economic globalization or just complain about them. Rather, we should make joint efforts to find solutions. We should work together with other members of the international community to step up dialogue, coordination and cooperation and contribute to upholding and securing global economic stability and growth. To this end, we should promote the building of an open global economy, advance trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, jointly build new global value chains, and rebalance economic globalization. Doing so will bring benefits to people across the world. We five countries should open more to each other, expand converging interests in this process, take an inclusive approach and share opportunities, so as to create even brighter prospects for growing the economies of the five countries.
The development of emerging market and developing countries is not intended to move the cheese of anyone but to make the pie of the global economy bigger. We should join hands to steer the course of economic globalization, offer more vision and public goods, make the governance model and rules more balanced and inclusive, and improve and reshape international division of labor and global value chains. We should work to reform the global economic governance system to make it commensurate with the reality of the global economic architecture. We should also improve governance rules for the new domains of deep sea, polar regions, outer space and cyberspace, so as to ensure that all countries share both rights and responsibilities.
Fourthly, we should increase the influence of BRICS and build extensive partnerships. As a cooperation platform with global influence, BRICS cooperation is more than about our five countries. Rather, it carries the expectations of emerging market and developing countries and indeed the international community. Guided by the principle of open and inclusive cooperation, we BRICS countries place high premium on cooperation with other emerging market and developing countries and have established effective dialogue mechanisms with them.
As a Chinese saying goes, “It is easy to break one arrow but hard to break ten arrows bundled together.” We should leverage our respective strengths and influence, promote South-South cooperation and North-South dialogue, pool the collective strengths of all countries and jointly defuse risks and meet challenges. We should expand the coverage of BRICS cooperation and deliver its benefits to more people. We should promote the “BRICS Plus” cooperation approach and build an open and diversified network of development partnerships to get more emerging market and developing countries involved in our concerted endeavors for cooperation and mutual benefits.
During the Xiamen Summit, China will hold the Dialogue of Emerging Market and Developing Countries, where leaders of five countries from different regions will be invited to join the BRICS leaders in discussing global development cooperation and South-South cooperation as well as the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Mutual understanding and friendship among peoples is crucial to enhancing BRICS cooperation and building extensive partnerships. We should fully leverage the role of people-to-people and cultural exchanges and encourage extensive public participation in BRICS cooperation. We should hold more events like cultural festivals, movie festivals and sports games that are popular among the people so that the BRICS story will be told everywhere and the exchanges and friendship of the peoples of our five countries will become an inexhaustible source of strength driving BRICS cooperation.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Friends,
The past decade has not only seen solid progress in the BRICS cooperation mechanism; it has also witnessed the unfolding of all-round reform and opening up in China and its rapid economic and social development. Over these ten years, China’s economic aggregate has grown by 239% and its total volume of exports and imports in goods risen by 73%. China has become the world’s second largest economy, the lives of its 1.3 billion-plus people have been significantly improved, and China has made increasingly greater contribution to both regional and global economic development.
It is true that as China’s reform endeavors have entered a crucial stage where tough challenges must be met, some underlying difficulties and problems have surfaced, which must be addressed with resolve and determination. As a Chinese saying goes, “Effective medicine tastes bitter.” The medicine that we have prescribed for ourselves is to carry out all-round reform. Over the past five years, we have adopted over 1,500 reform measures covering all sectors, with breakthroughs made in multiple areas, and the reform is being pursued with greater intensity. The pace of economic structural adjustment and industrial upgrading has accelerated. China’s economy has maintained steady and sound performance, and new drivers sustaining development have grown in strength. In the first half of this year, China’s economy grew by 6.9%, the value added from services accounted for 54.1% of the GDP, and 7.35 million urban jobs were created. All these achievements have proven that deepening all-round reform is the right path that we should continue to follow.
Going forward, China will continue to put into practice the vision of innovative, coordinated, green, open and inclusive development. We will adapt to and steer the new normal of economic development, push forward supply-side structural reform, accelerate the building of a new system for an open economy, drive economic development with innovation, and achieve sustainable development. China will stay firmly committed to peaceful development and make even greater contribution to global peace and development.
Last May, China successfully hosted the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, which was attended by 29 heads of state or government and over 1,600 representatives from more than 140 countries and 80-plus international organizations. This ushered in a new stage of translating the Belt and Road Initiative from vision to action and from planning to implementation. Forum participants discussed ways of promoting cooperation and development and reached broad consensus. Let me make this clear: The Belt and Road Initiative is not a tool to advance any geopolitical agenda, but a platform for practical cooperation. It is not a foreign aid scheme, but an initiative for interconnected development which calls for extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits. I am convinced that the Belt and Road Initiative will serve as a new platform for all countries to achieve win-win cooperation and that it will create new opportunities for implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The business community of the BRICS countries is the main force driving our economic development. Over the last decade, you have incorporated business development into BRICS cooperation, thus making important contribution to forging BRICS economic partnerships. The reason why we are holding the Business Forum on the eve of the Summit is to solicit your views and advice, so that we can work together to make the Xiamen Summit a success and enable BRICS cooperation to deliver. I hope you will leverage your strengths in terms of information, technology and funding to launch more practical and mutually beneficial cooperation projects that benefit our countries and peoples. What you do will help spur economic and social development and improve people’s lives. The Chinese government will continue to encourage Chinese companies to operate and take root in other countries, and likewise, we also warmly welcome foreign companies to invest and operate in China.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Friends,
We BRICS countries will enter a second decade of more vibrant growth. Let us work together with other members of the international community. Let our cooperation deliver more benefits to the peoples of our five countries. Let the benefits of global peace and development reach all the people in the world.
In conclusion, I wish the Business Forum every success.
This article was first published in January 2017. Is “Mad Dog” James Mattis who is now in charge of the Pentagon a war criminal?
Retired Gen. James Mattis earned the nickname “Mad Dog” for leading U.S. Marines into battle in Fallujah, Iraq, in April 2004. In that assault, members of the Marine Corps, under Mattis’ command, shot at ambulances and aid workers. They cordoned off the city, preventing civilians from escaping. They posed for trophy photos with the people they killed.
Each of these offenses has put other military commanders and members of the rank and file in front of international war crimes tribunals. The doctrine that landed them there dates back to World War II, when an American military tribunal held Japanese Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita accountable for war crimes in the Philippines. His execution later was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
During the siege of Fallujah, which I covered as an unembedded journalist, Marines killed so many civilians that the municipal soccer stadium had to be turned into a graveyard.
In the years since, Mattis – called a “warrior monk” by his supporters – repeatedly has protected American service members who killed civilians, using his status as a division commander to wipe away criminal charges against Marines accused of massacring 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005 and granting clemency to some of those convicted in connection with the 2006 murder of a 52-year-old disabled Iraqi, who was taken outside his home and shot in the face four times.
These actions show a different side of Mattis, now 66, than has been featured in most profiles published since his nomination as President-elect Donald Trump’s defense secretary, which have portrayed him as a strong proponent of the Geneva Conventions and an anti-torture advocate.
Although Mattis argued against the siege of Fallujah beforehand, both international and U.S. law are clear: As the commanding general, he should be held accountable for atrocities committed by Marines under his command. Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting received no reply to messages sent to Mattis’ personal, business and military email addresses. Trump’s transition team likewise did not respond to inquiries. Mattis’ biography on the transition team’s website does not mention the battle.
There have been credible reports that U.S. troops under the command of Gen. Mattis did target civilians, conducted indiscriminate attacks and also conducted attacks against military objectives that caused disproportionate casualties to civilians during military operations in Fallujah,” said Gabor Rona, who teaches international law at Columbia University and worked as a legal adviser at the Geneva headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross at the time of the siege.
“All of these are war crimes,” Rona said. “Applying the doctrine of command responsibility, Gen. Mattis would be responsible for these misdeeds, these war crimes of troops under his command if he … either knew, should’ve known or did nothing to prevent or punish this behavior.”
Nearly 13 years later, the siege of Fallujah has receded from the headlines. But for those of us who experienced the events firsthand, the death and destruction are seared into our memories. The lack of accountability for the killing of so many civilians grates like nails on chalkboard.
Given his command responsibility, Mattis’ confirmation hearing for defense secretary, which starts Thursday, provides an opportunity to probe his role in the killings, including asking whether he committed war crimes.
*
I spent parts of three years in Iraq, covering the war as an independent, unembedded journalist, including work in and around Fallujah at the time of the April 2004 siege. The year before, in May 2003, I had spent $10 to take a taxi from Baghdad to Fallujah and – as an American journalist armed only with a microphone – walked freely among the fruit and vegetable sellers, buying a Seiko watch with a fake leather band and sitting in on a Friday prayer to hear from Jamal Shakur, the city’s most strident and powerful imam.
Although AK-47s were being sold openly on the street and there already had been clashes with American troops, the imam urged nonviolence.
“Islam is a religion of peace,” he preached.
Do not confront the Americans, he said. Do not turn out to protest.
But as the U.S. government bungled the occupation, anti-American sentiment grew. Basic services such as electricity, knocked out during the initial invasion in March 2003, were not restored. Insurgent attacks increased, and along with them the number of civilians killed in American counterattacks. Thousands of Iraqis disappeared into Abu Ghraib prison, Saddam Hussein’s old lockup outside Baghdad, by then operated by the U.S. military.
A year later, Fallujah was destroyed by the Marines under Mattis’ command.
A day after the April 2004 siege of Fallujah was lifted, an Iraqi man surveys a shopping center destroyed by U.S. troops. (Credit: Eunji Kang)
Rotting bodies in Fallujah streets
More than 12 years later, I still remember the smell of bodies left to rot in the streets for weeks because they could be buried only after the Marines withdrew. Iraqi doctors told me that when they tried to bury bodies during breaks in the fighting, American snipers on rooftops would shoot at them.
“When you see a child, 5 years old with no head, what (can you) say?” Dr. Salam Ismael, the head of Iraq’s young doctors association, told me in Baghdad at the time. “When you see a child with no brain, just opened cavity, what (can you) say? Or when you see a mother just hold her child, still an infant, with no head and the shells all over her body.”
Iraqi volunteers in surgical masks pull a woman’s corpse out of the front yard of a Fallujah home, where she was temporarily buried. (Credit: Eunji Kang)
My strongest memory of Fallujah came from the day the Marines withdrew from the city. On May 1, 2004, I watched as a team of volunteers wearing surgical masks pulled the rotting corpse of a middle-aged woman from a shallow grave in the front yard of a single-family home. The homeowner explained how the woman came to be lying dead in his yard.
An American warplane bombed her car as she fled the city with her husband, he said. The husband had been temporarily buried in the garden of the house next door, the charred remains of the car still visible a few yards from his front door.
The volunteers poured formaldehyde over the woman’s body to cut the stench, then placed her on a gurney and took her away in a small pickup truck. I was struck by the sad, intense eyes of one boy – not more than 12 – helping with the operation. He didn’t blink as he stood in the back of the open bed of the truck next to the body, which was covered with a white sheet.
The truck sped away. The boy was still standing, his hands on the side of the truck. In 10 minutes, he would be at the municipal soccer stadium helping bury the woman alongside hundreds of others who had died in the fighting.
Shooting at ambulances, refugee camp
Ismael told me Marines shot at his organization’s ambulance twice while he was in it. One time, he said, he was trying to retrieve bodies for burial. The other time, he was trying to bring aid to civilians stranded in their homes.
“I see people carrying a white flag and yelling at us, saying, ‘We are here, just try to save us,’ but we could not save them because whenever we opened the ambulance door, the Americans would shoot at us. We tried to carry food or water; the snipers shoot the containers of food.”
Proof often is elusive in a war zone. But that same week, British filmmaker Julia Guest showed me footage of a clearly marked ambulance, complete with blue flashing lights, riddled with bullet holes. The driver had a bandage around his head.
“It’s very clearly an ambulance,” she told me. “It’s carrying oxygen bottles. The damage to the ambulance was such that two of the wheels are totally wrecked. … They were left without an ambulance after that.”
At the time, the Marine Corps did not deny it was shooting at ambulances, but it blamed insurgents. In a 2004 email, corps spokesman Lt. Eric Knapp told me that his forces had seen fighters loading weapons from mosques into ambulances.
“By using ambulances, they are putting Iraqis in harm’s way by denying them a critical component of urgent medical care,” he wrote. “Mosques, ambulances and hospitals are protected under Geneva Convention agreements and are not targeted by U.S. Marines. However, once they are used for the purpose of hostile intent toward coalition forces, they lose their protected status and may be targeted.”
Both Ismael and Guest denied that the ambulances were used to ferry arms. Contacted for this story, Ismael, who now lives in England, still maintains that his ambulance should have been protected.
“We entered that area because we had been called for by civilians who were trapped,” he said.
The statement that ambulances were being used to smuggle arms was just one of the claims by Marine commanders that didn’t match up with what I heard on the ground from civilians and officials alike.
For instance, on one hand, the Marine Corps command consistently said it strategically targeted insurgent fighters. On the other, an official with the Iraqi Red Crescent Society told me outside Baghdad that the aid agency had to move a camp for civilians fleeing the violence because the U.S. kept shooting at it.
Civilians repeatedly told me they were targeted by Marine snipers who had taken up positions at high points around Fallujah, too. One 11-year-old boy, Yusuf Bakri Amash, said a sniper killed his best friend.
“Ahmed was in my class,” he said. “He was younger than me. He was standing next to the wall of the secondary school and was trying to cross the street. He was hit by a bullet. The American troops fired the bullet.”
Through it all, Mattis’ top deputies downplayed the number of civilian casualties. In one statement, Lt. Col. Brennan Byrnetold reporters that 95 percent of the casualties were “military-age males.”
“The Marines are trained to be precise in their firepower,” Byrne said when confronted with an Associated Press report that 600 Iraqis had been killed, with many buried in a mass grave at the soccer stadium. “The fact that there are 600 goes back to the fact that the Marines are very good at what they do.”
In New York, a senior official with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights requested an independent inquiry, citing reports that 90 percent of the people killed in Fallujah were noncombatants. The investigation never occurred. An official Marine Corps history of the battle later would put the number of civilian deaths in the first two weeks of fighting alone at 220.
Mattis initially opposed attack on Fallujah
The official Marine Corps history says Mattis was against the assault on Fallujah, reporting that he argued, presciently, “that a large-scale operation would send the wrong message, unnecessarily endanger civilians, and ultimately fail to achieve the primary objective” of apprehending the insurgents who had killed four Blackwater security contractors.
But once it began, the official history says the Marines reporting to him carried out the assault “in a state of confusion.” U.S. military veterans of the siege, who I’ve talked to since, describe ever-shifting rules of engagement with a self-defense provision that they were encouraged to stretch to the limit.
Adam Kokesh served as a sergeant in Fallujah during the April siege. I met him four years later, in 2008, when he was one of 36 veterans who spoke at a Winter Soldier gathering of antiwar veterans in Silver Spring, Maryland. There, veterans disclosed atrocities they perpetrated or witnessed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At the gathering, Kokesh showed a trophy photo of himself next to a car with an Iraqi man killed by Marines at a checkpoint he staffed. He said the Marines in his unit took turns taking pictures with the dead Iraqi, who had been killed in a hail of machine-gun fire.
Marine Sgt. Adam Kokesh poses for a so-called trophy photo with a car that Marines shot up at a checkpoint, killing the Iraqi driver in the hail of machine-gun fire. (Credit: Courtesy of Adam Kokesh)
According to Kokesh, a whole group of Marines “unloaded into the vehicle with a .50-caliber machine gun,” even though the car was still far away.
“The bullets started at the bumper and went up through the engine compartment, and then one round at least hit this Iraqi in the chest so hard that it broke his chair backwards, and we saw the vehicle burning in the distance,” he said. “Everybody tried to justify it and said, oh, they heard rounds cooking off in the fire, AK-47 rounds were bursting in the trunk or somewhere in the car. And they dragged the car into the area where we were sleeping the next day. And we didn’t even question that, but it was clear that there were no … holes from rounds that were cooking off in the side of this car.”
Kokesh also described how at one point during the siege, he and other men commanded by Mattis stood on a bridge over the Euphrates River and allowed women and young children to flee Fallujah but pushed back all males 14 and older.
“It took me a long time before I could think about what a horrible decision we were forcing these families to make,” he said. They “could split up and leave their husband and older sons in the city and hope a Spectre gunship round doesn’t land on their head, or stay with them and hunker down and just hope they made it through alive.”
After the Marine Corps allowed women and children under 14 to flee Fallujah, but forced male civilians to stay behind, women pray for their loved ones behind barbed wire that troops had set up, cordoning off the city. (Credit: Eunji Kang)
Press on, Mattis said, as ire mounted
The decision to allow only some civilians to flee the city, which I witnessed – and other media covered as well – occurred when then-Maj. Gen. James Mattis was sent in to negotiate a ceasefire following tremendous blowback from across Iraqi society about the mounting number of civilian casualties.
The Iraqi army had refused to fight alongside Mattis’ Marines, while members of the hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council threatened to quit. The U.N.’s envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, threatened to resign.
“Collective punishment is certainly unacceptable and the siege of the city is absolutely unacceptable,” Brahimi said at the time.
But Mattis wanted to keep fighting. In his book “Fiasco,” military journalist Thomas E. Ricks writes that Mattis was against the negotiations and the ceasefire.
“If you’re going to take Vienna, take fucking Vienna!” Ricks quotes Mattis as snarling to Gen. John Abizaid, then-head of U.S. Central Command.
Mattis eventually negotiated an end to the assault, which turned over control of the city to an Iraqi-run “Fallujah Brigade” commanded by a former general in Saddam Hussein’s army, who sported a beret and wore a thick Baathist mustache. The settlement did not deliver the strategic objective announced when the assault began, namely that the killers of the four Blackwater security contractors be apprehended.
Years later, Mattis referred to the withdrawal from Fallujah as one the toughest orders he ever had to follow.
“It was a difficult decision,” he said in a Marine Corps interview posted in October. “It was a decision taken for reasons that had nothing to do with the tactical situation on the ground.”
“I was concerned to a degree that the Marines would lose confidence in their leadership,” he added, noting that sailors and Marines under his command had lost comrades in the assault.
“But they didn’t,” Mattis said, recalling a slow-talking gunner who sat for a television interview and told the reporter that he wasn’t troubled by the order to pull out of Fallujah. Mattis quotes the Marine as saying: “Doesn’t matter, we’ll just hunt ’em down somewhere else and kill ’em.”
Mattis ordered wedding party carnage
As the summer of 2004 began and it was clear that Fallujah had become a haven for insurgents, Mattis again was sent in to negotiate. Those talks failed and that November, Marines would return and, in an even bloodier siege, take the entire city.
By then, Mattis was back in the U.S., having been promoted to lieutenant general and assigned to the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Virginia.
But before Mattis’ command in Iraq ended, he was involved in another controversial incident. On May 19, less than three weeks after his forces pulled back from Fallujah, Mattis personally authorized an attack on a wedding party near the Syrian border. The Iraqi government said the strike left 42 civilians dead, including at least 13 children.
The killings roiled Iraq, coming so soon after the carnage of Fallujah – but Mattis stood by his action, arguing the dead were insurgents.
“How many people go to the middle of the desert … to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?” he told The Guardian. “These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let’s not be naive.”
A few days later, the Associated Press obtained a videotape of the event. In it, a dozen white pickup trucks sped through the desert, escorting a bridal car decorated with colorful ribbons. The bride wore a white dress and veil and was ushered into a house by a group of women, while men reclined “on brightly colored silk pillows,” the AP reported, “relaxing on the carpeted floor of a large goat-hair tent as boys” danced to tribal songs.
The video did not capture the strike itself, but soon after the footage was taken, the AP reported many, including the wedding videographer, were dead.
Mattis later told military historian Bing West that it had taken him less than 30 seconds to deliberate whether to bomb the location.
Exonerations for Haditha massacre
In media reports since Donald Trump’s nomination of Mattis for defense secretary, the now-retired general consistently has been portrayed as the adult in the room, a veteran military man beloved by his fellow Marines. He’s seen by many as a steady, well-read leader in a group that includes a national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who believes that Islam is not a religion and wrote in a book published last year that America already was “in a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people.”
“There’s no doubt,” Flynn wrote, that the Islamic State is “dead set on taking us over and drinking our blood.”
These observers took heart, for example, when Trump emerged from a meeting with Mattis in November and reported that the general had argued against waterboarding, an interrogation technique broadly condemned as torture, which Trump embraced during his campaign.
“I’ve never found it to be useful,” Trump quoted Mattis as saying. “I’ve always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers, and I do better with that than I do with torture.”
But my experience as a journalist reporting on Mattis’ assault from the perspective of Iraqi civilians gave me insight into another side of the general, a man who was willing to look the other way – and even authorize attacks on civilians – when there were “fighting-aged males” nearby. While he has many aphorisms about the importance of international law and the Geneva Conventions, in the battle of Fallujah, his Marines were not sanctioned.
This pattern becomes even clearer when you look at Mattis’ behavior once he returned to the U.S. and was promoted to general in charge of all Marine forces serving Central Command.
Time magazine broke the story in March 2006, four months after the killings. Reporter Tim McGirk wrote that after a popular member of their unit was killed by a roadside bomb, a group of Marines “went on a rampage in the village … killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including seven women and three children.” Marines also shot up a car and killed a man running on a ridge. The total number of civilian dead was 24, including a man in a wheelchair.
The Marines Corps initially did not investigate the attack because no one on the ground reported it. A subsequent Department of Defense inquiry found Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents arrived on the scene only after Time published its exposé. Another military investigation by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell found that the entire Marine Corps chain of command in Iraq ignored obvious signs of serious misconduct.
“All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics,” Bargewell wrote. “Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get ‘the job done’ no matter what it takes.”
Mattis, then a lieutenant general stationed at Camp Pendleton, California, became the “convening authority” for the court martial – giving him ultimate authority of justice in the case. In that role, he took the rare step of writing public letters to Marines accused of murder, exonerating them for their roles in the massacre.
In his letter wiping away murder charges against Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, who stood accused of killing three Iraqi men in a home, Mattis referenced Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who served as an infantryman in the Civil War, saying,
“Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the face of an uplifted knife.”
“You have served as a Marine infantryman in Iraq where our Nation is fighting a shadowy enemy who hides among the innocent people, does not comply with any aspect of the law of war, and routinely targets and intentionally draws fire toward civilians. As you well know, the challenges of this combat environment put extreme pressures on you and your fellow Marines,” Mattis wrote. “With the dismissal of these charges you may fairly conclude that you did your best to live up to the standards, followed by U.S. fighting men throughout our many wars, in the face of life or death decisions.”
After Mattis dismissed charges against three Marines, the cases against the others collapsed. In the end, only the alleged ringleader, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, was held accountable, though his sentence did not include a day in prison. In 2012, more than six years after the massacre, Wuterich pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty, and, as punishment, his rank was reduced to private. He told the court that he regretted telling his men to “shoot first and ask questions later.”
Mattis has his defenders – and critics
Today, the prosecution of Marines involved in the Haditha massacre is widely seen as a debacle, said Gary Solis, a former Marine Corps prosecutor who teaches a course at the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School called “Losing Haditha.”
But Solis, like other observers, doesn’t blame Mattis, saying he was hamstrung by inexperienced prosecutors. Compounding matters further was the lack of good evidence, the result of the initial failure of Marines on the ground to report the killings. Marine prosecutors also wasted three years fighting CBS in court, trying to get the network to provide unreleased footage from a “60 Minutes” broadcast, Solis said, during which time memories faded and witness statements changed.
“I think so highly of Gen. Mattis,” Solis said, putting primary blame for the killings on the nature of the Iraq War itself. “Whenever you are involved with armed opposition groups who don’t identify themselves, civilians are going to die by the carload.”
Other observers, including Gabor Rona, the former attorney for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said Mattis’ actions in the Haditha aftermath deserve renewed scrutiny with his nomination as defense secretary.
“Mattis’ role in whitewashing, if in fact that’s what he did, would be a war crime under international law, and analogous to what we prosecuted and executed Yamashita for,” he said, referring to the Japanese World War II general.
Indeed, Haditha was not the only time that Mattis used his command authority to clear Marines in a war crimes case. He also granted clemency to three Marines convicted in the 2006 killing of a disabled Iraqi man in Hamdania, freeing them from prison.
The Washington Post reported that a group of Marines went into the home of a 52-year-old disabled Iraqi with a metal bar in his leg, pulled him out and shot him in the face four times. The Marines then tried to frame him by planting a machine gun and shovel at the scene, to make it look as though he were an insurgent digging a roadside bomb. Eight servicemen initially were convicted and jailed; a year later, all but one had been released.
Among the three freed by Mattis was Lance Cpl. Robert Pennington, who had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit premeditated murder and kidnapping and was sentenced to eight years.
Faded Iraq War memories
Nearly 13 years have passed since the April 2004 siege of Fallujah. More than a decade has gone by since the Haditha massacre. The murder of a disabled man in Hamdania is nearly as old.
So much time has passed, in fact, that an inquiry to the Marine Corps press office for details of service member prosecutions related to the Fallujah siege was met with confusion. I was routed in sequence to the Marine Corps History Division, the Office of the Judge Advocate General of the Navy and eventually back to the Marine Corps’ main public affairs desk.
I told each officer I encountered that I was not aware of anyone being held accountable for atrocities, but wanted to be sure before I said so in a story.
After two weeks of phone calls and emails, a Marine spokeswoman, Lt. Danielle Phillips, offered this answer: I would have to submit a Freedom of Information Act request. The events simply were too long ago, she said.
Many of the international law experts contacted for this story likewise had forgotten the details, and I had to jog their memories with photographs, audio recordings and government documents.
With James Mattis’ nomination on the horizon, some suggest senators should press him about his actions as commanding general of one of the war’s bloodiest battles and his subsequent role in exonerating servicemen found guilty of war crimes.
At his confirmation hearing, senators should “ask about the high numbers of civilian casualties and whether there was adequate oversight and accountability,” said Beth Van Schaack, a law professor at Stanford University who served as deputy to the ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues in the Obama administration.
Mattis also should be asked about his “personal role as commander over subordinates who committed what appear to be war crimes against Iraqi civilians by targeting civilians or using indiscriminate force that insufficiently verified whether the targets were civilians or combatants,” Van Schaack said. “How did he supervise his troops, and what measures did he take after the fact?”
Gabor Rona, the former legal adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross, said senators should remind Mattis that commanders in Yugoslavia and Rwanda have been convicted in international war crimes tribunals for failing to prevent or punish lower-ranking war criminals, a doctrine also recognized in U.S. law through Yamashita’s case and enshrined in the Department of Defense Law of War Manual.
“Troops are between a rock and a hard place,” Rona said, “obligated to follow orders but also obligated to disobey manifestly unlawful orders” such as mistreatment of civilians or captured combatants.
Mattis’ hearing, he said, offers Congress an opportunity to put commanders on notice that they have a duty to prevent and punish abuses committed by their troops.
We are now into reckless territory with the latest North Korean nuclear test – in all probability a genuine hydrogen weapon – sending the ever reckless US President Donald Trump into a true state of belligerent adolescence.
After Saturday midnight, Washington time, when the test is meant to have taken place, Trump took little time to start pushing out those less than encyclopaedic tweets. He felt, for one, that South Korea needed a good ticking off, a scolding for presuming that some diplomatic, accommodating stance between Seoul and the north might be possible.
“South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!”[1]
Peering through that transparent glass, Trump’s anger with Seoul may well also have another context: the issue of trade, or practices he deems “unfair”. (The spirit of Steve Bannon still rides high.) Given his aversion to various free trade deals, Trump has taken exception to arrangements with South Korea.
Gary D. Cohn of the National Economic Council, and national security advisor H.R. McMaster, warn against the needless aggravation that would ensue should the US wish to rewrite, or withdraw from the South Korean deal.[2] But the position is by no means uniform, and diplomats are fully charged with the mission of extricating Washington. Even under threat of incineration and the mushroom cloud, the president reveals his true enthusiasm: doing business, and doing it badly.
Defense Secretary James Mattis, who had been the more stable of the two, was feeling an insistent and heavy breather down his back. Be strong, came the message, and do so with a promise of violence, should the circumstances arise. Importantly, give the impression that a bag of tricks so vast was still available to the Trump administration. Just don’t let one that this bag has gone missing.
Mattis’ briefing to the press in front of the White House came dangerously close to those lunatic appraisals by mega-death advocates who believed that fighting a nuclear conflict would be entirely feasible.
For one thing, Mattis insisted that there were “many military options and the President wanted to be briefed on each of them.” In truth, these options, at least vis-à-vis the North Korean nuclear project, are non-existent.
The issue would be different should Kim Jong-un prefer to attack the US and its interests:
“Any threat to the United States or its territories including Guam, or our allies, will be met with a massive military response, a response both effective and overwhelming.”
Having laid out the necessary punches, even if into thin air, Mattis retracted a bit, considering it good form to tell Pyongyang that the US was against obliterating it.
“Because we are not looking to the total annihilation of a country, namely North Korea, but as I said, we have many options to do so.”[3]
US satellite spokesman and Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was doing his best to stir the war pot, insisting that the peninsula was on the verge of conflict at a point closer than any time since the Korean war. (Does this sage know something we do not?) Such statements are beyond testing, and only have meaning if there is, in fact, a conflict: the rest, till then, is not merely speculation but irresponsible venting.
After the initial doom and gloom rant, the economic option again remains a point of fancy. According to Trump,
“the United States is considering, in addition to other options, stopping all trade with any country doing business with North Korea.”[4]
Tediously, China is again being pressed, as if Beijing wishes to aid in perpetrating a collapse in Pyongyang. Trump is ever decent enough to suggest that Beijing might be trying to help, but has proven ineffectual – much like an ignored parent.
“North Korea is a rogue nation which has become a great threat and embarrassment to China, which is trying to help but with little success.”[5]
Turnbull similarly likes speaking for China, having, it would seem, a telepathic linen into the Chinese foreign ministry.
“The Chinese are frustrated and dismayed by North Korea’s conduct, but China has the greatest leverage, and with the greatest leverage comes the greatest responsibility.”[6]
Given that China does trade with Pyongyang, the cessation of trade between the US and the world’s second largest economy is bound to be an own goal of dramatic idiocy. Doing so will make the US smaller rather than great, somewhat against the current puffy rhetoric preferred in the White House.
As for other options – take the denuclearisation of the peninsula – realism starts to ebb. The idea was again advanced by Mattis as an important goal of the UN Security Council; but such matters remain the stuff of nonsense. Having struck gold, a person is hardly going to relinquish it. The nuclear weapon remains Kim’s best insurance policy, his plumage of warning. He also knows that his opponents in the west, most notably in the United States, know that fact better than most.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
It is a basic rule from Journalism 101 that when an allegation is in serious doubt – or hasn’t been established as fact – you should convey that uncertainty to your reader by using words like “alleged” or “purportedly.” But The New York Times and pretty much the entire U.S. news media have abandoned that principle in their avid pursuit of Russia-gate.
When Russia is the target of an article, the Times typically casts aside all uncertainty about Russia’s guilt, a pattern that we’ve seen in the Times in earlier sloppy reporting about other “enemy” countries, such as Iraq or Syria, as well Russia’s involvement in Ukraine’s civil war. Again and again, the Times regurgitates highly tendentious claims by the U.S. government as undeniable truth.
So, despite the lack of publicly provided evidence that the Russian government did “hack” Democratic emails and slip them to WikiLeaks to damage Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump, the Times continues to treat those allegations as flat fact.
For a while, the Times also repeated the false claim that “all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies” concurred in the Russia-did-it conclusion, a lie that was used to intimidate and silence skeptics of the thinly sourced Russia-gate reports issued by President Obama’s intelligence chiefs.
Only after two of those chiefs – Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan – admitted that the key Jan. 6 report was produced by what Clapper called “hand-picked” analysts from just three agencies, the Times was forced to run an embarrassing correction retracting the “17 agencies” canard.
But the Times then switched its phrasing to a claim that Russian guilt was a “consensus” of the U.S. intelligence community, a misleading formulation that still suggests that all 17 agencies were onboard without actually saying so – all the better to fool the Times readers.
The Times seems to have forgotten what one of its own journalists observed immediately after reading the Jan. 6 report. Scott Shanewrote:
“What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”
However, if that was the calculation of Obama’s intelligence chiefs – that proof would not be required – they got that right, since the Times and pretty much every other major U.S. news outlet has chosen to trust, not verify, on Russia-gate.
Dropping the Attribution
In story after story, the Times doesn’t even bother to attribute the claims of Russian guilt. That guilt is just presented as flat fact even though the Russian government denies it and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he did not get the emails from Russia or any other government.
CIA seal in lobby of the spy agency’s headquarters. (U.S. government photo)
Of course, it is possible the Russian government is lying and that some cut-outs were used to hide from Assange the real source of the emails. But the point is that we don’t know the truth and neither does The New York Times – and likely neither does the U.S. government (although it talks boldly about its “high confidence” in the evidence-lite conclusions of those “hand-picked” analysts).
And, the Times continues with this pattern of asserting as certain what is both in dispute and lacking in verifiable evidence. In a front-page Russia-gate story on Saturday, the Times treats Russian guilt as flat fact again. The online version of the story carried the headline: “Russian Election Hacking Efforts, Wider Than Previously Known, Draw Little Scrutiny.”
The Times’ article opens with an alarmist lede about voters in heavily Democratic Durham, North Carolina, encountering problems with computer rolls:
“Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before. ‘It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,’ Ms. Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham.”
The Times reported that Greenhalgh “knew” this supposed fact because she heard it on “a CNN report.”
If you read deeper into the story, you learn that “local officials blamed human error and software malfunctions — and no clear-cut evidence of digital sabotage has emerged, much less a Russian role in it.” But the Times clearly doesn’t buy that explanation, adding:
“After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.”
But was the 2016 campaign really “scarred by Russian meddling”? For instance, the “fake news” hysteria of last fall was actually traced to young entrepreneurs who were exploiting the gullibility of Donald Trump’s supporters to get lots of “clicks” and thus make more ad revenue. The stories didn’t trace back to the Russian government. (Even the Times discovered that reality although it apparently has since been forgotten.)
‘Undermining’ American Democracy
The Jan. 6 report by those “hand-picked” analysts from CIA, FBI and the National Security Agency did tack on a seven-page appendix from 2012 that accused Russia’s RT network of seeking to undermine U.S. democracy. But the complaints were bizarre if not laughable, including the charge that RT covered the Occupy Wall Street protests, reported on the dangers of “fracking,” and allowed third-party presidential candidates to state their views after they were excluded from the two-party debate between Republican Mitt Romney and Democrat Barack Obama.
That such silly examples of “undermining” American democracy were even cited in the Jan. 6 report should have been an alarm bell to any professional journalist that the report was a classic case of biased analysis if not outright propaganda. But the report was issued amid the frenzy over the incoming Trump presidency when Democrats – and much of the mainstream media – were enlisting in the #Resistance. The Jan. 6 report was viewed as a crucial weapon to take out Trump, so skepticism was suppressed.
Because of that – and with Trump continuing to alarm many Americans with his erratic temperament and his coy encouragement of white nationalism – the flimsy Russian “hacking” case has firmed up into a not-to-be-questioned groupthink, as the Times story on Saturday makes clear:
“The assaults on the vast back-end election apparatus [i.e. voting rolls] … have received far less attention than other aspects of the Russian interference, such as the hacking of Democratic emails and spreading of false or damaging information about Mrs. Clinton. Yet the hacking of electoral systems was more extensive than previously disclosed, The New York Times found.”
In other words, even though there has been no solid proof of this “Russian interference” – either the “hacking of Democratic emails” or the “spreading of false or damaging information about Mrs. Clinton” – the Times reports those allegations as flat fact before extending the suspicions into the supposed “hacking of electoral systems” despite the lack of supporting evidence and in the face of counter-explanations from local officials. As far as the Times is concerned, the problem couldn’t be that some volunteer poll worker screwed up the software. No, it must be the dirty work of Russia! Russia! Russia!
The Times asserts that “Russian efforts to compromise American election systems … include combing through voter databases, scanning for vulnerabilities or seeking to alter data, which have been identified in multiple states.” Again, the Times does not apply words like “alleged”; it is just flat fact.
Uncertainty Acknowledged
Yet, oddly, the quote used to back up this key accusation acknowledges how little is actually known. The Times cites Michael Daniel, the cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama White House, as saying:
“We don’t know if any of the [computer] problems were an accident, or the random problems you get with computer systems, or whether it was a local hacker, or actual malfeasance by a sovereign nation-state. … If you really want to know what happened, you’d have to do a lot of forensics, a lot of research and investigation, and you may not find out even then.’”
Which is exactly the point: as far as we know from the public record, no U.S. government forensics have been done on the Russian “hacking” allegations, period. Regarding the “hack” of the Democratic National Committee’s emails, the FBI did not secure the computers for examination but instead relied on the checkered reputation of a private outfit called Crowdstrike, which based much of its conclusion on the fact that Russian lettering and a reference to a famous Russian spy were inserted into the metadata. Why the supposedly crack Russian government hackers would be so sloppy has never been explained. It also could not be excluded that these insertions were done deliberately to incriminate the Russians.
Without skepticism, the Times accepts that there is some secret U.S. government information that should bolster the public’s confidence about Russian guilt, but none of that evidence is spelled out, other than ironically to say what the Russians weren’t doing.
The Times cited the Jan. 6 report’s determination that
“The Russians shied away from measures that might alter the ‘tallying’ of votes, … a conclusion drawn from American spying and intercepts of Russian officials’ communications and an analysis by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the current and former government officials.”
But this seems to be the one U.S. government conclusion that the Times doubts, i.e., a finding of Russian innocence on the question of altering the vote count.
Again accepting as flat fact all the other U.S. government claims about Russia, the Times writes:
“Apart from the Russian influence campaign intended to undermine Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic officials, the impact of the quieter Russian hacking efforts at the state and county level has not been widely studied.”
There’s, of course, another rule from Journalism 101: that when there is a serious accusation, the accused is afforded a meaningful chance to dispute the allegation, but the Times lengthy article ignores that principle, too. The Russian government and WikiLeaks do not get a shot at knocking down the various allegations and suspicions.
Deep-seated Bias
The reality is that the Times has engaged in a long pattern of anti-Russia prejudice going back a number of years but escalating dramatically since 2013 when prominent neoconservatives began to target Russia as an obstacle to their agendas of “regime change” in Syria and “bomb-bomb-bombing” Iran.
By September 2013, the neocons were targeting Ukraine as what neocon National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershmandeemed the “biggest prize” and an important step toward an even bigger prize, neutralizing or ousting Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine’s Azov battalion. (As filmed by a Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV)
When neocon U.S. officials, such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Sen. John McCain, encouraged a coup that overthrew Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych, the Times served as a cheerleader for the coup-makers even though the violence was spearheaded by neo-Nazis and extreme Ukrainian nationalists.
When ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and Crimea resisted the Feb. 22, 2014 coup, the Times collaborated with the State Department in presenting this rejection of an unconstitutional transfer of power as a “Russian invasion.”
For instance, on April 21, 2014, the Times led its print editions with an investigative story using photos provided by the coup regime and the State Department to supposedly show that fighters inside Ukraine had previously been photographed inside Russia, except that the two key photographs were both taken inside Ukraine, forcing the Times to run a half-hearted retraction two days later.
Here is the tortured way the Times treated that embarrassing lapse in its journalistic standards:
“A packet of American briefing materials … asserts that the photograph was taken in Russia. The same men are also shown in photographs taken in Ukraine. Their appearance in both photographs was presented as evidence of Russian involvement in eastern Ukraine.
“The packet was later provided by American officials to The New York Times, which included that description of the group photograph in an article and caption that was published on Monday. The dispute over the group photograph cast a cloud over one particularly vivid and highly publicized piece of evidence.”
In other words, U.S. officials hand-fed the Times this “scoop” on a Russian “invasion” and the Times swallowed it whole. But the Times never seems to learn any lessons from its credulous approach to whatever the U.S. government provides. You might have thought that the Times’ disgraceful performance in pushing the Iraq-WMD story in 2002 would have given the newspaper pause, but its ideological biases apparently win out every time.
Two Birds, One Stone
In the case of the Russian “hacking” stories, the anti-Russia bias is compounded by an anti-Trump bias, a two-fer that has overwhelmed all notions of journalistic principles not only at the Times but at other mainstream news outlets and many liberal/progressive ones which want desperately to see Trump impeached and view Russia-gate as the pathway to that outcome.
So, while there was almost no skepticism about the Jan. 6 report by those “hand-picked” analysts – even though the report amounts only to a series of “we assess” this and “we assess” that, i.e,, their opinions, not facts – there has been a bubbling media campaign to discredit a July 24 memo by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Former National Security Agency official William Binney sitting in the offices of Democracy Now! in New York City. (Photo credit: Jacob Appelbaum)
The memo, signed by 17 members of the group including former NSA technical director for world geopolitical and military analysis William Binney, challenged the technological possibility of Russian hackers extracting data over the Internet at the speed reflected in one of the posted documents.
After The Nation published an article by Patrick Lawrence about the VIPS memo (a story that we re-posted at Consortiumnews.com), editor Katrina vanden Heuvel came under intense pressure inside the liberal magazine to somehow repudiate its findings and restore the Russia-gate groupthink.
Outside pressure also came from a number of mainstream sources, including Washington Post blogger Eric Wemple, who interviewed Nation columnist Katha Pollittabout the inside anger over Lawrence’s story and its citation by Trump defenders, a development which upset Pollitt:
“These are our friends now? The Washington Times, Breitbart, Seth Rich truthers and Donald Trump Jr.? Give me a break. It’s very upsetting to me. It’s embarrassing.”
However, in old-fashioned journalism, our reporting was intended to inform the American people and indeed the world as fully and fairly as possible. We had no control over how the information would play out in the public domain. If our information was seized upon by one group or another, so be it. It was the truthfulness of the information that was important, not who cited it.
A Strange Attack
But clearly inside The Nation, Pollitt and others were upset that the VIPS memo had undercut the Russia-gate groupthink. So, in response to this pressure, vanden Heuvel solicited an attack on the VIPS memo by several dissident members of VIPS and she topped Lawrence’s article with a lengthy editor’s note.
Strangely, this solicited attack on the VIPS memo cites as its “first” point that the Jan. 6 intelligence report did not explicitly use the word “hack,” but rather “cyber operation,” adding:
“This could mean via the network, the cloud, computers, remote hacking, or direct data removal.”
That uncertainty about how the emails were extracted supposedly undercut the VIPS argument that the download speeds prohibited the possibility of a “hack,” but this pretense that the phrase “cyber operation” isn’t referring to a “hack” amounts to a disingenuous word game. After all, senior U.S. intelligence officials, including former FBI Director James Comey, have stated under oath and in interviews with major news outlets that they were referring to a “hack.”
These officials also have cited the Crowdstrike analysis of the DNC “hack” as support for their analysis, and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta has described how he was the victim of a “spear-phishing” scam that allowed his emails to be hacked.
After all these months of articles about the Russian “hack,” it seems a bit late to suddenly pretend no one was referring to a “hack” – only after some seasoned experts concluded that a “hack” was not feasible. Despite the latest attacks, the authors of the VIPS memo, including former NSA technology official Binney, stand by their findings.
However, when the cause is to demonize Russia and/or to unseat Trump, apparently any sleight of hand or McCarthyistic smear is permissible.
Russia scholar Stephen Cohen.
In Post blogger Wemple’s article about The Nation’s decision to undercut the VIPS memo, he includes some nasty asides against Russia scholar Stephen Cohen, who happens to be Katrina vanden Heuvel’s husband.
In a snide tone, Wemple describes Cohen as providing “The soft-glove treatment of Russian President Vladimir Putin,” calling it Cohen’s “specialty.”
Wemple also repeats the canard about “a consensus finding of the U.S. intelligence community” when we have known for some time that the Jan. 6 report was the work of those “hand-picked” analysts from three agencies, not a National Intelligence Estimate that would reflect the consensus view of all 17 agencies and include dissents.
What is playing out here – both at The New York Times and across the American media landscape – is a totalitarian-style approach toward any challenge to the groupthink on Russia-gate.
Even though the Obama administration’s intelligence chiefs presented no public evidence to support their “assessments,” anyone who questions their certainty can expect to be smeared and ridiculed. We must all treat unverified opinions as flat fact.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
On August 25th, Gallup headlined “Republicans’, Democrats’ Views of Media Accuracy Diverge”, and reported that ever since America’s newsmedia in 2003 tried to postpone and suppress the findings that there had been no WMD (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq after 1998, Republicans’ trust in America’s newsmedia plunged from 35% in 2003 down to 14% today, but Democrats’ trust in America’s newsmedia actually increased from 42% in 2003 to 62% today — 14 years after the press’s deceit of the U.S. public, about that matter.
Another Gallup poll provides interesting context for understanding what might be behind this increasing respect for the newsmedia by Democrats after the newsmedia had aided a U.S. President to deceive this nation into an evil invasion. Apparently, Democrats’ respect for the newsmedia rose because the President who did that was a Republican, not a Democrat — they’re responding as political partisans, and because the seeping truth about that matter during the year following 2003 was accompanied by declining public support for the Republican President, and because Democrats reward that with increased respect for the press, as if Bush’s fall in support were the result of the press’s honesty. Republicans were responding partisanly in the exact opposite way, by punishing the newsmedia for the declining public support for that Republican President. On 28 June 2017, Gallup bannered, “In US, Confidence in Newspapers Still Low but Rising”, and reported that Democrats’ increase in respect for the newsmedia consisted of increasing respect for newspapers and other traditional newsmedia (the very same newsmedia that had stenographically deceived this nation into invading), whereas Republicans were drifting away from those traditional newsmedia into viewing more online news instead. Or, as I commented at the time:
“The same mainstream ‘news’ media that the U.S. aristocracy used for deceiving the American people into believing that Saddam Hussein had WMD and was a danger to the U.S. in 2003, and that did the same to Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and has been trying to do the same to Bashar al-Assad since then — and that wants to do it ultimately to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin — continues on with undiminished prestige and ability, to do the same ad nauseam.”
And this rewarding of the stenographic ‘news’media was especially the case with Democrats, because the Republican President now appeared in a less favorable light after than before the 2003 invasion, in those traditional media.
So: can we infer, from Republicans’ declining respect for the newsmedia after those newsmedia had deceived this nation into an invasion, that Republicans learn from experience more than Democrats do? Hardly. Democrats are just as partisan in their response. And this is confirmed also in other polls. For example, back on 20 June 2014, Gallup reported that even so late in the (failed) Presidency of Democrat Barack Obama, 90% of Democrats still approved of his job-performance, almost the same as the 88% of Republicans who still approved of the Presidency of George W. Bush. These were two catastrophically bad Presidents, yet each of them was still supported overwhelmingly by his party’s electorate. George W. Bush invaded Iraq on lies; Barack Obama invaded Libya and Syria on lies; yet both Presidents retained their party’s support, oblivious to reality, and blaming only ‘the opposite party’, instead of blaming the aristocracy that controls both parties and the press and the international corporations — which is one and the same aristocracy, regardless of its factions (none of which represent the public, though all of its factions pretend to).
Whereas Republicans soured on the newsmedia after 2003, Democrats soured on George W. Bush after 2003. That’s what the August 25th Gallup report appears to be showing. Republicans blamed the traditional newsmedia for the lies that produced the invasion of Iraq in 2003, whereas Democrats blamed the Republican President for those lies. Neither response was rational. Both the President and the press were to blame: the President (and his Administration), for lying; and the press, for stenographically spreading their lies to the public, unchallenged. (And the press continued lying to support the invasions by the Democratic President Obama, just as they had done regarding the invasions by Bush. There was no change: only the parties in ‘power’ changed; America’s aristocracy was actually in control throughout, and did not change at all.)
An unbiased person would blame both the lying politician and the stenographic conveyor to the public of his lies (and especially blame the aristocracy that controlled both). Democracy is impossible unless both the politicians and the press are honest. Clearly, George W. Bush lied; but, also clearly, the nation’s ‘news’media hid that fact until we had invaded Iraq. So, America’s ‘democracy’ is dysfunctional on both levels: the politicians, and the press. The deception of the public is a joint operation of both the politicians and the press, working together, to deceive and control the public, in the interest of the aristocracy. Neither the politicians nor the press can do it without the other. And any politician who tries to represent the public interest gets treated the way Bernie Sanders was. Pretending to represent the public’s interest is acceptable to the aristocracy, but representing the public’s interest isn’t.
Intelligent voters are nonpartisan — only political parties themselves should be partisan — and this nonpartisanship requires punishing all of the system’s liars (both the politicians and the press) after a voter has been deceived. A rational American, after the 2003 catastrophe, should distrust the entire system — both the press and the politicians, of both parties — rather than be partisan at all, in assigning the blame for it. This was a huge collapse of the entire American system. For any rational American voter, trust can no longer be placed in either the government or the press, unless and until the existing system of government in the U.S., has been replaced by a functioning, authentic, democracy — which this is not.
Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” James Mattis confirmed at a Press Conference that the “North Korea threat to the US will be met with ‘massive military response'” while cautioning that “‘We are not looking for the annihilation of North Korea – we have many options.” (emphasis added).
Mattis stated that president Trump “wanted to be briefed on each of the “many military options””:
“Any threat to the United States or its territories, including Guam, or our allies will be met with a massive military response, a response both effective and overwhelming.”
Retired Gen. James Mattis earned the nickname “Mad Dog” for leading U.S. Marines into battle in Fallujah, Iraq, in April 2004. In that assault, members of the Marine Corps, under Mattis’ command, shot at ambulances and aid workers. They cordoned off the city, preventing civilians from escaping. They posed for trophy photos with the people they killed. …
During the siege of Fallujah, which I covered as an unembedded journalist, Marines killed so many civilians that the municipal soccer stadium had to be turned into a graveyard. (emphasis added)
The Americans invaded, chillingly: “house to house, room to room”, raining death and destruction on the proud, ancient “City of Mosques.”
One correspondent wrote: “There has been nothing like the attack on Fallujah since the Nazi invasion and occupation of much of the European continent – the shelling and bombing of Warsaw in September 1939, the terror bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940.”
Further: “ …the ‘battle for Fallujah’ was entirely one-sided. US military and technical superiority over the Iraqi resistance (was) as great, if not greater, than the American army’s advantage over their Indian opponents in the 1870s and 1880s.”(1)
Seventy percent of houses and shops were reported destroyed, with those still standing damaged. Iraqi doctor, Ali Fadhil, described a city: “ … completely devastated, destruction everywhere. It looked like a city of ghosts. Falluja used to be a modern city; now there was nothing. We spent the day going through the rubble that had been the centre of the city; I didn’t see a single building that was functioning.”(City of Ghosts, The Guardian, January 11, 2005.)
Annihilation 2.0 with “Mad Dog” Mattis in Charge
Now “Mad Dog” Mattis heads the Pentagon, in charge of both tactical and strategic nuclear weapons, threatening an entire country with a Fallujah inspired “Massive Military Response”. The same criminal motivations prevail on a much larger scale.
War criminals in high office. Who’s threatening Whom?
North Korea lost 30% of its population as a result of US carpet bombing during the Korean war. Let’s be under no illusions: It was a policy of total annihilation.
US General Curtis Lemay in the aftermath stated:
“After destroying North Korea’s seventy eight cities and thousands of her villages, and killing countless numbers of her civilians … Over a period of three years or so we killed off – what – twenty percent of the population.”
“We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another …”, (see Pyongyang below)
Pyongyang 1953
Economic Warfare
Vice President Pence, however, intimated at the press conference that the immediate objective was to freeze trade with North Korea, namely a policy of total economic isolation. This would be carried out by a sanctions regime of “stopping trade with any nation doing business with North Korea”.
What is now on the US drawing board is to freeze trade with North Korea, 90% of which is with China
“If carried out, that option could mean a halt to US trade with China, which has supported economic sanctions on North Korea but remains the key economic partner for the rogue nation.”
That statement (CNN, September 3, 2017) borders on ridicule. Sanctions directed against China would immediately backlash against America, leading to the potential disruption of the “Made in China” consumer economy.
Will China heed to Washington’s threats? While Beijing controls 90% of the trade with North Korea, the People’s Republic of China is America’s largest trading partner.
China is not dependent on US imports. Quite the opposite. America is an import led economy with a weak industrial and manufacturing base, heavily dependent on imports from the PRC.
Imagine what would happen if China following Washington’s threats decided from one day to the next to significantly curtail its “Made in China” commodity exports to the USA.
It would be absolutely devastating, disrupting the consumer economy, an economic and financial chaos.
“Made in China” is the backbone of retail trade in the USA which indelibly sustains household consumption in virtually all major commodity categories from clothing, footwear, hardware, electronics, toys, jewellery, household fixtures, food, TV sets, mobile phones, etc.
Ask the American consumer: The list is long.
“China makes 7 out of every 10 cellphones sold Worldwide, as well as 12 and a half billion pairs of shoes’ (more than 60 percent of total World production). Moreover, China produces over 90% of the World’s computers and 45 percent of shipbuilding capacity” (The Atlantic, August 2013)
Make America Great again: Made in China. Not a good option for the Donald!
Economic Hara-kiri
This kind of economic blackmail on the part of the Trump administration directed against China will not work. It falls flat.
US sanctions against China would backlash on the USA. America cannot relinquish its imports of Chinese manufactured goods.
It would be suicide, a self-imposed “economic hara-kiri”.
Moreover, Trump is also blackmailing South Korea for its failure to fully endorse the US military agenda against Pyongyang, threatening to rescind the US-ROK bilateral free-trade agreement (KORUS).
ROK president Moon favors dialogue and reconciliation rather than confrontation with Pyongyang, not to mention the restoration of North-South trade and investment established as a result of the 2000 Joint Declaration.
Screenshot NYT, September 3, 2017
President Trump, in a tweet on September 3, accused South Korea of talking about “appeasement.”
What is significant is that without South Korea’s cooperation, the US will not be in a position to effectively initiate military procedures against the DPRK. Hopefully, peace negotiations (with the support of China, Russia and South Korea) could emerge.
Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” Mattis confirmed at a Press Conference that the “North Korea threat to US will be met with ‘massive military response'” while cautioning that “‘We are not looking for the annihilation of North Korea – we have many options.” (emphasis added)
Mattis stated that president Trump “wanted to be briefed on each of the “many military options”:
“Any threat to the United States or its territories, including Guam, or our allies will be met with a massive military response, a response both effective and overwhelming.”
Vice President Pence intimated at the press conference that the immediate objective was to freeze trade with North Korea, namely a policy of economic isolation. Trump warned that the United States “was considering stopping trade with any nation doing business with North Korea”.
This sanctions regime is essentially directed against China.
What is now on the books is to completely freeze trade with North Korea, 90% of which is with China.
But at the same time, will China heed to these threats. While Beijing controls 90% of the trade with North Korea, the People’s Republic of China is America’s largest trading partner. According to CNN (September 3, 2017):
‘If carried out, that option could mean a halt to US trade with China, which has supported economic sanctions on North Korea but remains the key economic partner for the rogue nation.”
This statement borders on ridicule. Sanctions directed against China would immediately backlash against America: what would happen if China decided to curtail its trade with the the USA, which is the topic of this article first published on August 3, 2017
China is not dependent on US imports. Quite the opposite. America is an import led economy with a weak industrial and manufacturing base, heavily dependent on imports from the PRC.
Imagine what would happen if China following Washington’s threats decided from one day to the next to significantly curtail its “Made in China” commodity exports to the USA.
It would be absolutely devastating, disrupting the consumer economy, an economic and financial chaos.
“Made in China” is the backbone of retail trade in the USA which indelibly sustains household consumption in virtually all major commodity categories from clothing, footwear, hardware, electronics, toys, jewellery, household fixtures, food, TV sets, mobile phones, etc.
Michel Chossudovsky, September 3, 2003
***
In June, Washington threatened Beijing with a sanctions regime, in response to China’s increased bilateral commodity trade with North Korea. Initially, the US sanctions were not intended to be against the Chinese government: selected Chinese banks and trading companies involved in the financing of China-DPRK commodity trade would be potential targets of US reprisals.
According to Chinese sources, China’s trade with the DPRK increased by 37.4 percent in the first quarter of 2017, in relation to the same period in 2016. China’s exports increased by 54.5 percent, with imports from the DPRK experiencing an 18.4 percent increase.
The insinuation was crystal clear: curtail your trade with North Korea, or else…
Coupled with the aggressive legislative sanctions “package” recently adopted by the US Congress directed against Russia, Iran and North Korea, Washington now threatens China in no uncertain terms.
Trump is demanding that Beijing relinquish its relationship with the DPRK, by unconditionally siding with Washington against Pyongyang. Washington has granted China six months “to prove that it is committed to preventing a nuclear-armed North Korea”, despite the fact that Beijing has expressed its firm opposition to the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program.
The political deadline is coupled with veiled threats that “if you do not comply”, punitive trade measures will be adopted which could result in the disruption of China’s exports to the United States.
Moreover, the White House is intent upon conducting “an investigation into China’s trade practices” focussing on alleged violations of U.S. intellectual property rights. A “Section 301” investigation, named after a portion of the 1974 Trade Act is slated to be launched.
Following the completion of the investigation, Washington threatens to “impose steep tariffs on Chinese imports [into the US], rescind licenses for Chinese companies to do business in the United States, or take other measures, which could, “pave the way for the U.S. to impose sanctions on Chinese exporters or to further restrict the transfer of advanced technology to Chinese firms or to U.S.-China joint ventures.”
In formulating these veiled threats, the Trump administration should think twice. These measures would inevitably backlash on the U.S. economy.
China is not dependent on US imports. Quite the opposite. America is an import led economy with a weak industrial and manufacturing base, heavily dependent on imports from the PRC.
Imagine what would happen if China following Washington’s threats decided from one day to the next to significantly curtail its “Made in China” commodity exports to the USA.
It would be absolutely devastating, disrupting the consumer economy, an economic and financial chaos.
“Made in China” is the backbone of retail trade which indelibly sustains household consumption in virtually all major commodity categories from clothing, footwear, hardware, electronics, toys, jewellery, household fixtures, food, TV sets, mobile phones, etc. Ask the American consumer: The list is long. “China makes 7 out of every 10 cellphones sold Worldwide, as well as 12 and a half billion pairs of shoes’ (more than 60 percent of total World production). Moreover, China produces over 90% of the World’s computers and 45 percent of shipbuilding capacity (The Atlantic, August 2013)
A large share of goods displayed in America’s shopping malls, including major brands is “Made in China”.
“Made in China” also dominates the production of a wide range of industrial inputs, machinery, building materials, automotive, parts and accessories, etc. not to mention the extensive sub-contracting of Chinese companies on behalf of US conglomerates.
www.Made-In-China.com
China is America’s largest trading partner. According to US sources, trade in goods and services with China totalled an estimated $648.2 billion in 2016.
China’s commodity exports to the US totalled $462.8 billion dollars.
Import Led Growth
Importing from China is a lucrative multi-trillion dollar operation. It is the source of tremendous profit and wealth in the US, because consumer commodities imported from China’s low wage economy are often sold at the retail level more than ten times their factory price.
Production does not take place in the USA. The producers have given up production. The US trade deficit with China is instrumental in fuelling the profit driven consumer economy which relies on Made in China consumer goods.
A dozen designer shirts produced in China will sell at a factory price FOB at $36 a dozen ($3 dollars a shirt). Once they reach the shopping malls, each shirt will be sold at $30 or more, approximately ten times its factory price. Vast revenues accrue to wholesale and retail distributors. The US based “non-producers” reap the benefits of China’s low cost commodity production. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, Global Research, 2003).
The import of commodities from China (in excess of 462 billion dollars) is conducive through the interplay of wholesale and retail markups (which contribute to value added) to a substantive increase in America’s GDP, without the need for commodity production. Without Chinese imports, the GDP rate of growth would be substantially lower.
What we are referring to is Import Led Growth. US businesses no longer need to produce, they subcontract with a Chinese partner.
And why is this occurring? Because America’s manufacturing industries (in many sectors of production) has in course of the last forty years been closed down and relocated offshore (through subcontracting), to cheap labor locations in developing countries.
China’s economy is not only linked to industrial assembly, China increasingly constitutes a competitor and major exporter in a variety of high technology sectors.
Image: Make America Great Again: Made in China
In Your Face Donald Trump!
In summary, this kind of economic blackmail on the part of the Trump administration against China does not work. It falls flat.
In turn, America is threatening both Russia and China militarily including the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons. How will Russia and China respond to US threats?
While US sanctions against Russia have largely backlashed on the European Union, it is not excluded (although unlikely) that China could at some future date respond to US threats by impose economic sanctions against the USA.
In the short run, the US cannot relinquish its imports of Chinese manufactured goods. It would be economic suicide.
Laughing in Beijing
Chinese policy makers are fully aware that the US economy is heavily dependent on “Made in China”.
And with an internal market of more than 1.3 billion people, coupled with a global export market, these veiled US threats will not be taken seriously by Beijing.
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The British Trident ‘deterrent’ is a £100 billion bad joke when Israel now has a nuclear-armed, state-of-the-art fleet of five German-built submarines armed with SLCM Cruise missiles that can already blow a British SLBM-armed Trident submarine out of the water at close range.
Israel already has a fleet of five such nuclear-armed naval strike vessels assumed to be now patrolling the Mediterranean, the Gulf and the North Sea, unseen.
Just one Israeli strike vessel armed with SLCM, patrolling Trident’s home port, could incinerate a Royal Navy Vanguard-class submarine armed with a Trident long-range ballistic missile that has no short-range capability, within seconds.
Secretary Michael Fallon, with his 20 year plan for a Trident replacement, knows full well that Britain must now rely on the United States for its nuclear defence, only no Conservative government will admit it.
Britain is a NATO signatory to the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and subject to inspection by the IAEA, whilst Israel is one of the only UN members that refuses to sign either, and is, (together with North Korea and Pakistan), a global nuclear threat that Britain is completely powerless to confront.
A plan to expend £100 billion for a replacement nuclear deterrent that will not be available until 2035, is £100 billion thrown down the drain. Mrs May knows it. The SNP know it and the much-maligned Mr Corbyn has the guts to say that to expend £1600 for every man, woman and child in Britain on a deterrent that is in fact no such thing, is not only political misjudgment but a serious threat to our national security.
It is public money that should be spent on modern hospitals, cancer treatment and Britain’s road, rail and communications infrastructure – not thrown away on a discredited Conservative political doctrine.
Russian scientists and local oil field services companies claim to have created a technology for thermochemical gas fracturing that could be an alternative to hydraulic fracturing and could increase oil production by between 1.7 and 6 times, Russia’s news agency RIA Novosti reports, citing the University of Tyumen’s press service.
In hydraulic fracturing, rocks are fractured with high-pressure injection of fluids, while the new breakthrough technology, as claimed by Russian scientists and media, is creating chemical reactions in the strata that contain oil.
The chemicals react and emit heat and gas, which makes extraction easier and lifts well productivity, according to the scientists and researchers.
The other upside in the technology, the Russians claim, is that the main component in the chemical reactions is ammonium nitrate, which is often used as fertilizer.
According to Professor Konstantin Fedorov, Director of the Institute of Physics and Technology at the University of Tyumen and the scientific consultant on the project, the improved well productivity effect lasts between 300 and 1,000 days. Production increases by between 1.7 times and 6 times compared to the initial output level, although the scientists have seen tests with production increases of 10 to 20 times.
The success rate is close to 100 percent, Fedorov claims, as reported by Russian media.
According to the University of Tyumen, the project—partially supported by government funding—had the goal to create an innovative and, more importantly, Russian method of oil and gas production.
The project partners plan to begin the first tests at operational wells of one of Rosneft’s subsidiaries in September, according to the University of Tyumen.
Plans are that the new technology could also be tested at oil fields of other major Russian companies, including Tatneft, Bashneft, and Gazprom Neft, Sputnik International reports.
The Trump administration ordered the closure of Russia’s San Francisco consulate, a chancery annex in Washington, and a New York consular annex – effective September 2.
On Saturday, FBI agents searched their premises, a flagrant Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations violation.
Under Article 22(1), “(t)he premises of the mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission.”
Article 22(3) states:
“The premises of the mission, their furnishings and other property thereon and the means of transport of the mission shall be immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution.”
Article 29 adds:
“The person of a diplomatic agent shall be inviolable. He shall not be liable to any form of arrest or detention. The receiving State shall treat him with due respect and shall take all appropriate steps to prevent any attack on his person, freedom or dignity.”
Article 30 grants the same inviolability and protection to a diplomatic agent’s private residence, his or her papers, correspondence, and property.
At the same time, inviolability isn’t extra-territoriality. Embassy, consular and other diplomatic grounds remain the territory of host nations.
Inviolability protects them from forced entry. Doing so constitutes a serious breach of international law.
If states want their diplomats given courtesy and respect, they’re obligated to afford similar treatment to foreign representatives on their soil. They’re bound under international law – something America ignores in geopolitical relations.
On Saturday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry summoned US deputy chief of mission in Moscow Anthony Godfrey saying:
“We consider the planned illegitimate search of the Russian diplomatic property without presence of Russian officials and the said threat to break up the entrance door as an unprecedented, aggressive act, which besides may be used by the US intelligence services to orchestrate an anti-Russian provocation by planting compromising items.”
“(W)e reserve the right to retaliate on the basis of reciprocity.”
On Saturday, Russia’s UN envoy Vasily Nebenzya said bilateral relations are at an
“unaffordable low level…add(ing) (there’s nothing) positive (about Washington’s action) not only to our relations, but also to the international situation.”
Newly arrived Russian ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov can expect rough waters to navigate in his new post, operating in hostile territory.
Moscow will react “professionally and calmly” to America’s latest affront, not with “hysterical impulses,” he said. Tough sanctions imposed in early August didn’t make things easier.
They dealt a “serious blow to bilateral relations and opportunities for effective cooperation. It is time to stop,” Antonov stressed, knowing bilateral relations are likely to get worse, not better.
The Russian people do not want war and do not plan to take part in it, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday, speaking to students and teachers of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), an academic institution run by the Russian Foreign Ministry.
“There were numerous periods throughout our history when we were restrained, but they never ended with our people being lost or reconciled with it,” he said. “I think that we have never lacked patience. No one wants a ‘hot war,’ and we are not going to take part in it, but, seeing all of this around, we’ve got to have arms, an army, a fleet and aerospace forces that would be consistent with reality.”
“We are not saying this to egg someone on into an arms race or to test our strength,” the Russian foreign minister stressed. “Situations when a poorly armed country is taken over, not in a judicial or internationally legal way, but concerning its independence, are rather frequent.”
Lavrov stressed that Russia’s main fortune is its people.
“Our people who have genetically absorbed our civilizational culture and our openness to the world and who understand that we will be ready to talk and be friends with those who want to reciprocate on an equal footing and who will not push their own rules upon other people. I expect that your colleagues from other states who study alongside our citizens will sense this great feature of our people,” the minister concluded.
Featured image: US freelancer Christopher Allen killed while reporting in South Sudan (Source: Twitter)
Last week, Christopher Allen, a young American journalist was killed on the 27 August by South Sudanese government forces near the Ugandan border of South Sudan.
Allen’s death is tragic and unfortunate and so are the deaths of the two government soldiers and 16 rebels that were also killed in the firefight. All of these deaths are unnecessary and tragic for all the families concerned who will be mourning the loss of fathers, brothers, husbands and sons.
But there are no good guys in this story and no bad guys. The government of Salva Kiir and the rebels under opposition leader Riek Machar are both constructs of Empire in Africa. Salva Kiir became president in 2011 and one of his first acts of the new South Sudan was to hand over nearly 50% of the oil rights to Rothschild’s Glencore.
It doesn’t require a great imagination to see this as payment for Empire’s role in funding and arming John Garang’s SPLA. Garang probably underestimated the malevolence of his benefactors. He for his part, had a genuine mission to improve the lot of his people. He was dispatched in a helicopter crash. Coincidentally (or not), the helicopter was owned by President Museveni.
South Sudan has been at civil war which is described as a tribal conflict between Nuer and Dinka. Such an anthropological dissection of society is itself one of Empire’s constructs and has been the modus operandii of warfare in Africa for at least half a century. It is a strategy of war written about in a book called Gangs and Counter-Gangs by British General Sir Frank Kitson; a strategy first used to full effect in Kenya during the Mau-Mau Rebellion of the 1950s. The strategy is simple – divide and rule. Once again Riek Machar is being used as the tool to continue South Sudan’s destabilization, to justify western soft power disguised as humanitarian intervention. Quite why he is being used to topple Salva Kiir is not clear. Salva Kir has perhaps been looking East towards China and Russia instead of West.
Earlier this year the government raised the fees for foreign aid workers permits from $100 to $10 000. There are 2 ways of looking at this. The government could be profiting from international aid as famine once again threatens the region and an influx of aid workers is expected.Or this is the government’s attempt to reduce foreign intervention from the humanitarian soft power complex.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has begun refusing visas for Washington’s humanitarian aid workers many of whom can be regarded as spies and trouble makers, an act which is highly commendable. High-profile American journalist and UN-affiliated operative Jason Stearns also had his visa denied last year, as did Human Rights Watch journalist, Ida Sawyer.
As to the role of the young journalist Christopher Allen, it is unfortunate. Interestingly, he had also been sent to the Ukraine as a journalist. However, instead of recognizing the situation in 2014 as a CIA sponsored coup, he chose to report the western favoured ‘color revolution’ narrative. Ukrainians now find themselves with a government of fascist NeoNazis who are CIA tools and puppets. The story of Ukraine is similar to that of so many African countries, like in Libya to mention only one. How much longer can the fake liberal American missionary-like zeal for intervening in other countries, fool itself?
Unfortunately for the multitude of well-meaning people worldwide fighting for “human rights” in Africa is really not what it appears to be.
Meanwhile, the western mainstream media continues with a standardised narrative, effectively begging for some form of UN or western/NATO intervention. It’s an all too familiar pattern:
‘The war has created the world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis and both sides of the conflict have been accused of abuses.’
We leave you with the definitive article on this subject written by journalist Keith Harmon Snow and entitled:
Author P.D. Lawton is a native of South Africa and host of African Agenda, and committed to finding African solutions to Africa’s political and socio-economic problems. A previous version of this report was filed at African Agenda.
Pyongyang claimed it developed a hydrogen bomb miniaturized enough to fit atop a ballistic missile, according to its KCNA news agency.
Kim Jong-un was quoted saying his country has a “thermonuclear weapon with super explosive power made by our own efforts and technology. All components of the H-bomb were 100 per cent domestically made.”
KCNA said the DPRK “further upgraded its technical performance at a higher ultra-modern level on the basis of precious successes made in the first H-bomb test.”
After the January 2016 test, scientists said the six-kiloton yield was too low for a thermonuclear bomb. Its September 2016 test reportedly had a 10-kiloton yield.
The Hiroshima bomb was a 15-kiloton device. America’s first successful H-bomb test in 1952 produced a yield exceeding 10 megatons, the equivalent of 10 million tons of TNT – 500 times more powerful than the Nagasaki bomb.
It’s unknown if DPRK technology advanced this far. It likely will eventually, given its determination to develop the most powerful weapons possible – its most effective way to deter feared US aggression.
Post-WW II history shows America only attacked nations without its super-weapon capability. North Korea has A-bombs. If able to mount them atop ballistic missiles, it potentially can deliver a robust response to US aggression – against its regional forces in South Korea and Japan.
On Sunday, a 6.3-magnitude tremor was registered in DPRK territory. It’s unclear if it was an earthquake or nuclear detonation.
South Korean intelligence earlier said Pyongyang completed preparations for a nuclear test at its Punggye-ri site in the country’s northeast.
Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono said his government determined that a nuclear device was tested, the DPRK’s sixth since 2006, the first one since September 2016.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff called Sunday’s seismic event “artificial.” A 4.6-magnitude tremor followed the first one. China said a “cave-in” could have caused it.
Beijing’s earthquake networks center said a nuclear explosion might have caused the initial seismic event.
South Korean Nuclear Engineering Professor Kune Suh said
“(t)he power (of Sunday’s event was) 10 or 20 times or even more than previous ones.”
Japan’s meteorology agency called Sunday’s tremors at least 10 times more powerful than earlier ones. Seoul placed its military on high alert.
Japan’s Foreign Minister Kono said
“(a)ll options are on the table.”
Trump didn’t immediately comment.
US nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis called Sunday’s event
“big, an order of magnitude bigger than anything else we’ve seen the North Koreans explode. (Its leadership) want(s) an arsenal as modern as anyone else.”
Sunday’s event occurred as a BRICS three-day summit began in China. Pyongyang said it won’t halt development of its nuclear and ballistic programs as long as US hostility persists.
I have finished the reading of Mark Taliano’s upsetting and comforting book “dedicated to the people of Syria, all of whom are on the frontlines against international terrorism”.
The author is a rigorous investigator and makes no secret of being a man of conviction. He has got a genuine and deep empathy for “the Holy land” of Syria, and for its “proud, forward-looking people”.
A very simple but strong idea is the thread guiding the demonstration that makes up the core of “Voices from Syria”: Truth must be used against the lying narratives as an instrument for building peace and denouncing manipulations and crimes of the Western Empire and its Eastern allies (Israel, Turkey and Gulf Monarchies). Sticking to this approach, Mark Taliano made a point to collect moving and indisputable personal testimonies, evidences and reports coming from witnesses and sources in Syria. He hands over to all kinds of people who have suffered from war, violence and destruction, unveiling and pointing to the supporters, the decision makers, the actors, all those involved and responsible for carrying on and refueling the Dirty War.
The writer’s honesty, his frankness, his refusal of any intellectual game at the expenses of the suffering Syrian People are such that his pleading can’t be contested. Through the authenticity of his “Voices from Syria” and the accuracy of these genuine testimonies, he shuts the door on the miserable and shameless lies and false flags of Western and Islamist [Wahhabi] propaganda. Here is a deeply documented book on the savage War against Syria (among other countries) which has been sowing crime, destruction and terror for years in this “Ancient Land”, “the mother of our civilization”. The western assault on Syria is an assault on our common humanity and Future.
Terms such as fraud, false flag, lies, manipulation, false intelligence, misrepresentations, inversion of responsibilities, are repeatedly used. Indeed, “Voices from Syria” denounce:
The Great Fraud of the so-called “Global War on Terrorism” and the western support to Terror: the “War on Syria” is presented by the US and the West as a noble war for the sake of civilization. In fact, it is a mere war of aggression against a country and a people that did not declare War to anybody and just protect their national sovereignty: according to Nuremberg standards, this type of War is “the international crime par excellence”. In fact, the genuine Syrian People support their Homeland and their National Army.
Feigned Humanitarianism – for instance “the Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) – is used as Cover for Crimes against International Law. In Syria as elsewhere, “Regime Change Policy” is the real goal of the US and western “Deep State”. -Corrupt Mainstream Media plays a strategic role in the Big Manipulation: in fact actors, facts, realities and responsibilities are clearly identified and very well known to Syrian People, but the deliberately lying narrative restlessly spread in the West leads the public opinion to believe that the US is leading a merciless campaign against Daesh, regardless of the fact that US intelligence is behind the creation and supports the Islamic State organization.
Mark Taliano is not arguing over details and he is right. After reading his beautiful and invigorating book, you will never forget those “Voices from Syria” that the West has refused so obstinately to listen to. And you will let moderate intellectuals draw a balance between the pros and cons in the Kill and martyrdom of the Syrian People whose “blood is being shed for our sins”.
Michel Raimbaud is a former French ambassador particularly in the Arab world, in Africa and Latin America. Former Director of the French Office of Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA). He is the author of Tempête sur le Grand Moyen-Orient.
Global Research announces the forthcoming release of the print edition of Mark Taliano’s Book, “Voices from Syria”which includes an additional chapter.
Taliano talks and listens to the people of Syria. He reveals the courage and resilience of a Nation and its people in their day to day lives, after more than six years of US-NATO sponsored terrorism and three years of US “peacemaking” airstrikes.
Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes the mainstream media narratives on Syria.
“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.” –Voltaire
“If you offend the powers that be; if you offend the public health establishments; if you offend the pharmaceutical industry and threaten their bottom line (as we did by calling into question the safety of MMR [and later all the other vaccines that contain brain-toxic, mitochondrial-toxic and blood-brain barrier-toxic ingredients like aluminum and mercury – ed note]) there is no price that you will not pay. You will be destroyed in order to protect their bottom line.” – Dr Andrew Wakefield
“Anything that implies that immunizations are not the greatest medical advance in the history of public health is ignored or ridiculed. Can you imagine the economic and political import of discovering that immunizations are killing (or maiming) thousands of babies?” — Dr William C. Douglass, MD (Honored twice as America’s ‘Doctor of the Year’)
“I was told by a network executive that during non-election years up to 70% of his news division’s revenues are from pharmaceutical corporation’s advertising. That executive told me that if one of his talk show hosts allowed me on the air, he would fire that host. Losing an advertiser is a major catastrophe for a network.” – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr (an outspoken critic of mercury-laced vaccines)
“It is difficult to get a man to understandsomething, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” –Upton Sinclair, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist American author
Definitions:
“The Semmelweis Reflex (aka, the ‘Semmelweis Effect’): the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or paradigms.” — Semmelweis Society International (http://semmelweis.org/)
Cognitive Dissonance:the psychological discomfort that happens when one’s deeply held beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information.
Clinical Iatrogenesis: The injury done to patients by an ineffective, toxic or unsafe drug or surgical treatment.
When I was in medical school, one of the memorable lessons that I learned from the few lectures that I received on the history of medicine was the sad story of what happened to Ignaz Semmelweis (1818 – 1865), a young physician who practiced obstetrics in Vienna, Austria. Semmelweis died before his time after he was hounded out of his medical career (and out of Vienna) by close-minded establishment physician “colleagues” who refused to believe what Semmelweis had repeatedly proven to them: that the enormously high mortality rate of Vienna’s obstetric patients (from “childbed fever”) was caused by the older physician’s failure to wash their hands prior to examining and/or delivering their pregnant patients. In effect, Semmelweis was accusing them of being guilty of fatal “doctor-caused” (ie: iatrogenic) diseases.
Up until Louis Pasteur formulated the germ theory of infectious disease it was not unusual for physicians to go directly to the delivery room from the autopsy room while in the middle of dissecting freshly dead, often infected bodies while trying to determine the cause of death. Many of the corpses were the doctor’s own septic OB patients who came into the hospital healthy, and ended up dead because of an iatrogenic infection in the immediate post-partum period. Often the babies died or were sickened as well.
Semmelweis had noted that in the obstetric service of the female midwives (at the same hospital) the mortality rate for childbed fever was far lower than the OB service that was under the control of the male physicians. Midwives were gentler practitioners, more aware of the importance of good hygiene and far less likely to do pelvic exams; and they also did not do autopsies. At the time, women in labor were admitted to the two services on an alternating basis, but the mortality rates were well known in the community, and patients in the know often refused to be admitted to the physician services, preferring to deliver in the street had a low mortality rate.
So after considering the range of possibilities that might explain the higher mortality rate in the physician-controlled OB service, it was obvious to Semmelweis that the probable cause was the lack of physician hand-washing. Semmelweis set out to prove his thesis.
Proving that Childbed Fever was an Iatrogenic Disease was Fatal for Semmelweis
It didn’t take him long to prove the connection. He did the obvious simple experiment that proved to him (and many other unbiased observers) that his theory was correct. He simply had his group of forward-thinking obstetric physicians that were under his supervision wash their hands with a chlorinated antiseptic solution prior to examining or delivering their patients. The incidence of childbed fever dropped dramatically down to the same rate experienced by the patients of the midwives, thus proving that childbed fever was an iatrogenic disease.
But instead of being celebrated by his colleagues for his life-saving discovery (which he repeated enough times to convince anybody with an open mind about the truth of the matter), Semmelweis was ignored, denigrated and eventually driven out of town for being impertinent enough to have pointed out that the esteemed physicians of his otherwise honorable profession had been responsible for the deaths and sicknesses of the pregnant women in their care.
It took many years after Semmelweis’s death for medicine to recognize the importance of his discovery and to give him the posthumous honor he deserved. It was another century before the term “The Semmelweis Effect” came into existence.
Aggressive Blood-letting and George Washington’s Death
It hadn’t been very many decades prior to Semmelweis’s discovery that blood-letting (opening veins to bleed patients) was an approved treatment for any number of illnesses for which physicians had no cures. I recall learning that repeated blood-lettings were administered to George Washington by his trusted physician, Dr Benjamin Rush (who was later to be celebrated as the “Father of American Psychiatry” – and whose likeness is proudly used as the symbol of the American Psychiatric Association).
Dr Rush, a co-signer of the Declaration of Independence, believed fervently in blood-letting for many of his patients, and he had persisted in bleeding Washington until he died of blood loss and shock. In other words, an iatrogenic disorder killed the first president of the United States – and very likely many others in that era as well.
One can only imagine the wrath directed at any upstart physician (or an unlucky patient’s family) who had the temerity of questioning the effectiveness of the treatment. Dr Rush of course was never accused of medical malpractice since medical knowledge had not progressed sufficiently to reveal that such “treatments” were counterproductive. Also, there was probably no Semmelweis around to point out the folly of such barbaric approaches to sick patients.
Galileo Galilei was Also a Victim of the “Semmelweis Effect”
Two centuries before Semmelweis, and long after his death, Galileo Galilei(1564-1642) was honored with the titles of both the “Father of Observational Astronomy” and the “Father of Modern Physics”. (One wonders if he ever observed an eclipse of the sun or moon.) It could be said that he was a victim of the Semmelweis Effect. He surely caused a lot of cognitive dissonance among his close-minded, indoctrinated clerical critics.
This original thinker, philosopher, scientist and mathematician had proved beyond a doubt that the earth revolved around the sun – rather than the other way around, which was the archaic interpretation of some of the stories in the Old Testament. The impertinence of this scientist to dispute long-held religious beliefs incensed religious authoritarians who had been indoctrinated into believing the ancient teachings that the sun revolved around the earth. Anyone saying otherwise was a damnable heretic that deserved punishment – and so Galileo was condemned by the church to house arrest, a punishment that continued for the remainder of his life.
Andrew Wakefield and the Semmelweis Effect
Galileo and Semmelweis were treated the same way that Dr Andrew Wakefield was treated a generation ago when he proved that the same strain of live measles virus that was in GlaxoSmithKline’s MMR vaccine was found in the infected bowels of a series of severely regressed autism patients, all of whom had been suffering with severe abdominal pain and chronic diarrhea soon after they each one had been injected with GSK’s live virus MMR shot (findings which, by the way, have been replicated a number of times by other independent researchers).
Dr Andrew Wakefield
Dr Wakefield and his 11 co-authors in the research group weren’t really trying to make the point that the new syndrome they were researching was an iatrogenic disorder, but that is how many of the perpetrators understood it. The series of victims of the MMR shot all had severe, chronic, measles virus enterocolitis and they were all also severely regressed autism patients that had been normal children prior to the MMR inoculations. And because Wakefield defended the study’s findings after it was peer-reviewed and then published in The Lancet (and was then celebrated by the thousands of British parents whose autistic spectrum-afflicted children had suffered similar vaccine-induced disorders), he was hounded mercilessly by the pharmaceutical giant GSK, Rupert Murdoch yellow journalism media empire (Murdoch’s son sat on the board of GSK) and ultimately the Big Pharma-complicit medical establishment that combined to hound him out of his home country of England.
Similarly, Semmelweis was driven out of Austria to his Hungarian homeland, where he was met with similar hostility when he continued to promulgate his findings. Some of his forward-thinking students published journal articles that supported his thesis. And open-minded physicians elsewhere on the European continent were convinced of the truth he had uncovered, so that they too began instituting good hygiene in the delivery rooms.
It was only a couple of decades after Semmelweis’s death (from a vicious beating by security guards after he was tricked into being admitted to an insane asylum) that Louis Pasteur came up with the germ theory of infectious diseases, thus making sense out of – and finally proving – Semmelweis’s theory, even to those who had destroyed his career.
Only posthumously was Semmelweis honored for his contribution to women’s health. All he got during his short life was undeserved condemnation, disgrace and ignominy and an early, painful death. Both Semmelweis and Wakefield were intentionally made “radioactive” (or “leprous”) by the medical establishment that was threatened by unwelcome new scientific truths that they irrationally refused to acknowledge. One difference between the two pioneer physicians is that the medical establishment was able to convince Semmelweis’s wife that he was insane and needed to be removed from polite society, while happily, Wakefield’s wife believes in her husband’s important work. She has remained supportive of his continued efforts to convince close-minded physicians of his truth.
Science is NEVER “Settled”
Authoritarians throughout history – not just fossilized physicians who desperately want to believe that “science is settled“ (or can ever be” settled”) – have behaved like they know everything that needs to be known about their chosen profession, while in reality they just haven’t wanted to go through the effort of having to learn something new, especially if the new information contradicts their previously deeply held beliefs.
Lessons to be Learned from how the “Establishment” Treated Galileo, Semmelweis, Wakefield, et al
Many of today’s medical establishment “authorities” have vested interests in the drugs and vaccines that cause some of them to become oblivious to the iatrogenic disorders caused by the drugs and vaccines that were integral to their profession. There are thousands of examples that present similar ethical dilemmas to my profession.
For instance, many of us physicians and physician’s assistants prescribed Merck’s popular arthritis drug Vioxx to some of the 60,000 patients that died of heart attacks directly because of Vioxx. (Many millions more were heart-sickened but survived – so far.) We were, by definition, complicit in causing some of those iatrogenic deaths or illnesses, although we weren’t medicolegally liable. In those cases, the real fault lay first of all with Merck – who did the deeply flawed studies – but also with the FDA – the agency that approved the long-term use of the drug but didn’t require long-term safety studies. Such short-sightedness, sadly, is normal for the FDA.
The same accusations of malfeasance could be leveled against every Big Pharma corporation that made every SSRI, every benzodiazepine tranquilizer, every anti-psychotic drug, every ADHD drug and every sleeping pill that we practitioners wrote prescriptions for and which ALL are fully capable of causing serious, permanent body and brain damage, although such manifestations may only become obvious years later.
And, of course, the same accusations of iatrogenesis could be leveled against every Big Pharma vaccine maker that has added to their factory vats proprietary ingredients that include neurotoxic metals and other toxins that likely have synergistic (multiplying, not just additive) adverse effects when they are injected into the tiny muscles of infants known to be immunologically and neurologically immature. What should alarm every physician and every parent (and every over-vaccinated soldier and pre-dementia adult) is that such vaccine combinations have never been evaluated for either short-term or long-term safety.
One of the earliest examples of drug- or vaccine-induced iatrogenic disorders involved Smith Kline & French (SKF), the predecessor corporation of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the maker of the infamous neurotoxic, so-called “anti-depressant” drug Paxil. GSK also manufactures the MMR vaccine, which contains three live viruses, including a strain of measles which was found in the infected intestines of the Wakefield autism research group discussed above. Both of those drugs are currently under fire by watchdog groups, but the major media does not report on such delicate (ie for media advertisers) issues.
SKF got FDA approval in 1955 for its dementia-inducing, memory-impairing and brain-damaging “major tranquilizer” Thorazine (which was the prototype for future so-called “anti-psychotic” drugs like Mellaril). Thorazine was the first of a flood of other dependency-inducing and brain-damaging “anti-psychotics” and then by a host of the so-called “minor tranquilizers” like Librium and Valium.
Such dependency-inducing drugs naturally made a lot of money for any number of multinational drug companies – as well as many psychiatrists. Ever since the break-out of psychiatric drugs on the market in the 1950s, we physicians have been bamboozled into trusting the fast-tracking of drugs and vaccines through their FDA approval process without long-term safety studies! And the epidemic of psych drug-induced dementia and the epidemic of vaccine-induced neurological and autoimmune disorders are evidence of the over-looked dangers.
The FDA is the federal regulatory agency that approves vaccines (except for the Anthrax vaccine that is being regularly injected into soldiers ever since Desert Storm and which has never been FDA approved), but the agency does not require vaccine makers to perform or present to the FDA either long-term or short-term safety or efficacy studies! Neither does the FDA require vaccine-makers to present double-blind studies to the FDA or comparative studies (against a competitor’s vaccine) or even safety or efficacy studies of the vaccines that contain more than one antigen (!).
Vaccine-makers are also in denial (as is the CDC and the FDA and the AAP and the AMA) concerning the known neurotoxicities of many of the vaccine ingredients, such as the aluminum adjuvant that is currently in many vaccines or the preservative mercury (which was in many of the vaccines prior to 2000 (when the autism epidemic was just starting to surge).
In 2011, in a decision that granted Big Vaccine further protections against legal liability for when their vaccines killed or maimed patients, vaccines were justifiably labeled as “unavoidably unsafe” by the US Supreme Court.
The same charge of “unavoidable unsafe” could have been made against the previously normal blood-letting in Dr Rush’s era and the lack of understanding by physicians about the importance of hand-washing for physicians in Semmelweis’s era..
Galileo’s critics refused to look through his telescope for the proof of his heliocentric theories. Semmelweis’s critics refused to look at the evidence he presented to them. Wakefield and many other anti-over-vaccination activists (many scholars and independent scientists among them) who have studied the complex science of Big Pharma’s pro-vaccination agendas – should be informing all concerned people to look at all sides of all issues before being tempted to make a firm decision.
The following list of useful quotations from anti-over-vaccination whistle-blowers is must reading for every human – open-minded or otherwise – that will soon be threatened by coercive vaccination legislation that is in the process of working through most state legislative bodies.
Useful Quotations from Whistle-Blowers that Dare to Expose the Over-Vaccination Agendas of Big Pharma, the CDC, the AAP and the AMA
Graph revealing that the US mortality rate for measles had already declined to near zero by the time a measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, due to improved nutrition, sanitation, safer drinking water and the availability of refrigeration – and NOT to the vaccine! Similar mortality and incidence charts explain the decreases in rates of diphtheria, whooping cough, scarlet fever (there never was a commercially-available scarlet fever vaccine) – From Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines and the Forgotten History, by Suzanne Humphries, MD and Roman Bystrianyk
Safety Recommendation for Parents Who Choose or are Mandated to Vaccinate Their Children, Based on Guidelines of the Autism Research Institute
1. Never vaccinate a sick child, even if just a runny nose from a viral infection, as all viruses are immunosuppressive, rendering the child more vulnerable to adverse vaccine reactions.
2.Never allow more than two vaccines per visit; avoid all combination vaccines.
3.Administer vitamin C before and after each vaccination, ideally in doses of 500 mgs every four hours during waking hours. Also give vitamin A in standard doses.
4.All forms of sugar should be avoided for several days before and after vaccines, as sugar has been shown to diminish the protective activities of the immune system by depressing white blood cells’ ability to destroy bacteria.
“industry-controlled ‘science’ is not really science but a smokescreen to pave the way for products that may be harmful – but what do they care as long as they profit? There are many great scientists but there are also some who are willing to be hired to ‘prove’ that something doesn’t cause cancer, or that something is ‘safe’. You cannot trust the EPA, the FDA, or industry science.” – Blogger
“A most disturbing thing about this entire zika virus fraud is the role that the mainstream media has played in continually promoting the fear mongering campaign orchestrated by the CDC. This is another example of how the medical/pharmaceutical industry controls what our mainstream media reports. They have gained the power to control not only what health information is reported, they also have the power to censor or not report any information that would be damaging to their financial interests.
“Here is one obvious example of this censorship. On April 14, the Reuters News Agency reported that more than 11,000 pregnant women in Colombia had tested positive for zika. More than 2,700 of them had already given birth, yet there were only two confirmed cases of microcephaly (compatible with the normal background rate). With only two cases of microcephaly out of more than 2,700 births, their health minister all but stated that there was no zika epidemic in Colombia. This was just more proof that the zika virus is NOT the cause of microcephaly and there is no epidemic.
“But this was a total contradiction to all the fear mongering claims of the CDC, and as far as I know, this information was censored and never even reported by any of our mainstream news media. So, by keeping the public in the dark, the CDC has been able to continue with their fear mongering, and is still pressuring Congress to give them $1 billion more of our taxpayer dollars to fight this fake epidemic and develop a new vaccine.
“With the aid of the mainstream media, our government leaders and Congress also seem to blindly accept the word of the CDC as if it’s the omnipotent and irrefutable truth. In spite of all the contradictory evidence, it appears that all the CDC has to do is to just say “TRUST US, WE ARE THE EXPERTS. IF WE SAY THERE IS A ZIKA VIRUS EPIDEMIC, YOU CAN BELIEVE IT’.” – Blogger on Mercola.com 8/16/16
“During the last 10 years, there has been one death from measles, but that patient was an adult woman who was on immunosuppressive medications and had other serious health problems. (But between) 2000 and 2017, there were 156 deaths related to the MMR vaccine.” —Dr. David Brownstein – Holistic Family Practitioner
“We are taught by the authorities that vaccines protect us against eventual aggressive viruses and microbes, and, therefore, prevent contagious illnesses and epidemics. This lie has been perpetuated for 150 years despite the ineffectiveness of vaccines in protecting against illnesses…the uselessness of certain vaccines, notably, TB & tetanus..diphtheria…influenza and hepatitis B.” — Guylaine Lanctot, MD
“The decline in infectious diseases in developed countries had nothing to do with vaccinations, but with the decline in poverty and hunger (Dr. Buchwald draws the Committee’s attention to a series of about 50 graphs in his book which show that vaccinations have no effect on the decline of infectious diseases).” — Gerhard Buchwald, MD
“Up to 90% of the total decline in the death rate of children between 1860-1965 because of whooping cough, scarlet fever, diptheria, and measles occured before the introduction of immunisations and antibiotics.” — Archie Kalokerinos, MD
“According to the records of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, from 1911 to 1935 the four leading causes of childhood deaths from infectious diseases in the U.S.A. were diphtheria, pertussis, scarlet fever, and measles. However, by 1945 the combined death rates from these causes had declined by 95% before the implementation of mass vaccine programs.” — Harold Buttram MD
“All infectious diseases decreased without vaccinations. Not only did vaccines have no influence over the decrease of the diseases, the contrary is true, they slowed down the downward trend of all diseases. The best example for this is polio. After the majority of people were vaccinated, severe epidemics occurred, such as in 1962 in the German speaking countries, after vaccination had been in full force for 3 years. Dr Buchwald carefully collected the facts in his book, which prove this fact beyond doubt for all infectious diseases.” —Anita Petek-Dimmer, German-born Swiss anti-vaccine activist.
“The really sad thing is the amount of doctors I’ve spoken to who say to me, ‘Del, I know that vaccines are causing autism, but I won’t say it on camera because the pharmaceutical industry will destroy my career just like they did to Andy Wakefield.'” — Del Bigtree, Producer of “Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe“
“I tell practitioners that vaccines are drugs, albeit biological drugs. I remind them that they would not consider it good medicine to give an unnecessary pharmaceutical drug on a recurring basis. I think it is even worse to give a vaccine…that isn’t necessary. The possible adverse consequences of a vaccine generally far outweigh the adverse consequences of a pharmaceutical drug. A pharmaceutical drug is usually much more restricted in its action. However, each time we stimulate an immune response, we have to look at the effect on all body systems—not only on antibody responses or cell-mediated immunity, but also on interactions with the endocrine system and the nervous system.” – Dr Ronald Schultz, Professor and Chair of the Department of Pathobiological Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an expert in companion animal vaccines.
Onthe Arrogance of Preventive Medicine
“But surely the fundamental promise we make when we actively solicit individuals and exhort them to accept preventive interventions must be that, on average, they will be the better for it. Accordingly, the presumption that justifies the aggressive assertiveness with which we go after the unsuspecting healthy must be based on the highest level of randomized evidence that our preventive manoeuvre will, in fact, do more good than harm. Without evidence from positive randomized trials (and, better still, systematic reviews of randomized trials) we cannot justify soliciting the well to accept any personal health intervention. There are simply too many examples of the disastrous inadequacy of lesser evidence as a basis for individual interventions among the well: supplemental oxygen for healthy preemies (causing retrolental fibroplasia and blindness), healthy babies sleeping face down (causing SIDS), thymic irradiation in healthy children, and the list goes on.” — Dr David Sackett, (a pioneer of evidence based medicine),
“The full extent of the Gardasil scandal needs to be assessed: everyone knew when this vaccine was released on the American market that it would prove to be worthless. Diane Harper, a major opinion leader in the United States, was one of the first to blow the whistle, pointing out the fraud and scam of it all. I predict that Gardasil will become the greatest medical scandal of all time because at some point in time, the evidence will add up to prove that this vaccine, technical and scientific feat that it may be, has absolutely no effect on cervical cancer and that all the very many adverse effects which destroy lives and even kill, serve no other purpose than to generate profit for the manufacturers. Gardasil is useless and costs a fortune! In addition, decision-makers at all levels are aware of it! Cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, paralysis of the lower limbs, vaccine-induced MS and vaccine-induced encephalitis can be found, whatever the vaccine.” — Dr Bernard Dalbergue(former Merck employee)
“The autism epidemic is real, and excessive vaccinations are the cause.” – Dr Bernie Rimland
“Completely unvaccinated children have less chronic disease and a lower risk of autism than vaccinated children.” — J. B. Handley, Jr. – Founder of Generation Rescue
“…our current results are consistent with the existing evidence on the toxicology and pharmacokinetics of Aluminum adjuvants which altogether strongly implicate these compounds as contributors to the rising prevalence of neurobehavioral disorders in children. Given that autism has devastating consequences in a life of a child, and that currently in the developed world over 1% of children suffer from some form of ASD, it would seem wise to make efforts towards reducing infant exposure to aluminum from vaccines.“—C A Shaw, PhD
“There is a serious problem with vaccine safety. Vaccine aluminum adjuvant has adverse neurological effects, at dosages that are recommended by the US CDC. Vaccine critics are supported by the science. Parents refusing to vaccinate according to the recommended CDC schedule are supported by the science. Use aluminum-containing vaccines with great caution, or not at all.” –Chris Shaw, PhD http://vaccinepapers.org/category/aluminum/
“Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant…research clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation andassociated neurological complications and may thus have profound and widespread adverse health consequences.” — (FromTomljenovic and Shaw’s journal article “Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are They Safe?”, published in Curr Med Chem, 2011;18(17):2630-7.)
“Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant. Despite almost 90 years of widespread use of aluminum adjuvants, medical science’s medical understanding of their mechanisms of action is still remarkably poor. There is also a concerning scarcity of data on toxicology and pharmacokinetics of these compounds. In spite of this, the notion that aluminum in vaccines is safe appears to be widely accepted.” — Tomljenjovic and Shaw
“No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable…for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death.” – President Ronald Reagan, as he signed TheNational Childhood Vaccine Injury Act(NCVIA) of 1986, absolving drug companies from all medico-legal liability when children die or are disabled from vaccine injuries, thus reversing many of the intentions of the original legislation establishing the FDA
“The human immune system is divided into two major classes: 1) Cellular Immunity (for which injected vaccines do absolutely nothing, except to weaken it), located in the mucous membranes of the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts and their respective lymph nodes and 2) Humoral Immunity, with production of antigen-specific antibodies by plasma cells in the bone marrow. For eons of time the mucous membranes of the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts have been the primary sites of infectious microbe entry into the body so that, of necessity, mucosal/cellular immunity has evolved as the primary defense system, with humoral immunity serving a secondary or backup role…Vaccines are reversing these roles, attempting to substitute vaccine-induced humoral immunity for the far more efficient mucosal immunity, the latter in turn undergoing a process of “atrophy of disuse” as a result of this role-switching.” — Harold Buttram, MD
“The steadily increasing patterns of physical and/or mental illnesses among American children show no signs of abating. Unless this issue is definitively addressed, at some future time the process will pass a point of no return (socially and economically) from the sheer numbers of incapacitated children.” – Harold Buttram, MD
“A 2007 [Zika] outbreak on Yap Islands in Micronesia is estimated to have affected nearly 75% of the (island’s) population of some 12,000 people, and a 2013 outbreak in French Polynesia affected nearly 28,000 of 270,000 residents. Neither epidemic caused a spike in microcephaly.” — Quartz (qz.com)?
“The correlation between a) the presence of Zika and b) babies with the microcephaly birth defect is so weak and sparse, it constitutescounter-evidencefor Zika as the cause…the overwhelming majority of birth-defect cases show no presence of Zika. Therefore, the Zika-carrying mosquitoes have no business being the target of toxic spraying. But they are. And the spraying increases the risk of neurological damage in babies.” – Jon Rappoport (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/category/zika/)
“Microcephaly may result from any insult that disturbs early brain growth…Annually, approximately 25,000 infants in the United States will be diagnosed with microcephaly…”– From the Report of the Quality Standards Subcommittee of the American Academy of Neurology and the Practice Committee of the Child Neurology Society. (Neurology 2009 Sep 15; 73(11) 887-897)
“…even the ideal influenza vaccine, matched perfectly to circulating strains of wild influenza and capable of stopping all influenza viruses, can only deal with a small part of the ‘flu’ problem because most ‘flu’ appears to have nothing to do with influenza. Every year, hundreds of thousands of respiratory specimens are tested across the US. Of those tested, on average 16% are found to be influenza positive.” – Dr Peter Doshi (from a British Medical Journal review article, “Influenza: marketing vaccines by marketing disease” 2013 (BMJ 2013; 346:f3037)
“…It’s no wonder so many people feel that ‘flu shots’ don’t work: for most flus, they can’t work because most diagnosed cases of the flu aren’t the flu.” – Jon Rappoport
“[According to CDC statistics], ‘influenza and pneumonia’ took 62,034 lives in 2001—61,777 of which were attributable to pneumonia and 257 to flu, and in only 18 cases was the flu virus positively identified.” – Dr Peter Doshi, from in his 2005 BMJ report, titled, “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” (BMJ 2005; 331:1412)
“Between 1979 and 2001, [CDC] data showed an average of 1348 [flu] deaths per year (range 257 to 3006).” – Dr Peter Doshi de-bunking the CDC’s pro-vaccine disinformation campaign that says that 36,000 people die from influenza annually
“The CDC says that 36,000 people die from the flu every year in the US. But actually, it’s closer to 20. However, we can’t admit that, because if we did, we’d be exposing (the CDC’s) gigantic psyop. The whole campaign to scare people into getting a flu shot would have about the same effect as warning people to carry iron umbrellas, in case toasters fall out of upper-story windows.”– Jon Rappoport
“Alzheimer’s Disease is a human form of chronic aluminum neurotoxicity.”– JR Walton, PhD – Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, St George Hospital, Sydney, Australia
“The soaring incidence of physical and mental illnesses among today’s children (may be) causally related to current childhood vaccine programs. Primary among these is the large-scale contamination of the measles, mumps, and influenza vaccines with retroviruses capable of engrafting their genetics into the DNA of childhood recipients. This is rendered more likely because of the cavalier disregard with which combinations of viral vaccines are now being administered, primarily involving the MMR vaccines…in spite of the toxicology principle that combinations of toxins may bring exponential (10-fold or 100-fold) increases in toxicity.” – Harold Buttram, MD
“In the field of chemical toxicology it is universally recognized that combinations of toxins may bring exponential increases of toxicity; ie, a combination of two chemicals may bring a 10-fold increase in toxicity, three chemicals 100-fold increases. This same principle almost certainly applies to the immunosuppressive effects of viral vaccines when administered in combination, as with the MMR vaccine, among which the measles vaccine is (known to be)exceptionally immunosuppresive.” –Harold Buttram,MD
“…the NIH (National Institutes of Health) is incapable of conducting conflict-free research. …it is clear that the system managing our vaccine program is corrupt beyond repair and needs a complete overhaul.”– Lori Mellwain, National Autism Association board chair
“It is difficult to get a man to understandsomething, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” –Upton Sinclair, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist American author who wrote in the first half of the 20th century. Sinclair’s 1903 novel “Jungle” (about the repulsive slaughterhouse practicesin the meat-packing industry in Chicago) led to President Theodore Roosevelt’s pushing through the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
“The only safe vaccine is one that is never used.” —Dr James A. Shannon, National Institutes of Health
“No batch of vaccine can be proved safe before it is given to children.” – Dr Leonard Scheele, Surgeon General of the United States, addressing an AMA convention in 1955
“The evidence for indicting immunizations for SIDS is circumstantial, but compelling. However, the keepers of the keys to medical-research funds are not interested in searching this very important lead to the cause of an ongoing, and possibly preventable, tragedy. Anything that implies that immunizations are not the greatest medical advance in the history of public health is ignored or ridiculed. Can you imagine the economic and political import of discovering that immunizations are killing thousands of babies?” — Dr William C. Douglass, MD (Honored twice as America’s ‘Doctor of the Year’)
“Only after realising that routine immunisations were dangerous did I achieve a substantial drop in infant death rates. The worst vaccine of all is the whooping cough vaccine…it is responsible for a lot of deaths and for a lot of infants suffering irreversible brain damage. In susceptible infants, it knocks their immune systems about, leading to irreparable brain damage, or severe attacks or even deaths from diseases like pneumonia or gastro-enteritis and so on.” — Dr Kalokerinos
“Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has been reported following the administration of DPT. The significance is unclear. 85% of SIDS cases occur in the period 1 through 6 months of age, with the peak incidence at age 2 to 4 months.” (From the accompanying insert to Connaught Labs DPT vaccine.)— Jane Orient, MD, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) and clinical lecturer in medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, and a professor of clinical medicine at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
“Official data shows that large scale vaccination has failed to obtain any significant improvement of the diseases against which they were supposed to provide protection” — Dr Sabin, developer of Polio vaccine
“The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunization…..There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.” — Dr Robert Mendelsohn, MD
“It is pathetic and ludicrous to say we ever vanquished smallpox with vaccines, when only 10% of the population was ever vaccinated.” — Dr Glen Dettman
“The decline in infectious diseases in developed countries had nothing to do with vaccinations, but with the decline in poverty and hunger.” — Gerhard Buchwald, MD
“There is a great deal of evidence to prove that immunization of children does more harm than good.” – Dr J. Anthony Morris (formerly Chief Vaccine Control Officer at the US Federal Drug Admin.)
“There is insufficient evidence to support routine vaccination of healthy persons of any age.” — Paul Frame, MD Journal of Family Practice
“I think that no person would permit anybody to get close to them with an inoculation if they would really know how they are made, what they carry, what has been lied to them about and what the real percent of danger is of contracting such a disease which is minimal.” —Dr Eva Snead
“I was working in one of the oldest lung illness treatment centres in Germany, and just by chance, I looked at the files of those people who had fallen ill during the first German epidemic of smallpox (in 1947)…We had always been told that the smallpox vaccinations would protect against smallpox. And now I could verify, thanks to the files and papers, that all of those who had fallen ill had been vaccinated. This was very upsetting for me.” — Gerhard Buchwald, MD
“There has been a frightening increase in cases of autism that has not been explained. There are a number of anecdotal reports from parents that symptoms of autism have appeared close to the time of the (MMR) vaccine.” — Jane Orient, MD
“I once believed in Jenner; I once believed in Pasteur. I once believed in vaccination. I once believed in vivisection. But I changed my views as the result of hard thinking.” — Dr Hadwen
“If you want the truth on vaccination you must go to those who are not making anything out of it. If doctors shot at the moon every time it was full as a preventive of measles and got a shilling for it, they would bring statistics to prove it was a most efficient practice, and that the population would be decimated if it were stopped.” — Dr Allinson
“The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunization…There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.” — Dr Robert Mendelsohn, MD
“You might as well consult a butcher on the value of vegetarianism as a doctor on the worth of vaccination.” – George Bernard Shaw
“The vaccinations are not working, and they are dangerous. We should be working with nature.” — Lendon H.Smith, MD
“Medicine is of all the Arts the most noble; but, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it, and of those who, inconsiderately, form a judgment of them, it is at present far behind all the other arts.” — Hippocrates (400 BC)
Merck’s 27 page Hit List of Physicians who are Targeted for “Neutralization” or “Discrediting”
Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. He writes a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, the area’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s psychiatric drugging and over-vaccination regimens, and other movements that threaten the environment, prosperity, democracy, civility and the health and longevity of the planet and the populace. Many of his columns are archived at
All polymer foams – polyurethane, polystyrene and polyethylene, are fire accelerators that will not only quickly combust but will burn with the production of hugely toxic hydrogen-cyanide gas. Anyone in close proximity of such dangerous combustion will be either burned alive or asphyxiated by poison gas.
These facts are well known to all professionals in civil engineering and building contracting i.e. architects, surveyors, engineers, contractors, designers as well as local-authority and government building inspectors. It is also extensively covered in all relevant textbooks. Furthermore, it has been public domain knowledge at least since the catastrophic industrial disaster at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India that produced isocyanates, in the mid ‘sixties’.
Anyone specifying or allowing the use of such fire accelerators in or on residential or other building would be committing a criminal offence regardless of any other factor or ‘ambiguous advice’ from any quarter.
Any such person responsible for knowingly endangering life should be prosecuted under existing legislation. There is no valid excuse. Greed or personal advancement are not valid.
Gross criminal negligence that causes loss of life is (multiple) manslaughter and must be treated as such and the appropriate penalties applied with the full rigour of the law that is there to protect us, the citizens of the United Kingdom.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” (Upton Sinclair)
(OMNS Sept 1, 2017) Now there’s yet another article cautioning readers to not take vitamins because they may somehow increase the risk for lung cancer. [1,2]
Attacks pushing drug treatment, in preference to less expensive and more effective treatment with vitamins and other essential nutrients, have become quite common in recent years. Orthomolecular medicine has adapted to such assaults. The field now looks forward to these spurious attacks because they provide a level of comic relief from the tensions of serious orthomolecular research.
The gist of the article is the following: Epidemiologists at two American cancer research institutes (Mayo Clinic and Ohio State University) and the National Taiwan University studied 77,000 men between the ages of 50-76. The research institutes found evidence to suggest that long term (10 years) high dose supplementation with 20 mg of vitamin B6 (Pyridoxine Hydrochloride) and 55 mcg of B12 (cobalamin) – nutrients that are necessary for proper cellular metabolism throughout the body – was linked with a 3-fold increase in risk of developing lung cancer in men who regularly smoked.
“I think smoking is such a wild card that it can throw off many a study. To me, it would be like studying the effects of artificial colors in soft drinks . . . when served to people dying of thirst.” (Andrew W. Saul)
What was not made clear during the rant was why vitamins B6 and B12 were chosen for lung cancer research. Indeed, Abram Hoffer, MD, PhD, has written of the great value of these nutrients, saying
“vitamin B6 should be taken for the protection against arteriosclerosis, heart disease and strokes. Vitamin B6 is one of the nutrients essential in the conversion of homocysteine to the nontoxic cystathionine. Vitamin B12 (cobalamin) is used to maintain the health of all body cells by production of nucleic acid. It maintains nerve tissue sheaths, helps in blood formation and the production of genetic material DNA and RNA and affects protein and fat cells.” [3]
Modern medicine places a great deal of importance on RDA vitamin intake, believing a good diet will somehow provide all the necessary nutrients to maintain good health. There is this ingrained belief that higher, optimal doses of vitamins are not necessary. Yet when it comes to treating pernicious anemia, conventional physicians will frequently use megadoses of B12 such as 100 mcg injections. 100 mcg is 40 times the RDA. They are inadvertently practicing orthomolecular medicine. Why can’t they expand their minds to using mega-doses of other vitamins?
The authors of the above-mentioned article missed the fact that the most recent data (2015) from the United States National Poison Data System emphatically states that there were no deaths from vitamins, no deaths from minerals or amino acids, and no deaths from homeopathics or herbs.[4,5]
The article is misleading because it only showed an association (correlation) with an increased risk of lung cancer in smokers. It only assessed the amount of B vitamins that the study participants were consuming via dietary surveys, not actual blood levels. The article makes no mention of the source of B vitamins in the participants’ diet. I doubt, in the smokers, that they are coming from an over-consumption of leafy greens! And the study only evaluated current or past smokers, as there were too few never-smokers to evaluate associations. Therefore one is suspicious that the problem was smoking, not the vitamin B6 or B12 reported in the diet.
Further, the risk of previous smokers was significantly less than for current smokers, implying that smoking was the true risk factor, not vitamin intake. In fact, some previous studies have found no association, or even an inverse (protective) relationship between blood levels of vitamins B6 and B12 and lung cancer! [6,7]
Said one study:
“The authors found significantly lower risk of lung cancer among men who had higher serum vitamin B6 levels. Compared with men with the lowest vitamin B6 concentration, men in the fifth quintile had about one half of the risk of lung cancer.” [7]
Vitamins are not the problem. In fact, they can prevent lung cancer. The pioneering research conducted by Indu B. Chatterjee, PhD, demonstrates the importance of taking adequate doses of vitamin C and other essential nutrients.
Dr. Chatterjee was a colleague of Drs. Irwin Stone and Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling. Here is a quote from Chatterjee: “I had indeed significant contact with the late Dr. Irwin Stone and Linus Pauling. In fact, Dr. Irwin Stone sent a copy of his book The Healing Factor: Vitamin C Against Disease with a handwritten inscription in red ink: “In appreciation for your pioneering work on ascorbate biosynthesis,” dated 13 March 1974. In an e-mail sent to me five years ago it is quite apparent that Dr. Chatterjee was a more skillful marksman and superior researcher than the epidemiologists at the two American Cancer research institutes and the National Taiwan University. He wrote:
“Besides having the importance of vitamin C in our day to day nutrition, our recent work indicates that vitamin C is really a panacea for preventing cigarette smoke-related fatal diseases like emphysema, cardiovascular disease, and also lung cancer. Although cigarette smoke contains about 4000 compounds, p-benzoquinone produced from p-benzosemiqinone of cigarette smoke in the lungs of smokers appears to be a major factor for producing the diseases.
“All commercial cigarettes contain substantial amounts (100-200 micrograms/cigarette smoke) of p-benzosemiquinone, which is oxidized to p-benzoquinone in the lungs of smokers and denatures proteins and DNA. From lungs, p-benzoquinone goes to blood and all organs. Because these dreadful diseases have no cure, prevention should be the target. Vitamin C is a strong antagonist of p-benzoquinone and intake of a moderately large amount of vitamin C (about 2,000 mg/day) by smokers should almost completely prevent cigarette smoke-induced diseases. In support of this, I am appending below some of our recent publications.” [8-13]
Conclusion
If you want to reduce your risk of lung cancer – or any type of cancer, and also of heart disease – you can stop smoking. The risk goes down once you stop. And don’t believe the shills. You should take adequate doses of the B vitamins, and vitamins C, D, and E. [14,15]
2. Brasky TM, White E, Chen CL. Long-Term, Supplemental, One-Carbon Metabolism-Related Vitamin B Use in Relation to Lung Cancer Risk in the Vitamins and Lifestyle (VITAL) Cohort. J Clin Oncol. 2017 Aug 22:JCO2017727735. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28829668
3. Hoffer A, Walker M, Putting It All Together: The New Orthomolecular Nutrition, Keats Publishing, Inc. 1978, p 112-114
5. Saul AW. No Deaths from Supplements. No Deaths from Minerals or Amino Acids. No Deaths from Homeopathics or Herbs. Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, Jan 5, 2017.http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v13n02.shtml
7. Hartman TJ, Woodson K, Stolzenberg-Solomon R, Virtamo J, Selhub J, Barrett MJ, Albanes D. Association of the B-vitamins pyridoxal 5′-phosphate (B(6)), B(12), and folate with lung cancer risk in older men. Am J Epidemiol. 2001; 153:688-94. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11282797
8. Das A, Dey N, Ghosh A, Das T, Chatterjee IB. NAD(P)H: quinone oxidoreductase 1 deficiency conjoint with marginal vitamin C deficiency causes cigarette smoke induced myelodysplastic syndromes. PLoS One. 2011; 6(5):e20590. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21655231
9. Dey N, Chattopadhyay DJ, Chatterjee IB. Molecular mechanisms of cigarette smoke-induced proliferation of lung cells and prevention by vitamin C. J Oncol. 2011; 2011:561862.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21772844
10. Ghosh A, Choudhury A, Das A, Chatterjee NS, Das T, Chowdhury R, Panda K, Banerjee R, Chatterjee IB*. Cigarette smoke induces p-benzoquinone-albumin adduct in blood serum: Implications on structure and ligand binding properties. Toxicology. 2012 Feb 26;292(2-3):78-89. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22154986
11. Das A, Dey N, Ghosh A, Das S, Chattopadhyay DJ, Chatterjee IB. Molecular and cellular mechanisms of cigarette smoke-induced myocardial injury: prevention by vitamin C. PLoS One. 2012; 7(9):e44151. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22970172
13. Banerjee S, Chattopadhyay R, Ghosh A, Koley H, Panda K, Roy S, Chattopadhyay D, Chatterjee IB. Cellular and molecular mechanisms of cigarette smoke-induced lung damage and prevention by vitamin C. J Inflamm (Lond). 2008; 5:21. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19014449
14. Hoffer A, Saul AW, Orthomolecular Medicine for Everyone. Basic Health Publications, Inc., 2008. 376 pages.
Shortly before ousted Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra was to face a court ruling for her failed populist rice subsidy scheme, she reportedly fled the country, joining her likewise fugitive brother Thaksin Shinawatra in hiding abroad. Thaksin Shinawatra was himself ousted from power in 2006 for similar charges of corruption and abuse of power.
While the US and European media attempt to frame the Shinawatras as victims of powerful, democracy-adverse institutions in Thailand, sensible analysis must consider the fact that Thailand does not exist in a geopolitical or socioeconomic vacuum.
Much larger forces are at play beyond Thailand’s borders, and the role the Shinawatras play on behalf of some of these forces helps reveal the truth behind their ousting from power, their fleeing abroad and all of the support they continue to enjoy across the US and European media.
The Charges
Yingluck Shinawatra took office in 2011. Despite being depicted by the US and European media as a “landslide victory,” her brother’s political party, Pheu Thai, won elections with only 35% of all eligible voters’ support, failing to garner even a popular majority among those who participated at the polls.
The party campaigned openly portraying Thaksin Shinawatra, a convicted criminal and fugitive residing abroad, as remotely running the party with his sister serving merely as a proxy. The campaign slogan even boasted, “Thaksin Thinks, Pheu Thai Does,” openly flaunting the legal and political impunity the billionaire still enjoyed in Thailand.
One of the key pillars of Pheu Thai’s populist election campaign was a rice buying scheme that would offer above-market prices per ton of rice to farmers.
The scheme quickly collapsed after implementation, with funds exhausted and warehouses overflowing with unsold rice. Thailand’s international competitors quickly took advantage of rising prices and diminishing rice quality, absorbing many of Thailand’s longstanding trading partners and further compounding what was beginning to become a national crisis.
Government warehouses overflowed with unsold rice amid Yingluck Shinawatra’s ill-conceived populist subsidy scheme. Up to one million rice farmers had their rice taken and were left unpaid for over half a year. The farmers would only receive compensation after the military coup in 2014 that ousted Shinawatra from power.
By 2013 and 2014 when protesters began taking to the streets against the Shinawatra government for a variety of reasons, nearly 1 million farmers found themselves unpaid for months. Like farmers elsewhere around the world, many Thai farmers live either at the edge of or deeply in debt, a fact that drove dozens of farmers to suicide as they languished amid the collapsing populist scheme.
Cases of corruption and abuse of power began to quickly mount against the Shinawatra government, however the government responded by deploying police and heavily armed militants to force protesters off the streets and openly dismissed the authority of Thailand’s courts. With the courts being ignored and the police under the firm control of the Shinawatra government, the military was forced to intervene, taking power in a swift, uncontested coup.
The most recent court case involved Yingluck Shinawatra and several high-ranking Pheu Thai Party members for their role in the rice scheme’s mismanagement which cost Thailand billions in damages and has left its agricultural industry facing a painful process of rebuilding.
Many former supporters of Yingluck Shinawatra’s government would eventually join protests to oust her in 2013-2014, many of them among the one million rice farmers left unpaid by the government’s collapsing subsidy programme.
What is otherwise a clear-cut case of corruption and abuse of power centred around a poorly-conceived populist scheme aimed merely at buying votes, has been portrayed by the US and European media as a “politically motivated” campaign against the Shinawatra family. US and European media attempt to portray the Shinawatras as representative of true democracy in Thailand, chaffing at entrenched “elitist” elements clinging to power in Bangkok.
However, even a cursory look at Thailand’s political landscape reveals this to be untrue. The Shinawatras themselves represent in every way in reality the hereditary dictatorship they and their foreign supporters portray Thailand’s current establishment as in fiction. While opponents of Thailand’s traditional institutions allude to its shadowy influence over Thai politics, the Shinawatra family openly ran the government when in power, placing relatives in high-ranking positions and with Thaksin, sister Yingluck, and brother-in-law Somchai Wongsawat each at one point taking turns as prime minister.
Why US-European Interests Protect the Shinawatras
A look at the Shinawatras’ ties to US and European interests and the role they are meant to play in America’s attempts to reassert itself in Asia Pacific makes it much clearer that their rise and fall in Thai politics and their potential to create continued instability in Thailand, has nothing to do with fighting for “democracy.”
Ousted prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra (right) is seen shaking hands with US Senator John McCain (centre) flanked by US Senator Joe Lieberman (left). The two US politicians are permanent fixtures in America’s regime change industrial complex and often travel abroad to lend US client regimes support in person.
In the late 1990’s Thaksin Shinawatra was an adviser to private equity firm, The Carlyle Group. The group included members of former US President George Bush Sr. administration, setting the stage for multiple conflicts of interests in the future. Shinawatra openly boasted upon taking office in 2001 that he intended to use his position in power to continue serving as a “matchmaker” between Thailand and US business interests.
In 2004, Thaksin Shinawatra would attempt to pass without parliamentary approval the US-Thailand Free Trade Agreement championed by many of the corporations still to this day funding and directing efforts to place Shinawatra back into power.
It was also under Thaksin Shinawatra that a 20 year peace in Thailand’s deep south with separatists was ended. Shinawatra’s heavy-handed tactics resulted in a 2004 crackdown that saw over 80 protesters killed in a single day.
The violence he triggered during his 2001-2006 time in office has continued to present day and has been used multiple times by the United States as a pretext for proposing closer US-Thai “counter-terrorism cooperation.” In essence, it would have been the first of many steps to permanently station US troops across Southeast Asia, a goal openly proposed by US policymakers in papers like the 2000 “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” by the Project for a New American Century chaired by several of Shinawatra’s fellow Carlyle alumni.
In reality, from Shinawatra opening up Thailand’s economy and resources to foreign corporations, to offering Thai territory and troops for US wars, to creating a bloody conflict in the deep south to create a pretext for US troops to occupy Thailand itself, Shinawatra was more an agent for foreign interests than a prime minister for Thailand.
Shinawatra, his political party and his supporters in the form of US and European-funded fronts posing as nongovernmental organisations, student groups and members of academia, constitute a client regime created by and for foreign interests and represents the same sort of internal interference the United States and its European allies are engaged in around the world from Venezuela and Eastern Europe to North Africa and the Middle East.
Shinawatra has enjoyed extensive lobbying services since being ousted from power in 2006 from fellow Carlyle Group alumni and Bush-era adviser James Baker, Barbour Griffith & Rogers (BGR), Amsterdam & Peroff, Kobre & Kim and Edelman.
Edelman’s lobbying was headed by Kenneth Adelmanwho concurrently served as a trustee for the US government and corporate-funded organisation, Freedom House. Freedom House would regularly declare Thailand as “Not Free” in its annual reports for its systematic attempts to remove Shinawatra and his political network’s influence from the nation.
Adelman’s role at Freedom House and his paid-for lobbying represent an obvious conflict of interest, further exposing US “democracy promotion” as a facade to obfuscate politically-motivated interference on behalf of powerful special interests. As this facade is increasingly exposed, efforts by other Southeast Asian states to uproot these US networks is underway, including in neighbouring Cambodia.
With Yingluck Shinawatra joining her brother Thaksin Shinawatra abroad alongside many other members of the political opposition scattered from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom and even the United States, just as the US has done regarding other “oppositions in exile,” it will continue providing support to them while systematically undermining Thailand until instability provides an opportunity for reinstalling them into power.
As was the case in Libya, however, often not much is left to hold power over.
Reasserting American Primacy in Asia
It is troubling that despite having the Arab Spring in hindsight, many commentators, analysts and journalists are deferring to ideological superficiality in their analysis of Thailand, and are either inadvertently or intentionally dismissing obvious evidence that once again the United States and its European partners are interfering in the internal political matters of a sovereign nation.
Thailand lies at the centre of Southeast Asia and is a pivotal component of Washington’s agenda in encircling, isolating and containing the rise of Beijing. The US since the Korean and Vietnam wars has invested much in entrenching its military in the region. Since withdrawing its forces from the Philippines in the 1990s, the US has sought every means of reintroducing troops in Southeast Asia vis-à-vis China.
The United States is openly attempting to reassert primacy in Asia through political, economic and military means. Placing client regimes like the Shinawatra government into power along China’s borders is a policy pursued by Washington for decades.
A 2000 US policy paper, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (.pdf) would openly declare and detail the necessity to, “increase the presence of American forces in Southeast Asia.”
The paper would also note:
In Southeast Asia, American forces are too sparse to adequately address rising security requirements. Since its withdrawal from the Philippines in 1992, the United States has not had a significant permanent military presence in Southeast Asia.
The paper would point out:
This will be a difficult task requiring sensitivity to diverse national sentiments, but it is made all the more compelling by the emergence of new democratic governments in the region.
Written in 2000, “new democratic governments” was a reference to up and coming US client regimes like Thaksin Shinawatra‘s government in Thailand, Anwar Ibrahim‘s in Malaysia and Aung San Suu Kyi‘s National League for Democracy in Myanmar. Like Shinawatra, his Malaysian and Myanmar counterparts likewise received immense material support from the US in their respective bids to take and hold power.
It should be noted that just as had happened under Shinawatra in 2001 with the resurgence of violence in Thailand’s deep south setting up a possible opportunity for US “counter-terrorism assistance” leading to a permanent US military presence in Southeast Asia as desired by US policymakers, Aung San Suu Kyi upon taking power in Myanmar has similarly presided over a sudden increase in violence involving its Rohingya minority, presenting Washington with an opportunity to intervene.
It is particularly worth noting that militant groups involved in Myanmar’s violence are funded and directed from America’s closet and oldest ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Reuters would reveal.
Despite setbacks for the US since 2000, attempts to install client regimes across Southeast Asia or coerce current governments regarding US objectives for the region are still underway, including continuous support provided to the Shinawatras and what remains of their political network in Thailand.
Thailand’s current government is deeply invested in building ties with Beijing while maintaining an equitable balance of power in the region between China and its neighbours. The current Thai government has signed multiple infrastructure deals with China including expanding Thailand’s rail infrastructure. It has also begun purchasing weapons from China including armoured infantry carriers, main battle tanks and even submarines. Joint Thai-Chinese military exercises have also commenced for the first time under the current Thai government.
Amid its closer ties to Beijing, Thailand’s current government is also diversifying ties with Eurasian powers like Russia as well as Western Europe. It is continuing a centuries-old policy of cautious balance that has kept it the only Southeast Asian state to avoid foreign colonisation.
As Thailand’s current government continues writing the US out of any significant future role both in Thailand and in Southeast Asia, attempts by Washington to undermine political and economic stability in Thailand will continue in turn.
The only question remaining is how long it will take independent analysts and news organisations to begin fully exposing the political conflict in Thailand in its true geopolitical context, and lay ideologically superficial commentary echoing US and European media talking points to rest.
Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
All images in this article are from New Eastern Outlook.
The CIA-organized New Syrian Army had, in turn, been the remnants of the Free Syrian Army, which the U.S. had formed in Syria in 2011, during the “Arab Spring” uprisings across Arabia. So, this defector had quit from what was actually the straggling and failing end, of America’s proxy-army of Syrians, who were fighting to overthrow Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad.
This defector had been stationed at America’s Tanf military base inside Syria, ten miles north of (U.S. ally) Jordan, at which base the U.S. was claiming to be training “anti-ISIS” “moderate rebels.” Apparently, as the war progressed, America’s promises to its fighters in Syria changed from overthrowing Assad, to defeating ISIS, because even Assad’s opponents inside Syria came increasingly to abandon their efforts to overthrow Assad, while they increased even more their determination to conquer ISIS.
This is one of several military bases that the U.S. has set up inside Syria after having invaded that country subsequent to the “Arab Spring.” That U.S. base is illegal — it’s a hostile military occupation of Syrian sovereign territory — but all of America’s presence in Syria is that. The U.S. Government doesn’t care about illegality, except when it can be cited against a country that the U.S. wants to conquer, such as against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (his ‘WMD’ or weapons of mass destruction), to ‘justify’ invading it.
This defector, Assad As-Salem, says he defected because America’s statements and promises were all lies, and that, instead of fighting ISIS, the U.S. was training fighters to use U.S.-made weaponry which was being supplied to the base, but which the head of the base sold to ISIS; and that some Maghawir al-Thawra regulars, according to the article posted by Russian Television,
“reported that to American base command, but following our report no action has been taken, the Americans only ramped up the support to the man who was appointed our commander and who was dealing with ISIS,’ As-Salem said.”
The U.S. had appointed their commander, who was actually assisting ISIS — a group the defector loathes. And the U.S. didn’t punish that commander, but instead “the Americans only ramped up the support to the man who was appointed our commander and who was dealing with ISIS.”
If that statement is true, then the countries which have been financing ISIS (mainly Saudi Arabia) are the actual buyers of these U.S.-made weapons; and, of course, the U.S. weapons-manufacturers were actually selling these weapons to the funders of ISIS, which funders then donated these weapons to ISIS, as their part of the U.S. coalition’s campaign to overthrow and replace Assad. Of course, the Sauds regularly receive training by the U.S. in how to operate U.S.-made weapons; so, this training can be passed along to ISIS, by their U.S.-trained Saudi troops.
What’s described here is, then, essentially, a sales-and-marketing campaign by the U.S. Government, to increase sales-volumes for U.S. weapons-makers (who, of course, heavily lobby Congress, so they’ve got support there to increase military funding).
This is truly the free market at work, but relying heavily upon government, as any economy itself inevitably must (because without laws, etc., there can’t be any “market” at all). (To be against corruption is intelligent; to be against ‘government’ is not; government is necessary. The only question about government is “good or bad?” not “small or large.”) This sales-and-marketing campaign certainly isn’t the libertarians’ fantasy of creating zero government (anarchy), nor even just “to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” — as one mega-corporate lobbyist proudly proclaimed to be his goal. It’s the real world; it’s no libertarian (or any other) fantasy about things, at all.
A link to this news-report on RT, Russian Television, became posted at reddit, under the category “Syrian Civil War”, and reader-comments there were generally in the nature of “Corrupt Syrian soldiers sell arms to rebels and corrupt rebels sell arms to ISIS/Al Nusra.” Apparently, most readers were blaming the Syrians, not the U.S. Government. However, one comment was at least open-minded:
“War and corruption go hand in hand. One should try to investigate here.”
That “investigation” is our aim. But in order to investigate the situation, one must first know accurately what it really is. One can’t know that, without knowing the relevant context, which is what we are now focusing on.
(CNN) The US-led coalition fighting ISIS has told its local Syrian allies that they must be exclusively focused on fighting ISIS and not fight the Syrian regime, a directive that prompted one rebel group to depart a joint coalition base in Southern Syria, several coalition and US defense officials told CNN.
“The coalition supports only those forces committed to fighting ISIS,” coalition spokesman US Army Col. Ryan Dillon told CNN.
But one US-backed group which calls itself “the Shohada Al Quartyan” has balked at the restriction, opting to leave the base to carry out independent operations against Syrian regime troops several US and coalition officials told CNN. The officials added that other local allies remain at the garrison and continue to cooperate with coalition advisers.
“The Shohada Al Quartyan have made it known that they may want to pursue other objectives. The coalition is making it clear to Shohada Al Quartyan leadership that if they choose to pursue other objectives, the coalition will no longer support their operations,” Dillon said. …
Though both the RT report and the CNN report agree that the U.S. Government is telling its Syrian ‘moderate rebels’ that they are fighting against ISIS, the reports disagree in that RT’s says that quitters are leaving because America’s actual focus is on overthrowing Assad, whereas CNN’s says that quitters are leaving because there’s not enough focus on overthrowing Assad. Both reports could be true, because the two reports deal with different groups of ‘Syrian rebels’.
Perhaps, the U.S. is telling its fighters in Syria, their target is to be only ISIS, even at the same time that the U.S. is actually using those fighters as an excuse to bring into Syria U.S.-made weaponry that are secretly then to be supplied to ISIS. Of course, if that’s the real case, the Shohada al-Quartyan people might be leaving the U.S. alliance because they’ve been deceived by their American bosses to think their target to be ISIS instead of Assad. However, the Maghawir al-Thawra group are alleged to have quit the U.S. alliance on account of having been lied-to and themselves seen that the U.S. is actually selling U.S.-made weapons to ISIS.
The CNN article alleges only that the Shohada al-Quartyan group had left because of what their U.S. bosses merely told them: that ISIS would now be the target. So, possibly, both articles are true; but, in that case, America is now telling Syrian rebels that their focus is to be on eliminating ISIS; and, some rebel-groups are abandoning the American effort because of this instruction, while other rebel-groups are abandoning the American effort because that allegation by their U.S. commanders is actually a lie and the U.S.’s real objective is to overthrow Assad.
Therefore, quite possibly, both RT and CNN are telling different aspects of the same narrative (though focusing on different aspects of it).
I have previously provided detailed documentation that the U.S. was relying almost exclusively upon Al Qaeda in Syria — called “al-Nusra” there — in order to lead and train virtually all anti-Assad forces there. However, apparently, the more successful the Syrian-Russian-Iranian coalition has been at defeating in Syria the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari-UAE coalition, which employed Al Qaeda’s leaders in Syria to train fighters to overthrow and replace Assad, the more reliance the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari-UAE group has come to place upon ISIS, and the less they’re placing upon Al Qaeda in Syria.
I reported on this development — America’s increasing reliance upon ISIS after the decline of Al Qaeda in Syria — in several previous articles, especially these two:
Those ISIS jihadists were being moved from the Iraqi city of Mosul, to the Syrian city of Deir Ezzor, otherwise called Der Zor, at the center of Syria’s oil-well territory. If ISIS wins firm control of that city, plus transit-routes out in order to sell the oil, they won’t need any more money from the Sauds. CNN starts their report with the false assumption that Syria doesn’t own Syria, that Syrian national sovereignty (the legal Government of Syria, which is headed by Assad) doesn’t exist; and, so, CNN continued their 26 July 2017 report:
Some time ago, Bashar al-Assad‘s forces — supported by Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah proxy militias on the ground, and Russian air force on the air — realized that ISIS was in retreat, so they moved quickly to grab as much territory as they could [notice the allegation here, that Syria’s Government is ‘grabbing’ this Syrian territory, which ISIS had stolen]: in the north to west of Raqqa; in the middle of the country moving east of Palmyra, toward Al Sukhna — a crossroads town considered a gateway to Deir Ezzor; and in the south along the Jordanian and Iraqi borders in Tanf, blocking the path to Deir Ezzor. It’s obvious that Assad and his allies are eyeing Deir Ezzor. [This statement reinforces that Assad isn’t the legitimate head-of-state there.]…
If Assad and his allies reach Deir Ezzor and the strategic border town of Abu Kamal before the coalition forces advancing from north, then it’s game over for the coalition.
CNN’s ‘news’ treats America’s attempted theft of Syria, from the Syrian Government, as being instead an attempted protection of the Syrian people, from the Syrian Government. (Never mind that America is backing jihadists to become the new Syrian government, as a supposed improvement upon Assad’s decidedly secular Government of Syria.) And America claims to be a law-abiding nation, ‘protecting the peace of the world’, instead of to be grabbing yet another piece of the world.
That CNN ‘news’-report is cited here only as being a contrast to the news-report on Russian Television. So, we’ll now briefly complete our discussion of the RT report:
*
In other words, America’s sudden determination, late in Obama’s Presidency, to oust ISIS from Mosul in Iraq, was intended specifically to provide this emergency-assistance by means of ISIS, to the U.S. coalition’s failing al-Qaeda-led effort to overthrow Assad. This is what we know of Obama as a strategic thinker. He was resourceful, and adapted to changing conditions, when he was faced with the failure of his existing strategy. There aren’t yet sufficiently clear signs to indicate Trump as a strategic thinker.
According to another RT news-article, on August 25th, Al Qaeda still remains intensely devoted to the effort to oust Assad. (Perhaps Al Qaeda still is getting enough support from the Sauds and UAE, even if the U.S. is no longer backing them.) RT headlined “New 25,000-strong Syrian terrorist force unites 70 gangs – Russian General Staff”, and reported that:
A new terrorist formation, Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham, consists of 25,000 militants, with Jabhat al-Nusra jihadists at its core, the intelligence chief of Russia’s General Staff said. He also spoke of the terrorists’ favorite tactics, state-of-the-art equipment and ways of getting profit.
“Currently, more than 70 gangs, including those from the ranks of the opposition, which used to consider themselves ‘moderate,’ have banded together. The total strength of the Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham group exceeds 25,000 militants,” Col. Gen. Igor Korobov, the head of the Main Directorate of the Russian General Staff (the foreign military intelligence agency), said during a roundtable on Friday as part of the Army-2017 international military-technical forum, held in the Moscow Region.
The key role in the formation belongs to Jabhat al-Nusra (Nusra Front)
Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), an alliance led by al Qaeda’s former Syrian branch, has consolidated its grip over large parts of Idlib after their main rival, the Kuwait-backed Ahrar al Sham, was ousted from the province’s main towns and villages. The HTS is even crueler than Islamic State (IS). Its leadership rejects the very idea of dialogue with anyone. The group is a great spoiler and a hindrance on the way to Syria’s crisis management based on the [Russian-led] Astana peace process. No ceasefire or peace is possible as long as this Al-Qaeda affiliate controls the province and its border with Turkey.
On August 7th, al-Monitor, the news-site owned by Jamal Daniel of Houston, who is the head of Crest Investment Company, and a friend of the Bush family (who are buddies of the royal Sauds), reported about HTS, by saying that “the group’s aggressive behavior reflects the organization’s priority to expand its territory and consolidate its power, which would make it a de facto interlocutor in the cease-fire deals ongoing in Syria.” A reasonable assumption would be that HTS is extremely well-funded by outside sources.
Warplanes of the US-led coalition have carried out airstrikes on the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) Tiger Forces in the village of Kadir in the province of Homs, according to pro-government sources.
America’s support of ISIS in Syria, is, in any case, becoming more overt. And, Al Qaeda’s failure, which caused the U.S. to turn to ISIS instead, has left the Saud-backed Al Qaeda competing with ISIS now, as the prime head-choppers against Syrians.
Regardless of what the explanations for America’s turn (at least temporarily) toward ISIS are, America’s weapons-makers will profit handsomely from it, just as they have profited enormously from the entire Syrian campaign since 2011. It’s probably an effective business-strategy for them, at the present stage.
Global Research announces the forthcoming release of the print edition of Mark Taliano’s Book, “Voices from Syria”which includes two additional chapters.
Taliano talks and listens to the people of Syria. He reveals the courage and resilience of a Nation and its people in their day to day lives, after more than six years of US-NATO sponsored terrorism and three years of US “peacemaking” airstrikes.
Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes the mainstream media narratives on Syria.
President Trump was crucified by the mainstream media a few weeks back after hosting an improvised press conference and saying there was “blame on both sides” for the violence in Charlottesville that resulted in the death of a counterprotester. The comments resulted in most of Trump’s advisory councils being disbanded, as CEO’s around the country pounced on the opportunity to distance themselves from the administration, and heightened calls from CNN for impeachment proceedings.
The problem is that while Trump’s delivery probably could have been a bit more artful, the underlying message seems to be proving more accurate with each passing day and each new outbreak of Antifa violence.
As Politico points out today, previously unreported FBI and Department of Homeland Security studies found that “anarchist extremist” group like Antifa have been the “primary instigators of violence at public rallies” going back to at least April 2016 when the reports were first published.
Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” according to interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by POLITICO.
Since well before the Aug. 12 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned deadly, DHS has been issuing warnings about the growing likelihood of lethal violence between the left-wing anarchists and right-wing white supremacist and nationalist groups.
Previously unreported documents disclose that by April 2016, authorities believed that “anarchist extremists” were the primary instigators of violence at public rallies against a range of targets. They were blamed by authorities for attacks on the police, government and political institutions, along with symbols of “the capitalist system,” racism, social injustice and fascism, according to a confidential 2016 joint intelligence assessment by DHS and the FBI.
Not surprisingly, law enforcement officials noted that the rise in Antifa violence overlapped perfectly with Trump’s campaign as they made appearances at rally after rally to incite chaos…all the while making it seem as if violent, racist Trump supporters were to blame.
“It was in that period [as the Trump campaign emerged] that we really became aware of them,” said one senior law enforcement official tracking domestic extremists in a state that has become a front line in clashes between the groups. “These antifa guys were showing up with weapons, shields and bike helmets and just beating the shit out of people. … They’re using Molotov cocktails, they’re starting fires, they’re throwing bombs and smashing windows.”
Almost immediately, the right-wing targets of the antifa attacks began fighting back, bringing more and larger weapons and launching unprovoked attacks of their own, the documents and interviews show. And the extremists on both sides have been using the confrontations, especially since Charlottesville, to recruit unprecedented numbers of new members, raise money and threaten more confrontations, they say.
“Everybody is wondering, ‘What are we gonna do? How are we gonna deal with this?’” said the senior state law enforcement official. “Every time they have one of these protests where both sides are bringing guns, there are sphincters tightening in my world. Emotions get high, and fingers get twitchy on the trigger.”
As you’ll likely recall, one such event came in June 2016 when Antifa showed up at a rally in Sacramento and began violently attacking protestors with canes and knives. Of course, with the whole thing caught on video, it’s pretty clear who the instigators of violence were (see our post here).
Some of the DHS and FBI intelligence reports began flagging the antifa protesters before the election. In one from last September, portions of which were read to POLITICO, DHS studied “recent violent clashes … at lawfully organized white supremacist” events including a June 2016 rally at the California Capitol in Sacramento organized by the Traditionalist Workers Party and its affiliate, the Golden State Skinheads.
According to police, counter-protesters linked to antifa and affiliated groups like By Any Means Necessary attacked, causing a riot after which at least 10 people were hospitalized, some with stab wounds.
At the Sacramento rally, antifa protesters came looking for violence, and “engaged in several activities indicating proficiency in pre-operational planning, to include organizing carpools to travel from different locations, raising bail money in preparation for arrests, counter-surveilling law enforcement using three-man scout teams, using handheld radios for communication, and coordinating the event via social media,”the DHS report said.
Insane video. Crowd sees any signs of "Nazis" and they run&attack. A lot of people bleeding/getting maced. @ABC10pic.twitter.com/PoFhILfZ95
Of course, it’s not just California. As the FBI and DHS note, the Antifa group operates much like terrorist cells with disconnected groups all over the country.
Even before Charlottesville, dozens and, in some cases, hundreds of people on both sides showed up at events in Texas, California, Oregon and elsewhere, carrying weapons and looking for a fight. In the Texas capital of Austin, armed antifa protesters attacked Trump supporters and white groups at several recent rallies, and then swarmed police in a successful effort to stop them from making arrests.
California has become another battleground, with violent confrontations in Berkeley, Sacramento and Orange County leading to numerous injuries. And antifa counter-protesters initiated attacks in two previous clashes in Charlottesville, according to the law enforcement reports and interviews.
More recently, the antifa groups, which some describe as the Anti-Fascist Action Network, have evolved out of the leftist anti-government groups like “Black bloc,” protesters clad in black and wearing masks that caused violence at events like the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests. They claim to have no leader and no hierarchy, but authorities following them believe they are organized via decentralized networks of cells that coordinate with each other. Often, they spend weeks planning for violence at upcoming events, according to the April 2016 DHS and FBI report entitled “Baseline Comparison of US and Foreign Anarchist Extremist Movements.”
Dozens of armed anti-fascist groups have emerged, including Redneck Revolt and the Red Guards, according to the reports and interviews. One report from New Jersey authorities said self-described antifa groups have been established in cities including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco.
Meanwhile, even by the spring of 2016, the FBI had already grown concerned enough about Antifa that they began investigating overseas trips by activists out of concerns that they were coordinating with European anarchists to stage large bombings in the U.S.
By the spring of 2016, the anarchist groups had become so aggressive, including making armed attacks on individuals and small groups of perceived enemies, that federal officials launched a global investigation with the help of the U.S. intelligence community, according to the DHS and FBI assessment.
The purpose of the investigation, according to the April 2016 assessment: To determine whether the U.S.-based anarchists might start committing terrorist bombings like their counterparts in “foreign anarchist extremist movements” in Greece, Italy and Mexico, possibly at the Republican and Democratic conventions that summer.
Some of the antifa activists have gone overseas to train and fight with fellow anarchist organizations, including two Turkey-based groups fighting the Islamic State, according to interviews and internet postings.
Alas, we suspect you’ll hear precisely nothing about any of this on CNN.
Gore Vidal once remarked that advertising was the only art form that America ever created. Beyond this, America’s ideological debates are both a product of and a symptom of a culture where everything is commodified and when there is nothing left to commodify, one needs only to invent a new concept around which to sell a plethora of accessories.
The most strident example of this in the 21st century is the phenomenon of selling lifestyles. From men that call themselves women, women who call themselves men and every permutation of such notions, the entire situation which is disguised as a philosophical debate on so-called ‘sexuality’ is merely a distraction to hide the larger truth that the ‘trans’ industry is just that, a business and a very big business at that.
Not content to simply sell bigger breasts, smaller noses and hair to the bald, the American pharmaceutical and medical industry is strongly invested in surgical operations and the accompanying medicines, education, training, medical equipment and technology, ‘therapy’ and literature which is a multi-million dollar industry.
Awkward and controversial plastic surgeries are nothing new, but selling such things and the preparatory stages as something that is not only mainstream but fashionable, is the latest trend in an American advertising industry that has gone from selling obscene images to selling the modification of sex organs.
The roots of this concept are not new. In 1915, US companies began marketing shaving products to women in a move to sell a group of people something they did not need and previously did not particularly want. There is no hygiene based reason for the average woman to remove her leg or under-arm hair, but there is a very good reason for a salesman or product manufacturer to want them to.
Prior to the early 20th century, shaving products were sold and marketed to men. By selling similar products to women, almost zero research and development is required and almost at once you’ve doubled your market from just under half of the adult population to almost all of the adult population. For big business, it was a mission accomplished moment.
In the 1920s, the same thing happened with cigarettes. The nature of cigarette production particularly different in 1926 that it was in 1896, but by marketing cigarettes for women as something fashionable, big tobacco was able to sell a considerably higher amount of cigarettes to the population at large.
After the Second World War, even American political movements became dominated by the marketing of fashion products. The so-called anti-war movement and the related ‘hippy’ movement saw generally inexpensive peasant style garments marketed to young Americans at vastly inflated prices vis-à-vis the cost of production. Why sell someone a dress which requires some craftsmanship to design and produce when instead, one can simply sell dyed rags with a peace sign painted on it for competitive prices? The answer was, ‘yes we can’ and so they did.
While the American wars in South East Asia raged until 1975, the anti-war movement died much earlier than that. The anti-war movement died when the fashion industry realised that it had reached the limits of marketing ‘peace and love’ and instead designed more complex fashions so as to sell the accoutrements which accompany a lifestyle of decadence. Those who were selling cannabis pipes began selling engraved devices to make the process of taking cocaine more fashionable along with a wardrobe to match.
In the 1980s, it was all about selling clothes with slogans, irrespective of their meaning. “Choose life”, “Frankie says relax”, “Say no to drugs”, “Live Aid”, “We Are The World”, were all officially licensed items for the generation that thought they were turning activism into T-shirts, but in reality inexpensive T-shirts simply became more easily marketable if they carried an exclusive and therefore expensively sold, trademarked slogan.
In the 1990s, just as many American factories were closing, enter the age of ‘grunge rock’. Not only was the US public sold records of generally very easily and inexpensively produced music, but to go along with it, children of wealthy middle class professionals can dress up like the factory workers who increasingly no longer needed their ‘uniforms’. Never mind putting a hole in your ‘designer’ jeans, someone will sell you jeans with a pre-made hole and charge you for the privilege.
The 2000s saw the increasing normalisation of tattoos for women. It was cigarettes all over again. Why limit tattoos to a traditionally male dominated market when the other half (technically slightly more than half) of the population is a potential consumer base? The answer as always, was, ‘why not’!
And now as we approach 2020, the new fashion is the ‘trans’ fashion. It comes in the form of expensive cosmetic surgery and all that goes with it and for those that don’t want to take the plunge and surgically remove or altar ones genitals, there are plenty of T-shirts, hats, books, music downloads and other media products that are there waiting for you to consume. There are also plenty of public events celebrating the ‘trans’ lifestyle that one can pay for the privilege of entering.
If you oppose such things, don’t worry, the marketing department has something else for you, it’s a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat, or shirt, or novelty pen or gun holster. This indeed was one of the genius moves of Donald Trump. In true American style, he realised that in order to get his message across, he needed to associate his message with an easily commodified fashion statement. Perhaps if Ross Perot had hats for sale in 1992, he would have won the US Presidential election, after all, his policies were highly similar to those of Trump who ran decades later.
If ever one felt that it was odd for people who had been previously more conservatively minded on the issue of altering one’s sex, to come out robustly in favour of such things, one only needs to remember that in the United States and all other societies with copy-cat economies, the sales pitch and potential for profit always trumps any moral or ethical matters.
The fact that the severing of a human penis by a surgeon is objectively less benign than selling a shaver to a woman so she can sever the hair under her arms, is merely symptomatic of the fact that as the most obvious ideas become taken and consequently exhausted, the marketing experts will simply push the envelope further, chasing a profit at all times.
This is indeed one of the reasons that the United States is, along with South Korea (which was sold on the idea after US occupation), the only nation in the world to perform routine circumcisions on the very young outside of any religious context. Someone is getting paid to perform the operation and someone is getting paid to make the necessary medical equipment. While the WTO has found that the operation can reduce the rate of AIDS in populations where the disease is widespread, no child could contract AIDS through a sex act that one is medically too young to engage in, in the first place. However, fewer adults opt for the operation in spite of their lifestyle and therefore it is more profitable to sell it to concerned and often frightened parents, in spite of not having any medical benefits prior to one’s early adult years.
America therefore is only having as much of a moral crisis as the marketing industry allows. It’s no wonder that people in countries with vastly different economic systems don’t feel the need to have sex change operations or involve themselves with making videos, selling books, medicines and other clinical products. This is because those with psychological deviancies which make them unhappy with the sex of their birth is an extremely rare condition, that is, unless one turns such a rare condition into a fashion statement for the mases. The leap from wearing an AC/DC T-shirt in spite of never having heard a single AC/DC piece of music, to promoting products on the virtues of embracing sex change politics without having any previous desire to engage in such things, is not a big leap after all.
Smoking a single pack of cigarettes is generally not a life changing experience, especially if one refrains from smoking thereafter. In spite of this, many people have affirmed the correlation between social smoking and advertisements which glamourize the activity.
If one can glamourize the medically unnecessary act of smoking, why do so many find it hard to believe that the same marketing strategies can glamourize the act of surgically altering one’s genitals? The answer is in fact the same as the question: marketing!
Over the past few weeks, some dramatic stories and a potential nuclear war have taken the media’s attention away from the non-story that is the Russiagate-election scandal. But as attention veers away from the Russian hacking narrative, why are genuine stories regarding Russia’s actual influence in the world almost completely ignored?
Russia is slowly but surely nabbing small but significant pieces of the American empire. Not only did Russia foil the U.S. military establishment’s plan to dominate Syria by inserting its military in the country and setting up a quasi-no-fly-zone of its own, but Russia is also acquiring pieces of the global chessboard through other means.
Let’s start backward. Washington’s violent, stalwart ally and regional power player Saudi Arabia has been cozying up to Russia over the course of the year amid Russia’s demonstrable successes in Syria. As Al-Jazeeraexplains:
“In late May, then Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman went to Russia to discuss with President Vladimir Putin the oil market and the situation in Syria. The visit came just three weeks before Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef was removed and bin Salman took his position. While in Moscow, the latter said that ‘relations between Saudi Arabia and Russia are going through one of their best moments ever.’
“Two months later, Moscow and Riyadh signed a preliminary military cooperation agreement worth $3.5bn. The Saudis have requested transfer of technology to accompany the signing of the deal.” [emphasis added]
Al-Jazeera also notes that Saudi Arabia helped provide a platform for Egypt to negotiate between Moscow and the Syrian opposition, which held huge significance for Russia:
“The importance of this step for the Kremlin is obvious. Russia is extremely interested in concluding an agreement on de-escalation zones, the implementation of which is not possible exclusively within the framework of the tripartite initiative of Russia, Iran and Turkey, without the involvement of other actors. From this perspective, the role Saudi Arabia played in the signing of the two Cairo agreements between Russia and the Syrian opposition on East Ghouta and Rastan is very important.”
This brings us to the next point. Turkey, a NATO member, was for some time one of the heaviest backers of the Syrian opposition in their attempt to overthrow the Syrian government, a Moscow ally. Turkey was so entrenched in its desire to overthrow the Assad regime that they were allegedly supporting ISIS in more ways than can be counted. The Turkish government is now working closely with both Tehran and Moscow to secure a questionable de-escalation process. Russian-owned media outlet Sputnik claims that according to a regional newspaper, Turkey will be ceasing its support for large elements of the Syrian opposition.
Where is the U.S. during all of this? Practically nowhere to be seen, to put it simply. Unsurprisingly, Turkey even expressed its desire to join a security bloc dominated by Russia and China, snubbing the E.U. and NATO in the process.
Russia now also has a strong presence in Libya, an oil-rich country the U.S. helped destabilize in 2011 to prevent its leader from independently enriching the African region independent of the U.S. and NATO powers. Russia has provided political and military assistance to Libyan General Khalifa Haftar, who controls a significant chunk of Libyan territory. Moscow is also involved in the diplomatic settlement between Haftar and the U.N.-backed Libyan government and has been attempting to create good relations with parties on both sides of the conflict.
But how – and why – did Russia find itself in Libya, as well? As explained by Chatham House, an independent policy institute based in London:
“The real driving forces behind Russian involvement in Libya are a mixture of ambition, opportunism and anti-Western sentiment.” [emphasis added]
In this context, it makes a lot more sense that Western powers are all of a sudden so much more interested in working with Haftar considering he is emerging as a significant Libyan figure and potential Russian client.
And one cannot talk about Libya without mentioning Egypt, another country in the region with which Russia has strengthened ties. Chatham Housespeculates that Russia was only able to assert itself in Libya through Egypt’s direction and recommendations that it support Haftar in the first place. Russia and Egypt are also improving their ties in relation to trade and economic cooperation and have been holding joint naval drills and military exercises over the past few years. Further, Russia has allegedly deployed its own Special Forces in Egypt with a specific eye on the Libyan conflict.
Russia also distances itself from the practices of the U.S., which allows it to become a more viable option for states in the region which desire less control over what they do. As Forbesnotes:
“Military cooperation with Moscow matters to Cairo. US arms deals don’t allow for secondary sales– what Egypt buys has to stay in Egypt. No such strings come with Kremlin arms deals, and in the context of crony Egyptian capitalism arms deals with Russia can appear more attractive. Some of Moscow’s weapons are better suited for Egypt’s needs than American ones, and from an Egyptian perspective, a Russian MIG-29 is also simply easier to maintain than an American aircraft.”
The U.S. is also concerned that Russia is injecting itself into Afghanistan (again), as well as increasing its military cooperation with Pakistan. Another prime example of Russia’s growing presence in the region is the fact that even though it has had strong American backing, Iraq reportedly wanted to turn to Russia for air cover in its war against ISIS.
All that being said, Russia’s influence extends exceedingly further than the Middle East and its neighbors, such as Ukraine. Just days ago, in an unusual show of force, Russia reportedly flew its nuclear-capable bombers close to the Korean peninsula at roughly the same time the U.S. and South Korea were conducting their annual military exercises.
Russia has a huge hand in South America, too, which is arguably one of the reasons why the U.S. is so desperate to “intervene” in Venezuela. As Anti-Media explained two weeks ago:
“As isusually the case, Washington’s desire to undermine yet another country has pushed that country into the open arms of America’s cold war rival, Russia. Reuters just released a ‘special report’ citing inside sources who revealed the South American nation is turning to Russia for cash and credit it needs to survive following American sanctions and offering prized state-owned oil assets in return.”
Russia’s hand in this country was greatly facilitated by the late Hugo Chavez, who cemented a $4 billion arms-for-oil-deal in 2006 with Russia while actively rejecting American corporations. As Anti-Media explained further:
“Russia also has aquasi-military relationship with Peru, Argentina, and Nicaragua, as well as close economic ties with Mexico and Brazil. This has shaken the cage of U.S. anti-Russian paranoia over the course of the last few years.”
These are just a few examples that demonstrate the American empire is slowly breaking off piece by piece and being acquired by America’s Cold War rival Russia in the process. Most famous of the examples is undoubtedly the fact that Russia is also one of the leading nations in the so-called BRICS coalition, which has attempted to provide a buffer to American dominance of the financial order.
The next time the media decides to rattle on with the alleged interference carried out by Russia in the 2016 election, remember what is really at stake and that the true motives for confronting Russia are not rooted in concerns about democracy in any way, shape or form. Instead, the powers-that-be are concerned with the need to prop up a failing empire that Russia is continuously challenging.
Even most leftish white Americans like to think that their country is good and its institutions are fair and equitable. According to this wishful thinking human rights abuses only happen in faraway places and injustices here are resolved by reining in a few bad apples. The facts say otherwise and prove that the United States is consistently one of the worst human rights violators in the world. The cruelty of its prison system extends far beyond headlines of a few well known villains likeDavid Clarkeand Joe Arpaio.
Donald Trump’s pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio is quite rightly a big news story. Trump’s pardon is easily denounced as an obvious violation of the spirit of the presidential pardon process. It was a sham used to circumvent an established process. Arpaio had not even been sentenced for his misdemeanor contempt of court conviction. Full pardons are rare in any case, with examples such as Chelsea Manning’s being far more common. She received a commutation and only after serving seven years of her sentence.
Arpaio is surely deserving of scorn heaped upon him. He referred to his jails as “concentration camps.”He held prisoners outdoors in tents, a violation of national and international law. Arpaio was convicted of contempt of court because he continued to detain undocumented people without charge in violation of a judge’s order.
“Arpaio referred to his jails as ‘concentration camps.”
He used intimidation and charged anyone who opposed him with crimes and even faked an assassination attempt which sent an innocent manto jail for four years. Not only were female prisoners shackled while giving birth but he didn’t bother to investigate hundreds of sexual assault cases. The judgments against him cost Maricopa County in Arizona millions of dollars.
But Arpaio differs from the rest of law enforcement only in the openness of his methods. Joe Arpaio was a media whore and relished the attention given to him by Fox news and other right wing outlets. He became a fixture among the people who elected Donald Trump and openly bragged about his untouchability.
It must be pointed out that the United States is full of Arpaios in all 50 states. Two judges in Pennsylvania literally made a fortune sending juveniles to jail. Women in New York state prisons are still shackled while giving birth, in direct violation of that state’s law.
No one knows for certain how many people died in Arpaio’s custody. But there are horrific stories of death in prison all over the country. Prisoners have died of thirst, or from treatable illnesses when denied medication. Some of these cases are brought to light but thousands of others go unreported. In the state of Texas alone, 6,900 prisoners diedin custody over a ten year period.
“The United States is full of Arpaios in all 50 states.”
Trump and Arpaio are inviting targets. Both men dispense with niceties and show the system in its barbaric glory. There is no attempt to mince words, beat around bushes or put a happy face on wrong doing. They are forthright in advocating their racism while the prison industrial complex grinds on, destroying lives and sometimes ending them.
Arpaio and Trump show the dangers of allowing open racism to flourish. The Trump presidency emboldens white supremacy but in an ironic way minimizes it too. Mass incarceration is diminished by attention paid to the Trumps and Arpaios in this country. Because of the endless desire to cover up the country’s crimes, the focus falls on the most blatant evils. All the while the system goes on committing an unknown number of human rights abuses in jails and prisons across the country.
The system is built to incarcerate for the sake of incarcerating, and people of color are the primary victims. Their victimizers may not look for publicity like Arpaio did, but their actions as nameless bureaucrats are equally deadly.
“There are horrific stories of death in prison all over the country.”
It is a grave mistake to reserve outrage and protest for the Trumps and the Arpaios of the world. Doing so allows the other killers to act with impunity. That is why the carceral system must be torn out root and branch. Prison abolition should be the watch words and mealy mouthed talk of reform must be dismissed.
The United States would still have more than 2 million incarcerated persons if Joe Arpaio didn’t exist or if Donald Trump weren’t president. It should not be forgotten that a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, did more to expand mass incarceration than any other. But his successors did nothing to end it either.
The worst criminals are outside of the prison walls. Some of them are well known like Trump and Arpaio but most are faceless as they carry out horrific abuses. The focus of our attention must be on ending the system that allows them all to flourish.
Margaret Kimberley‘s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com.Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
Featured image: Taliban leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada (Source: South Front)
Taliban leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada in a message on the occasion of Eid Al-Adha announced that the departure of all American and NATO forces from Afghanistan is the only solution to end the war and violence in Afghanistan.
He also denied any Taliban links with terrorist attacks and declared that the Taliban controls more than half of the country. However, this claim contradicts to the info provided by the US military.
Gen. John Nicholson, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said that government forces control 62% of the country and the Taliban controls only 10%. The rest of the area is contested, according to the general.
The Pentagon has also confirmed that there are about 11,000 US troops in Afghanistan, including regular troops and special forces. The US is going to send about 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan under the newly declared strategy in the country.
The article is provided by Islamic World News exclusively for SouthFront
In an unprecedented legal decision four members out of seven within the Kenyan Supreme Court struck down the results of the presidential elections which were held on August 8.
Four members voted in favor of nullification, two were dissenting, while one chief justice was in hospital and did not participate in the decision.
This is the first time in Africa’s 66-year history of electoral politics where such a significant occurrence has taken place.
President Uhuru Kenyatta, 55, was declared the winner of the poll carried out less than a month ago with 54 percent of the votes counted. Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, 72, who ran on behalf of the opposition coalition known as the National Super Alliance (NASA), garnered 44 percent.
The Supreme Court has mandated that a revote be held within 60 days. Supporters of the NASA coalition began to celebrate what they perceived as a ruling which will provide Odinga yet another opportunity to seek the highest office in the East African state.
Odinga ran for the presidency against Mwai Kibaki in 2007. Disagreements over the outcome led to internecine conflict resulting in the deaths of over a thousand people.
Later in 2013, Odinga lost to Uhuru Kenyatta by a substantial margin. Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) rejected the results and later filed a legal challenge in the Kenyan courts. This attempt to overturn the elections in 2013 failed.
“Unascertained” Evidence Lead to the Nullification
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the majority opinion delivered by Chief Justice Daniel Kenani Maraga was that it lacked any substantial findings documenting the claimed violations of the Kenyan constitution. The chief justice said that such proof would be presented within the next 21 days.
Therefore, with campaigning for the revote getting underway immediately, there will be a gap in the initial messaging since the basis for the nullification has not been spelled out by the majority members of the Supreme Court. President Kenyatta in a statement to the media on September 1 said that he emphatically disagreed with the decision to designate the election results invalid although he would respect and abide by the ruling.
Kenyatta said that it was:
“important to respect the rule of law even if you disagree with the Supreme Court ruling. Your neighbor will still be your neighbor, regardless of what has happened. My primary message today to every single Kenyan is peace. Let us be people of peace.”
The president referred to the four justices in Kiswahili as “wakora”, meaning crooks. He asserted that their decision was politically motivated in deciding to “cancel the elections.”
Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta addresses crowd on Sept. 1, 2017 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
Later the Jubilee party leader and president reminded Chief Justice Maraga that he was still the head-of-state in Kenya. Furthermore, Kenyatta warned his opponents within the Supreme Court that they would be monitored closely by the government.
Kenyatta asked during the press conference:
“Do you understand me? Maraga should know that he is now dealing with the serving president. We are keeping a close eye on them. But let us deal with the election first. We are not afraid.”
A summarized dissenting opinion from Justices Jackton Boma Ojwang and Njoki Susanna Ndungu laid out eight points of disagreement. Their arguments point to the failure to cite any specific instances of electoral practice which run contrary to the Kenyan constitution.
The minority summary emphasizes in point three that:
“Whereas the substance of the case founded on illegality and irregularity rests on the voting-results electronic transmission process, there is substantial information showing that, by law, the conduct of the election should have been mainly manual, and only partially electronic. Hardly any conclusive evidence has been adduced in this regard, which demonstrates such a manifestation of irregularity as to justify the invalidation of the election results.” (Standard article by Fredrick Obura, Sept. 1)
Moreover, the most revealing sections of the dissenting opinion are located in points five and six which notes:
“Much of the evidence which the majority opinion adopts is largely unascertained, apart from standing in contradiction to substantial, more credible evidence. In such a marginal state of merits in the case challenging the conduct of elections on 8th August, 2017, it is clear to me beyond peradventure, that there is not an iota of merit in invalidating the clear expression of the Kenyan people’s democratic will, which was recorded on 8th August, 2017.”
In other words it is unconscionable when four members of a high court can reverse the popular will of the millions of Kenyan voters who elected President Uhuru Kenyatta to a second term of office. The nullification of the presidential election is providing further political ammunition to the NASA coalition in their efforts to question the legitimacy of the Kenyan Independent Boundaries and Electoral Commission (IBEC). Odinga is also calling for the resignation and prosecution of the IBEC Chair Wafula Chebukati and other officials for alleged crimes committed against the people.
Moreover, this Supreme Court ruling could open up legal challenges to other office holders whom secured their positions as a result of the August 8 elections within the parliamentary and county governmental structures. Therefore, the potential for widespread destabilization utilizing the electoral process remains an ominous threat.
An article published by the Daily Nation on September 1 warned:
“The judgment by the Supreme Court on the presidential results petition has put the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission at the mercy of candidates who lost in the elections. Legal experts on Friday (Sept. 1) argued that Chief Justice David Maraga’s judgment will set precedence for hundreds of similar petitions at the lower courts. Lawyer Gordon Ogolla said the candidates who contested various seats were waiting to hear what the court would decide before lodging their appeals. According to Mr. Ogolla, the judgment poked holes in almost all the stages of the electoral process, giving other candidates a reason to think they lost unfairly and thus head to the court and use those grounds to protest their loss.”
International Impact of the Supreme Court Ruling
The elections were subjected to a rigorous outside monitoring process involving the African Union (AU), the United Nations, Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the Carter Center from the United States, European Union (EU), among others. These observer missions unanimously agreed that the election process was free and fair saying it represented a landmark in democratic practice for the continent.
Consequently, such a ruling by the Supreme Court has grave implications for Kenya’s relationship with the broader global community. Since the country has the largest economy in the East Africa region, this decision could impact its interactions with its neighbors as well as trading partners internationally.
After the announcement voiding the elections by the Supreme Court, volatility in the Kenyan stock market resulted in a temporary suspension of trading. Also the value of the national currency, the shilling, fell against the U.S. dollar.
Kenya has maintained an annual growth rate of five percent. The nation is largely dependent upon agricultural production, commodity export and tourism. In recent years with the discovery and exploitation of oil, prospects for exponential development are on the horizon.
According to CNN Money as it relates to the current situation:
“Observers are worried that the ruling could result in a repeat of 2007, when the country plunged into widespread violence following elections. John Ashbourne of Capital Economics estimated before the vote that a similar crisis would cut roughly three percentage points off quarterly economic growth.” (Sept. 1)
It is important to recount that in 2013, both the U.S. and Britain, the former colonial power, threatened retribution if Kenyans elected Kenyatta as president. The president and his Vice-President William Ruto were investigated by the Netherlands-based International Criminal Court (ICC) for possible trial related to events stemming from political violence during the post-election period of late 2007 and 2008.
The cases against both Kenyatta and Ruto were dropped by the ICC for lack of evidence. The ICC has almost exclusively been preoccupied with events in Africa and has failed to investigate any of the war crimes and other atrocities committed by the western imperialist countries particularly the U.S. and Britain.
During the May 2013 fiftieth anniversary summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor to the AU, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the AU held extensive discussions on whether to withdraw as a continental group from the Rome Statute, the ostensible legal document which underpins the validity of the ICC.
Efforts by three African states to reject the Rome Statute have been thwarted. In Gambia, a state which withdrew from its jurisdiction had its government overthrown in early in 2017.
The Republic of South Africa, whose President Jacob Zuma, announced its intentions to withdraw from the oversight of the ICC, was subjected to a Constitutional Court ruling which said that it could not implement such a policy decision absent of the passage of legislation by parliament. South African opposition forces have utilized the courts to obstruct the capacity of the African National Congress (ANC) government to enact measures which adhere to the protocols of the AU and other policy imperatives related any semblance of genuine sovereignty and national independence.
Burundi, which made a similar declaration regarding the ICC, has been largely isolated by former colonial powers and neo-colonial governments due to a domestic constitutional court ruling granting the ability of President Pierre Nkurunziza to serve for a third term. During the Pentagon-NATO war of regime-change against the North African state of Libya in 2011, the ICC began an investigation into the now deceased former leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi and other high-ranking officials within the previous government.
These events in Kenya must be viewed within the broader context of the current post-colonial political conjuncture on the African continent. Despite the existence of liberation struggles throughout the region since the post-World War II period, the imperialist states led by the U.S. remain committed to the political and economic domination of the AU member-states.
On August 31, two explosions rocked the plant, causing toxic chemical fires, contaminating air and water.
The company’s web site said the “threat of additional explosions remains.”
On Friday, another explosion and massive fire occurred. More could follow. Toxic black smoke filled the air, visible for miles around the plant. More explosions and fires are likely.
Trailers with chemicals at the site require refrigeration. According to Arkema official Richard Rennard, floodwaters knocked out municipal and auxiliary power. He “expect(s) the same thing to happen with those containers that we saw today.”
Residents within miles of the plant aren’t safe. Maybe no one in Harris County – home to 4.6 million people, living in harm’s way, exposed to hazardous conditions.
A major public health emergency exists, local, state and federal authorities aren’t explaining. Everyone should have been evacuated right away from areas most endangered. Instead, only a 1.5 evacuation zone was in place before the plant explosions and fires.
Emergency responders let them burn out. On Friday, Arkema president and CEO Rich Rowe said he expects six remaining trailers with chemicals to catch fire. Let them burn out, he said.
Friday’s explosions and fires were more violent than Thursdays. If remaining trailers explode and ignite fires as expected, they’ll cause far more widespread contamination.
On Thursday, officials called the smoke and fumes “noxious.” The plant stores thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals.
If released into the environment, it could be potentially harmful to millions of Harris County residents.
Earlier, a federal court delayed approving EPA rules designed to improve plant safety. Arkema refused to release information on hazardous chemicals at its plants – disgracefully claiming it could heighten the risk of terrorism.
Under federal and Texas laws, companies can decline to disclose what toxic materials are produced or maintained at plant and other sites. Area residents have no idea about the hazards they’re potentially exposed to.
In February, OCHA fined Arkema’s Crosby plant $90,000 for “serious” hazardous chemical-related safety violations – likely contributing to Thursday and Friday explosions and fires, more likely coming.
Chemical and other US industries lobby intensively to be as regulatory-free as possible. Trump and most others in Washington serve their interests.
After the fact, Arkema listed the following chemicals stored at its Crosby, TX site:
2-ETHYLHEXANOYL CHLORIDE DISTILLED
ACETIC ACID 84%
ACETONE
AROMATIC 100
BENZOYL CHLORIDE
CAUSTIC POTASH 45%
CAUSTIC SODA 50%
CUMENE HYDROPEROXIDE
CUMENE HYDROPEROXIDE
DIMETHYL HEXADIENE
DIMETHYL HEXANEDIOL DH-S
EPSOM SALTS
HEXANE
HYDROGEN PEROXIDE 70%
ISOAMYLENE
ISOBUTYLENE ISOPROPYL ALCOHOL
MINERAL OIL, WHITE
MINERAL SPIRITS ODORLESS
MONOSODIUM PHOSPHATE
NEODECANOYL CHLORIDE >=98.0% UNDISTILLED
PIVALOYL CHLORIDE 95-100%
PROPYLENE GLYCOL
SODIUM BICARBONATE
SODIUM CARBONATE
ANHYDROUS LIGHT
SODIUM SULFATE ANHYDROUS
SODIUM SULFITE ANHYDROUS
SULFUR DIOXIDE
SULFURIC ACID 93% REAGENT ACS
T-BUTYL HYDROPEROXIDE 70%
They’re expected to burn and spread toxicity over a wide area.
US ground troops were attacked outside of the Syrian city of Manbij today, according to coalition spokesman Col. Ryan Dillon. They came under fire from Syrian rebels allied with Turkey, and US forces returned fire before fleeing back into Manbij.
With the CIA program ended, the rebels are now aligned with Turkey, and Turkey has made clear since their invasion of Syria that they intended to try to capture Manbij militarily, to expel Kurdish forces. It is only the presence of US troops in Manbij that has deterred NATO member Turkey from attacking the city.
But Turkey’s been very publicly griping about the US support for the Kurds. That, combined with the Turkish-backed rebels claiming the US “abandoned” them by cutting aid, appears to have finally provoked some fighting.
This puts a final exclamation point on what a bad idea the CIA arms program turned out to be, as not only did it not accomplish the regime change goals of the time, it’s armed up rebel factions that are now eager to fight US troops. While Turkey clearly has an interest in preventing this going too far, it’s unlikely this is the last of the US clash with these rebels.
Featured image is from Russia Insider.
Global Research announces the forthcoming release of the print edition of Mark Taliano’s Book, “Voices from Syria”which includes two additional chapters.
Taliano talks and listens to the people of Syria. He reveals the courage and resilience of a Nation and its people in their day to day lives, after more than six years of US-NATO sponsored terrorism and three years of US “peacemaking” airstrikes.
Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes the mainstream media narratives on Syria.
First published by Global Research on November 17, 2014
The terms “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy nut” are used frequently to discredit a perceived adversary using emotional rather than logical appeals. It’s important for the sake of true argument that we define the term “conspiracy” and use it appropriately, not as an ad hominem attack on someone whose point of view we don’t share.
According to my Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, the word “conspiracy” derives from the Latin “conspirare,” which means literally “to breathe together” in the sense of agreeing to commit a crime. The primary definition is “planning and acting together secretly, especially for a harmful or unlawful purpose, such as murder or treason.”
It was in this sense that Mark Twain astutely observed, “A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public.”
Conspiracies are common. If they weren’t, police stations would not need conspiracy units to investigate and prosecute crimes such as “conspiracy to import cocaine” or any other collusion on the part of two or more people to subvert the law.
Unfortunately, too many people smugly chide “conspiracy theories” as if they imagine that such a derisive characterization reflects superior intellect—whether or not they know anything about the issue in question. It’s a pitiful display of ego inflation and intellectual dishonesty, yet it appears to be a common approach preferred by those either short on information and critical thinking skills or harboring a hidden agenda.
Here are a few examples of past “conspiracy theories” that have been commonly derided but were later determined to be credible:
1933 Business Plot: Smedley Butler, a decorated United States Marine Corps major general, who wrote a book called War is a Racket, testified before a congressional committee that a group of powerful industrialists, who had tried to recruit him, were planning to form a fascist veterans’ group that intended to assassinate Franklin Roosevelt and overthrow the government in a coup. While news media at the time belittled Butler and called the affair a hoax, the congressional committee determined that Butler’s allegations were credible, although no-one was prosecuted.
Project Paperclip: After “winning” World War II, the US imported hundreds of Nazis and their families through “Project Paperclip,” so-named because ID photos were clipped to paper dossiers. It was set up by an agency within the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA. Along with creating false identities and political biographies, Paperclip operatives expunged or altered Nazi records and other criminal histories in order to illegally circumvent President Truman’s edict that prohibited Nazis from obtaining security clearances. Thus, high-level Nazis waltzed into sensitive positions of authority and secrecy in the US military-industrial establishment, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), major corporations, and universities. These Germans were conveniently referred to as “former Nazis,” but “former” was commonly just a euphemism for “active” and “ardent.”
Consider the irony of the United States’ moon mission. In order to successfully land men on the lunar surface and return them to Earth, the US depended almost exclusively on Nazis. A notable example was rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, a member of the Allgemeine SS, who would eventually lead the US space program. Von Braun had exploited concentration camp labor in Germany to build V-2 rockets at Peenemünde, and German aviation doctors’ gruesome and often fatal experiments at Dachau and other prisons afforded information that would help keep American astronauts alive in space.
While many Americans would prefer to call it a conspiracy theory, the United States defeated the Nazi organization in Germany only to transplant that ideology directly into the US after the war, and not just among members of the lay population but, more significantly, among members of the very “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower (a five-star general during WWII) had presciently warned the nation about in his 1961 message of leave-taking and farewell.
Operation Northwoods: Declassified documents revealed that in 1962 the CIA was planning to execute false flag terrorist attacks, such as killing random American citizens and blowing up civilian targets, including a US airliner and ship, in order to blame Castro and justify invading Cuba.
Gulf of Tonkin: President Lyndon Johnson used a contrived version of this 1964 event to justify escalation of the Vietnam War. It was claimed that Vietnamese gunboats had fired on the USS Maddox. It never happened—or at best was grossly distorted and overblown—yet the story served to prompt Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which provided the public justification Johnson needed to attack North Vietnam. This led to the deaths of about two million Vietnamese people and fifty thousand Americans.
MK-ULTRA: As its code name suggests, MK-ULTRA was a mind control program run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence for the ostensible purpose of discovering ways to glean information from Communist spies although its applications were undoubtedly more far-reaching. It employed various methodologies including sensory deprivation and isolation, sexual abuse, and the administration of powerful psychotropic drugs such as LSD to unwitting subjects, including military personnel, prisoners, and college students. Many of them suffered serious consequences. One biochemist, Frank Olson, who was secretly slipped a strong dose of LSD at a CIA meeting, suffered a severe psychotic break and died when, for whatever reason, he plummeted from his apartment window to the pavement below. Such revelations came to light in 1975 during hearings by the congressional Church Committee (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) and the presidential Rockefeller Commission. These investigations were hindered by CIA Director Richard Helms who in 1973 had ordered the MK-ULTRA files destroyed.
Operation Mockingbird: This was a CIA media control program exposed by the Church Committee in 1975. It revealed the CIA’s efforts from the 1950s through the 1970s to pay well-known foreign and domestic journalists from “reputable” media agencies such as the Washington Post, Time Magazine, Newsweek, the Miami Herald, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, Miami News, and CBS, among others, to publish CIA propaganda, manipulating the news by planting stories in domestic and foreign news outlets. During the hearings, Senator Church asked an agency representative, “Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?” The speaker eyed his lawyer then replied, “This I think gets into the details, Mr. Chairman, that I’d like to get into in executive session.” In other words, he didn’t want to admit the truth publicly. He gave the same response when asked if the CIA planted stories with the major wire services United Press International (UPI) and the Associated Press (AP). In his 1997 book, Virtual Government — in the chapter “’And Now a Word from Our Sponsor – The CIA’: The Birth of Operation Mockingbird, the Takeover of the Corporate Press & the Programming of Public Opinion” — Alex Constantine claims that during the 1950s “some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts.” I’m curious to know what the estimate would be today.
CIA Drug Smuggling: It’s no longer a secret that clandestine arms of US Intelligence have profited from running drugs for many years. I first became aware of the issue when a Vietnam veteran claimed he had helped load opium cultivated in Laos onto military transport planes. The opium was turned into heroin and shipped around the world, sometimes in the visceral cavities of dead soldiers. A Hollywood version of these events is portrayed in the film Air America, but the movie is based on historical truth. When the US military presence in Southeast Asia declined and the focus shifted to Central America, cocaine became the new revenue source. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb ran a well-documented three-part series in theSan Jose Mercury News called “Dark Alliance” alleging that traffickers with US intelligence ties had marketed the cocaine in Los Angeles and other cities where it was turned into the new and highly addictive form known as “crack,” inflicting a scourge that claimed the lives and freedom of thousands. One guy I met in Compton who had been arrested for crack possession described the drug this way: “It doesn’t really get you high,” he said. “You just want more.” Webb’s allegations were confirmed by an LAPD Narcotics Officer and whistleblower, Michael Ruppert, and the story received additional confirmation from CIA contract pilot Terry Reed, whose story is revealed in his 1994 book Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA. According to Reed, the sale of cocaine was used to finance the Contras in Central America when congressional funding was blocked by the Boland Amendment. He claimed the operation was run out of Mena, Arkansas when Bill Clinton was governor. Military cargo planes were flown to Central America with military hardware, he said, and then returned to Mena loaded with coke.
I could add to the list, and it would be a long one. The Iran-Contra scandal, Watergate, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), the Tuskegee syphilis experiment—there is no shortage of crimes that were planned and committed by two or more people and thus constituted conspiracy. Conspiracies happen, and before any crime is solved it spawns theories. There are people who look at these theories rationally using logic and discernment, and there are others who are illogical, engaging in fallacious, emotion-based thinking and jumping to unjustified conclusions based on little or no evidence. The term “conspiracy theorist,” however, has been manipulated to suggest only those in the latter category.
The John F. Kennedy assassination provides a good example of how the term “conspiracy” has been misapplied to disparage people who find fault with official versions of major events. After Kennedy was murdered, very few people questioned the Warren Commission’s verdict that Lee Oswald had shot the president unassisted, and anyone who challenged that belief was branded a “conspiracy nut” (or buff) unworthy of respect or consideration. Forty years later, a 2003 Gallup poll revealed that 75% of the US population believed there had been a conspiracy to kill JFK.
Apparently some people have a psychological need to protect themselves from unpleasant realities, so it’s easier for them to label others as conspiracy nuts than to assimilate hard but discomforting facts. In the case of the John Kennedy assassination, even a congressional committee, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, concluded in 1979 that there had been a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. They tried to soften that reality by calling it a “limited conspiracy” as if Oswald’s drunken cousin had helped him and not elements of US Intelligence, but the fact remains that the US government has officially admitted there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. “Conspiracy theorists” were finally vindicated, but I’ve never heard anyone apologize for disparaging their names and questioning their sanity.
“9/11,” of course, is the current topic that yields the most accusations of conspiracy nuttiness. Anyone who challenges the 9/11 Commission’s conclusions are branded “conspiracy theorists” (or nuts, wackos or kooks) as were their predecessors when JFK was killed.
History repeats itself.
One of the strange truths about the 9/11 affair is that members of the 9/11 Commission also called the event a conspiracy. That alone shows the term is being intentionally manipulated. In the Commission’s view, the conspirators were exclusively fanatical Muslims, but somehow that investigative body has been exempt from accusations of conspiracy theorizing even though they called the event a conspiracy. Apparently one must challenge the official version of events to qualify as a “conspiracy theorist.”
I asked Jim Marrs, the popular author and critic of various official versions of history, what he considered to be the origin of “conspiracy” as a derogatory term and how it has been manipulated: “The term ‘conspiracy theory’ was consciously submitted to assets of the CIA back in a document from the 1960s to be used to counter factual information that was continually being made public regarding the Kennedy assassination. From there, these assets, including media personalities, pundits, academics and government officials, expanded the term to become a pejorative for any statements not complying with the Establishment line,” Marrs said. “However, its repetitive overuse, plus the fact that the 9/11 attacks obviously involved a conspiracy, today has lessened the impact of the term.”
Many critics of the 9/11 Commission report make some valid points, and it’s not fair to simply dismiss them as conspiracy theorists when the very people they’re countering also claim there was a conspiracy. The question is simply: whose conspiracy was it?
Even officials tasked with investigating 9/11 knew there was plenty of deception involved. Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, John Farmer, said on page four of his book The Ground Truth, “At some level of government, at some point in time, there was an agreement not to tell the people the truth about what happened.” In their book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, the two co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, outlined reasons they believe the government established the Commission in a manner that ensured its failure. These reasons included delay in initiating the proceedings, too short a deadline for the scope of the work, insufficient funding, and lack of cooperation by politicians and key government agencies including the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, and NORAD. “So there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail,” the chairmen said.
How much clearer can they be?
Conspiracies exist. They have always existed, and not wanting them to be true does not invalidate their existence. I think it’s time we reject the intentional misappropriation of the term “conspiracy” by forces attempting to manipulate public opinion and restore the term to its original and proper meaning. As long as we observe logic and reason, there is no intellectual dishonor in contemplating and discussing conspiracies, and doing so is imperative if we wish to retain what’s left of our liberties.
A version of this article was originally published at OpEdNews.com. [Correction, Oct. 28, 2014: An earlier version of this article mistakenly stated that a chapter title of Alex Constantine’s 1997 book Virtual Government is “Mockingbird: The Subversion of The Free Press by the CIA”. The chapter is titled “‘And Now a Word from Our Sponsor – The CIA’: The Birth of Operation Mockingbird, the Takeover of the Corporate Press & the Programming of Public Opinion.” The text has been revised to correct the error.]
Shawn Hamilton is a writing teacher and has taught in the United States and Taiwan. He authored a recently published book with the satirical title, Be All You Can Be (the old US Army recruiting slogan) about an Air Force major who, in the latter part of his life, rejected use of our military as an instrument of US imperialism. He has worked as a capitol reporter in Sacramento for KPFA Radio (Pacifica) and written for various print publications. He received a Project Censored award in 2011 and writes poetry for fun.
In light of the ninth BRICS summit which will be held in Xiamen, China on September 4 and 5, Global Research brings to your attention some articles on the framework and roadmap of the BRICS partnership.
Will the US empire break the on-going strategic relations between the concerned countries? Or will the BRICS partnership weaken US hegemony and lead the world into a peaceful economic development?
The Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa summit in Xiamen from September 3-5 is already inscribed with high tension thanks to Sino-Indian border conflicts. But regardless of a welcome new peace deal, centrifugal forces within the fast-whirling world economy threaten to divide the BRICS.
It is important that our group’s activities are based on the principles of equality, respect for one another’s opinions and consensus. Within BRICS, nothing is ever forced on anyone. When the approaches of its members do not coincide, we work patiently and carefully to coordinate them. This open and trust-based atmosphere is conducive to the successful implementation of our tasks.
Over the past decade, the BRICS bloc has transformed itself from a concept to an entity by strengthening dialogue, deepening cooperation and establishing the New Development Bank (NDB) and Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA).
Strange things happen in the world. Imagine a grouping of countries spread across the globe, which gets formed only for the simple reason that an analyst for an investment bank decides that these countries have some things in common, including future potential for growth, and then creates an acronym of their names! Bizarre but true.
What is significant, however, from a geopolitical standpoint is that China and Russia are developing a ruble-yuan swap, negotiated between the Russian Central Bank, and the People’s Bank of China.
The situation of the other three BRICS member states (Brazil, India, South Africa) with regard to the implementation of (real, rand rupiah) currency swaps is markedly different. These three highly indebted countries are in the straightjacket of IMF-World Bank conditionalities. They do not decide on fundamental issues of monetary policy and macro-economic reform without the green light from the Washington based international financial institutions.
Establishment and the role of BRICS is of historic importance for the present and for the future of the world economic relations and development. BRICS represent a turning point from the world system of domination to the world sovereign equality and equal chances for all. From the system of deepening economic and social gaps to the system of equitable distribution of wealth and human well-being centered strategies.
BRICS today runs the risk of seeing an avalanche of membership request forms raining on its desk. Country after country is toying with the idea of joining BRICS.
* * *
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.
Republican and undemocratic Democrats flagrantly breach international, constitutional and US statute laws.
They demand subservience from all other nations. They treat US citizens contemptuously. All independent countries are targeted for regime change. Washington wants them transformed into vassal states, naked aggression its favored strategy.
America is permanently at war on humanity at home and abroad. Deplorable hostility toward Russia risks direct confrontation, the increasing possibility of unthinkable nuclear war, a terrifying doomsday scenario if launched.
The latest chapter in dismal bilateral relations was the ordered closure of its San Francisco consulate, its oldest in America, operating since the 19th century. Three others are in New York, Seattle and Houston.
Two annex buildings in Washington and New York were also ordered closed – all three by September 2, staff given around 36 hours to vacate the premises. No further diplomatic activities from these facilities are allowed.
Sergey Lavrov said Moscow will “closely study” the action. An appropriate response will follow.
The affected consulate issued a statement, saying in 2016 alone, it “issued more than 16 thousand tourist visas for American citizens. Closure…will create certain difficulties in the preparation of documents for this category of Americans.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova denounced Washington’s “raider seizure” of its diplomatic properties saying:
“On August 31, the US authorities declared unprecedented measures on limiting the activity of Russian diplomatic and consular missions in the US.”
“This step is a gross violation of international law, including the United States’ commitments on the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic and Consular Relations.”
“This is an invasion of the consulate and apartments of diplomatic staff, and they were kicked out so that they would not obstruct FBI agents.”
They and other US security service operatives intend searching the consulate offices, along with residences of its staff, Zakharova explained – given 12 hours to leave their homes.
Trump’s order exceeded Obama’s year end 2016 expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and confiscation of its diplomatic properties in New York and Maryland.
“It is obvious that the US is not interested in the development of relations between people,” Zakharova stressed, adding:
“Russia reserves the opportunity for retaliatory measures. This is not our choice. It has been imposed on us.”
US hostility toward Russia continues hitting new lows. Trump is captive to dark forces controlling him.
Investigative journalist Mike Cernovich said Trump is under “house arrest” in the White House, adding:
“Rex Tillerson, who planned on staying until December, now wants out, as everyone knows. Nikki Haley will take his position, with Dina Powell subbing in at the UN.”
Cernovich calls Powell “an all-star leaker…repeatedly undermining Trump.” He entered office wanting improved relations with Russia.
They’re worse than ever. What’ll be the next shoe to drop in bilateral relations? How much worse can things get?
Trump appears powerless to stop things going from dismal to who knows what. America’s deep state wants adversarial relations with Moscow. What’s coming is anyone’s guess.
“Harrowing footage published by the White Helmets volunteer rescue group showed a street littered with corpses and body parts, after civilians fleeing eastern Aleppo were reportedly hit by (regime) artillery fire. Shoes, clothing, suitcases and bags could be seen among puddles of blood and flesh.” ~ Lizzie Dearden for the Independent
On November 30th 2016, the clashes for the final liberation of East Aleppo, from a five year Nusra Front-dominated occupation and brutal siege of Syrian civilians, raged across the battle-scarred landscape of the eastern districts of Aleppo. Throughout this US coalition-armed and funded extremist campaign to steal Aleppo’s resources & industry and to gradually occupy the entire second capital city of Syria, the media propaganda campaigns had run in lock-step and parallel intensity.
Omran Daqneesh now a happy, well-adjusted child still living in East Aleppo with his family. July 2017.(Photo: Vanessa Beeley)
First there was Omran Daqneesh, the dusty, bloodied and bewildered little boy, whose image went viral within hours and was described by the majority of NATO aligned media & NGOs (including the UN) as the child “whose bloodied and dusty image gave a face to the suffering of Aleppo’s civilians in last year’s siege”. Omran’s story has more recently been exposed as a cynical publicity campaign for a “Bomb Free Zone”, set up by the UK FO constructed White Helmets and their child-beheading, Nour al Din Zinki, associates.
During the ground battles to liberate East Aleppo, the White Helmets produced many of the varied and imaginative narratives to demonize the Syrian Arab Army as it fought to cleanse civilian areas of the extremist brigades that had universally converted schools and hospitals into prisons, Sharia courts, torture chambers, military centres and bomb making factories.
On the 30th November 2016, in Jibb al Qubeh, East Aleppo – the White Helmets appeared in one of their most theatrically “poignant” and iconic story lines, complete with “heartrending” testimony from “survivors”. This production was brought to the western corporate media by none other than French Foreign Office funded Aleppo Media Centre. This version was shared by Middle East Eye. Watch:
The Corporate Media Scrum
The “copy paste” corporate media sprang into action. Despite the dearth of journalists on the ground in Aleppo, within hours, the story had gone viral based entirely upon the testimony and video footage from an Al Qaeda affiliate, the White Helmets. Syrian media, civilian testimony and reports from officials on the ground in East Aleppo contradicted this White Helmet narrative but to no avail. The NATO-aligned media simply buried such bones of contention under the rubble of their crumbling propaganda edifice in their rush to halt the Syrian Arab Army advance by eliciting outrage from the international community over another fabricated “massacre by the evil regime forces“.
High Commissioner for Human Rights at the UN, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, issued the following plea to the international community:
“… heed the cries” of the women, men and children being terrorized and slaughtered in Aleppo and to take urgent steps to ensure that the tens of thousands of people who have fled, surrendered or been captured are treated in line with international law.
“The crushing of Aleppo, the immeasurably terrifying toll on its people, the bloodshed, the wanton slaughter of men, women and children, the destruction – and we are nowhere near the end of this cruel conflict,”
UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon talked once again about how history would judge the international community if they did not “act”:
“History will not easily absolve us, but this failure compels us to do even more to offer the people of Aleppo our solidarity at this moment,”
[It must be noted that during my time in Jebrin Registration centre in December 2016, an estimated 100,000 liberated civilians were pouring in from Eastern Aleppo districts and were receiving humanitarian aid and assistance from the Syrian Arab Army, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, various Syrian civil society organisations and volunteers. The Russian military were distributing food and water and Russian medical teams had set up treatment tents that were receiving over 150 civilians per day, suffering from the effects of starvation, appalling, festering injuries & chronic illnesses that had been left untreated by the “moderate rebels” during the 5 year Nusra Front-led occupation. The UN organisation was nowhere to be seen during this crucial time of release and recovery for these traumatized people. ]
Channel 4 grabs the ball and runs with it..
Who else should step in to score a home try for the Syrian “opposition” but Channel 4.
Jon Snow (winner of 21st Century Wire’s #FakeNews poll) stepped up to the plate and performed perhaps one of the landmark Goebbelesque propaganda interviews of the Syrian conflict, with Fares Shehabi. Shehabi is an independent Aleppo MP and head of the Aleppo Chamber of Commerce. Unlike many of his colleagues, Shehabi remained in Aleppo throughout the five-year East Aleppo occupation, by US coalition armed & funded extremist brigades.
Snows pugnacious questioning of Shehabi revealed absolutely no objectivity nor did it leave room for doubt. In Snow’s mind “the Syrian army did it” and no amount of logical reasoning, from Shehabi in Aleppo, was going to derail his propaganda train. Unfortunately for Snow, at some point that train was destined to hit the brick wall of truth from the mouths of the very civilians that Snow claimed to be advocating for.
Meme produced by page supporting NATO state intervention in Syria.
In his eagerness to discredit the Syrian government and the Syrian Arab Army, Snow got a bit confused over his facts. Initially endorsing the “barrel bomb” narrative, he then deftly switched to “Syrian artillery” fire. Nowhere in his repertoire did he include the analysis that the neighborhood of Jib Al Qubbeh would be a mountain of rubble, had it been double whammied by the 7-9-richter-scale-barrel-bombsand Syrian artillery. Why should a little reality get in the way of producing news-desk-fantasy after all, especially when UK foreign policy interests are at stake.
Fares Shehabi told me after the interview that Channel 4 had edited many of his responses to better comply with their narrative. To watch Jon Snow’s stellar performance in its entirety (plus edits), it is linked here.
So the official, NATO-aligned narrative was that the Syrian Arab Army, its allies, the Russian & Syrian airforces had all combined to obliterate Syrian civilians fleeing East Aleppo for the humanitarian corridors set up by the Syrian government & their Russian allies to enable these civilians to escape the fighting and reach the sanctity of the Syrian government protected West Aleppo. Not a single question was raised among the corporate media elite about the blatantly irrational logic behind this distorted chronicling of events.
The Inevitable Requests for a No Fly Zone
Less than a week after this tragedy was aired by western media, Abdulrahman Al Mawwas a White Helmet representative was given a platform to speak in front of the foreign affairs committee of the European Parliament in Ireland. Images taken from the White Helmet/AMC Jibb Al Qubeh production were used to reinforce demands for the creation of humanitarian corridors and planes to drop aid to civilians affected by war and of course, last but not least, a No Fly Zone. Mawwas stuck to the familiar script but the disturbing images from Jibb al Qubeh gave new impetus to his recital.
The Truth of Jibb Al Qubeh as Revealed by its Residents
In July/August 2017 I returned to the districts of East Aleppo that I had seen during liberation in December 2016 and again in April/May 2017. In July it was heartening to see that so many civilians had returned to their homes and were trying to recreate the life they had before the violent disruption of their peaceful existence, by US coalition-manufactured, armed, extremist groups.
I went with Aleppo journalist, Khaled Iskef, to the Jib Al Qubbeh neighborhood and I spoke with civilians. We sat outside their houses and drank coffee whilst around them, life returned to a semblance of “normal”. The recall of these civilians, many of whom witnessed events on that day in November 2016, differed wildly from the mass-produced narrative of NATO-aligned media outlets.
Discussing the November 2016 events in Jibb al Qubeh with residents and Khaled Iskef. July 2017. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)
During my time in this district I spoke with Salaheddin Azazi and Ammar Al Bakr (in above photo) and a number of other named witnesses who testified to the truth of the killing of civilians who were fleeing East Aleppo to the safety of West Aleppo as the Syrian Arab Army was advancing on the ground and cleansing East Aleppo of Nusra Front and associated militant factions.
The street in Jibb Al Qubbeh where the White Helmets filmed their footage of massacred civilians. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)
Initially we toured (on foot) around the actual street that was the scene of the White Helmet/AMC video. Here we found the usual configuration of Nusra Front headquartes, Aleppo Council and White Helmet centres all within easy walking distance from each other. This same layout was found in every district of East Aleppo where these three entities were operating, also combining with the UK Foreign Office funded, Free Syrian Policein many of the same districts.
The above video, taken in the area, walks you through the Aleppo Council building and demonstrates the proximity of Nusra Front and the White Helmet centre at the end of the street. Graffiti on the garage door opposite the Aleppo Council is Kataeb Abu Amara, a Turkish funded militant brigade closely associated with Nusra Front that was also operating in this district of East Aleppo.
Khateab Abu Amara Graffiti on garage door opposite Aleppo Council, Jibb Al Qubeh, East Aleppo. July 2017. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)
In this district the Nusra Front headquarters were just behind the Aleppo Council on the main through-road that runs parallel to Bryyah Al Maslakh street. This was another school that had been occupied by the terrorist group and converted into a military centre and Sharia Court, the Ruba school in Jibb Al Qubeh.
Nusra Front headquarters in Jib Al Qubbeh, another converted school. This building was less than 200m from the Aleppo Council and the White Helmet centre in this area. July 2017. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)
Nusra Front aka Al Qaeda were the dominant force in Jib Al Qubbeh according to residents. A number of other, affiliated, extremist brigades were also operating, including Ahrar Souria (a version of the FSA strongly linked to Nusra Front and who shared their ideology), Ahrar Al Shaman extremist group responsible for many of the sectarian massacres in Sryia yet still not designated a terrorist group by the US coalition and lastly the aforementioned Abu Amarabrigade.
The leader of Ahrar Souria in Jib Al Qubeh was an individual by the name of Mahmoud Afash who came from Anadan. He was known as the terrorist tank “taxi driver”. He provided tanks for the terrorist front lines and battles. Talking to civilians a picture was formed of the dense network of terrorist entities that worked alongside one another including the White Helmets:
“The White Helmets worked ten hour shifts. Ten hours as White Helmets and then ten hours as Nusra Front fighters”Salaheddin Azazi told us.
The manager of the Jib Al Qubeh (JAQ) Aleppo council was Hassan Nairobani Hassoun, a pediatrician from the area who was working in Zahzour hospital during the Nusra Front-led five year occupation. Hassoun worked with Nusra Front, some residents told us of “large sums of money that he had tucked away in Turkish banks”. Azazi told us that Hassoun was tasked by Nusra Front to recquisition houses that had a basement for Nusra Front military use, during the almost 5 year occupation. Basements gave some protection from the aerial bombing by Syrian and Russian airforces. When Azazi heard of this project he deliberately broke his own sewage pipes and flooded his basement so Hassoun would reject it as a Nusra Front venue.
Syria Charity front page on its website, advertising Syrian children for “sponsorship”
We were also told that Aleppo Council was equipped and maintained by the Syria Charity, a French government linked organisation that also “took care of the training of the White Helmets in Jib Al Qubeh”. Pierre Le Corf, an independent, French humanitarian worker based in Aleppo said this about Syria Charity in his open letter to former President of France, Francois Hollande:
“Our government also finances associations such as ‘Syria Charity’ that has as an emblem the three star flag, and that was originally called the “League for a Free Syria.” This association, even if providing humanitarian aid, has crossed the thin red line by taking part in an opinion war to justify the overthrowing of the government by hiding the reality on the field and their proximity with belligerent groups and by providing constant medical relief to terrorist forces (their presence is carefully erased from all available videos).
Numerous French and international associations or humanitarian organisations intervening in « rebel » zones have done more harm than good through the weaponization of the suffering of the local populations and the public opinion in the name of an oriented cause, and through wrongfully directed donations. They are also responsible for taking civilians as hostages of this war, and enabling the conflict to continue by legitimizing it in a dishonest manner, enabling the fightings to continue and death to stay a daily preoccupation.”
How Events Unfolded on 30th November 2016
The street in Jib Al Qubbeh that was the scene of the White Helmet footage in November 2016. July 2017 (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)
Below is the image taken from the White Helmet/AMC footage that was widely shared by corporate media, in this case, the Daily Mail who ran the unambiguous headline:
Bodies lie scattered in the streets of Aleppo after Syrian forces bombard rebel-held region, slaughtering at least 45 people
All residents we spoke to including Azazi and Al Bakr were adamant that two terrorist home-made rockets were fired from the Eye Hospital to the east of the district of Sha’ar. At that time the Eye Hospital and the Childrens Hospital combined compound was still occupied by Nusra Front and the Jabhat Al Shamiya brigade. This hospital complex was only liberated by the Syrian Arab Army on the 4th December, so four days after the tragedy occurred in Jibb Al Qubeh.
Diagram showing (estimated) placement of Syrian Arab Army and Nusra Front in relation to Jib Al Qubeh on 30/11/2016
On the 30th November, the closest Syrian Arab Army artillery position was in the Castle in the Old Citadel. They did also have artillery further away, to the north east of Jib Al Qubbeh in Hanano. The missiles had landed on the west side of the street targeting the Aleppo Council and adjacent building, the holes in the masonry were still visible. The Citadel was to the south west of the street and well over 1km away, therefore logic dictates that the missiles must have been fired from due east, which is where the terrorist occupied Eye Hospital is located.
First missile strike hit the wall of the Aleppo Council on the western side of the road. July 2017 (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)
Second missile/rocket strike hit further along the street towards the White Helmet centre but still on western side. July 2017 (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)
Both Azazi and Al Bakr told me:
“We have lived through four years of occupation and we are very experienced when it comes to determining from how far away the mortars or rockets have been fired. From the sound of launch to the number of seconds before impact we can tell you almost exactly the distance to the rocket launcher and direction. These rockets were fired from the Eye Hospital to the east.”
So, through a pretty simple deduction and elimination process, the entire White Helmet/AMC, corporate media narrative has already started to fall apart at the seams. Certainly the Syrian air strike or seismic scale barrel bomb narrative does not fit as the street is largely untouched by aerial bombing, most of the structural damage is clearly from artillery mortar fire and there are additional signs of close quarter gun fights with bullet holes in the walls on both sides of the street.
Remaining buildings in the street, even those inbetween the two mortar strikes are structurally intact. July 2017 (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)
Everyone interviewed told us, the attack happened at around 7am. Over 2000 civilians had been trying to escape the terrorist reprisals as the Syrian Arab Army advanced and these civilians were heading for the crossing points or SAA humanitarian collection points that would eventually give them safe access to West Aleppo. Azazi told me:
“They came from all areas, Jaloum, Salhiyeh, Midan, Bab al Nairab, Soukhari. They took this road to Farouj Al Sharq (one of the SAA collection points) instead of the main road, past the Nusra Front headquarters, to avoid being attacked by the terrorists…Nusra Front and Ahrar al Sham”.
Azazi went on to describe the confusion that preceded the terrorist targeting of these civilians. I have paraphrased his description which I also videoed:
On that day, these 2000 civilians had been told that the safe point of Farouj AlSharq had been opened, by the SAA, to the north-east of Jibb Al Qubeh. They had collected their belongings and left their homes to escape the terrorists who were killing civilians rather than see them leave for the Syrian government held areas. (See my collection of testimonies from East Aleppo during liberation, December 2016 – here)
As these civilians approached the end of the street, they saw that the way forward was blocked by Nusra Front terrorists. The terrorists told them to go back to Boustan Al Qasr, an area to the south-west of Jibb al Qubeh which was on the frontline between Nusra Front and the Syrian Arab Army.
“The leader of Nusra Front in this area stopped them, he shot at them to turn them back. His nickname was Khattab Al Shishani his real name was Khaled Ktay. He is Syrian and from this area, we knew him” said Azazi
As they turned and fled back towards Boustan Al Qasr, they realised that this road was now also closed to them by the terrorist forces.
The crowds of civilians were effectively kettled into the narrow street at 7am when the rockets targeted them. Corporate media reports claimed 45 dead, residents told us 15 were killed in the attack. Those who managed to escape the rocket fire, were then pushed out of the street into the surrounding areas.
“Bodies were left in the street for ten hours, until 3 or 4pm” said Al Bakr.
“We watched the White Helmets steal the belongings of the victims” said Azazi and this was repeated by a man who had come to join the discussion and who had a shop in the street…
Screenshot from video in Jibb Al Qubeh while residents explained events on 30/11/2016. July 2017. (Video: Vanessa Beeley)
“The White Helmets and Nusra Front would not allow relatives or people from the area into the street to help the injured or even to collect the bodies” added Azazi
“At around 4pm the White Helmets finally brought the orange body bags and started filming” said Al Bakr and Azazi
All three men confirmed that relatives were still prevented entry into the street to collect the bodies, until after the filming session. It is also very important to note that everyone we spoke to in East Aleppo, told us that filming or photography was only permissable if Nusra Front gave the green light. Nusra Front controlled all video footage and still photos in areas they governed, which was pretty much all of East Aleppo prior to liberation. This means that any footage being produced by the White Helmets, AMC, SMART, Channel 4 prize winning camerawomanWaad Al Khateab etc was enabled, almost exclusively by the express permission of Al Qaeda in East Aleppo. It also means that the footage and imagery that western corporate media based their narrative upon came with the blessings of Al Qaeda.
Above is a screenshot from the WhiteHelmet/AMC video. There is one White Helmet in full uniform on the left “checking” the body. The guy in the centre is unarmed but certainly looks more like a fighter than a first responder and the guy on the right is still wearing what could be identified as a militant headdress while sporting a White Helmet jacket. At this point, according to witness testimony, these bodies had already been picked clean of their valuables and belongings before these faux humanitarians starred in another of their cameo roles as rescue workers.
Walking back from the scene of the civilian massacre carried out by Nusra Front and “mopped up” by the NATO & Gulf state funded White Helmets. July 2017 with Khaled Iskef. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)
Conclusions
We walked back past the remnants of war and the ghosts of the lives lost on that day in November 2016, the July heat swirled around us and the sun cast long shadows on the street beneath our feet. I felt profoundly sad that these civilians, bewildered and terrified, had been trapped in this corridor of death on a bitterly cold November day in 2016 by the terrorists and their white-helmeted cohorts, before being mown down by the Nusra Front missiles. I tried to imagine the panic, the fear and then the severe trauma for relatives who had to watch their children, their family members, dead or dying for over ten hours, unable to reach them or to prevent their meagre belongings being stolen from them.
Meanwhile the western corporate media had not pondered on any aspect of this incident before launching their “Syria & Russia did it” campaign. A campaign based upon the evidence of the White Helmets who hours before had left the bodies unattended in the street while they sifted through their remains and robbed the dead and dying of the few items of value these families had managed to gather together as they fled to what they hoped would be refuge from a life of oppression under Nusra Front rule.
Finally those desecrated bodies became propaganda props in another White Helmet movie, destined to evoke sympathy among the misinformed in the west and to feed the “regime change” narratives of the NATO-aligned media and NGOs who rely almost exclusively upon Al Qaeda affiliated testimony to produce their bullish pro-“moderate”, no-fly-zone lobby reports.
I leave you with another “immortal” quote from the Jon Snow interview…. Syrians are going home Jon Snow, ‘you know nothing.’
Global Research announces the forthcoming release of the print edition of Mark Taliano’s Book, “Voices from Syria”which includes two additional chapters.
Taliano talks and listens to the people of Syria. He reveals the courage and resilience of a Nation and its people in their day to day lives, after more than six years of US-NATO sponsored terrorism and three years of US “peacemaking” airstrikes.
Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes the mainstream media narratives on Syria.
In addition to the two major events that AE911Truth is organizing, Richard Gage, AIA, will be appearing in two other events around the September 11th anniversary. Plus, our latest documentary, Stand for the Truth, featuring former NIST employee Peter Michael Ketcham, will be showing at the 9/11 Truth Film Festival in Oakland, CA. Here’s the full schedule:
Wednesday, September 6, 2017, at 8:00 PM Eastern: Dr. Leroy Hulsey, speaking from the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Schaibel Auditorium, will present the findings and conclusions detailed in his team’s September 2017 Progress Report, which will be issued the same day. The University of Alaska Fairbanks’ webstream site is momentarily down, but more info can be found in UAF’s event post.
Friday, September 8, 2017, at 6:30 PM Eastern: Richard Gage will be speaking and screening our newest documentary, Stand for the Truth, at the event “From 9/11 Truth to 9/11 Justice” at New York City’s Foley Square.
Monday, September 11, 2017 at 1:00 PM Eastern: Bob McIlvaine, Peter Ketcham, and Richard Gage will announce the “Bobby McIlvaine World Trade Center Investigation Act” at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Later that day and the following day, we will hand-deliver the Bobby McIlvaine package to all 535 members of Congress. Visit the Press Club’s website for more info.
Monday, September 11, 2017 at 7:00 PM Eastern: Richard Gage and Peter Michael Ketcham will be participating in the “9/11 Truth Seekers Panel” at the Holiday Inn Rossyln Key Bridge near Washington, D.C
Those of you near Washington, D.C., and those traveling greater distances to commemorate 9/11 are invited to attend our news conference and join us on Capitol Hill.
To RSVP for the news conference or volunteer for our Capitol Hill outreach (or both), please email us at [email protected].
We need to assemble a group of at least 15 volunteers to hand-deliver the Bobby McIlvaine package to all 535 members of Congress on September 11th and 12th. If you contact us soon enough, we will even assist you in scheduling a meeting with your congressperson!
In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”. Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.
The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.
According to Chossudovsky, the “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.
Following a swift campaign and assault on the Tal Afar district, the Iraqi forces within a matter of days cleared the last pockets of Daesh militants from Ayadiyah. With that, the Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi declared the province of Nineveh to be fully liberated and under Iraqi control for the first time since 2014, when the terrorists rampaged through the north of Iraq, subjecting millions of people to their oppressive rule.
The Tal Afar ground offensive began on the 20th August, and what followed was a total Daesh collapse, which allowed the Iraqi forces to sweep into the centre of Tal Afar within six days and liberate the whole town within eight days, along with dozens of villages and mountain ranges on the outskirts of the town.
The months long siege on the district along, with the complete liberation of Mosul a month before, completely demoralised the Daesh militants that remained in Tal Afar. When the Iraqi forces pushed into the town, many Daesh militants fled to nearby villages and sub-districts, principally the Ayadiyah sub-district.
After taking full control of the town, the Iraqi troops advanced onto Ayadiyah where they initially encountered fierce resistance before overpowering the enemy, taking control of the whole area along with 21 villages and the Sasan mountain range after 72 hours of fighting.
The liberation of Tal Afar also revealed more evidence of the horrors that the residents of the town had to endure under the extremist militants. More mass graves were discovered, filled with men and women who had dared to stand up to the group, as well as those who happened to adhere to a different faith or strand of Islam. Historical sites that gave Tal Afar its unique and distinct character were destroyed and desecrated. The iconic Tal Afar Citadel was converted into a prison for women and girls who were to be forcibly married to ISIS militants, as well as a torture chamber for dissidents.
The loss of Tal Afar is a further defeat for Daesh in Iraq and the end of their presence in the country’s northern Nineveh Province, which was once the heartland of the group’s so-called caliphate in 2014. After three years of oppression and brutality, the group’s presence has been wiped out in northern Iraq signalling the beginning of new life for millions of Iraqis who had suffered under the group.
Even across the region, Daesh is suffering further losses. In Syria, principally the group’s de facto capital of Raqqa, the Syrian Democratic forces (SDF) have captured more than half of the city. On the Lebanon-Syria border in Qalamoun, Daesh’s tenuous presence has been eradicated, with the militants suffering a humiliating loss, which culminated in their total surrender. Over 300 militants, subdued and humbled, were transferred to their shrinking territories in Deir ez-Zour, amid the onslaught inflicted against them.
Daesh militants on a bus from eastern Lebanon to eastern Syria after their surrender (Source: Al Shahid)
With the liberation of Tal Afar, Iraqi forces are gearing up to advance on the last remaining towns on the Iraq-Syria border as well as around Kirkuk, where months of isolation and besiegement has left them beleaguered and underequipped. As Daesh loses more territory and eventually begins to disappear into insignificance, its appeal will fade away along with their memory, as the region begins to rebuild and revive itself.
On August 30, the Taliban claimed that it downed a US helicopter in the Afghan province of Logar and that 20 US soldiers were killed in the attack.
A spokesman for the US military in Afghanistan, Bob Purtiman, denied the Taliban’s claims and said that the helicopter had some technical problem and it made a precautionary landing. According to Purtiman, the aircraft has been successfully recovered.
On August 22, President Donald Trump announced a plan to deploy 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan and to win somehow, in the US’ longest war. Currently, there are about 9,800 US troops and 25,197 contractors on the ground in the war-torn country.
The Taliban responded to Trump’s announcement with increased attack against NATO and pro-US government forces and promised to turn Afghanistan “into a graveyard for the American Empire”.
On August 25, Taliban militants entered Kas Uruzgan district in central Afghanistan after they had overrun the Afghani Army defense. During the month, the Taliban captured over 10 district centers. Government forces, even with the assistance of the US military, were not able to reverse the militants’ gains.
Meanwhile, aircraft with removed identification marks started transferring groups of ISIS fighters as well as some separate ISIS emissaries from southern to northern Afghanistan. According to reports, these aircrafts operate under cover of the US-led coalition. Reports also appear that the coalition covers weapon supplies to ISIS in and via Afghanistan. The goal, is to boost a point of instability at the southern flank of Russia.
The US invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Since then, the White House has been struggling in its attempt to put in power a US-allied government. However, the security situation remains very complicated for the US and its allies.
The Taliban keeps a notable power in Afghanistan and even made some new gains in recent years. Today the Taliban has a vertical of local administrative and judicial bodies that cover the territory of Afghanistan no less effectively than the administrative structures of the official Kabul.
To this day, the US does not have any useful strategies which would restore peace and national accord in the country. Many experts claim that the White House does not know how to cope with Afghanistan or what to do inside the country.
Furthermore, the situation in Afghanistan is just a part of the US military and political activity in the conflict zones around the world. The growing tensions with Northern Korea and Iran, the ongoing conflicts in Syria and Iraq and instability in South America draw much more US attention than the situation in Afghanistan.
Washington has dismal bilateral relations with Russia, China and other sovereign independent nations.
Things got worse with the ordered closure of Russia’s San Francisco consulate along with annex buildings in Washington in New York.
For the first time, the US Pacific Command developed a schedule for South China Sea naval patrols, claiming its freedom of navigation operations right (FONOPS).
Beijing considers the intrusion of US warships in or near its waters provocative. Weeks earlier, its Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said
“(u)nder the pretext of ‘freedom of navigation,’ the US (sends) military vessels into China’s territorial waters off the Xisha Islands without (its) approval.”
Washington “violated Chinese law and relevant international law, infringed upon China’s sovereignty, and disrupted the peace, security and order of the relevant waters.”
Beijing “is dissatisfied with, and opposed to, the relevant behavior of the US side…(It’s) deliberately stirring up troubles in the South China Sea, as well as running in the opposite direction from countries in the region who aspire for stability, cooperation and development.”
China considers the invasion of US warships in its territorial waters “trespass(ing).”
How would Washington react if Russian or Chinese warships provocatively entered the Gulf of Mexico, or positioned themselves off America’s east or west coast? US hawks would likely consider the intrusion an act of war.
Yet US warships provoke China near its Xisha and Nansha Islands repeatedly, antagonizing Russia as well by their Black Sea intrusions.
The Pentagon’s last South China Sea provocation occurred on August 10 – the USS (Admiral) John McCain accompanied by two P-8 Poseidon maritime reconnaissance planes. Air support may accompany future intrusions.
Pacific Command officials confirmed their intention to conduct FONOPS two or three times monthly – to confront China’s sovereignty over its South China Sea islands and surrounding waters.
Beijing is certain to respond appropriately to repeated US provocations – as would America under similar circumstances.
Hawkish generals in charge of Trump’s geopolitical agenda worsened relations with Russia and China – increasing the chance for confrontation with both countries.
A very senior Israeli intelligence delegation, a week ago, visited Washington. Then, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu broke into President Putin’s summer holiday to meet him in Sochi, where, according to a senior Israeli government official (as cited in the Jerusalem Post), Netanyahu threatened to bomb the Presidential Palace in Damascus, and to disrupt and nullify the Astana cease-fire process, should Iran continue to “extend its reach in Syria.”
“according to eyewitnesses of the open part of the talks, the Israeli prime minister was too emotional and at times even close to panic. He described a picture of the apocalypse to the Russian president that the world may see, if no efforts are taken to contain Iran, which, as Netanyahu believes, is determined to destroy Israel.”
So, what is going on here? Whether or not Pravda’s quote is fully accurate (though the description was confirmed by senior Israeli commentators), what is absolutely clear (from Israeli sources) is that both in Washington and at Sochi, the Israeli officials were heard out, but got nothing. Israel stands alone. Indeed, it is reported that Netanyahu was seeking “guarantees” about the future Iranian role in Syria, rather than “asking for the moon” of an Iranian exit. But how could Washington or Moscow realistically give Israel such guarantees?
Belatedly, Israel has understood that it backed the wrong side in Syria – and it has lost. It is not really in a position to demand anything. It will not get an American enforced buffer zone beyond the Golan armistice line, nor will the Iraqi-Syrian border be closed, or somehow “supervised” on Israel’s behalf.
Of course, the Syrian aspect is important, but to focus only on that, would be to “miss the forest for the trees.” The 2006 war by Israel to destroy Hizbullah (egged on by the U.S., Saudi Arabia – and even a few Lebanese) was a failure. Symbolically, for the first time in the Middle East, a technologically sophisticated, and lavishly armed, Western nation-state simply failed. What made the failure all the more striking (and painful) was that a Western state was not just bested militarily, it had lost also the electronic and human intelligence war, too — both spheres in which the West thought their primacy unassailable.
The Fallout from Failure
Israel’s unexpected failure was deeply feared in the West, and in the Gulf too. A small, armed (revolutionary) movement had stood up to Israel – against overwhelming odds – and prevailed: it had stood its ground. This precedent was widely perceived to be a potential regional “game changer.” The feudal Gulf autocracies sensed in Hizbullah’s achievement the latent danger to their own rule from such armed resistance.
The reaction was immediate. Hizbullah was quarantined — as best the full sanctioning powers of America could manage. And the war in Syria started to be mooted as the “corrective strategy” to the 2006 failure (as early as 2007) — though it was only with the events following 2011 that the “corrective strategy” came to implemented, à outrance.
Against Hizbullah, Israel had thrown its full military force (though Israelis always say, now, that they could have done more). And against Syria, the U.S., Europe, the Gulf States (and Israel in the background) have thrown the kitchen sink: jihadists, al-Qaeda, ISIS (yes), weapons, bribes, sanctions and the most overwhelming information war yet witnessed. Yet Syria – with indisputable help from its allies – seems about to prevail: it has stood its ground, against almost unbelievable odds.
Just to be clear: if 2006 marked a key point of inflection, Syria’s “standing its ground” represents a historic turning of much greater magnitude. It should be understood that Saudi Arabia’s (and Britain’s and America’s) tool of fired-up, radical Sunnism has been routed. And with it, the Gulf States, but particularly Saudi Arabia are damaged. The latter has relied on the force of Wahabbism since the first foundation of the kingdom: but Wahabbism in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq has been roundly defeated and discredited (even for most Sunni Muslims). It may well be defeated in Yemen too. This defeat will change the face of Sunni Islam.
Already, we see the Gulf Cooperation Council, which originally was founded in 1981 by six Gulf tribal leaders for the sole purpose of preserving their hereditary tribal rule in the Peninsula, now warring with each other, in what is likely to be a protracted and bitter internal fight. The “Arab system,” the prolongation of the old Ottoman structures by the complaisant post-World War I victors, Britain and France, seems to be out of its 2013 “remission” (bolstered by the coup in Egypt), and to have resumed its long-term decline.
The Losing Side
Netayahu’s “near panic” (if that is indeed what occurred) may well be a reflection of this seismic shift taking place in the region. Israel has long backed the losing side – and now finds itself “alone” and fearing for its near proxies (the Jordanians and the Kurds). The “new” corrective strategy from Tel Aviv, it appears, is to focus on winning Iraq away from Iran, and embedding it into the Israel-U.S.-Saudi alliance.
If so, Israel and Saudi Arabia are probably too late into the game, and are likely underestimating the visceral hatred engendered among so many Iraqis of all segments of society for the murderous actions of ISIS. Not many believe the improbable (Western) narrative that ISIS suddenly emerged armed, and fully financed, as a result of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s alleged “sectarianism”: No, as rule-of-thumb, behind each such well-breached movement – stands a state.
Daniel Levy has written a compelling piece to argue that Israelis generally would not subscribe to what I have written above, but rather:
“Netanyahu’s lengthy term in office, multiple electoral successes, and ability to hold together a governing coalition … [is based on] him having a message that resonates with a broader public. It is a sales pitch that Netanyahu … [has] ‘brought the state of Israel to the best situation in its history, a rising global force … the state of Israel is diplomatically flourishing.’ Netanyahu had beaten back what he had called the ‘fake-news claim’ that without a deal with the Palestinians ‘Israel will be isolated, weakened and abandoned’ facing a ‘diplomatic tsunami.’
“Difficult though it is for his political detractors to acknowledge, Netanyahu’s claim resonates with the public because it reflects something that is real, and that has shifted the center of gravity of Israeli politics further and further to the right. It is a claim that, if correct and replicable over time, will leave a legacy that lasts well beyond Netanyahu’s premiership and any indictment he might face.
“Netanyahu’s assertion is that he is not merely buying time in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians to improve the terms of an eventual and inevitable compromise. Netanyahu is laying claim to something different — the possibility of ultimate victory, the permanent and definitive defeat of the Palestinians, their national and collective goals.
“In over a decade as prime minister, Netanyahu has consistently and unequivocally rejected any plans or practical steps that even begin to address Palestinian aspirations. Netanyahu is all about perpetuating and exacerbating the conflict, not about managing it, let alone resolving it…[The] message is clear: there will be no Palestinian state because the West Bank and East Jerusalem are simply Greater Israel.”
No Palestinian State
Levy continues:
“The approach overturns assumptions that have guided peace efforts and American policy for over a quarter of a century: that Israel has no alternative to an eventual territorial withdrawal and acceptance of something sufficiently resembling an independent sovereign Palestinian state broadly along the 1967 lines. It challenges the presumption that the permanent denial of such an outcome is incompatible with how Israel and Israelis perceive themselves as being a democracy. Additionally, it challenges the peace-effort supposition that this denial would in any way be unacceptable to the key allies on which Israel depends…
“In more traditional bastions of support for Israel, Netanyahu took a calculated gamble — would enough American Jewish support continue to stand with an increasingly illiberal and ethno-nationalist Israel, thereby facilitating the perpetuation of the lopsided U.S.-Israel relationship? Netanyahu bet yes, and he was right.”
And here is another interesting point that Levy makes:
“And then events took a further turn in Netanyahu’s favor with the rise to power in the United States and parts of Central Eastern Europe (and to enhanced prominence elsewhere in Europe and the West) of the very ethno-nationalist trend to which Netanyahu is so committed, working to replace liberal with illiberal democracy. One should not underestimate Israel and Netanyahu’s importance as an ideological and practical avant-garde for this trend.”
Former U.S. Ambassador and respected political analyst Chas Freeman wrote recently very bluntly:
“the central objective of U.S. policy in the Middle East has long been to achieve regional acceptance for the Jewish-settler state in Palestine.”
Or, in other words, for Washington, its Middle East policy – and all its actions – have been determined by “to be, or not to be”: “To be” (that is) – with Israel, or not “to be” (with Israel).
Israel’s Lost Ground
The key point now is that the region has just made a seismic shift into the “not to be” camp. Is there much that America can do about that? Israel very much is alone with only a weakened Saudi Arabia at its side, and there are clear limits to what Saudi Arabia can do.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi.
The U.S. calling on Arab states to engage more with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi seems somehow inadequate. Iran is not looking for war with Israel (as a number of Israeli analysts have acknowledged); but, too, the Syrian President has made clear that his government intends to recover “all Syria” – and all Syria includes the occupied Golan Heights. And this week, Hassan Nasrallah called on the Lebanese government “to devise a plan and take a sovereign decision to liberate the Shebaa Farms and the Kfarshouba Hills” from Israel.
A number Israeli commentators already are saying that the “writing is on the wall” – and that it would be better for Israel to cede territory unilaterally, rather than risk the loss of hundreds of lives of Israeli servicemen in a futile attempt to retain it. That, though, seems hardly congruent with the Israeli Prime Minister’s “not an inch, will we yield” character and recent statements.
Will ethno-nationalism provide Israel with a new support base? Well, firstly, I do not see Israel’s doctrine as “illiberal democracy,” but rather an apartheid system intended to subordinate Palestinian political rights. And as the political schism in the West widens, with one “wing” seeking to delegitimize the other by tarnishing them as racists, bigots and Nazis, it is clear that the real America First-ers will try, at any price, to distance themselves from the extremists.
Daniel Levy points out that the Alt-Right leader, Richard Spencer, depicts his movement as White Zionism. Is this really likely to build support for Israel? How long before the “globalists” use precisely Netanyahu’s “illiberal democracy” meme to taunt the U.S. Right that this is precisely the kind of society for which they too aim: with Mexicans and black Americans treated like Palestinians?
‘Ethnic Nationalism’
The increasingly “not to be” constituency of the Middle East has a simpler word for Netanyahu’s “ethnic nationalism.” They call it simply Western colonialism. Round one of Chas Freeman’s making the Middle East “be with Israel” consisted of the shock-and-awe assault on Iraq. Iraq is now allied with Iran, and the Hashad militia (PMU) are becoming a widely mobilized fighting force. The second stage was 2006. Today, Hizbullah is a regional force, and not a just Lebanese one.
Far-right militia members demonstrating outside Ukrainian parliament in Kiev. (Screen shot from RT video via YouTube video)
The third strike was at Syria. Today, Syria is allied with Russia, Iran, Hizbullah and Iraq. What will comprise the next round in the “to be, or not to be” war?
For all Netanyahu’s bluster about Israel standing stronger, and having beaten back “what he had called the ‘fake-news claim’ that without a deal with the Palestinians ‘Israel will be isolated, weakened and abandoned’ facing a ‘diplomatic tsunami,’” Netanyahu may have just discovered, in these last two weeks, that he confused facing down the weakened Palestinians with “victory” — only at the very moment of his apparent triumph, to find himself alone in a new, “New Middle East.”
Perhaps Pravda was right, and Netanyahu did appear close to panic, during his hurriedly arranged, and urgently called, Sochi summit.
Alastair Crooke is a former British diplomat who was a senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy. He is the founder and director of the Conflicts Forum.
Amid mounting military and diplomatic tensions between the US and Russia, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported Friday that the American Congress has taken the first steps toward Washington’s annulling of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
The INF, or Washington Treaty on Mid-range Nuclear Systems, is a bilateral agreement reached between the United States and the Soviet Union on the decommissioning of short- and mid-range missiles (with a range of between 500 and 5,500 miles), and the banning of their production.
The treaty, signed on 8 December 1987 by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, led to a significant reduction of US nuclear weapons in Europe. The nuclear-armed mid-range Pershing II missiles, whose stationing in Western Europe five years earlier had triggered the largest peace demonstrations to that point in history, were withdrawn.
The danger now is “that the US will construct new missiles and station them in Europe,” warned the Süddeutsche Zeitung. A major shift would be set “into motion” and Europe would stand “on the brink of a new nuclear era … nuclear mid-range missiles were the horror of the Cold War … thirty years on, the spectre has returned.”
The reason for the potential ending of the treaty, according to the newspaper, is the “deep freeze” in US-Russia relations and announcements by both sides of intentions to “comprehensively modernise their nuclear arsenals.”
Characteristically, the explosive reports by the German press have been totally ignored by the US print and broadcast media.
The report came amid a hysterical campaign being mounted by the US and NATO over military exercises planned by the Russian military in western Russia, Belarus and Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad later this month, with Washington and its allies suggesting that they could be used as a “Trojan horse” to pre-position weapons stockpiles and prepare an invasion of the Baltic states.
The Pentagon has deployed seven US F-15C fighter planes to a base in Lithuania along with an additional 600 US airborne troops to the Baltics in advance of the war games.
This military build-up has been carried out in conjunction with a major US diplomatic provocation as the Trump administration has retaliated against Russia’s expulsion of US embassy personnel from Russia (itself a tit-for-tat response to earlier expulsions of Russians from the US) by ordering the shutdown of three Russian diplomatic facilities in Washington, New York and San Francisco. Moscow has charged that the action, which it said was accompanied by FBI searches of the San Francisco consulate and the residences of Russian diplomatic personnel, constituted a violation of international law.
The increasingly dangerous friction between the world’s two largest nuclear powers is unfolding in the context of growing war dangers internationally, particularly on the Korean peninsula. Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Friday that the increasingly bellicose confrontation between the US and North Korea had left the region “balanced on the verge of a large-scale conflict.”
It is in this context that the reported threats of an escalation of nuclear brinksmanship on the continent of Europe pose such an imminent danger.
A NATO document classified as secret which was obtained by a joint research group made up of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and public regional broadcasters NDR and WDR contains 39 proposals on how NATO can take action against Russia. According to diplomats, “formal consultations within NATO” could take place in the autumn at the initiative of the US. The paper was “a compendium of all options available” carefully “divided up into the categories ‘conceivable’, ‘currently to be avoided’ and ‘not advisable’.”
Even the more than a dozen “conceivable” options, which NATO believes would be compatible with the INF agreement, “would exacerbate already tense relations,” according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Proposals include “increased rotation of B-2 and B-52 bombers from the US to Europe,” an “expansion of early warning systems and missile or submarine defence,” and the strengthening of “military and civilian infrastructure against attacks.” The increased readiness and capability for a nuclear retaliatory strike, “nuclear signalling,” is seen as “conceivable.”
Two proposals are especially provocative: “to expand the so-called nuclear targeting planning – i.e. identifying and confirming the targets for nuclear weapons,” and “to increase the operational readiness of those air bases that would drop these bombs in case of war.” On this, “NATO also advises caution,” the Süddeutsche noted. The confirmation of targets, i.e., the concrete planning of a nuclear assault, could rapidly provoke a nuclear war with Russia, which could potentially wipe out humanity.
According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, if the US abandons the INF treaty, “measures currently found in the ‘not advisable’ category [would be] conceivable: Construction, testing and stationing of a new class of missiles – a further step into a new Cold War.”
The German ruling class is extremely concerned by Washington’s increasingly aggressive war drive against Russia. Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel (Social Democrats, SPD) warned in an interview on Thursday against “repeating the worst mistakes of the Cold War. We are on our way to a Cold War 2.0. All of the good treaties on disarmament and arms controls from Gorbachev and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened once again with becoming a military training ground for nuclear weapons.”
He continued:
“It is wrong for Mrs. Merkel to remain silent on this. Germany of all countries must raise its voice against this. We have to stick to being a power for peace and oppose an arms spiral. In that context, I found the statement by [SPD Chancellor candidate] Martin Schulz that we must focus on finally ridding our country of nuclear weapons to be correct.”
Schulz and Gabriel are in the midst of an election campaign, and are well aware that the vast majority of Germany’s population—like that of the rest of the planet—opposes military rearmament and war, and would welcome the withdrawal of the US nuclear weapons still stationed in Germany.
The two Social Democratic politicians are by no means committed to peace, but are rather leading representatives of German imperialism. They oppose the US plans for nuclear rearmament because a return to the conditions of the Cold War would endanger Germany’s own plans for global power and increase Berlin’s dependence on the US. It would undermine Germany’s economic and geopolitical interests, which are ever more at odds with those of Washington.
In July, Gabriel strongly criticised the latest US sanctions against Russia. Although Europe and the US had “jointly and in close consultation answered Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and Russia’s actions in eastern Ukraine,” it was not possible to accept “the threat of unlawful extraterritorial sanctions against European companies participating in the expansion of European energy supplies!” The supply of energy to Europe was “a European affair and not one for the United States of America!”
Following the latest threats from the US, the Social Democrats are leading the way in attempting to transform the widespread opposition to Donald Trump’s right-wing, militarist policies into support for German militarism. Asked whether he thought “the fear of many Germans that Trump could overreact and incite a war is justified,” Gabriel answered,
“I am concerned that the US will be forever lost to the West. Some of the people around Donald Trump want to replace the rule of law with the law of the strongest. We must assert ourselves against this.”
Papers published by think tanks and the major political parties give a sense of the methods German imperialism intends to use to “assert” its interests. In “Principles for a Social Democratic Security and Defence Policy,” the SPD writes,
“To be equal to the increased demands for international deployments to tackle crises, cyber defence, and the defence of our own population, we need a modern armed forces capable of action. We need an army in which […] troops capable of deploying are ready for crisis situations. For this we have to better equip the army with personnel and material.”
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP) is the only party participating in Germany’s federal election campaign that opposes the US build-up of nuclear weapons from the standpoint of the international working class, and fights for a socialist strategy to combat social inequality, militarism and war. To the capitalist warmongers on both sides of the Atlantic, we counterpose the unity of the international working class. Under conditions of the mounting danger of nuclear war, this perspective assumes enormous urgency.
Featured image: Texas refineries and petrochemical plants affected by Hurricane Harvey have released nearly 1 million pounds of seven dangerous air pollutants, and upwards of 2 million pollutants overall, according to industry data. (Photo: IIP Photo Archive/flickr/cc)
Texas refineries and petrochemical plants affected by Hurricane Harvey have released nearly a million pounds of seven especially dangerous air pollutants, according to a new analysis released Friday.
“Staggering amounts of benzene, 1,3-butadiene, hexane, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, toluene, and xylene—estimated at 951,000 pounds so far—were emitted” at “several dozen petroleum industry facilities,” the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) said in a statement.
According to the group,
“these seven chemicals are all toxic air pollutants documented to cause serious harms to human health, and several cause cancer.”
The analysis is based on initial industry reports submitted to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality through August 31, and the group said it expects these numbers to continue to rise in the coming days.
Expressing concern for communities in the immediate vicinities of the facilities, Shaye Wolf, the scientist who compiled the analysis, said:
“Oil-industry facilities spewed thousands of tons of toxic chemicals into defenseless communities, despite ample warning about hurricane risk to this area.”
“Dangerous flaring from coastal refineries has become routine during major storms,” Wolf added. “The petroleum industry seems utterly unwilling to take responsibility for operating safely, even as climate change makes storms like Harvey more destructive.”
“Long before Harvey made landfall, environmental groups and scientists had been warning of the disastrous effects that could result from a massive storm like Harvey hitting Texas, the heart of the U.S. petrochemical industry,” Common Dreams previously reported.
The CBD analysis confirms alarming first-hand reports that started pouring out of Texas earlier this week.
Overall, refineries and petrochemical facilities “may have released as much as 2 million pounds of potentially hazardous airborne pollutants from oil refineries and other facilities in the Houston area,” NBC Newsreported on Wednesday.
“In one of the largest accidental releases, Chevron Phillips Chemical reported that it may have released more than 745,000 pounds of contaminants into the air as it shut down its Cedar Bayou Plant in Baytown, Texas,” NBCNews noted.
“At least 25 plants have either shut down or experienced production issues” because of Harvey, Grist reported, and not all the hazardous emissions are the result of storm damage. In fact, a notable amount of troubling emissions has come from several facilities closing ahead of the storm. As Grist explained:
Petrochemical plant shutdowns are a major cause of abnormal emission events. The short-term impacts of these events can be “substantial,” according to a 2012 report from the Environmental Integrity Project, because “upsets or sudden shutdowns can release large plumes of sulfur dioxide or toxic chemicals in just a few hours, exposing downwind communities to peak levels of pollution that are much more likely to trigger asthma attacks and other respiratory systems.”
Air Alliance Houston’s Executive Director Bakeyah Nelson is concerned about how these shutdowns will affect nearby communities already suffering from Harvey. “The excess amount of air pollution puts communities in close proximity to these plants at risk, especially people with chronic health conditions,” she said. She also noted that communities closest to these sites in Houston—and in general—are disproportionately low-income and minority. Some residents have already been complaining of “unbearable” petrochemical-like smells
On Thursday, two explosions—followed by “plumes of black smoke“—were reported at an Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Texas.
After the explosions, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez was heavily criticized for claiming the plumes did not contain toxins and were not dangerous to the community—even though residents within a 1.5-mile radius of the plant were forced to evacuate and urged to “seek medical advice” if they were exposed to the smoke.
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“The Muslim terrorist apparatus was created by US intelligence as a political weapon” – National security adviser to the Carter administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski
“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda, and any informed intelligence officer knows this. But, there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an intensified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the United States.” – Former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H.L. Mencken
Corporate propaganda is flying so thick and fast lately it’s dizzying just keeping up with it. For regular readers of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, Vladimir Putin is the new Fuhrer of American Nazism, while Kim Jong Un is the secret architect of a newly revamped Syrian ‘chemical weapons program’. Chinese hackers are suspected responsible for recent collisions involving American war ships, Venezuela has become an international pariah under the corrupt leadership of bus driver-cum-dictator Nicolas Maduro, and Russia is accused of trying to ‘redraw international borders’. Meanwhile troop deployment to Afghanistan has doubled and the mission of America’s 16 year long war has been re-defined from ‘nation building’ to simply ‘killing terrorists’.
While J. Robert Oppenheimer’s gift to humanity may have placed the prospect of great power war officially off the table, so too it seems is the zero sum game of mutually assured destruction. With the recent departure of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and key Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, the US administration is now firmly under military control and US military presence is escalating across multiple theatres. A $600bn defence budget representing an 18% increase in military spending was passed in July, approved by 60% of house Democrats. The latter tidbit is by the way of course – it makes little difference on which side of the aisle you sit in American politics. The US barely wears a fig leaf of democracy. The dismissal of the fraud case brought against the DNC for stealing the presidential nomination from Sanders last year is ample evidence of this. Leaders are chosen over cigars in back rooms. It’s been that way since the uniquely underqualified Harry Truman secured the Democratic vice presidential nomination ahead of Henry Wallace in 1944, long before the advent of the internet or so-called ‘Russian hackers’.
The elephant and the ass are equal in every way that matters, especially so since the fall of the Soviet Union. Western liberal democracy didn’t win the Cold War; fascism did. The end of dialectical materialism was the death knell for democracy. Flip a coin: Identitarian-environmentalism or conservative-libertarianism. If you’re lucky you might score a small victory for women’s equality, as long as those women don’t happen live in North Africa or Central Asia, or anywhere else the United States of Amnesia claims the sovereign right to bomb with impunity. The US has but one political party. It is the party of war, owned and controlled by finance.
“The rich and powerful piss on us and the media tells us it’s raining”, so the saying goes. But it doesn’t take much to draw back the curtain and see the real machinations at work, most of which are really quite transparent.
Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, Larry Summers, Jacob Rothschild and James Woolsey are just a few of the familiar names who sit on the board of Genie Energy, a company intent on drilling for oil and gas in the Golan Heights, internationally recognised as Syrian territory under the Franco-British Boundary Agreement of December 1920, and illegally occupied by Israel since the Six Day War of 1967. Let’s look at that list again. A former US vice president, the chairman and CEO of the world’s second-largest media conglomerate, a former head of US treasury, a former energy secretary, a former CIA director and one of the world’s richest and most powerful investment bankers all decide they want a slice of Syria’s energy reserves, and the next thing you know we are fighting a humanitarian war against an army of darkness led by Skelator, who mercilessly slaughters millions of his own faithful followers by bombing them with depleted uranium missiles dipped in pigs blood. Oh wait…
Syria is just the latest manoeuvre in a long game which began with the Dulles brothers’ ouster of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. Annexing the Middle East’s energy reserves has been the number one priority of the national security state since it came to power under the presidency of Dwight D Eisenhower. While the Golan may be something of a soft target, the ongoing siege of Deir ez-Zor and nearby Raqqa supported by Kurdish SDF forces clearly indicates Washington’s desire to occupy and control Syria’s oil-rich north eastern provinces. To this end we are assured to hear further reports of attacks on civilians by government forces.
Of course these false claims are nothing new. Ubiquitous mention should also go to Saddam’s WMD, which might have been found had UN weapons inspectors bothered to look under the Bushes. Excuse the terrible joke but sometimes you have to either laugh or cry. “Mistakes were made” we are told. “We went to war based on faulty ‘intelligence’.” No, we went to war based on a DELIBERATE LIE. The US military presence in Iraq between 2003 and 2011 comprised 191 camps, 174 forward bases and 74 combat outposts. How is it then that ISIS headchoppers were able to take over 70% of the country? The question is rhetorical. The War on Terror is nothing less than a call for bellum romanum, all-out war without restraint as the Romans practiced against groups they considered barbarians. Depicting the enemy as sub-human savages feeds directly into the neocons ‘clash of civilisations’ wet dream.
Since I’m apparently in the mood for labouring the point, perhaps we could take a moment here to revisit the events which kicked off America’s longest war. That is unless anyone reading this is foolish enough to believe that the project of depopulating and recolonising the Middle East has anything to do with fighting extremism…
Let’s skip the detailed compendium of facts and analysis supported by 2000 plus architects and engineers and 200 plus senior government and military officials and just consider the question of cui bono.
In September 2000, The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a neo-conservative think-tank released a report entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” in which it was stated that
“the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a NEW PEARL HARBOR.”
Of the twenty-five people who signed PNAC’s founding statement of principles, ten went on to serve in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. Cheney has since stated that 9/11 achieved the goals of PNAC and was his “highest moment in office”. Cheney’s company Haliburton would net $39.5 billion from contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Leaving aside the mountain of evidence casting doubt on the official narrative in which 19 Saudi hijackers armed with box cutters managed to pull off the crime of the century in the world’s most jealously guarded airspace, even if we concede that 9/11 was the work of an al Qaeda terror cell, we are still faced with the awkward fact that al Qaeda is incontrovertibly a tool of US intelligence, funded by its Saudi allies.
Listen to Herman Goring invoke Plato’s idea of the noble lie at his Nuremberg trial:
“Of course, the people do not want war. But it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”
To its target audience, the US portrays its mission in the world as safeguarding globalisation and promoting democracy in countries which are ‘disconnected from the global economy’. To those who’ve read more widely than JK Rowling and Dr Seuss, it’s called practicing imperialism. To be fair when we speak of imperium we don’t refer to the US alone. Suffice it to say capital has no borders, and the current class of financial elites aren’t patriotic to any nation state. If the crimes of 9/11 and the human suffering which followed are to be laid at the feet of governments and their intelligence apparatuses – and who else would have the resources to pull off something on this scale – the suspect list would have to include not just the usual US spook agencies, but British, Israeli and French intelligence agencies, all of which had issued ‘warnings’ prior to the events.
Those still in denial may like to consider this question. Is there not a single a common denominator in the last 70 years of international armed conflict? Have US and NATO fingerprints not been left at the scene of almost every genocide? Rome conquered the world in ‘self-defence’, according to the historian Livy – a trope which we see repeated in the doctrine of pre-emptive war. Nowadays the premise is more likely to be R2P, genocide thinly veiled as humanitarian intervention. How long will we accept the lies of empire to justify its wars of aggression? They lied about Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, they lied about Afghanistan, they lied about Iraq, they lied about Libya, they lied about Syria, and now they are lying about North Korea, Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran, Russia, China and Pakistan.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” – Carl Sagan
Vladimir Putin’s article BRICS: Towards New Horizons of Strategic Partnership was published ahead of the BRICS Summit, which will be held in Xiamen, China, on September 4 and 5.
Below is the official English translation of the letter in full.
“The 9th BRICS Summit will be held in Xiamen, China, on September 4 and 5. I consider it important in this regard to present Russia’s approaches to cooperation within the framework of this large and respected association and to share my views on the future of our further cooperation.
I would like to begin by expressing our appreciation of China’s significant contribution as this year’s chair of the organisation, which has allowed the BRICS countries as a group to move forward in all the key areas of our partnership, including politics, the economy and culture. Moreover, the group of five has greatly strengthened its global standing.
It is important that our group’s activities are based on the principles of equality, respect for one another’s opinions and consensus. Within BRICS, nothing is ever forced on anyone. When the approaches of its members do not coincide, we work patiently and carefully to coordinate them. This open and trust-based atmosphere is conducive to the successful implementation of our tasks.
Russia highly values the multifaceted cooperation that has developed within BRICS. Our countries’ constructive cooperation on the international arena is aimed at creating a fair multipolar world and equal development conditions for all.
Russia stands for closer coordination of the BRICS countries’ foreign policies, primarily at the UN and G20, as well as other international organisations. It is clear that only the combined efforts of all countries can help bring about global stability and find solutions to many acute conflicts, including those in the Middle East. I would like to say that it was largely thanks to the efforts of Russia and other concerned countries that conditions have been created to improve the situation in Syria. We have delivered a powerful blow to the terrorists and laid the groundwork for launching the movement towards a political settlement and the return of the Syrian people to peace.
However, the fight against terrorists in Syria and other countries and regions must continue. Russia calls for going over from debates to the practical creation of a broad counterterrorism front based on international law and led by the UN. Naturally, we highly appreciate the support and assistance of our BRICS partners in this respect.
I have to say a few words about the situation on the Korean Peninsula, where tensions have grown recently and the situation is balancing on the brink of a large-scale conflict. Russia believes that the policy of putting pressure on Pyongyang to stop its nuclear missile programme is misguided and futile. The region’s problems should only be settled through a direct dialogue of all the parties concerned without any preconditions. Provocations, pressure and militarist and insulting rhetoric are a dead-end road.
Russia and China have created a roadmap for a settlement on the Korean Peninsula that is designed to promote the gradual easing of tensions and the creation of a mechanism for lasting peace and security.
Russia also calls for promoting the interaction of the BRICS countries in the area of global information security. We propose joining our efforts to create a legal basis for cooperation and subsequently to draft and adopt universal rules of responsible behaviour of states in this sphere. A major step towards this goal would be the signing of an intergovernmental BRICS agreement on international information security.
I would like to point out that on Russia’s initiative a BRICS Strategy for Economic Partnership was adopted at the Ufa Summit in 2015 and is being successfully implemented. We hope to be able to discuss new large-scale cooperation tasks in trade and investment and industrial cooperation at the Xiamen Summit.
Russia is interested in promoting economic cooperation within the BRICS format. Considerable practical achievements have been recently reported in this area, primarily the launch of the New Development Bank (NDB). It has approved seven investment projects in the BRICS countries worth around $1.5 billion. This year, the NDB is to approve a second package of investment projects worth $2.5-$3 billion in total. I am convinced that their implementation will not only be a boost to our economies but will also promote integration between our countries.
Russia shares the BRICS countries’ concerns over the unfairness of the global financial and economic architecture, which does not give due regard to the growing weight of the emerging economies. We are ready to work together with our partners to promote international financial regulation reforms and to overcome the excessive domination of the limited number of reserve currencies. We will also work towards a more balanced distribution of quotas and voting shares within the IMF and the World Bank.
I am confident that the BRICS countries will continue to act in a consolidated manner against protectionism and new barriers in global trade. We value the BRICS countries’ consensus on this issue, which allows us to more consistently advocate the foundations of an open, equal and mutually beneficial multilateral trade system and to strengthen the role of the WTO as the key regulator in international trade.
Russia’s initiative on the development of cooperation among the BRICS countries’ antimonopoly agencies is aimed at creating effective mechanisms to encourage healthy competition. The goal is to create a package of cooperation measures to work against the restrictive business practices of large multinational corporations and trans-border violations of competition rules.
I would like to draw your attention to Russia’s initiative on the establishment of a BRICS Energy Research Platform. We believe that this would enable us to coordinate our information, analysis and research activities in the interests of the five BRICS countries and would ultimately facilitate the implementation of joint energy investment projects.
Another priority is to build up our cooperation in the area of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). We believe that we should integrate the national SMEs’ online resources for placing crosslinks and other commercial information and for exchanging data on reliable partners.
Russia is advocating the Women and the Economy public-private dialogue. This initiative provides for holding regular debates by members of the BRICS countries’ business and expert communities, women’s associations and government agencies. The first such meeting was held in Novosibirsk on July 4, 2017, on the sidelines of the First International Women’s Congress of the SCO and BRICS Member States. Another related idea is to create a BRICS Women’s Business Club as a network of professional interaction between women in business through a specialised online information resource.
Our other priorities include cooperation in science, technology, innovations and cutting edge medicine. Our countries have a big potential in this respect that comprises a solid and mutually complementary research base, unique technical achievements, skilled personnel and huge markets for science-intensive products. We propose discussing at the upcoming summit a package of measures to reduce the threat of infectious diseases and to create new medicines to prevent and fight epidemics.
I believe our cooperation in the humanitarian sphere has excellent prospects. While working to implement the BRICS Intergovernmental Agreement on Cooperation in the Field of Culture, we hope that our partners will take part in the New Wave and New Wave Junior international contests of young pop singers. We have also advanced the initiative to create a joint television network of the BRICS countries.
Russia stands for strengthening the BRICS countries’ partnership in politics, the economy, culture and other areas. We are ready to continue working jointly with our colleagues to promote democracy and to strengthen the healthy elements of international relations based firmly on international law. I am convinced that the Xiamen Summit will help invigorate our countries’ efforts towards finding solutions to the challenges of the 21st century and will propel cooperation within BRICS to a higher level.
I wholeheartedly wish health and success to your readers and to all people in the BRICS countries”.
It’s a pretty curious thing to see: marriage being defended at all. Like slavery, and not necessarily inconsistent with it, marriage is an institution. It embraces codes. It imparts obligations, duties, and rights. And it creeps up on you.
In Australia, flawed campaigns are being waged in its name. This has been occasioned by an absence of parliamentary will. Abdicating a responsibility that was clearly given to them by the High Court of Australia in the 2013 case between the Commonwealth and the Australian Capital Territory, parliamentarians will be waiting for the results of a postal plebiscite that should not be taken for granted by anybody. The farce will then continue on what form of bill will be voted upon, if, indeed, there will be a bill put forth at all.
Taking this survey into account (the wording by the Turnbull government on this is intentional) is, however, hard to take seriously. Lacking the austere gravitas and purpose of a referendum, it only promises to take the temperature of the Australian populace, a reading of that confused patient known as the public.
Then there is the nagging question of whether the plebiscite will even go ahead. A sword of Damocles hangs over its very legality, and the holder of that weapon – the High Court of Australia – may yet find against it. Advocates against it have argued that such a measure cannot bypass parliamentary will.
As for the arguments for marriage, these have been variant and even idiosyncratic. Conservatives groups for gay marriage argue that you strengthen it by virtue of expanding it. The more, it seems, the merrier. The stance is outlined by Nick Greiner, former New South Wakes premier.[1]
Those in favour of not enlarging the tent – such as Senator Matt Canavan – embrace the erroneous notion that an ancient institution should not be changed in terms of gender. What has been done for millennia must be right. (He forgets that the same arguments could be used in apologias for genocide, slavery and domestic violence.)
The good senator is somewhat confused in insisting that the institution needs more than love. It would be far more accurate to say that property and securing it against challengers has been the traditional role of marriage. Love tended to be found outside it.
The issue of marrying for love is a charmingly recent phenomenon. It was very much the understanding in European aristocratic circles that marriage would only ever be to keep the line of succession safe. If you so happened to be a Hapsburg operating the levers of power five hundred years ago, you would also see marriage as a means of acquiring other properties (states, possessions, colonies).
The issue of children raises other fascinating points. For Canavan, the bond between males and females called for “a special word and a special institution” because of its link to breeding.[2] A strict reading of marriage as a breeding machine puts those heterosexual couples who don’t wish to add to their global carbon footprint at odds with the religiously minded. Marriage entails issue, and blessed are the breeders, despite adding to population bomb. Even on that score, same-sex couples can have children, even if a heterosexual element is still required to supply the, to put it indelicately, raw matter.
As for the issue of miracles, nothing could be less so. Offspring tend to be an automatic affair that only promises to disappear when the process of reproduction becomes sexless, a dry, mess free laboratory matter sketched in such dystopian delights as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The campaign has also given a foretaste of the nastiness to come. The pro-marriage conservatives insist that children who are raised in any environment that is not hetero-normative are bound to have a few screws loose.
Again, we have a problem of false attribution of value: since the conventional marriage produces children, it follows that it is good. This is hardly a good argument when stacked up against those dysfunctional children who come from that euphemised context of a “broken home”. Broken homes also produce broken children, and heterosexual couples can be damn good at it.
Advocates for the status quo have also brought the issue of freedom of religion into play. But this is a deceptive and disingenuous way of introducing discrimination via the backdoor. Traditional anti-discrimination statutes would thereby be circumvented by the bigoted notion that you could refuse to hold a service or bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.
The novelty of this debate is seeing how advocates from the Left perspective have marched in favour of same-sex marriage when marriage itself has lost its appeal to many progressives. The only argument left, then, is the equality of choice: same-sex couples should be perfectly entitled to enter into a flawed, anachronistic institution should they wish to. We should all be entitled to make our own mistakes.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
Pro-government forces, led by the Syrian Republican Guard, have liberated the strategic al-Bishri Mountain as well as the al-Birshri triangle from ISIS and deployed in only about 37 km from the city of Deir Ezzor besieged by ISIS terrorists. Some sources even speculate that government troops advanced 5-10 km further, but this still has to be confirmed.
The Al-Bishri Mountain is one of the highest points in the desert area between Palmyra and Deir Ezzor. With liberation of this strategic location as well as the progress along the Palmyra-Deir Ezzor highway government forces are now able to develop momentum in order to take control over Kobaje and Ash Sholah located en route to Deir Ezzor. The goal of the effort will be to take control over the key roads west and southwest of Deir Ezzor prior launching a direct advance to lift the siege from the strategic city.
At the same time, the ISIS activity in southern Raqqah poses a key threat to the advancing government forces where ISIS terrorists have seized the villages of Ghanim al-Ali, Shuraydah, Jabali and Zawr Shammar after almost a week of heavy fighting.
If ISIS successfully develops momentum along the road to the al-Birshri triangle, the terrorist group will threat the southern flank of government troops in the Palmyra-Deir Ezzor highway area.
In the eastern Hama countryside, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies have liberated Mukaymen, Maksar Janubi, Qastal Shamali, Qastal Wastani and Qastal Janubi. Multiple airstrikes are reported in the ISIS-held area of Uqayribat.
Jaysh Ahrar al-Ashayer and Jaysh Usud al-Sharqiya released a Syrian pilot Lieutenant Colonel Ali al-Helw and 30 Syrian soldiers.
Al-Helw was captured after his MiG-23BN was downed southeastern Syria on August 15. The 30 soldiers were captured by militants during their successful attack on SAA positions in the Suweida countryside on August 19.
No confirmed reports about the details of the deal between the government and US-backed militants are available now.
Featured image: Russian FM Sergey Lavrov greeting his Saudi counterpart in Moscow, June 2016 (Source: Oriental Review)
Many observers of Russian foreign policy have been left confused over the past couple of years as Moscow’s deft geostrategic maneuverings in the “Ummah” caught them completely off guard, as they never expected for Russia’s “Pivot/Rebalancing to Asia” to take on Muslim proportions in South-Central Eurasia. Most of these same people have difficulty accepting Russia’s moves, and instead have sought to either ignore, downplay, or craft outlandish conspiracy theories about them. The partnerships drawing the most controversy are those which Russia has recently reached with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, and Pakistan, and the reason why they’ve created such a fuss is because they fly straight in the face of everything that the foreign policy “traditionalists” stand for.
The “progressive” faction of the Russian “deep state” (permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies) understands that their country needs to flexibly adapt to the full-spectrum paradigm changes taking place across the globe as the emerging Multipolar World Order progressively enters into force. This means reconceptualizing Russia’s 21st-century geostrategic role and perceiving it as striving to become the supreme balancing force in the Eurasian supercontinent, which necessitates reaching mutually advantageous arrangements with non-traditional partners. The traditionalists, however, believe that Russia shouldn’t ever diversify from its existing partners in any way that could even remotely upset them, which symbolizes their extremely dogmatic and unflinching approach to the issue.
These traditionalists think that Russia either isn’t serious about its newfound partnerships or is engaging in them out of desperation to “keep one’s enemies close”, refusing to acknowledge that Moscow is actually very committed to deepening relations with each of its new partners and has sincere intentions to enter into multiple trust-building initiatives with them. For example, it’s ridiculous to suggest that Russia’s S-400 (military), Turkish/Balkan Stream (energy), and Astana (diplomatic) ties with Turkey are anything but genuine and designed to bring the two sides closer than at any moment in their histories. The same goes for its OPEC, investment, and potential arms ties with Saudi Arabia; its all-around strengthened partnership with Azerbaijan; and its rapid rapprochement with Pakistan.
All of these moves have shocked the traditionalists, who are fearful that their country has “betrayed” its beloved Syrian, Iranian, Armenian, and Indian partners due to the “irresponsible” forays of the progressives, but that’s not true at all since it was in reality the latter two states which “betrayed” Russia, as the author explained in his recent article questioning whether “Armenia, India, And Serbia Are ‘Balancing’ Against Russia Or ‘Betraying’ It?”. Even in this case, however, Russia still isn’t “betraying” anybody, since it’s simply diversifying and updating its international relationships for in line with the 21st-century geopolitics of the New Cold War in order to better “balance” the affairs of the Eurasian supercontinent, which is also the reason why it’s moved so close to Turkey and Saudi Arabia too in spite of the inferred uncomfortableness that this might make some in Syria and Iran feel.
Given the astounding geostrategic progress that Russia has made in the past couple of years in turning itself into a real force to be reckoned with in the Ummah, it’s extraordinarily unlikely and actually all but impossible that it will backtrack on its latest gains and revert back to the outdated mode of thinking that the traditionalists want it to abide by. The progressives “run the roost”, so to speak, and they’ve made it abundantly clear on numerous occasions that none of these exciting new partnerships are to the “zero-sum” disadvantage of anyone else; rather, they epitomize the “win-win” logic that modern-day multipolarity is becoming known for, whether observers recognize it right now or sometime later on.
If Russia is successful in retaining its “legacy” partnerships while strengthening the new ones that it’s worked hard to acquire, then the traditionalist-progressive “deep state” dichotomy might give way to a single class of “balancers/managers” in the future as Moscow finally fulfills its envisioned 21st-century geostrategic role in Eurasia.
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.
There’s been speculation lately that the EU might remove some of the anti-Syrian sanctions that it promulgated over the past six years, which would be a godsend to the millions of people who are suffering from the attendant lack of medicine and other humanitarian necessities. Russian, Iranian, and other aid has been pivotal in keeping the population alive during this time, as have of course Damascus’ heroic efforts in doing the best in its ability to provide for its people under such challenging circumstances.
Nevertheless, the West’s anti-Syrian sanctions have still left an indelible impact on society, and it would be a welcome and long-overdue move if they were repealed, which could conceivably happen now that it’s obvious to all that President Assad won’t be ousted from office by the “moderate rebels”. The impressive gains of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) since the beginning of Russia’s anti-terrorist intervention over the past two years, as well as the rapid ones which occurred all throughout this summer, have led observers to conclude that Daesh is on the brink of defeat and that a Moscow-brokered “political solution” might finally be on the horizon.
It’s in connection with the latter forecast about the end of the war becoming a realistic prospect that the EU might sense the “convenient opportunity” to lift the anti-Syrian sanctions in order to advance its own interests. To explain, Brussels might try to link this game-changing humanitarian move to Damascus accepting certain levels of refugee-migrant resettlement, and/or it might make this dependent on Syria agreeing to specific political demands from the “opposition” related to the Russian-written “draftconstitution” or other pertinent issues. This tactic of “strings-attached” sanctions relief only works if Syria is desperate enough to go along with it, which is becoming less the case with each passing day.
Thus, it’s worthwhile to wonder whether the EU would provide unconditional sanctions relief to Syria instead, though this move, just like the other one, wouldn’t ever occur unless the US gave the go-ahead for it to happen. In the event that it does, then Washington’s motives would be to use this as a way to help EU firms counter the reconstruction and other deals that Russia, China, and Iran have already been promised by Damascus or are slated to obtain. Although it makes sense for Syria to reward its allies for their loyalty, the economically beleaguered state might come under pressure from Western-backed “civil society” forces because of this.
“Opposition”-leaning citizens might try to stir up trouble by alleging that this is nothing more than “wasteful political corruption” and that the people’s money would be “best served” through an EU-participating open tender bidding process instead. The argument that they’d be basing this off of is that European companies sometimes provide better quality services than their counterparts for a more competitive cost, meaning that the war-torn country could save some of its precious funds by contracting Western firms instead of Eastern ones. The point here isn’t to discuss the merits of this argument, but just to warn that it might become a weaponized infowar tool in the future.
Syrian citizens hold portraits of President Bashar al-Assad as they protest against sanctions outside the EU offices in Damascus, Sept 2011.
So long as the EU lifted its unilateral sanctions against Syria, then Damascus could theoretically include some of its companies in this prospective bidding process if there’s enough “grassroots” pressure for it to do so, though taking care to only allow “semi-friendly” nations who haven’t directly contributed to its people’s suffering to take part, such as Hungarian and Swedish ones for example instead of French and British. Even in the event that this scenario doesn’t come to pass, that doesn’t mean that unconditional anti-Syrian sanctions relief couldn’t also strengthen Western interests in the post-conflict country.
For instance, the EU might give tacit preferential trading rights to the “moderate rebels” so that they could attempt to monopolize some industries (whether in the “de-escalation zones” or beyond) and gain an edge over the competition in order to compensate for some of their political-territorial losses. It’s unlikely that the West will cut all of their ties with the proxy forces that they’ve supported for years already, and the same goes for those said surrogates not wanting to snip the umbilical cord that connects them to their patrons, so this could become a creative way for the US and its allies to attempt to establish asymmetrical influence in Syria after the war.
Ultimately, whether it’s the overt Hybrid War weapon of “strings-attached’ sanctions relief or the much more clandestine one of unconditionally removing the economic-humanitarian restrictions on Syria, it can be expected that the West will only do the “right thing” for the “wrong reasons”, and that Syria has every right to be skeptical of the EU’s intentions if such a move ever came to pass. That doesn’t imply that millions of regular people wouldn’t stand to benefit from this, but just that Damascus would do well to be wary of what might actually turn out to be sly maneuver designed to destabilize it with time.
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.
In its latest quarterly report, the IAEA again certified Iranian compliance with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Trump wants cooked CIA intelligence to show noncompliance, giving him a pretext to renege on the deal – not easily with IAEA certification.
Its report states
“(t)he Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities and locations outside facilities where nuclear material is customarily used (LOFs) declared by Iran under its Safeguards Agreement.”
“Evaluations regarding the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities for Iran remained ongoing. Since Implementation Day, the Agency has been verifying and monitoring the implementation by Iran of its nuclear-related commitments under the JCPOA.”
Iran hasn’t pursued construction of its Arak heavy water research reactor. It hasn’t produced or tested natural uranium pellets, fuel pins or assemblies designed for the reactor.
Existing uranium pellets and fuel assemblies remain stored – under “continuous Agency monitoring.”
Its stock of low-enriched uranium hasn’t exceeded the agreed limit of 300 kg. Its stock of heavy water is below the permitted 130 ton limit.
It hasn’t “carried out activities related to reprocessing at the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) and the Molybdenum, Iodine and Xenon Radioisotope Production (MIX) Facility or at any of the other facilities it has declared to the Agency.”
It hasn’t enriched uranium above its permitted “3.67& U-235.” The IAEA has continuous access to its nuclear facilities.
Trump’s claim of Iranian noncompliance is false. It’s enrichment activities strictly observe JCPOA guidelines.
Since January 2016, the IAEA certified Iranian compliance eight times – the latest at end of August.
Last week, Trump’s UN envoy Nikki Haley unsuccessfully tried pressuring IAEA officials to inspect Iranian military sites – what America and other NATO members don’t permit in their own countries.
The Trump administration alone among P5+1 nations opposes the JCPOA.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said it represents “the European way to foreign policy,” calling the deal “a commitment undertaken by the entire international community on the one side and Iran on the other, supported by a resolution of the UN Security Council, and certified regularly by the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
If Trump declares Iranian noncompliance in mid-October, America and Israel will be isolated among the world community of nations on this issue.
Comments from Rich Rowe, President & CEO, Arkema Inc. on our Site in Crosby, Texas
The nation is dealing with a natural disaster of enormous magnitude in Texas. As part of that, Arkema is dealing with a critical issue at our Crosby, Texas facility.
Please let me begin by thanking our brave and dedicated employees who safely shut down the site before Hurricane Harvey made landfall. Like everyone else in the region, these folks were dealing with personal and family issues caused by the storm, yet they performed their tasks in the most professional manner.
Next, we apologize to everyone impacted by our situation, particularly in combination with the horrible conditions visited upon the region by the hurricane. We are working closely with many governmental authorities and first responders, and we want to thank them for their guidance, professionalism and dedication. People are working around the clock under extremely challenging conditions, and the work thus far has been tremendous. We cherish the strong relationships and support we have received from our neighbors, the United States Department of Homeland Security, Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency, Harris County Fire Marshall’s Office, Harris County Texas Sheriff’s Office, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and our elected representatives.
Our Crosby facility makes organic peroxides, a family of compounds that are used in everything from making pharmaceuticals to construction materials. But organic peroxides may burn if not stored and handled under the right conditions. At Crosby, we prepared for what we recognized could be a worst case scenario. We had redundant contingency plans in place. Right now, we have an unprecedented 6 feet of water at the plant. We have lost primary power and two sources of emergency backup power. As a result, we have lost critical refrigeration of the materials on site that could now explode and cause a subsequent intense fire. The high water and lack of power leave us with no way to prevent it. We have evacuated our personnel for their own safety. The federal, state and local authorities were contacted a few days ago, and we are working very closely with them to manage this matter. They have ordered the surrounding community to be evacuated, too.
We are setting up a call center to handle questions from neighbors and others affected, and a claims center to handle financial claims related to Arkema’s Crosby situation. Also, we’ve reached out to local crisis leaders in Harris County and offered our support. Once more, we apologize for impacting their lives. We thank the governmental authorities who are working closely with us for their guidance and professionalism, and will continue to work with them until this situation is resolved.
Thank you.
* * *
Earlier
Yesterday we reported, that in a potentially disastrous outcome from the Harvey flooding, a chemical plant in Crosby, Texas belonging to French industrial giant Arkema SA, has announced it is evacuating workers due to the risk of an explosion, after primary power was knocked out and flooding swamped its backup generators. The French company said the situation at the plant “has become serious” and said that it is working with the Department of Homeland Security and the State of Texas to set up a command post in a suitable location near our site.
The plant, which produces explosive organic peroxides and ammonia, was hit by more than 40 inches of rain and has been heavily flooded, running without electricity since Sunday. The plant was closed since Friday but has had a skeleton staff of about a dozen in place. Following the flood surge, the plant’s back-up generators also failed. The threat emerged once the company could no longer maintain refrigeration for chemicals located on site, which have to be stored at low temperatures. The plant lost cooling when backup generators were flooded and then workers transferred products from the warehouses into diesel-powered refrigerated containers.
“refrigeration on some of our back-up product storage containers has been compromised due to extremely high water, which is unprecedented in the Crosby area. We are monitoring the temperature of each refrigeration container remotely.”
It then warned that “while we do not believe there is any imminent danger, the potential for a chemical reaction leading to a fire and/or explosion within the site confines is real.”
One day later, and with the torrential rains finally over, has the situation at the giant peroxide chemical plant stabilized? Unfortunately, according to Reuters, the answer is no.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday afternoon, Richard Rowe, the chief executive of Arkema’s American operations said that
“the company has no way of preventing chemicals from catching fire or exploding at its heavily flooded plant.”
Rowe added that the company now expects chemicals on site to catch fire or explode within the next six days. Since the plant remains flooded by about six feet of water, “the company has no way to prevent” this worst-case outcome.
Anticipating the worst, the company earlier evacuated all remaining workers, while Harris County ordered the evacuation of residents in a 1.5-mile radius of the plant that makes organic chemicals.
Previously, Arkema said that it was working with Homeland Security and the state of Texas to set up a command post near the site. As we reported on Tuesday, Rep. Ted Poe, a Texas Republican, wrote on Twitter that the Crosby plant “is in danger of fire/explosion. The local area is being evacuated. Stay out of area.”
Chemical Plant that makes ammonia in Crosby is in danger of fire/explosion. The local area is being evacuated. Stay out of area. #Harveyhttps://t.co/zCtnCGO5w8
Previously Reuters added that other chemical plants have also shuttered production in Texas because of the hurricane, however none are in such a precarious state. These include Anglo-Swiss chemicals firm Ineos Group Holdings, which said it has been forced to shut down facilities in Texas. Chocolate Bayou Works and Battleground Manufacturing Complex, and INEOS Nitriles’ Green Lake facility are following hurricane procedures and are temporarily shut down, spokesman Charles Saunders said. Huntsman Corp said it has closed six chemical plants in Texas, along with its global headquarters and advanced technology center in Texas.
Featured image: A Coast Guard MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter crew from Air Station Houston conducts an overflight of a southeastern Houston neighborhood on 27 August 2017. (Source: U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Corinne Zilnicki)
We knew this was coming. This August the rains have come with a vengeance. But we knew something like this was coming. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its summary of the expected impacts of climate change. In dry, academic language, the report sets out the evidence: climate change will bring extremes of precipitation: more droughts and more deadly floods.
Early in the morning on 14 August, heavy rains in Freetown, Sierra Leone triggered a mudslide. Muddy rubble cascaded down the hillside, destroying homes and burying people inside them. The official death toll from this tragedy has now risen to over a thousand.
At the same time, monsoon rains were causing deaths in India and Nepal. In Himachal, two buses with their passengers were swept into a gorge in a landslide. Fatalities from flooding are not uncommon in the summer monsoon season, but this time the heavy rains just kept coming, leading to extraordinary flooding in Nepal, northwestern Indian states and downstream Bangladesh, where the floods submerged over a third of the country.
A storm was brewing
By 24 August, official estimates were 41 million affected across the three nations of India, Nepal and Bangladesh and at least 900 killed. The next day the reported death toll had risen to 1200. And yet this catastrophe was barely reported in the western media.
Meanwhile, a storm was brewing off the southeastern US coast. Having been downgraded to a tropical wave, Harvey picked up energy again and regained hurricane status as it moved across the abnormally warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It also picked up unusual amounts of moisture. As it hit Houston and surrounding areas of Texas, there was no lack of media attention this time.
Experts had warned that Houston was particularly vulnerable to flooding in a warming climate because of several factors. In a low lying plain, with poor draining clay soils, and with the expanding city laying down ever more concrete, the water management plan is in no way fit for increasing storm risks. But this was a storm that would overwhelm even the most well-prepared city.
In the first 72 hours over a metre of rain fell in some areas. Dramatic photographs showed freeways turned into deep rivers, while stranded families sent out desperate pleas for rescue on social media.
Just days earlier, Donald Trump had signed an order scrapping stricter rules around flood risk for federal investment in infrastructure. As Harvey’s rains fell, Trump’s top official at the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, dismissed the subject of linking the storm to climate change. When asked in an interview, Pruitt described those discussing cause and effect as ‘opportunistic’.
Heavy load
So there may be no immediate impetus from disaster to climate action. The media plays an important role here. There are three ways that media can let us down in reporting climate change-influenced disasters.
The first is when the media give prominence to events which are easy to report, rather than those which are truly significant. Harvey is a significant story deserving major coverage. Yet before Harvey hit Texas (and hit the headlines), where were the reports on the South Asian flooding?
Even given the general tendency to treat the deaths of poor people in non-western countries as non-newsworthy, the death toll was then climbing towards a thousand and 41 million affected across three countries. But someone actively following the news could easily be completely unaware of these floods. The story was given cursory coverage then dropped completely out of the news for at least five days, to be picked up again on 29 August, this time more widely.
The second weakness is a failure to be upfront about the links between these disasters and climate change. In the case of Harvey, there are at least three links. One of the most significant is that the warmer than normal waters in the Gulf of Mexico contributed to Harvey’s heavy load of atmospheric moisture.
In the first five days, it dumped some 20 trillion gallons of water on Texas (one sixth the volume of Lake Erie). Warm waters also give hurricanes more energy. Another factor is that storm surge along the coast rides on top of raised sea levels. These are particularly significant on the Gulf Coast of Texas – sea levels there have risen over 30cm in 50 years.
Still devastated
One difficulty journalists have in reporting climate change is sustaining interest in a vast slow-motion catastrophe that plays out over a timescale of decades or more. But right now the drama and tragedy is immediate, and there is no excuse for not being clear about what is at stake and the choices we are making.
The final way the media can fail in their coverage is not to stick around. Flood waters make for dramatic photography. But what comes next can be just as devastating. With a lack of clean water, the displaced people of Bangladesh, especially the children, are at risk of deadly diseases such as cholera.
Many victims of the floods have lost all their possessions. Bangladesh was already experiencing food supply problems after flash flooding wiped out a large part of the rice crop in April. Now more vast areas of crops have been washed away.
And although the US is a rich country, even there, for those who have least, it is hardest to get it back. A year ago, Baton Rouge, Louisiana was hit by one of the worst floods in US history. One year on, poorer neighbourhoods are still devastated. For them, and for the people of Bangladesh, climate change is already here. Will we pay attention?
Claire James is the campaigns coordinator for the Campaign against Climate Change. She tweets at @campaigncc.
The number of dead and the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey continue to mount in what is already one of the worst disasters in American history.
The confirmed death toll from the region surrounding Houston, Texas remains at 31, but this is expected to rise rapidly as search-and-rescue teams carry out house-to-house searches now that floodwaters are beginning to subside. Meanwhile, now-Tropical Depression Harvey is making its way up through the Southeast, dumping heavy rains on Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.
At a White House press conference Thursday, Tom Bossert, President Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor, reported that an estimated 100,000 homes have been affected by the storm. AccuWeather, a private weather forecasting company, predicts that total damages from the storm could reach $190 billion, or more than 1 percent of US Gross Domestic Product.
One of the many thousands of homes destroyed by Hurricane Harvey in the greater Houston area. (Credit: Army National Guard, Sgt. 1st Class Malcolm McClendon)
Adding to the danger, two explosions Thursday rocked the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Texas, approximately 20 miles northeast of Houston, sparking a fire and sending noxious black smoke into the air. A 1.5-mile radius around the plant was evacuated, and 21 emergency responders were treated for chemical exposure at a local hospital and discharged.
Company officials had warned earlier in the week that the facility, which produces highly volatile organic peroxides, was primed for an explosion after it was inundated by floodwaters and the refrigeration units necessary to keep the chemicals from exploding lost power. More explosions are expected at the plant, and it is not known how many other such facilities in the region are at risk.
Arkema and many other chemical companies opposed additional safety regulations issued by the Obama administration in the wake of several accidents in Texas, including an explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas City in 2013 that killed 15 workers. The Trump administration postponed enforcement of the regulations in June.
Further east, more than 120,000 people in the city of Beaumont, Texas, home to some of the country’s largest oil refineries, were left without access to clean water after the city’s main water pump was overwhelmed by flood waters Wednesday night. The city’s hospital, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas, was forced to close and transfer patients to other facilities across the region.
In Tyler County, north of Beaumont, the Army Corp of Engineers was forced to open the floodgates of the Angelina-Neches Dam Wednesday, as rising waters threatened to overflow barriers. All residents were told to leave the region immediately.
“Anyone who chooses to not heed this directive cannot expect to be rescued and should write their social security numbers in permanent marker on their arm so their bodies can be identified,” Tyler County Emergency Management warned on Facebook. “The loss of life and property is certain.” The post ended with the declaration: “GET OUT OR DIE!”
Officials at every level of government continue to congratulate themselves on their response to the storm, while the endless media commentary avoids any discussion of those responsible for the disaster. If such a calamity had happened in Russia, China or Iran it would undoubtedly be cited as evidence of government incompetence and the failures of officials and urban planners.
US Vice President Mike Pence, fresh from a trip to West Virginia, where he pushed the Trump administration’s plans or a massive tax handout to the rich, visited Corpus Christi, Texas on Thursday. Pence echoed the empty pledges of other government officials that Washington will assist in ensuring a full recovery.
At a press conference, Pence repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether the White House would insist on budget cuts to offset any emergency federal funding—a position that Pence took as a congressman in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Record flooding has wiped out whole swathes of Houston and the surrounding areas. (Credit: Army National Guard, Sgt. 1st Class Malcolm McClendon)
White House Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced at a White House press conference Thursday that President Donald Trump had decided to donate $1 million of his own money to relief efforts, pocket change for the billionaire real estate developer.
Trump’s PR stunt will be viewed with contempt by the broader population, who have seen tens of thousands left homeless due to negligence by the government and large corporations, including the developers who paved over Houston’s wetlands and prairie lands.
Throughout the week, government officials have promoted volunteerism as the way to confront the flooding that has swept over southeastern Texas. The inept rescue effort by the Coast Guard and other government agencies has been buttressed by the response of thousands of volunteers who have risked their own lives to save people trapped by the floodwater.
The destruction wrought by Hurricane Harvey has exposed the reality of social life in the United States, the richest country in the world. Decades of increasing social inequality, official neglect and the decay of social infrastructure have left the fourth-largest city in the country, Houston, completely vulnerable to the hurricane.
The drowning of Houston comes exactly 12 years after Hurricane Katrina devastated nearby New Orleans and the surrounding area, killing more than 1,800 people. It comes seven years after the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed eleven and produced the worst environmental disaster in the history of the country.
Each of these disasters, in different ways, was the product of criminal negligence on the part of the American financial oligarchy. Trillions of dollars have been made available to bail out Wall Street and finance US military operations abroad, yet nothing has been done to prepare for entirely predictable extreme weather events like Harvey and Katrina. In the case of the BP oil spill, corporate cost cutting and deregulation left the entire region to the mercy of the profit drive of a giant oil company.
The cricket punter will be delighted by this result. Those favouring status quos and sides with long stretches of dominance will not. The first test match between Bangladesh and Australia in Mirpur was unnervingly close, delighting the home team which still remains callow in international cricketing competition.
Prior to playing the touring Australian side in the test opener of a two-match series, the Bangladeshi record of victories was skimpy, being roughly one in ten. Material, however, was being added. Over the last twelve months, both England and Sri Lanka have afforded scalps to a team that is, least at home, is on the rise.
For Steve Smith, the smarting Australian skipper, history was again being made against his side. Yet again, it was made with the tantalising play of the turning ball on dusty zipping pitches. Chasing a modest 265 for victory made more problematic by conditions, the survivors from the previous day were starting at a cool, confident 2/109.
David Warner, already a masterful centurion and a battling Steve Smith on 37, seemed in charge. But this entire match has been a sequence of false hopes and marked collapses, punctuated by sessions of gritty holdouts and rearguards. The loss of eight wickets for a paltry 86 runs doomed the Australian effort, but it would be folly to dismiss it wholesale.
Stunning as this home team display was, the turning ball remains that all bewitching means that undoes current Australian sides. Solid gains are whittled away; inroads are made with destabilising guile. Poor shot selection, naturally, plays its part. There are also undue burdens played on Warner and Smith, who, when on song, keep the effort consistent and even formidable.
Sri Lanka encountered many of these problems when rolling the visiting Australians with a near casual ruthlessness in a 3-0 home series victory; humbler, less experienced Bangladesh risk doing the same.
The hatchets were duly procured by an unforgiving Australian press. For a scathing Peter Lalor, Australian sides had developed an aversion to winning on the subcontinent spanning 23 matches over 12 years, the result of contracting “an almost fatal dust allergy.”[1] (Not entirely: Australia did net two lonely victories.)
Chip Le Grand of The Australian did not stretch the invalid theme, preferring to employ that tried approach of damning the victors with faint praise while heaping opprobrium upon the defeated.[2] Paupers on about $26,136 a year, in other words, had triumphed over the millionaires, the seditious underclass over the hapless ruling class.
“Although Warner earned his keep with a brilliant second-innings century, others played like millionaires.”
Glen Maxwell was singled out for special treatment, having made a “reckless shot to the first ball after lunch”. For Le Grand, the question had to be asked:
“Did our national team expend too much energy on the Australian Cricket Association picket line and not enough in the nets?”
The Herald Sun pressed the remuneration issue, reminding readers about those cricketers who had been in an ongoing pay dispute with Cricket Australia that had yielded them a five-year agreement worth some $500 million.
“What happened in Dhaka was on one hand wonderful for world cricket and on the other embarrassing for a pack of overpaid prima donnas.”
By all means, strike over pay, went the paper, but “make sure you back it up in the field of play. Losing to Bangladesh is hardly doing that.”
Such acid commentary suggests, according to the solid observations of Assistant Editor to ESNcricinfo Daniel Brettig, the lingering damage sustained by the pay dispute.[3] Cricket Australia’s targeting of the national team during the sniping sessions opened a hunting season that has yet to close, despite the official memorandum of understanding between the combatants.
Another facet of the rage directed against the Australian team comes from the old wisdom of playing foes that merit attention. To lose against a formidable, long engaged opponent (Brettig calls them “bankable”) such as England or India is a far bitter pill to swallow than losing to the unknown, the minnow, the usurper.
Rather than taking the stern, austere ground of criticism, one directed against the well paid, Bangladesh should be feted. Former test players certainly thought so, with India’s Sachin Tendulkar exclaiming that,
“Test cricket is thriving.”[4]
But it was the comment from Pakistan’s formidable bowling all-rounder Wasim Akram that summed up the celebratory note, the exhilaration of the gladiatorial context that tends to get lost in the monetary equation. “Great to see Bangladesh win against mighty Australians. Test cricket still is and always will be the ultimate form of the game.”[5]
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
“If we’re training cops as soldiers, giving them equipment like soldiers, dressing them up as soldiers, when are they going to pick up the mentality of soldiers?”— Arthur Rizer, former police officer
America, you’ve been fooled again.
While the nation has been distracted by a media maelstrom dominated by news of white supremacists, Powerball jackpots, Hurricane Harvey, and a Mayweather v. McGregor fight, the American Police State has been carving its own path of devastation and destruction through what’s left of the Constitution.
What this means is that police agencies, only minimally deterred by the Obama administration’s cosmetic ban on certain types of military gear, can now go hog-wild.
Contrast the idyllic Mayberry with the American police state of today, where local police—clad in jackboots, helmets and shields and wielding batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, and assault rifles—have increasingly come to resemble occupying forces in communities across the country.
As Alyssa Rosenberg writes for The Washington Post,
That’s really what this is about: a war on the American citizenry waged by local law enforcement armed to the teeth with weapons previously only seen on the battlefield
As investigative journalists Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz reveal,
Thanks to Trump, this transformation of America into a battlefield is only going to get worse.
To be fair, Trump did not create this totalitarian nightmare. However, he has legitimized it and, in so doing, has also accelerated the pace at which we fall deeper into the clutches of outright tyranny.
In the hands of government agents, whether they are members of the military, law enforcement or some other government agency, these weapons of war have become accepted instruments of tyranny, routine parts of America’s day-to-day life, a byproduct of the rapid militarization of law enforcement over the past several decades.
It’s a militarized approach to make-work programs, except in this case, instead of unnecessary busy work to keep people employed, communities across America are finding themselves “gifted” with unnecessary drones, tanks, grenade launchers and other military equipment better suited to the battlefield in order to fatten the bank accounts of the military industrial complex.
In addition to being an astounding waste of taxpayer money, this equipping of police with military-grade equipment and weapons also gives rise to a dangerous mindset in which police adopt a warrior-like, more aggressive approach to policing.
The danger of giving police high-power toys and weapons is that they will feel compelled to use it in all kinds of situations that would never normally warrant battlefield gear, weapons or tactics.
Just look at Trump: he’s been on the police unions’ payroll from the moment they endorsed him for president, and he’s paid them back generously by ensuring that police can kill, shoot, taser, abuse and steal from American citizens with impunity.
Still, the responsibility rests with “we the people.”
The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
Featured image: Ephraim Benjamin, a Mossad agent [masralarabia]
Libyan security forces have arrested a Mossad agent who held a leading position in Daesh in the north-eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, the Israeli website Inian Merkazi reported.
The Hebrew website whose name translates to “Central Issues”, added that Ephraim Benjamin is a Jewish spy and that he mingled with Libyans following the 2011 revolution that resulted in the ouster of former dictator Moammer Ghaddafi.
Masr Alarabia website described him as one of Mossad’s “Arabists” who are characterised by Arab features and who speak Arabic fluently in local dialects.
Israeli Arabists are known for infiltrating Palestinian protests and arresting demonstrators, as well as assassinating anti-occupation Palestinian activists, according to Masr Alarabia.
Benjamin had reportedly become a prominent imam of a large mosque in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city, then he became a Daesh leader who commanded 200 fighters from the militant group.
The spy, who was known in Libya as Abu Hafs, was arrested two months ago and accused by the Libyan authorities of gathering intelligence information on Daesh for Mossad.
The Israeli website cited the incident as evidence used by Arab media to justify the common conspiratorial argument propagated in some Arab circles about Israel being behind the rise of Daesh in the region.
Libyan media outlets describe Benjamin as the “Mossad sheikh” who was arrested by local authorities.
Daesh began to operate in Libya in 2015. Many believe that the video posted by the group on 12 February of the same year from the city of Sirte, featuring the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians, as the official announcement of the militant group’s emergence in the north African country even if militant operations were believed to have been committed by Daesh prior to that date.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered a crushing rebuke to the perennial optimists roused to hopes of imminent peace by the visit to the Middle East last week of Donald Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. At an event on Monday in the West Bank celebrating the half-centenary of Israeli occupation, Netanyahu effectively admitted that US efforts to revive the peace process would prove another charade.
There would be no dismantling of the settlements or eviction of their 600,000 inhabitants – the minimum requirement for a barely feasible Palestinian state.
“We are here to stay forever,” Netanyahu reassured his settler audience. “We will deepen our roots, build, strengthen and settle.”
So where is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heading if the two-state solution is dead? The answer: back to its origins. That will entail another desperate numbers battle against the Palestinians – with Israel preparing to create new categories of “Jews” so they can be recruited to the fray.
Demography was always at the heart of Israeli policy. During the 1948 war that founded a Jewish state on the ruins of the Palestinian homeland, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled in a campaign that today would be termed ethnic cleansing. By the end, a large native Palestinian majority had been reduced to less than a fifth of the new state’s population. David Ben Gurion, the country’s founding father, was unperturbed. He expected to swamp this rump group with Jews from Europe and the Arab world.
But the project foundered on two miscalculations.
First, Ben Gurion had not factored in the Palestinian minority’s far higher birth rate. Despite waves of Jewish immigrants, Palestinians have held fast, at 20 per cent of Israel’s citizenry. Israel has fought a rearguard battle against them ever since. Studies suggest that the only Israeli affirmative action programme for Palestinian citizens is in family planning.
Israeli demographic scheming was on show again last week. An investigation by the Haaretz newspaper found that in recent years, Israel has stripped of citizenship potentially thousands of Bedouin, the country’s fastest-growing population. Israel claims bureaucratic “errors” were made in registering their parents or grandparents after the state’s founding.
Meanwhile, another Rubicon was crossed this month when an Israeli court approved revoking the citizenship of a Palestinian convicted of a lethal attack on soldiers. Human rights groups fear that, by rendering him stateless, the Israeli right has established a precedent for conditioning citizenship on “loyalty”.
Justice minister Ayelet Shaked underlined that very point this week when she warned the country’s judges that they must prioritise demography and the state’s Jewishness over human rights.
The second miscalculation arrived in 1967. In seizing the last fragments of historic Palestine but failing to expel most of the inhabitants, Israel made itself responsible for many hundreds of thousands of additional Palestinians, including refugees from the earlier war.
The “demographic demon”, as it is often referred to in Israel, was held at bay only by bogus claims for many decades that the occupation would soon end. In 2005, Israel bought a little more breathing space by “disengaging” from the tiny Gaza enclave and its 1.5 million inhabitants.
Now, in killing hopes of Palestinian statehood, Netanyahu has made public his intention to realise the one settler-state solution. Naftali Bennett, Netanyahu’s chief rival in the government, is itching to ignore international sentiment and begin annexing large parts of the West Bank.
There is a problem, however. At least half the population in Netanyahu’s Greater Israel are Palestinian. And with current birth rates, Jews will soon be an indisputable minority – one ruling over a Palestinian majority.
That is the context for understanding the report of a government panel – leaked last weekend – that proposes a revolutionary reimagining of who counts as a Jew and therefore qualifies to live in Israel (and the occupied territories).
Israel’s 1950 Law of Return already casts the net wide, revising the traditional rabbinical injunction that a Jew must be born to a Jewish mother. Instead, the law entitles anyone with one Jewish grandparent to instant citizenship. That worked fine as long as Jews were fleeing persecution or economic distress. But since the arrival of 1 million immigrants following the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the pool of new Jews has dried up.
The United States, even in the Trump era, has proved the bigger magnet. The Jerusalem Post newspaper reported last month that up to one million Israelis may be living there. Worse for Netanyahu, it seems that at least some are included in Israeli figures to bolster its demographic claims against the Palestinians.
Recent trends show that the exodus of Israelis to the US is twice as large as the arrival of American Jews to Israel. With 150 Israeli start-ups reported in Silicon Valley alone, that tendency is not about to end.
With a pressing shortage of Jews to defeat the Palestinians demographically, the Netanyahu government is considering a desperate solution. The leaked report suggests opening the doors to a new category of “Jewish” non-Jews. According to Haaretz, potentially millions of people worldwide could qualify. The new status would apply to “crypto-Jews”, whose ancestors converted from Judaism; “emerging Jewish” communities that have adopted Jewish practices; and those claiming to be descended from Jewish “lost tribes”.
Though they will initially be offered only extended stays in Israel, the implication is that this will serve as a prelude to widening their entitlement to eventually include citizenship. The advantage for Israel is that most of these “Jewish” non-Jews currently live in remote, poor or war-torn parts of the world, and stand to gain from a new life in Israel – or the occupied territories.
That is the great appeal to the die-hard one-staters like Netanyahu and Bennett. They need willing footsoldiers in the battle to steal Palestinian land, trampling on internationally recognised borders and hopes of peace-making.
Will they get away with it? They may think so, especially at a time when the US administration claims it would show “bias” to commit itself to advancing a two-state solution. Trump has said the parties should work out their own solution. Netanyahu soon may have the arithmetic to do so.
A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “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 Rohingyas – or at least some Rohingyas – are now being projected as terrorists, as “Jihadists” out to kill Myanmar soldiers and civilians. Myanmar leaders including Aung San SuuKyi have spoken along these lines.
This view of the Rohingyas is being propagated by the Myanmar government with greater zeal since a small armed group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked security forces on 9 October 2016. These attacks have continued in recent weeks. In this new wave of violence it is alleged that 12 security personnel were killed while the Myanmar military and border police have killed 77 Rohingya Muslims.
The way Aung San SuuKyi and her government colleagues have framed the clashes ignores the brutal massacres committed by the military over a long period of time. The oppression and persecution of the Rohingyas by the State and other forces has been thoroughly documented by the United Nations Human Rights Council and other independent human rights groups. It is well-known that as a community the Rohingyas were stripped of Myanmar citizenship in 1982, deprived of basic human rights, tortured, imprisoned, and forced to flee their home province of Rakhine. This is why there are tens of thousands of Rohingyas living in squalid conditions in Bangladesh or struggling to survive in a number of countries from Malaysia to Saudi Arabia. They have been described by the UN itself as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities. Simply put, the Rohingyas are the victims of a slow genocide, to quote Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen.
To condemn the violence of a miniscule fraction of the Rohingyas without taking into account their massive marginalisation and severe oppression is a travesty of truth and justice. It is extreme desperation and hopelessness that has forced some of them to resort to violence. Of course, violence is not the solution. It will not help to restore the rights of the Rohingyas, especially their right to citizenship.
Our concern is that the violence will escalate. The signs are already there. Given the underlying religious connotations of the conflict — though the conflict itself is not rooted in religion per se — it is not inconceivable that the violence will spread beyond Myanmar’s borders and engulf Muslim and Buddhist communities in other parts of Southeast Asia. This would be catastrophic for ASEAN, a regional grouping in which 42% of the population is Muslim and another 40% is Buddhist.
Finding workable solutions to the Myanmar — Rohingya conflict is therefore of utmost importance. It is in this regard that the ‘Final Report of the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State’ under the chairmanship of former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, deserves the urgent attention of all stakeholders. The Report announced in August 2017 calls for a review of the 1982 citizenship law and notes that
“Myanmar harbours the largest community of stateless people in the world.”
It urges the government to abolish distinctions between different types of citizens.
Other recommendations pertain to reduction of the poverty rate in Rakhine state which is 78%, improving the socio-economic condition of the people, enhancing access to health services and education, ensuring freedom of movement and encouragingpeople’s participation and representation. Though the Report is worded with a great deal of caution and diplomacy, it does send an unambiguous message to the powers-that-be in Myanmar that the status quo cannot be allowed to persist and that change has to take place. That message is significant considering that the Commission was actually initiated by the government.
Will the government take heed? So far there is no indication that it will respond positively to the Commission’s recommendations. This is not surprising. It is the harsh authoritarianism of the government embodied in the power of the military that is primarily responsible for the targeting of the Rohingya as the “ethnic other.” This is what has resulted in the genocide that we are witnessing today.
Even if the Myanmar government does not act of its own volition, the Kofi Annan Report can be used to persuade other governments to pressurise Myanmar to act. Apart from ASEAN governments, special efforts should be made by civil society groups and the media to convince Beijing, Tokyo, New Delhi, Islamabad and Washington and London that they demand that the Myanmar government protects all its citizens without discrimination. If it fails to do so, these capitals should review their economic and/or military ties with Naypyidaw.
It is with the aim of persuading the leadership in Naypyidaw to change its behaviour that the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) is holding its concluding session in Kuala Lumpur on the treatment of the Rohingyas, Kachins and other minorities in Myanmar from the 18th to the 22nd of September 2017. As more and more voices plead for justice and compassion on behalf of the oppressed who knows they may eventually pierce the walls of Naypyidaw.
Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).
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The Rohingyas – or at least some Rohingyas – are now being projected as terrorists, as “Jihadists” out to kill Myanmar soldiers and civilians. Myanmar leaders including Aung San SuuKyi have spoken along these lines.
This view of the Rohingyas is being propagated by the Myanmar government with greater zeal since a small armed group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked security forces on 9 October 2016. These attacks have continued in recent weeks. In this new wave of violence it is alleged that 12 security personnel were killed while the Myanmar military and border police have killed 77 Rohingya Muslims.
The way Aung San SuuKyi and her government colleagues have framed the clashes ignores the brutal massacres committed by the military over a long period of time. The oppression and persecution of the Rohingyas by the State and other forces has been thoroughly documented by the United Nations Human Rights Council and other independent human rights groups. It is well-known that as a community the Rohingyas were stripped of Myanmar citizenship in 1982, deprived of basic human rights, tortured, imprisoned, and forced to flee their home province of Rakhine. This is why there are tens of thousands of Rohingyas living in squalid conditions in Bangladesh or struggling to survive in a number of countries from Malaysia to Saudi Arabia. They have been described by the UN itself as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities. Simply put, the Rohingyas are the victims of a slow genocide, to quote Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen.
To condemn the violence of a miniscule fraction of the Rohingyas without taking into account their massive marginalisation and severe oppression is a travesty of truth and justice. It is extreme desperation and hopelessness that has forced some of them to resort to violence. Of course, violence is not the solution. It will not help to restore the rights of the Rohingyas, especially their right to citizenship.
Our concern is that the violence will escalate. The signs are already there. Given the underlying religious connotations of the conflict — though the conflict itself is not rooted in religion per se — it is not inconceivable that the violence will spread beyond Myanmar’s borders and engulf Muslim and Buddhist communities in other parts of Southeast Asia. This would be catastrophic for ASEAN, a regional grouping in which 42% of the population is Muslim and another 40% is Buddhist.
Finding workable solutions to the Myanmar — Rohingya conflict is therefore of utmost importance. It is in this regard that the ‘Final Report of the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State’ under the chairmanship of former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, deserves the urgent attention of all stakeholders. The Report announced in August 2017 calls for a review of the 1982 citizenship law and notes that
“Myanmar harbours the largest community of stateless people in the world.”
It urges the government to abolish distinctions between different types of citizens.
Other recommendations pertain to reduction of the poverty rate in Rakhine state which is 78%, improving the socio-economic condition of the people, enhancing access to health services and education, ensuring freedom of movement and encouragingpeople’s participation and representation. Though the Report is worded with a great deal of caution and diplomacy, it does send an unambiguous message to the powers-that-be in Myanmar that the status quo cannot be allowed to persist and that change has to take place. That message is significant considering that the Commission was actually initiated by the government.
Will the government take heed? So far there is no indication that it will respond positively to the Commission’s recommendations. This is not surprising. It is the harsh authoritarianism of the government embodied in the power of the military that is primarily responsible for the targeting of the Rohingya as the “ethnic other.” This is what has resulted in the genocide that we are witnessing today.
Even if the Myanmar government does not act of its own volition, the Kofi Annan Report can be used to persuade other governments to pressurise Myanmar to act. Apart from ASEAN governments, special efforts should be made by civil society groups and the media to convince Beijing, Tokyo, New Delhi, Islamabad and Washington and London that they demand that the Myanmar government protects all its citizens without discrimination. If it fails to do so, these capitals should review their economic and/or military ties with Naypyidaw.
It is with the aim of persuading the leadership in Naypyidaw to change its behaviour that the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) is holding its concluding session in Kuala Lumpur on the treatment of the Rohingyas, Kachins and other minorities in Myanmar from the 18th to the 22nd of September 2017. As more and more voices plead for justice and compassion on behalf of the oppressed who knows they may eventually pierce the walls of Naypyidaw.
Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).
September 1st, 2017 by Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin (GEAB)
In the GEAB no 109 of November 2016 we wondered if “the euro would survive beyond the year 2017”. Five months later, we wish to deepen and complete our analysis. One reason for the weakness of the euro comes from the political anaemia of the euro zone, which is ultimately far too un-integrated to afford a single currency, or (the other side of the coin, if we may say it this way) afford misconceptions around this single currency for a heterogeneous zone.
The well known thesis driving us on this topic is the anchoring of the governance of the single currency in a common democracy which would immediately set in motion all the principles of solidarity, of economic convergence and upgrading, which would be required in order to make the eurozone a powerful and coherent economic player on a global scale.
But we see this road moving farther and farther away. The projects of a Parliament of the eurozone drafted by some (Schäuble, Macron and Hamon) are dramatically lacking imagination, merely wanting to bring together national and European parliamentarians (all elected on a national basis) from the eurozone into a new “democratic” entity; the latter actually has no chance of bringing Eurolanders together around the governance of their common currency.
The tendencies lean heavily to the massive return of European governance in the hands of the national level (project of the right-wing radicals in particular, but also of the centre wing with its multi-speed Europe project draft, exclusively based on the political strength of the re-legitimised member states, thus always eliminating the euro-citizens from the game … on the pretext that they are too anti-European. When we look at the solutions of all these policies, we can wonder who is truly the most anti-European).
Thus, in spite of our own convictions, here follows the anticipation of a compromise solution, which could bring together the characteristics of a reform of the euro “acceptable” by all (maintaining the euro while strengthening the autonomy of the member states), and acceptable from the point of view of our national leaders, the only masters on board this ungovernable Europe.
Euro currency: design problems
In our November article, we mentioned the case of the German reunification: despite a great disparity between East and West, the dream of a Deutsche Mark was made possible by a sufficiently powerful political will joined by a strong redistribution. However, these two conditions are currently totally absent in the eurozone (ironically, one of the most reluctant countries to increase solidarity seems to be Germany, who has experimented with the need for massive redistribution and who, back then, has seen that it was not even enough to completely bridge the gap between East and West).
Figure 1 – GDP per inhabitant in different German Länders, 2011. Source: Die Zeit.
The designers of the euro currency imagined that the latter would force political union, that it would be a crucial step towards strengthening a solidarity-based Europe. Almost twenty years after the introduction of the euro and in the light of the Greek crisis and all the other European psychodramas, there are unfortunately no signs of such a thing. Moreover, it is still not the case and it will not be in the near future either, given the exclusively national priorities promoted by most of our leaders … This poses a real problem, since the euro is designed to function only in a highly-integrated zone.
For example, the eurozone summit, which normally takes place twice a year, has not had a meeting since July 12, 2015, and has fully delegated the governance of the eurozone to the ECB which advances alone, without any political mandate, on the sole legitimacy granted to it by the treaties in terms of inflation rate (to be maintained at around 2%).
The criticism is known: the competitiveness of the eurozone countries have diverged too much since the introduction of the euro, but they cannot adjust their exchange rate to rebalance. This would require a significant redistribution of the most competitive countries to compensate for their deficit balance; but that redistribution is non-existent since no fiscal union or common budget exists. On the other hand, if we wanted to replace this redistribution by some good monetary policy, we would run up against the famous “impossible trinity” which shows that it is impossible to reconcile everything: with the “fixed exchange rate regime” imposed by the euro, and with the free mobility of capital within the zone, countries cannot possibly adopt a monetary policy adapted to their situation.
Figure 2 – The impossible Trinity of Mundell: the three vertices are impossible simultaneously. Source: Wikipedia.
This disparity between the countries of the eurozone, or rather their divergent trajectories due to a lack of political union, is indeed a real problem in designing the euro, unless a redistribution occurs within the monetary union. The so-called North-South divide in Europe is mirrored in the monetary policy habits of the European countries: before adopting the Maastricht convergence criteria, devaluations are frequent in the South in order to restore competitiveness to the economy obtained by the North more readily through “labour market reforms” (aka wage moderation)… Don’t miss our entire report in the latest GEAB bulletin / No 114, April 2017.
Featured image: National guardsmen rescue residents stranded by flooding after Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas coast, 27/08/2017, Houston, Texas. (Credit: Planetpix/Alamy Stock Photo)
Flood-prone Houston was woefully unprepared for days of torrential rainfall. Its drainage system can’t handle it.
Its regulatory policy is lax. Its overdevelopment eliminated green space. Its damaged oil refining, fuel and chemical facilities exacerbated the disaster, turning much of the area into a toxic swamp, land, air and water affected – certain to gravely harm public health.
Houston Health Department spokesman Porofirio Villarreal said there’s no need to test floodwater.
“It’s contaminated. There’s millions of contaminants.”
Exposure is hard to avoid.
Well water used by hundreds of thousands of residents in affected areas is contaminated. Before Harvey, Houston drinking water was ranked 6th worst in the nation.
Earlier water quality tests found 18 chemicals exceeding federal and state health guidelines. The national average is four.
Forty-six pollutants were detected, including benzene and other carcinogens. The national average is eight. Illegal alpha particles were found, a form of radiation.
City water was unsafe before Harvey. It’s much more hazardous to human health now.
Regulatory laxness is commonplace in America. Significant industrial disasters happen nationwide, aside from what acts of nature cause.
According to Political Correction, the 11 most significant ones in the last century included:
“Hawk’s Nest Tunnel: At least 764 dead
Texas City Port Explosion: Approx. 4,000 casualties
Consol No. 9 Mine Disaster: 78 dead
Sunshine Silver Mine Fire: 91 dead
L’Ambiance Plaza Building Collapse: 28 dead
Exxon Valdez Spill: 11M-30M gallons of crude spilled
Phillips 66 Explosion: 23 dead
Imperial Foods Fire: 25 dead
BP Refinery Explosion: 15 dead
Upper Big Branch Mine Collapse: 29 dead
Deepwater Horizon Drilling Disaster: 11 dead”
The International Business Times (IBT) said “Texas Republicans helped chemical (company Arkema) lobby against safety rules” – likely contributing to two August 31 explosions at its Crosby plant, 25 miles from Houston, releasing toxic smoke and chemicals into the air and water.
“The effort to stop the chemical plant safety rules was backed by top Texas Republican lawmakers, who have received big campaign donations from chemical industry donors,” IBT explained.
The plant was earlier fined for 10 “serious” violations this year. Five of the company’s six plants are near Texas’ southeast coast. Floodwaters pose a serious risk for further explosions, releasing more toxins into the air and water.
The Trump administration was instrumental in blocking chemical plant safety regulations. Supportive federal and state lawmakers received large industry political contributions.
Texas Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz got $408,000 and $234,000 respectively from the chemical industry over the course of their political careers.
It buys a lot of industry-friendly legislation and regulatory laxness.
The death toll from Hurricane Harvey stands at 31 so far. The human health toll, unfolding for months and years ahead, could be staggering – likely tens of thousands of area residents harmed, maybe millions, on their own with little or no federal or state aid.
United Nations Deputy Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Stephen O’Brien told the UN Security Council Wednesday that 27 people are being killed each day by the US-led siege of Raqqa. The Syrian city, controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, has been subjected to unrelenting US airstrikes and artillery bombardment for nearly three months, turning much of it into rubble.
Some 270,000 people have been driven out of the city, turned into homeless refugees, while an estimated 25,000 civilians remain trapped under the American firestorm. They are without food, access to clean water, electricity or medical care. Reports have come out of Raqqa that its residents have been reduced to eating grass and leaves to stave off starvation.
The UN’s chief adviser on the prevention of genocide, Adama Dieng, issued a separate statement condemning the “horrendous situation faced by civilians caught up in the offensive to retake the city from ISIS,” while the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein charged that “civilians—who should be protected at all times—are paying an unacceptable price.”
In other words, a war crime of monstrous dimensions is unfolding in plain sight, while its perpetrator, US imperialism, enjoys complete impunity.
On its Twitter account, the local monitoring group, Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, posts photographs daily of babies, children, men, women, the elderly and entire families perishing under the US bombs, missiles and shells, along with the utter devastation of the city’s residential neighborhoods.
The siege of Raqqa follows close on the heels of the even larger scale war crime consummated this summer in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, once the country’s second largest, where the death toll from nine months of bombing and shelling by the US and its Iraqi government allies has been estimated as high as 40,000.
All of this carnage is virtually blacked out of the US media, which only last year was engaged—in close coordination with the US government—in a full-throated campaign of feigned moral outrage over the Russian-backed offensive by the Syrian government to retake eastern Aleppo from Al Qaeda-linked and US-armed Islamist “rebels.”
Then the charge of “war crimes” was repeated incessantly; now there is only silence. Nothing could provide a more devastating exposure of the hypocrisy of “human rights” imperialism, the stock in trade of the Democratic Party, the so-called liberal press and the various pseudo-left groups that orbit around them, chiding Washington for failing to intervene more aggressively on the supposed behalf of the Syrian people.
Behind the lies and hypocrisy about human rights and terrorism, driving the current US interventions in both Iraq and Syria—like the continuous wars waged by US imperialism in the region over the past quarter century—is the attempt by Washington to assert its hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East at the expense of its regional and global rivals and thereby reverse the declining global position of American capitalism by means of military force.
The mass killing in Raqqa is part of an arc of US slaughter, stretching from the Horn of Africa through the Middle East and into South Asia, from Somalia to Afghanistan. US bombings, drone missile attacks and special operations kill missions are daily claiming the lives of innocent and impoverished civilians.
Everywhere, the US military is escalating its operations and changing its rules of engagement to pursue what US Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis described earlier this year as “annihilation tactics.”
On Thursday, Mattis announced that the Pentagon has begun a major military escalation in Afghanistan, committing what are reportedly another 4,000 American troops to the nearly 16-year-old US war.
The announcement of the escalation came immediately on the heels of the Pentagon’s admission that it had “low-balled” the number of troops already in Afghanistan, concealing the real scale of US operations from the American people. Instead of the official tally of 8,448 American troops, there are really 11,000 there today. Whether this includes all the so-called “temporary” deployments of troops rotated in and out is not clear. After the latest escalation, there will be at least 15,000 on the ground in Afghanistan.
While the Pentagon had said that its troops deployed in Iraq numbered 5,000, and in Syria, 500, it now acknowledges that both figures were also deliberate underestimates, with thousands more actually on the ground there as well. The US media slavishly echoed Pentagon figures that it knew to be false.
The Afghanistan escalation will spell a further increase in civilian casualties, which are already spiraling as a result of US operations. The United Nations mission to Afghanistan recorded a 43 percent increase in civilian deaths resulting from US airstrikes during the first six months of 2017 compared to the same period last year.
In three separate strikes beginning on Monday, at least 40 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed by US bombs dropped on Herat and Logar provinces.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has launched a major escalation of a bloody decades-long intervention in the strategically located but impoverished nation of Somalia, on the Horn of Africa, carrying out a campaign of drone strikes and special operations kill missions. Last Friday, US special forces troops operating with regime elements raided the village of Barire in the early morning hours, capturing 10 civilians and summarily executing them one by one. Outraged villagers brought the bodies, which included women and children, to the capital of Mogadishu to protest the massacre.
And in Yemen, the Trump administration has stepped up the indispensable arms and logistical support that Washington was already providing under Obama to a Saudi-led war that has assumed near-genocidal proportions. Saudi bombing raids have killed more than 12,000 civilians since the onset of the war in 2015, with the US supplying the bombs and missiles, including cluster munitions, banned under international law.
The latest US-Saudi atrocity occurred on Wednesday when bombs struck an oil tanker and gasoline station, igniting a fire that killed 13 people, all of them burned alive. Last week, an airstrike hit a hotel and three-story apartment building killing some 60 people.
The massive destruction of infrastructure and the blockading of Yemen’s ports and airspace have brought the country’s 22 million people to the brink of starvation while creating the conditions for the worst cholera epidemic in world history. Fully half a million Yemenis are infected, half of them children. The death toll from the disease has already reached 2,000 and is rapidly rising.
These war crimes are carried out behind the backs of the American people. The multiple and escalating interventions—virtually unreported by the media—are waged without a semblance of Congressional authorization or debate. Both Democrats and Republicans provide unstinting support to American militarism, an essential instrument for furthering the global looting operations of the ruling financial oligarchy.
Massive resources are lavished on the US war machine, while essential public services and social infrastructure are gutted, leaving millions unprotected from and devastated by increasingly frequent catastrophes like Hurricane Harvey.
About 10 years ago, Tim Wu, the Columbia Law professor who coined the term network neutrality, made this prescient comment: “To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king.”
Wu was right. And now, Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to acquire power. It has reached a dangerous point common to many monarchs: The moment where it no longer wants to allow dissent.
This summer, a small team of well-respected researchers and journalists, the Open Markets team at the New America think tank (where I have been a fellow since 2014), dared to speak up about Google, in the mildest way. When the European Union fined Google for preferring its own subsidiary companies to its rival companies in search results, it was natural that Open Markets, a group dedicated to studying and exposing distortions in markets, including monopoly power, would comment. The researchers put out a 150-word statement praising the E.U.’s actions. They wrote,
“By requiring that Google give equal treatment to rival services instead of privileging its own, [the E.U.] is protecting the free flow of information and commerce upon which all democracies depend.”
They called upon the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice and state attorneys general to apply the traditional American monopoly law, which would require separate ownership of products and services and the networks that sell products and services.
Google has been funding New America for years at high levels. Within 24 hours of the statement going live, Google representatives called New America’s leadership expressing their displeasure. Two planned hires for the Open Markets team suddenly were canceled. Three days later, the head of the Open Markets team, the accomplished journalist Barry C. Lynn, received a letter from the head of the think tank, demanding that the entire team leave New America. The reason? The statement praising the E.U.’s decision against Google was, according to New America President Anne-Marie Slaughter, “imperiling the institution.” (As of this writing, Slaughter has denounced the story as false, claiming that Lynn was dismissed for failures of “openness” and “collegiality.”)
When Google was founded in 1998, it famously committed itself to the motto: “Don’t be evil.” It appears that Google may have lost sight of what being evil means, in the way that most monarchs do: Once you reach a pinnacle of power, you start to believe that any threats to your authority are themselves villainous and that you are entitled to shut down dissent. As Lord Acton famously said,
“Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.”
Those with too much power cannot help but be evil. Google, the company dedicated to free expression, has chosen to silence opposition, apparently without any sense of irony.
Google did not always operate this way in relation to think tanks, even those it funded. The head of Google’s parent company, Eric Schmidt, served on the board of New America starting 2000 and was chairman from 2008 through May 2016. The Open Markets institute has long studied excessive corporate power and argued for the importance of antimonopoly laws. They were not previously punished for their work.
But in recent years, Google has become greedy about owning not just search capacities, video and maps, but also the shape of public discourse. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, Google has recruited and cultivated law professors who support its views. And as the New York Times recently reported, it has become invested in building curriculum for our public schools, and has created political strategy to get schools to adopt its products.
This year, Google is on track to spend more money than any company in America on lobbying. In 2015, it was the third biggest corporate spender, paying more than Exxon Mobil, Lockheed Martin or the Koch brothers on lobbying. Much of what it is spending its money on has nothing to do with technical details regarding its search engine and everything to do with using its power in its search engine to shut out some competitors and build power over others.
It is time to call out Google for what it is: a monopolist in search, video, maps and browser, and a thin-skinned tyrant when it comes to ideas.
The imperial overreach of Google in trying to shut down a group of five researchers proves the point that the initial release from Open Markets was trying to make: When companies get too much power, they become a threat to democratic free speech and to the liberty of citizens at large.
In 1948, in the Supreme Court case U.S. v. Columbia Steel Co., Justice William O. Douglas explained that the traditional philosophy of American antitrust law is that “all power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy … should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men.”
Google is forming into a government of itself, and it seems incapable of even seeing its own overreach. We, as citizens, must respond in two ways. First, support the brave researchers and journalists who stand up to overreaching power; and second, support traditional antimonopoly laws that will allow us to have great, innovative companies — but not allow them to govern us.
Google’s actions forced the Open Markets team to leave New America. But, thankfully, it did not succeed in silencing them entirely. Open Markets will continue on as a separate organization, which I will chair. Their work exposing corporate monopolies and advocating for regulation is more important than ever. Google shows us why.
Zephyr Teachout ran for governor of New York State in 2014. She teaches constitutional and property law at Fordham University Law School. Her latest book, Corruption in America, is a history of the corrosive influence of money in politics.
November 7, 1950: “Just when there was a lull in the fighting and it looked as if peace were possible, MacArthur staged a gigantic and murderous raid directly across from the Chinese frontier, destroying most of a city in an area where bombings had been forbidden to prevent border violations.” “There were reports,” The New York Times said October 15, that General MacArthur had ordered the first bombings of North Korean cities without authorization from Washington.” “General Stratemeyer, commander of the Far East Air Forces described the attack: ‘when fighter planes swept the area with machine guns, rockets, jellied gasoline bombs.
They were followed by ten of the superforts which dropped 1,000-pound high explosive bombs on railroad and highway bridges across the Yalu River and on the bridge approaches. After this, ‘the remaining planes used incendiaries exclusively on a two and a one-half mile built-up area along the southeast bank of the Yalu.’ The Air Force claimed that ninety percent of the city had been destroyed….There is an indifference to human suffering to be read between those lines which makes me as an American deeply ashamed of what was done that day at Sinuiju…
The mass bombing raid on Sinuiju November 8 was the beginning of a race between peace and provocation. A terrible retribution threatened the peoples of the Western world who so feebly permitted such acts to be done in their name. For it was by such means that the pyromaniacs hoped to set the world on fire.’”I.F. Stone, “The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1952, pages 178-179
Introduction. The Betrayal of the Founder of the United Nations, United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
All United Nations Security Council actions against North Korea are based upon an illegal and ruthless betrayal of the intent of United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the founder of the United Nations, the cherished organization which he established to preserve world peace. Perhaps the most scandalous betrayal of President Roosevelt has been the endorsement, by the United Nations Security Council, on June 27, 1950, of the attack on North Korea, in cynical and vicious violation of Roosevelt’s trust. This is the historic context of current United Nations venal and biased actions against North Korea. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in conceiving the United Nations, demanded that all Security Council resolutions be adopted by consensus, and only by consensus. President Roosevelt declared it categorically imperative that both the United States and the Soviet Union be in agreement in order for any United Nations action to be legitimate. As detailed in his letter to the Security Council of July 13, 1950, Soviet Deputy-Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko exposed the fact that “the Security Council, by its decision of 27 June, 1950 violated this most important principle of the United Nations organization.”
The consequence of this illegal resolution of June 27, 1950, and subsequent resolutions concerning North Korea were an attempted racist genocide of the North Korean people, and brought the world to the brink of World War III.
Part I. The History, 1950-1953
July 13, 1950, Letter from Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to United Nations Secretary-General, Trygve Lie:
“The illegal resolution of 27 June, 1950, adopted by the Security Council under pressure from the United States Government, shows that the Security Council is acting not as a body which is charged with the main responsibility for the maintenance of peace, but as a tool utilized by ruling circles of the United States for the unleashing of war. This resolution of the Security Council constitutes a hostile act against peace. If the Security Council valued the cause of peace, it should have attempted to reconcile the fighting sides in Korea before it adopted such a scandalous resolution. Only the Security Council and the United Nations Secretary-General could have done this. However, they did not make such an attempt, evidently knowing that such peaceful action contradicts the aggressors’ plans. It is impossible not to note the unseemly role played in that whole affair by the United Nations Secretary-General, Mr. Trygve Lie. Being under the obligation, by virtue of his position, to observe the exact fulfillment of the United Nations Charter, the Secretary-General, during discussion of the Korean question in the Security Council, far from fulfilling his direct duties, on the contrary obsequiously helped a gross violation of the Charter on the part of the United States government and other members of the Security Council. Thereby the Secretary-General showed that he is concerned not so much with strengthening the United Nations Organization and with promoting peace, as with how to help the United States’ ruling circles to carry out their aggressive plans with regard to Korea.”
Criminally Ignored in this Security Council “consideration” of the crisis in Korea is the letter dated 7 December 1950, from North Korea’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Pak Hen En, at Sinuiju, Korea, to the Security Council, describing the monstrous military slaughter to which the North Korean people were being subjected, and which was previously acknowledged by General Stratemeyer.
“They are waging war not only against armed forces but above all and chiefly against the civilian population. With the methodicalness of civilized barbarians, the American armed forces, bombing from the air, from the sea and by other means, have destroyed all the big industrial enterprises in Korea and a majority of the medium-sized and smaller enterprises, wiped small and large towns from the face of the earth, destroyed villages, and now that winter is coming on they have begun the systematic destruction of the remaining settlements. American aircraft carry out over a thousand sorties daily to bomb Korean towns and villages. Using scorched-earth tactics, the American air force drops on towns and villages in which there are no military targets of any kind an enormous quantity of incendiary and high-explosive bombs, destroying houses and private property of peaceful inhabitants, leaving millions of persons homeless and destitute. The systematic bombing of the remaining inhabited places became especially intense in the second half of October. American aircraft bombed and destroyed the towns of Sunchon, Kyachen, Gudyan, Hichen, Denchen and Koin. In November American aircraft systematically bombed and practically completely destroyed the towns of Kanggye, Sinuiju, Yideyu, Senchen, Gusen, Tmichen, Cholsan, Buktin, Kosan, Manpo, Tyungandin, Hweren and others. In the town of Kanggye out of 8,000 buildings less than 500 remain; in Sinuiju out of 12,000 buildings about 1,000 remain, in Chinnampo out of 1,500 buildings about 200 houses remain….The American interventionists are prepared to destroy every living thing, to turn Korea into a desert in order to carry out their rapacious plans for the enslavement of the Korean people. ….The American imperialists have issued a tacit ultimatum to the Korean people, either submit to the domination of American imperialism or we will destroy every living thing in your country.”
U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk said that the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops, and, of course, starving and drowning vast numbers of North Koreans.
Part II. The Current Crisis
Today, 67 years later, no peace treaty between the US and North Korea has been signed. Various factions of the US military are now calling for “preventive war” against North Korea. North Korea is desperately attempting to protect itself from a repetition of the devastation and slaughter of the first war against the DPRK.
At the UN Security Council meeting on August 5, 2017, Chinese Ambassador Liu called for:
“the establishment of a peace mechanism based on the suspension for suspension initiative, which calls for the DPRK to suspend its nuclear and missile activities, and for the United States and the Republic of Korea to suspend their large-scale military exercises….Beefing up military deployment on the peninsula is not in the interest of realizing denuclearization there or of maintaining regional peace and stability.”
At the same Security Council meeting, Russian Ambassador Nebenzia stated:
“All must understand that progress towards the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula will be difficult so long as the DPRK perceives a direct threat to its own security. For that is how the North Koreans view the build-up in military activity in the region, which takes on the forms of frequent wide-ranging exercises and manoeuvres by the United States and allies as they deploy strategic bombers, naval forces and aircraft carriers to the region….We hope that the assurances provided by the Secretary of State of the United States were sincere, and that the United States is not seeking to dismantle the existing situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or to forcibly unite the peninsula or intervene militarily in the country….Sanctions must not be used for the economic asphyxiation of the DPRK or to deliberately worsen the humanitarian situation. …Such sanctions may lead to the significant deterioration of the living conditions of the North Korean people –incidentally, as the United Nations humanitarian agencies are warning about.”
Resolution 2371, adopted at this meeting, can only be described as deliberate sadistic action by the drafters of the Resolution.
Resolution 2371 States:
“10. Decides that the DPRK shall not supply, sell or transfer, directly or indirectly, from its territory or by its nationals or using its flag vessel or aircraft, seafood (including fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and other aquatic invertebrates in all forms), and that all States shall prohibit the procurement of such items from the DPRK by their nationals, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, whether or not originating in the territory of the DPRK, and further decides that for sales and transactions of seafood (including fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and other aquatic invertebrates in all forms) for which written contracts have been finalized prior to the adoption of this resolution, all States may allow those shipments to be imported into their territories up to 30 days from the date of adoption of this resolution with notification provided to the Committee containing details on those imports by no later than 45 days after the date of adoption of this resolution.”
On August 18, the Associated Press in Beijing reported:
“Furious Chinese businesspeople said Friday that Beijing’s decision to enforce U.N. sanctions on North Korean seafood imports would hobble the economy of an entire northeastern city in China, sparking a rare public protest earlier this week after the surprise move suddenly choked off border trade. Anger swept the city of Hunchin, home to hundreds of seafood processing plants, after Beijing began refusing entry Tuesday to trucks carrying tons of North Korean seafood.”
Current relentless provocations of the DPRK seem designed and determined to infuriate North Korea, and seem intent upon the perpetuation of hostilities, a pattern alarmingly reminiscent of the first Korean War, endorsed, with dubious legality, by the United Nations.
On August 16, the UN Secretary-General held a stake-out with the UN press, and began by saying that more than three million people were killed in Korea, “with a civilian death rate higher than World War II. The Korean peninsula was left in ruins.” The Reuters correspondent asked :
“Ahead of the joint military exercises next week between the US and South Korea, which North Korea tends to see as an escalation of tensions, what’s your message to the North Korean leader and to President Trump ahead of those exercises?”
The Reuters correspondent phrased the question in a balanced way, which would have given the Secretary-General an opportunity for a balanced, impartial answer. Surprisingly, the Secretary-General failed to call on all parties to respect the need for de-escalation, and instead, he replied with a one-sided attribution of blame, and he stated, erroneously:
“everything started with the build-up of a potential nuclear capacity and of a number of missiles to be able to deliver that capacity.”
His accusation that North Korea was responsible for the perilous situation on the Korean peninsula is a distortion of the facts. Is he unaware of the statement by North Korean Ambassador Pak to the Security Council on October 14, 2006:
“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has clarified more than once that it would feel no need to possess even a single nuclear weapon once it was no longer exposed to the United States’ threat and after that country had dropped its hostile policy towards the DPRK and confidence had been built between the two countries.”
The first of two Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors is launched during a successful intercept test. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The Secretary-General’s reply to Reuters would have satisfied the US, the UK and France, but he was clearly ignoring the explicit statements by China and Russia, both of whom place equal, if not greater responsibility for this crisis upon the United States-Republic of Korea perpetual military provocations, exacerbating tensions on the peninsula, and perpetuating the state of alarm which has necessitated North Korea arming itself by all necessary means, to prevent the repetition of the horror inflicted upon it by the US, with the blessing of the UN between 1950-1953. The Secretary–General did not address the menace of the THAAD missiles which the United States has placed in South Korea, and which both Russia and China have stated, repeatedly, present an existential threat to their own survival, and which potentially destabilize the entire Eurasian continent.
For the past decades, the DPRK has repeatedly requested the Security Council to convene, on an emergency basis, meetings todiscuss and halt the provocative US-ROK military maneuvers. All urgent requests by the DPRK have been denied by the Security Council, which holds emergency meetings called by the US so frequently that the Security Council schedule appears to be determined by the US. Although, on August 16, 2017, the Reuters correspondent provided the opportunity for the UN Secretary-General to appropriately show at least token acknowledgement and respect for the agonies of the North Korean people, who are continually terrorized by these US-ROK manoeuvers, he failed to acknowledge the destructive and provocative character of the US-ROK military manoeuvers, thereby tacitly endorsing these dangerous, chronic threats to the survival of North Korea.
And inevitably, under these circumstances, as the Chinese-Russian call for “suspension for suspension” is ignored with impunity by the US-ROK, and, indeed, by the Secretary-General, himself, and since, on August 21 the US-ROK, with impunity, held their military exercises, often provocatively entitled “Decapitation of Head of State,” and “Invasion of Pyongyang,” North Korea, understandably, subsequently, (and it must be emphasized, subsequently), on August 28 launched another ballistic missile, provoked by the recalcitrant US-ROK military exercises which had instigated this vicious spiral.
Predictably, in its servile fashion, the Security Council, which failed to hold an emergency meeting condemning the US-ROK military provocations, in its melodramatic and bellicose fashion held an emergency meeting at 8PM on August 29, “condemning the August 28 ballistic missile launch by the DPRK.” Yet, in a curiously revealing, and certainly unintended way, the Security Council confessed its barbaric cruelty toward North Korea by listing its barbaric sanction resolutions, a lengthy list of torture: Resolution 1675 (2006, 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), 2094 (2013) 2270 (2016), 2321 (2016) 2356 (2017), 2371 (2017). In effect, when the UN Security Council is brought before the bar of history, and condemned for crimes against humanity, it will have made the investigators’ work easier by so neatly listing its attempts to strangle the life out of the North Korean people. This most recent resolution exposes the sadistic and malicious intent of these resolutions, as fish have nothing to do with construction of nuclear weapons, and the prohibition of sale of fish, one of the indispensable sources of income for the innocent people of North Korea, is one of the cruelties intended to starve the Korean people, and break their spirit. For their courage and integrity shames and condemns the opportunism, greed and psychopathology that defines the behavior of their tormenters.
Carla Stea is Global Research’s correspondent at United Nations Headquarters, New York, N.Y.
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Coupled with the aggressive legislative sanctions “package” recently adopted by the US Congress directed against Russia, Iran and North Korea, Washington now threatens China in no uncertain terms.
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