Global Research

Featured image: Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Several hours after President Trump officially signed the new Russian sanctions into law – despite his reservations and his statement that while he favors “tough measures to punish and deter aggressive and destabilizing behavior by Iran, North Korea, and Russia, this legislation is significantly flawed” – Russia responded when moments ago Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on his FaceBook page that any hopes of improving Russian relations with the new US administration are dead, that the Trump administration demonstrated complete impotence by transferring executive power to Congress “in the most humiliating manner”, and most notably, that the US just declared a full-scale trade war on Russia.

From Medvedev’s facebook page:

The signing of new sanctions against Russia into law by the US president leads to several consequences. First, any hope of improving our relations with the new US administration is over. Second, the US just declared a full-scale trade war on Russia. Third, the Trump administration demonstrated it is utterly powerless, and in the most humiliating manner transferred executive powers to Congress. This shifts the alignment of forces in US political circles.

What does this mean for the U.S.? The American establishment completely outplayed Trump. The president is not happy with the new sanctions, but he could not avoid signing the new law. The purpose of the new sanctions was to put Trump in his place. Their ultimate goal is to remove Trump from power. An incompetent player must be eliminated. At the same time, the interests of American businesses were almost ignored. Politics rose above the pragmatic approach. Anti-Russian hysteria has turned into a key part of not only foreign (as has been the case many times), but also domestic US policy (this is recent).

The sanctions codified into law will now last for decades, unless some miracle occurs. Moreover, it will be tougher than the Jackson-Vanik law, because it is comprehensive and can not be postponed by special orders of the president without the consent of the Congress. Therefore, the future relationship between the Russian Federation and the United States will be extremely tense, regardless of the composition of the Congress or the personality of the president. Relations between the two countries will now be clarified in international bodies and courts of justice leading to further intensification of international tensions, and a refusal to resolve major international problems.

What does this mean for Russia? We will continue to work on the development of the economy and social sphere, we will deal with import substitution, solve the most important state tasks, counting primarily on ourselves. We have learned to do this in recent years. Within almost closed financial markets, foreign creditors and investors will be afraid to invest in Russia due to worries of sanctions against third parties and countries. In some ways, it will benefit us, although sanctions – in general – are meaningless. We will manage.

Separately, Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that Russia retains the right to impose new counter-measures, adding the US sanctions are short-sighted, and risk harming global stability. He concludes that and attempts to pressure Russia will not make it change course.

Echoing Lavrov, earlier on Wednesday the permanent representative to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia said Moscow “won’t bend” and has no plans to change its policies following Donald Trump’s signing of new anti-Russian sanctions.

“Those who invented this bill, if they were thinking that they might change our policy they were wrong, as history many times proved. They should have known better that we do not bend and do not break,” Nebenzia told journalists in New York.

“Some of the US officials were saying that this is a bill that might encourage Russia to cooperate… This is a strange form of encouragement. But it is not our habit to be resentful children,” continued the diplomat, who promised that Moscow would “not relent on finding means and ways” to cooperate in the international arena over issues such as Syria.

The Kremlin also chose not to escalate the situation further.

“This changes nothing. There is nothing new here,” Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, told the media in Moscow. “Counter-measures have already been taken.”

And now we await a similar announcement from the European Union.

Surreal headline of the day pic.twitter.com/CsIMNBI49O

— Gap Spotter (@GotfrydKarol) August 2, 2017

“If you can’t beat them, arrange to have them beaten.” – George Carlin

One of the strangest phenomena of recent years has been the glut of memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies of living people or those still warm in their graves. Rock stars, movie stars, military war criminals, glittering stars of every stripe – even prostitutes and corrupt politicians and shy real estate magnates – think their lives so interesting and important that they should be made into books and sold to a public that has an apparently insatiable appetite for gossip and peepholes into the lives of the rich and infamous. 

Book publishers seem to agree with them. Recently they have awarded well-deserved book deals to some of our most important writers, wordsmiths of exquisite prose, today’s Hemingways and Martha Gelhorns, who will reveal truths we can’t live without. TV celebrity Megyn Kelly reportedly is receiving 3-10 million; comedian Amy Schumer, 9 million; Amanda Knox, the young American convicted and then acquitted by an Italian court of murdering her roommate, 4 million; Hillary Clinton and the Obamas, 8 million and up to 60 million respectively, despite having escaped convictions, since they were never tried  for  their war crimes. Whatever their deeds, or lack thereof, this disparate group, whose revelations are so eagerly awaited, share a common attribute.

What they have in common – aside from money, having appeared in the nation’s publications of record: People magazine, The National Enquirer or The New York Times, and attended parties on Martha’s Vineyard or in the Hamptons – is that they consider themselves, and are considered by their adoring publics, to be Somebodies. A Somebody is, if you didn’t know it, not a Nobody. What else, if anything, a Somebody is is very hard to say; you’d have to ask one. I’m sure you’d get an answer.

Does the name Narcissus ring a bell?

On the other hand, a Nobody is someone a Somebody thinks stupid enough to read the Somebody’s “life.” Who else but a Somebody would have the effrontery to put the boring, confessional details of his or her life between the covers of a book? Who else but a Somebody would confabulate in print even more than they did in life? And who else but a Nobody, wanting to be a Somebody, would read it? Who could bear to read page upon page of self-serving lies and fabrications except someone wishing to have the arrogance to do the same and make themselves look fascinating and virtuous.

Which brings me to the good news: I have just read a new book that brought a smile to my face and hope to my heart. Perhaps it is an omen of good things to come in book publishing; perhaps even a great shift in the quality of our cultural life. I note with pleasure that this book – Nobody’s Life (Prestige Press, 2017) – has already become an underground best seller in England and Schwenksville, Pennsylvania. Since so many of our television shows come from those seedbeds of creativity, I surmise that this revolutionary book could have an enormous impact on our reading habits, not to say our collective ego.

Understandably so, Nobody’s Life is written under a pen name, Shallow Bloke (henceforth referred to as SB). It’s good to know Shallow Bloke has a sense of humor. Somebodies never do. A self-admitted Nobody, SB is naturally the adult child of parents who were Somebodies. Who would publish a Nobody unless that were so? A Nobody with parents who were Somebodies might still be a Nobody, but even such a fatal connection can open doors, not to say induce one to open one’s wrists.

Which brings to mind the memorable opening lines of this non-life: “Call me Shallow Bloke. I’m a Nobody. Who are you? Are you a Nobody too?” This is the kind of opening that releases something in the reader. A hint of recognition perhaps, or maybe the sense that one is about to share in a dirty secret.

But don’t get me wrong; this is no “Mommy Dearest.” Far from it. SB is not out to get his parents, even though they got him good, as the saying has it. It’s why, of course, he’s a Nobody. He knows that, but being a Nobody, he doesn’t have the nerve to get revenge or just walk away and not write this book, which, by the way, is dedicated “to Mommy and Daddy, who made me who I am, a Nobody.”

The sad truth is SB would like to be a Somebody like them. This is obvious in the way he unconsciously emulates them by dropping names.

“When I was eighteen years old, I remember how Anna Freud would come to afternoon tea and we would play Chutes and Ladders….This was about the time Mommy and Daddy used to go bowling every Tuesday night with J Edgar Hoover and Uncle Allen….In those days we lived near Harvard Square, next door to Eddie Bernays, who would regale my parents over a bit of sherry about the way he fooled the stupid public in helping the CIA overthrow the Guatemalan government….”

In fact, it was by hearing his parents drop so many names that he realized his parents were Somebodies. They never came out and directly said, “Son, we are Somebodies and we would like you never to forget it.” That would have been gauche. The name dropping was enough. SB is very forthright about this, but there is no rancor in his telling. Nor does he seem to harbor any resentment toward his parents for the way he learned he was a Nobody: they kept telling him.

One of the nicest features of Nobody’s Life is the book jacket. Contrary to what you would expect, there is no author photograph on the back. In its place is a blank space. The reader is invited to send in the jacket with a photograph and have his photo superimposed for a small fee. I suppose they got this idea from the makers of Wheaties, who used to invite eaters to get themselves imprinted on “The Breakfast of Champions.” But this is a far better deal, for books last longer than cereal, and in the extremely literate United States writers are esteemed far higher than athletes; that’s why they earn on average 43 cents an hour.

For $10 you can contradict Andy Warhol’s dictum that we can all be famous for fifteen minutes. With your face staring out from Nobody’s Life on a well-positioned bookcase, for as long as you want you can present yourself as the author of this non-life. But don’t just take it from me. Listen: “That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts,” advises Donald the Dealer-in-Chief. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion.”

So go for it. Buy Nobody’ Life. Put your face on it. Make it your face book.

In that way, even if your parents aren’t Somebodies, you can become an author-ized Somebody without writing a word, without even knowing how to write. Nobody would know the difference, and your ambition would be fulfilled. Without really joining them, you would beat all the Somebodies at their own game of having nothing to say but self-serving bullshit. As for a multi-million dollar contract, you know what George Carlin says about the American dream: “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.” So don’t be greedy. That deal is not for you.

Being Somebody is the best revenge. Even if it involves a bit of “truthful hyperbole.”

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely.  He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/

Featured image: “Roar”. A portrait of Fela Anikulapo Kuti by Colombian-born artist Heriberto Cogollo (Source: Adeyinka Makinde)

Fela Kuti was a revolutionary African musician, the inventor of a genre which he called ‘Afro-Beat’ and the scourge of successive military dictatorships and civilian governments whose misrule of Nigeria has blighted the development of Africa’s most populated country. Fela was an iconoclast who challenged the powerful in society, a rebel whose bohemian lifestyle traversed the boundaries of socially prescribed behaviour as well as a social commentator whose lyrics, often suffused with coruscating barbs and comical vignettes, laid bare the daily tragedy of the lives of the suffering African proletariat. His death twenty years ago was mourned by millions of his countrymen and his legacy of social activism, critique of Nigeria’s governance as well as his Pan-Africanist aspirations remain as valid today as they did at the time of his passing.

Fela was born into the upper-middle class elite of colonial-era Nigerian society in the Yoruba city of Abeokuta. The first part of his original hyphenated surname, Ransome-Kuti, was bestowed on his grandfather Josiah Jesse Kuti, an Anglican clergyman, by an English benefactor. Josiah was a talented composer of Christian hymns and a church organist. Fela’s father, Israel Ransome-Kuti was a prominent educator and his mother, Funmilayo Kuti was a feminist and social activist with Marxist leanings who was part of several national delegations representing Nigeria at conferences which were designed to set out a pathway to independence from Britain.  It is from these antecedents that Fela’s talent for music, a predisposition to rebel and his interest in politics and the plight of the ordinary person stem.

Fela formed his first band Koola Lobitos in London when studying at Trinity College of Music where he enrolled in 1958. He learned classical music by day and played the trumpet at nightly and weekend gigs which catered to the tastes of Britain’s West African and Afro-Caribbean communities. He played conventional West African-style highlife music: songs about love and the mundanities of everyday life. It was a style he continued with on his return to Nigeria in 1963 right through to the period of the Nigerian Civil War when most of the federation was pitted against the secessionist state of Biafra in a bloody civil war that raged between 1967 and 1970.

It was not until he embarked on a tour of the United States during the war that Fela’s music and his raison d’etre undertook a radical shift. His association with Sandra Isidore, a black American immersed in the politics of the Black Panther Party and the growing drift towards Afrocentricity, ignited in Fela a new vision that involved integrating black politics with a hybrid style composed of contemporary horn-driven Afro-American popular music, psychedelic rock and the African rhythmic cadences of vocal and instrumental expression. A key part of this musical expression was the drumming of Tony Oladipo Allen whose input first in regard to an increasingly jazzified element to the music of Koola Lobitos and then with the new breed of politicised and funked-up music qualify him as being the co-creator of Afro-Beat.

The musical rebirth led to Fela renaming his band the Africa 70. American funk and soul collided with Yoruban rhythms which were accompanied by lyrics layered with Pan-Africanist sentiment. Fela’s new model sound, a symbiosis of Afro-Diasporan elements, sounded fresh but also natural. The Yoruba culture is one which is highly syncretic in nature.

The new bent towards protest singing was also consistent with Yoruban modes of expression. In contrast to the praise-singing directed at the wealthy and the important in traditional society was abuse-singing. Fela’s Yabis songs which ridiculed and denigrated the rich and powerful in Nigerian society would form the backdrop to many popular compositions as well as a multitude of iron-fisted reprisals from the authorities. His popularity markedly increased as the 1970s developed and his audience ravenously anticipated his next incendiary epistle on long-playing vinyl.

Fela lampooned the the high-handedness of police officers and soldiers in “Alagbon Close” and “Zombie”. His disdain for the ‘foreign imported’ religions of Christianity and Islam and his belief that they served as an opiate for the masses was reflected in “Shuffering and Shmiling”. He criticized middle class Nigerian aping of Western mannerisms in “Gentleman” and mocked African females who bleached their skin in “Yellow Fever”. His uncompromising position on eschewing the colonial-derived mentality and promoting black pride formed the backdrop to his dropping ‘Ransome’ from his surname. In its stead, he adopted the name ‘Anikulapo’ which means “he who carries death in his pouch”.

He had established his pan-African outlook via his album “Why Black Man Dey Suffer” in 1971 but when criticising the racist regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa in songs like “Sorrow, Tears and Blood” and “Beasts of No Nation”, did not fail to remind his listeners of the hypocrisy and the brutality of Nigeria’s military rulers. He sang against imperialism and neocolonialism while pointing out that he felt certain of Nigeria’s elite such as the wealthy businessman, Moshood Abiola were agents of the Central Intelligence Agency. Abiola, who rose to be the Vice President of the African and Middle Eastern region of the International Telephone and Telegraph company (IT&T), was lambasted in the song “ITT (International Thief Thief)” in a diatribe against the exploitation of Africa by multinational companies and the African ‘big men’ who aid them in this endeavour.

Corruption and the inhumanity of Nigeria’s elites were a consistent topic for Fela in his recordings, his stage banter at his popular club ‘The Shrine’ and in his frequent utterances to the press. When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in 1977, he refused to perform at the gathering in protest at the corruption surrounding the event. “Money is not Nigeria’s problem”, the overthrown General Yakubu Gowon had said a few years before, “it is how to spend it.” And ‘Festac’, the abbreviated name of the festival, had induced a wild spending spree by the Nigerian government which proceeded with the obligatory backhanders for organising officials.

The bringing together of artistic talent from Africa and the African Diaspora had appealed to the Pan-Africanist sentiments of Fela who as a young boy had been introduced to its greatest champion, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, by his mother. He felt that the gathering could be used to “redirect the thinking of the common man”. He had been invited to join the National Participation Committee for Festac along with other luminaries from Nigerian drama, music and literature, including his cousin the future Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, but along with Soyinka and a few others withdrew disillusioned.

When the festival commenced, Fela denounced the military government in nightly sermons delivered at ‘The Shrine’ where musicians flocked to pay him homage. Among them were Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra and Hugh Masekela. The Brazilian artists Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil who for a time had been forced into exile by the military junta of their country also met Fela.

Fela would pay a heavy price for his harangues. Less than a week after the end of the festival, the army surrounded his commune, known as the Kalakuta Republic, before storming it. Its inhabitants, not least Fela were beaten and the female members of his entourage sexually violated. Fela’s mother who resided at the residence was thrown from a first floor window and although initially surviving the attack died a few months later from injuries that she sustained.

It was a dark period for Fela. He spent 27 days in jail and suffered different bone fractures. He was put on trial and an official inquiry whitewashed the invasion and destruction of his compound concluding that the damage to his property had been perpetrated by “an exasperated and unknown soldier”. To top it all off Fela was branded a “hooligan”.

He went into temporary exile in Ghana and responded with lamentations of his experiences with the songs “Sorrow, Tears and Blood” and “Unknown Soldier”. In the former, Fela rails in his trademark pidgin English which was readily accessible to the common person:

So policeman go slap your face

You no go talk

Army man go whip your yansh (buttocks)

You go dey look like donkey

Fela’s allusion to Army brutality, a common occurrence in 1970s military-ruled Nigeria, carried a resonance among the many civilian victims who had been verbally humiliated, maimed and even killed by soldiers.

Yet Fela remained defiant. He partook in a traditional marriage ceremony with his entire female entourage of 27, performed at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1978 and in anticipation of the first civilian elections to be held in Nigeria since the middle 1960s, he formed a political party, the Movement of the People Party, and offered himself as a presidential candidate in 1979.

Fela continued to release music and embarked on many tours of European and American cities gaining a wider audience and respect from members of the rock community. He had known Ginger Baker, famous as the drummer for the 1960s blues-rock trio Cream, during his sojourn in England in the 1960s and both men collaborated in the 1970s and met each other frequently while Baker was resident in Nigeria from 1970 to 1976.

Paul McCartney and Fela Kuti (Source: okayafrica)

Paul McCartney was introduced to Fela when he went to Nigeria to record his album ‘Band on the Run’. After an awkward first meeting that had Fela accusing McCartney of coming to Africa to “steal the Black man’s music”, both men developed a friendship. McCartney would later confess to have been reduced to tears by the power of Fela’s music. In his autobiography published in 1989, Miles Davis acknowledged Fela as a force in music.

Fela would continue to endure numerous arrests: many of them for possession of Indian Hemp but also one last major politically-motivated arrest in 1984 which involved an alleged violation of currency regulations just before he was due to embark on a tour of the United States. His detention under the military regime which had overthrown the civilian government that had been elected in 1979 led to an international campaign spearheaded by Amnesty International to free him. Soon after his release in 1986, he played alongside artists such as U2, Sting and  Peter Gabriel in a series of benefit concerts for Amnesty.

Over a million people turned out for his funeral after a lengthy illness. His brother Olukoye, a medical practitioner, announced that Fela had stubbornly refused to seek medical help and that by the time he agreed to be taken to hospital was not cognizant of the diagnosis of AIDS.

The cause of death many blamed on a hedonistic lifestyle. The image he frequently portrayed in songs and interviews of a playboy were real enough. Alongside  the praise he earned from many of his country men were the denunciations of others. During his life he was criticised for corrupting the nation’s youth due to his fondness for marijuana and his projection of hypersexuality. While he may have spoken up for the nation’s downtrodden underclass, Fela was attacked for exploiting young women many of who came from poor backgrounds. The accusations of misogyny where often backed up by evidence of his living arrangements, the interviews that he gave as well as songs such as “Mattress”.

He was a mass of contradictions. While he may have spoken out against dictators, he ruled his commune in an authoritarian manner. And even the atrocity committed against him by the soldiers ransacking of his home was preceded by an incident in which a number of his employees had a violent confrontation with some soldiers during which they appropriated a motorcycle and later set it on fire. For some, Fela had set him set above the law from openly smoking weed on stage to holding up traffic while he crossed the road on his pet donkey.

Fela was uncompromising. In the early part of his career he turned down offers from foreign record companies to market Afro-Beat to Western audiences in the way reggae music was because it would have meant that he have to shorten the length of his songs. Later on he prevaricated over signing a one million dollar deal with Motown records until the offer lapsed. He could have chosen to live a relatively comfortable existence in European exile in a city such as London or Paris but that was never an option.

He had several distinct nicknames each reflecting a part of his multifaceted personage. ‘Omo Iya Aje’, which translated from Yoruba means the son of a witch, alluded to the belief that Fela inherited supernatural powers from his mother, in her prime a powerful female figure. Fela’s unusual disposition and rejection of convention earned him the sobriquet ‘Abami Eda’ (Strange creature). He was the ‘Chief Priest’ because of his practice of traditional Yoruba religious rites which were featured during his performances at the Shrine. Finally, the ‘Black President’ was an acknowledgement of his leadership qualities and his promotion of ‘Blackism’ and Pan-Africanism.

Now fully two decades after his passing, Fela’s music and the message in his music  continue to resonate. His records still sell and his life story has been retold in several biographies and through a successful Broadway play “Fela!” He was more than a musician simply because his protest songs were not merely abstractions confined to the music studio or to music festivals. He transcended the role of a conventional musician because he spoke to the masses and confronted successive military dictators at great cost.

Wrote Lindsay Barrett, a Jamaican-born naturalised Nigerian novelist:

“It is no exaggeration to say that Fela’s memory will always symbolise the spirit of truth for a vast number of struggling people in Africa and beyond.”

Fela Kuti was born on October 15th 1938 and died on August 2nd 1997.

Adeyinka Makinde is a London-based writer. He can be followed on Twitter @AdeyinkaMakinde

Global Research strives for peace, and we have but one mandate: to share timely, independent and vital information to readers across the globe. We act as a global platform to let the voices of dissent, protest, and expert witnesses and academics be heard and disseminated internationally.

We need to stand together to continuously question politics, false statements, and the suppression of independent thought.

Stronger together: your donations are crucial to independent, comprehensive news reporting in the ongoing battle against media disinformation. (click image above to donate)

*     *     *

Imagine What Would Happen if China Decided to Impose Economic Sanctions on the USA?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, August 03, 2017

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.”

Breaking: Seymour Hersh Cracks ‘RussiaGate’ as CIA-Planted Lie, Revenge Against Trump

By Eric Zuesse, August 02, 2017

In a youtube video upload-dated August 1st, he reveals from his inside FBI and Washington DC Police Department sources — now, long before the Justice Department’s Special Counsel Robert Mueller will be presenting his official ‘findings’ to the nation — that the charges that Russia had anything to do with the leaks from the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to Wikileaks, that those charges spread by the press, were a CIA-planted lie, and that what Wikileaks had gotten was only leaks (including at least from the murdered DNC-staffer Seth Rich), and were not from any outsider (including ’the Russians’), but that Rich didn’t get killed for that, but was instead shot in the back during a brutal robbery, which occurred in the high-crime DC neighborhood where he lived. Here is the video, and here is the transcript of it.

Trump’s Choices. Russian Military has Concluded that Washington is preparing a surprise Nuclear Attack on Russia

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, August 02, 2017

The US has broken and withdrawn from security agreement after security agreement and has compounded the threat that Russia sees by conducting war games on Russia’s borders, staging a coup in Ukraine, a province of Russia for centuries, and by a continuous stream of false accusations against Russia.

Going after ISIS, Killing Civilians as Military Doctrine

By Mark Taliano, August 02, 2017

Massacring 40,000 civilians in Mosul was not a mistake, just like slaughtering over 500,000 Iraqi kids under five with pre-war sanctions was not a mistake. These are all strategic decisions.

Extraordinary CIA Renditions and Arbitrary Detentions, Far Beyond the “War on Terrorism”

By Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli, August 02, 2017

After 2001, the U.S. implementation of ‘extraordinary renditions’ has required the secret collaboration of some EU governments and others around the world. For instance, Sweden collaborated secretly with the CIA in the rendition of two refugees that were transported from a Stockholm airport to a torture site in Egypt.

After Venezuela’s Election, U.S. and Allies Turn Up Heat – A Coup Could Be Ahead

By Whitney Webb, August 02, 2017

The Trump administration has described Sunday’s constituent assembly election in Venezuela as “another step toward dictatorship,” despite high voter turnout and little evidence that the assembly will dissolve the country’s legislature. Will Venezuela be the CIA’s next regime change target?

Le général John Kelly a pris ses fonctions lundi matin en tant que nouveau chef de cabinet de la Maison-Blanche. Il a affirmé son autorité immédiatement en éjectant Anthony Scaramucci, nommé directeur des communications de la Maison Blanche, seulement 11 jours avant, par le président Trump.

Le renvoi de Scaramucci a servi de démonstration publique de la suprématie de Kelly à la Maison Blanche le jour où il a prêté serment. Cela s’est produit à 9 h 30, seulement une demi-heure avant que Kelly préside sa première réunion avec le cabinet de Trump, consacrée en grande partie aux discussions des projets pour une réduction massive de l’impôt sur les sociétés américaine et les riches.

Trois hauts responsables du gouvernement, le directeur du Conseil économique national, Gary Cohn, le secrétaire au ministère des finances Steven Mnuchin et le directeur législatif de la Maison Blanche, Marc Short, ont déclaré que le président Trump considérait le plan de réduction des impôts comme la pièce maîtresse des efforts législatifs à l’avenir, après l’effondrement la semaine dernière du projet d’abrogation de la loi sur les soins abordables (Obamacare).

Le mandat de Scaramucci comme chef des communications est même plus bref que les 29 jours où le général retraité Michael Flynn occupait le poste de conseiller de la sécurité nationale. Au cours de ces 11 jours, Scaramucci a provoqué la démission de l’attaché de presse Sean Spicer et le renvoi du chef de cabinet, Reince Priebus, avant lui-même d’être renvoyé par Kelly.

La succession rapide des affectations et des départs témoignent de la crise grandissante du gouvernement Trump en place à peine depuis six mois, mais qui connaît déjà son deuxième chef de cabinet, deuxième chef adjoint de cabinet, deuxième conseiller à la sécurité nationale, deuxième attaché de presse, et le troisième (sinon le quatrième bientôt) directeur de la communication.

La lutte pour l’influence au sein de la Maison-Blanche est devenue tellement trouble que lors d’un programme d’entretiens télévisés du dimanche, quelques heures seulement avant que Kelly ne prenne ses fonctions, la conseillère de la Maison Blanche, Kellyanne Conway, a refusé à plusieurs reprises de dire si elle et d’autres haut responsables continueraient à être sous la responsabilité directe de Trump ou celle maintenant de Kelly.

Le lendemain, Kelly a rencontré le personnel de la Maison Blanche et a clairement indiqué que tout le monde, y compris Conway, le conseiller politique Steve Bannon, le beau-fils de Trump, Jared Kushner et sa fille, Ivanka Trump, rendraient compte à lui. Cette directive a été soulignée par le renvoi de Scaramucci, qui avait déclaré à plusieurs reprises aux journalistes qu’il ne rendait compte qu’à Trump, pas au chef de cabinet.

En accueillant son nouvel homme fort militaire, Trump a fait l’éloge du bilan de Kelly en tant que secrétaire du DHS (département de la sécurité intérieure). « Il fera un travail spectaculaire, je ne doute pas, en tant que chef de cabinet », a déclaré Trump. « Ce qu’il a fait en termes de sécurité intérieure est hors norme. »

De tels commentaires soulignent le caractère profondément antidémocratique du gouvernement Trump, qui rassemble des officiers militaires à la retraite, des milliardaires et des membres de la famille Trump et des copains dans une cabale nocive et réactionnaire.

Le fait politique le plus marquant dans le choix de Kelly est le soutien qu’il a reçu du Parti démocrate. Les démocrates sont restés silencieux lundi, alors que ceux qui s’y sont prononcés le week-end, comme la dirigeante minoritaire de la Chambre Nancy Pelosi, ont salué Kelly comme quelqu’un qui pourrait apporter l’ordre nécessaire à une présidence chaotique. Pelosi a déclaré dimanche qu’elle avait « hâte de travailler » avec Kelly.

En janvier, Kelly a été confirmé par 88 voix contre 11 au Sénat dans son poste précédent. Le sénateur du Vermont et le candidat à la présidentielle du Parti démocrate, Bernie Sanders, qui a voté pour la confirmation, a déclaré qu’il espérait que Kelly et le secrétaire à la défense James Mattis, un autre général à la retraite, auront une « influence modératrice » sur le gouvernement Trump.

Kelly a passé les six derniers mois à mener la persécution brutale des immigrants et des réfugiés. Il a appliqué vigoureusement l’interdiction inconstitutionnelle de Trump sur les musulmans, invalidée à maintes reprises par les tribunaux de premières instances, mais largement restaurée par un vote à 5 contre 4 de la Cour suprême. Il quitte le ministère de la sécurité intérieure (DHS), au moment où il prépare la prochaine étape de l’attaque de Trump contre les droits démocratiques, qui est la construction d’un réseau de camps de détention d’immigrants.

Les arrestations d’immigrants ont augmenté de 40 pour cent par rapport aux années précédentes, alors que la brutalité renforcée de l’ICE (douaniers) et de la patrouille frontalière a créé une atmosphère générale de peur dans les communautés d’immigrants.

Kelly a annulé les politiques antérieures consistant à accorder la priorité à la déportation d’immigrants reconnus coupables de crimes violents, en faveur d’une poursuite de tout immigrant sans papiers rencontré par le personnel du DHS. Toute « infraction pénale qui peut être poursuivie » est devenue un motif pour un traitement prioritaire, y compris des contraventions comme l’utilisation d’un faux numéro de sécurité sociale et le non-respect d’une mesure d’expulsion.

En outre, Kelly a donné libre cours aux agents de l’ICE et aux patrouilleurs frontaliers les autorisant à poursuivre tout immigrant qui « aux yeux d’un agent de l’immigration » pose un risque pour la sécurité nationale des États-Unis. Le résultat a été une série de cas dans lesquels des immigrants ayant des liens de longue date avec les États-Unis, avec des enfants et épouses citoyens américains, qui s’étaient déclarés fidèlement pendant des années aux bureaux de l’ICE, ont été interpellés et expulsés soudainement.

Kelly a également officiellement annulé le Deferred Action for Parents ofAmericans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) la suspension de la mesure d’expulsion pour les parents dont les enfants ont la nationalité américaine ou étaient éligibles au Differed Action for Child Arrival (DACA – en faveur des enfants arrivés au pays avant leur majorité). Le DAPA fut annoncé par Obama mais n’a jamais été mis en œuvre en raison des contestations en justice contre cette loi.

Le DHS évolue vers deux actions encore plus drastiques et radicales : l’abrogation de la DACA elle-même, qui touche 800 000 jeunes entrés aux États-Unis durant leur enfance ; et l’expansion du programme de déportation accéléré, en vertu de laquelle les immigrants récents appréhendés à moins de 160 km de la frontière peuvent être déportés sans procès. Dans le cadre d’un projet maintenant envisagé sérieusement, une déportation accélérée serait maintenant appliquée à tout immigrant détenu n’importe où aux États-Unis qui ne peut pas prouver qu’il réside aux États-Unis depuis plus de 90 jours.

L’élévation de Kelly à la Maison Blanche marque une étape supplémentaire dans l’érosion de traditions démocratiques telles que le contrôle civil sur l’armée. Un vétéran qui a passé 40 ans dans le corps des marines, dont des années au Pentagone et des années de commandement sur le champ de bataille, sera maintenant le responsable du personnel du commandant en chef qui est un civil.

S’il est un « non-partisan » avoué, au sens où il n’a pas de préférence entre un parti bourgeois ou l’autre – il a dit à la revue Foreign Policy l’an dernier qu’il serait prêt sans a priori à servir dans un gouvernement démocrate ou républicain – Kelly a des opinions politiques affichées, et elles sont du genre le plus réactionnaire. Il a défendu agressivement le camp de détention de Guantanamo Bay lorsque le gouvernement Obama cherchait à le fermer. Il a déclaré que Clinton et Trump trompaient le peuple américain en affirmant qu’il était possible de vaincre l’État islamique sans engager des troupes de combat américaines en Irak et en Syrie.

Kelly, qui est apparu avec Trump récemment lors d’une cérémonie de remise des diplômes de la Garde côtière, lui a offert un sabre de cérémonie et a suggéré que ce serait un instrument approprié à utiliser contre les critiques du président dans les médias. Il a également dit, en parlant de plaintes du Congrès au sujet de sa répression contre les immigrants : « Si les législateurs n’aiment pas les lois qu’ils ont adoptées et que nous sommes chargés de faire respecter, ils devraient avoir le courage et les compétences nécessaires pour modifier les lois. Sinon, ils devraient se taire et soutenir les hommes et les femmes en première ligne. »

Patrick Martin

Article paru en anglais, WSWS, le 1 août 2017

Edu Montesanti: Quando o governo Obama discutiu publicamente os ataques com drones, ofereceu garantias de que tais operações seriam uma alternativa mais precisa às tropas terrestres, e que seriam autorizadas somente quando uma ameaça “iminente “estivesse em questão com existência de “quase certeza”de que o alvo pretendido seria eliminado. Professor Peter Kuznick, como o senhor vê essa “política” em si, de substituir as tropas por drones – no caso da administração de Obama, utilizando-os muito mais do que seu antecessor, o governo Bush? E o quanto são precisos os drones?

Professor doutor Peter Kuznick: Oponho-me intensamente ao uso generalizado de drones, especialmente fora das zonas de guerra declaradas. Não vejo isso como uma escolha entre drones, bombardeiros tripulados e tropas terrestres, mas como uma escolha entre a guerra e a diplomacia.

Há, certamente, situações em que a diplomacia não funciona, mas os Estados Unidos têm sido muito rápidos em recorrer a meios militares para resolver todas as controvérsias e problemas. Tomemos o caso da invasão dos Estados Unidos ao Afeganistão, por exemplo; sim, o governo Taliban no Afeganistão abrigou a Al Qaeda quando planejava o ataque do 11 de Setembro, e o governo Taliban era extremamente repressivo, especialmente contra as mulheres.

Mas nestes 16 anos de guerra liderada pelos Estados Unidos, tem havido alguma melhora? Alguns afegãos e empreiteiros de defesa norte-americanos ficaram ricos, mas a maioria dos afegãos tem se tornado bastante miserável.

Após o 11 de Setembro, os Estados Unidos insistiram para que os afegãos entregassem os líderes da Al Qaeda. Em 15 de outubro, uma semana após a Operação Liberdade Duradoura ter começado, o ministro de Relações Exteriores do Taliban ofereceu Osama bin Laden à Organização da Conferência Islâmica para que fosse julgado, mas os Estados Unidos o acusaram de inação.

Contudo, para Milton Bearden, ex-diretor da CIA que supervisionou a guerra secreta dos anos 80 do Paquistão, o Taliban estava sendo sincero. “Nós nunca ouvimos o que eles estavam tentando dizer”, ele insistiu. “Não falávamos a mesma língua: nosso discurso era ‘entregar Bin Laden’, enquanto eles diziam ‘ajudaremos a entregá-lo'”.

Os representantes dos Estados Unidos se encontraram com líderes talibans mais de 20 vezes nos três anos anteriores. Bearden disse que “não tem dúvidas de que eles queriam se livrar dele”, mas os Estados Unidos estavam decididos a ir à guerra, e nunca ofereceram os plano de salvação que os talibans precisavam.

Desde então, o Afeganistão tem sido um parque infantil para a guerra com drones dos Estados Unidos, especialmente depois que Obama retirou a maioria dos cem mil soldados que ele e Bush haviam enviado.

Mas a justificativa para o uso de drones é que estes são cirúrgicos e precisos, e não matam civis. O presidente Obama fez esse caso repetidamente quando era presidente. Falando na Faculdade de Direito da Universidade de Chicago em abril de 2016, ele declarou: “O que posso dizer com grande certeza é que a taxa de baixas civis em qualquer operação com drone é muito inferior à taxa de baixas civis que ocorrem na guerra convencional”. Isso parece bom, mas não é verdade. Um estudo de Larry Lewis, do Centro de Análises Navais, e de Sarah Holewinski do Centro para Civis em Conflito, ambos em 2013 concluíram que o uso de drones no Afeganistão causou dez vezes mais mortes civis que os aviões de combate tripulados.

Em 2016, Micah Zenko e Amelia Mae Wolf, do Conselho de Relações Exteriores, relataram que “a afirmação do governo Obama de que os drones causam menos danos colaterais do que as aeronaves pilotadas, é simplesmente falsa. De acordo com as melhores evidências publicamente disponíveis, os ataques com drones em locais fora dos campos de batalha – Paquistão, Iêmen e Somália – resultam em 35 vezes mais mortes de civis que ataques aéreos por sistemas de armas tripulados em campos de batalha convencionais, como Iraque, Síria e Afeganistão”. A vantagem real dos drones é que eles resultam em muito menos mortes norte-americanas em combate, que os voos tripulados e as tropas terrestres.

Conforme o presidente Trump dá à CIA mais liberdade para atacar com drones, os crimes de guerra devem se agravar ainda mais, não?

Por mais odioso que fosse o método da guerra com drones de Obama, ele se configura uma voz moderada em comparação a Trump.

Obama realizou reuniões semanais, nas quais assinou pessoalmente suas “listas da morte”. Depois de muitas críticas, criou novas regras para limitar os danos aos civis. No final de sua administração, não permitiu ataques de drones fora das zonas de guerra, a menos que houvesse “quase certeza” de que civis não fossem feridos, que a captura dos criminosos “não era viável”, ou que o alvo representasse uma “ameaça iminente” aos Estados Unidos.

Já Trump, por outro lado, deu carta branca aos seus generais, dizendo que “confia” nos generais para as decisões militares, e os deixa encarregado delas. Como resultado, o número de ataques com drones realmente aumentou dramaticamente desde que Trump assumiu a presidência. The Long War Journal relatou que, no último ano de Obama no cargo, houve apenas três ataques com drones no Paquistão, baixos em relação aos anos anteriores, e 38 no Iêmen.

Trump afrouxou as regras instituídas por Obama, e deu à CIA e aos militares muito mais liberdade para que ataquem a Al Qaeda e o Estado Islamita no Iêmen, na Líbia, na Síria, na Somália, no Iraque e no Afeganistão. Como resultado, o número de mortes civis disparou. Enquanto Obama limitou o envolvimento da CIA na guerra com drones, Trump está ampliando o papel da CIA.

Quais as principais diferenças entre Bush, Obama e agora Trump, nos ataques com drones?

A diferença se dá principalmente no fato de que Bush usou drones em zonas de guerra declaradas para que sua administração fosse mais aberta, mas não inteiramente aberta. Obama não admitiu usar drones em zonas de guerra não declaradas, então ele foi mais encoberto. Obama esteve diretamente envolvido nos alvos.

Trump, como já mencionei, deu carta branca aos militares para decidir. Os ataques aumentaram com Trump, especialmente no Iêmen. Como Obama, ele quer evitar as baixas norte-americanas. Mas, ao contrário de Obama, Trump parece ter pouca preocupação com vítimas civis.

O uso generalizado de drones por Obama legitima o uso ainda maior e menos cauteloso de Trump. Este é um precedente muito perigoso que os Estados Unidos estabeleceram.

Qual sua avaliação da versão oficial nos Estados Unidos, de classificar como “danos colaterais” os ataques supostamente “eficientes” de drones, que comprovadamente matam muito mais civis que combatentes inimigos?

Como mencionei anteriormente, a atitude realista expressada algumas vezes através de “efeitos colaterais”, é inaceitável. É obscena. Como disse o arcebispo Desmund Tutu, na carta ao editor do New York Times: “Os Estados Unidos e seu povo querem mesmo dizer aos que vivemos no resto do mundo, que nossas vidas não têm o mesmo valor que as suas?”.

Mas os Estados Unidos encontraram uma solução para o problema do “efeito colateral “. O governo Obama definiu o problema para além da realidade, alegando que todo homem com idade militar em uma zona de guerra é militante, e digno de execução em um ataque por “assinatura”. Na maioria desses ataques, os Estados Unidos não têm como saber se os alvos eram terroristas.

Esses ataques não são apenas moralmente censuráveis ​​e, muitas vezes, ilegais: são também contraproducentes. Eles produzem mais terroristas do que matam. Como Faisal Shahzad, atacante do Times Square, respondeu ao juiz que lhe perguntou como ele era capaz de arriscar matar crianças e mulheres inocentes, sobre ataques com drones ele disse: “Não veem crianças, não veem ninguém. Eles matam mulheres, crianças, matam todos”. Os operadores de drones, muitas vezes, desumanizam as vítimas ao se referir a elas como “frutos de um erro”.

A professora doutora Azadeh Shahshahani, renomada jurista da American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), observou recentemente para mim que:

Quanto o governo dos Estados Unidos está respeitando esses princípios na utilização de drones tanto na vigilância quanto como carregadores de bombas?

Como no caso da maioria das inovações científicas e tecnológicas, os drones podem ser usados ​​para a guerra ou para a paz. Eles podem ser usados ​​para enriquecer a vida humana, ou para destruí-la. Eles representam não apenas uma engrenagem da morte na guerra, mas também como um mecanismo de vigilância que ameaça a privacidade.

Seus potenciais usos vão muito além de fazer entregas, como a Amazon considera. Eles podem ser usados ​​para monitorar o meio ambiente, para proteger a vida selvagem e para combater incêndios, entre outras coisas. O céu, por assim dizer, é o limite para eles.

Porém, os usos de drones são principalmente negativos hoje. Eles foram transformados em máquinas de matar. E, conforme ficamos sabendo através das armas nucleares e de outros sistemas de armas perigosas, uma vez que um país os tenha, outros também os terão.

Então, agora, os Estados Unidos, Israel e Grã-Bretanha estão se armando para usá-los em “zonas de guerra”, mas o que é feito para impedir que os russos os usem para matar os chechenos, ou os chineses para matar os uigures?

A visão dos Estados Unidos é muito estreita enquanto seus líderes pensam que manterão o monopólio deste tipo de guerra. China, Rússia e Irã também possuem sistemas muito avançados de drones predadores. A face da guerra moderna é assustadora, e está prestes a piorar. Atenção.

Ler a entrevista em inglês publicada por Global Research :

US Drones “Kill Women, Children, They Kill Everybody”

Featured image: Aerial view of the Amazon, near Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas. (Photo: CGIAR / Flickr)

Camp 41, Brazilian Amazon — Less than 30 years ago, the Earth’s tropical rainforests held the carbon equivalent of half of the entire atmosphere. But as atmospheric CO2 has escalated along with the deforestation of so much of the tropics, that is no longer the case. Nevertheless, carbon stored in tropical rainforests is still significant. According to NASA, 

“In the early 2000s, forests in the 75 tropical countries studied contained 247 billion tons of carbon. For perspective, about 10 billion tons of carbon is released annually to the atmosphere from combined fossil fuel burning and land use changes.”

This is one of the countless reasons why losing them would be catastrophic to life on Earth.

I’m writing this dispatch just having emerged from the heart of the Amazon, the most biodiverse place on the planet. I was fortunate enough to spend some time with Tom Lovejoy, known as the “Godfather of Biodiversity,” at the famous Camp 41, which is filled with researchers and scientists. Throughout our conversations, Lovejoy emphasized the staggering amount of biological diversity in the Amazon, which has thousands upon thousands of species of trees, fish, birds, plants and astronomical numbers of insect species.

“We’ve only scratched the surface, and are discovering new species of birds all the time,” said Lovejoy, who was the first person to use the term “biological diversity” in 1980 and made the first projection of global extinction rates in the “Global 2000 Report to the President” that same year.

Lovejoy, who founded the public television series “Nature” and is now a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation and a professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University, views anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) from the perspective of the fact that we are essentially “social primates.”

“We are so stuck on ourselves, we don’t consider the fact that the life sciences are a giant library that is continually acquiring new volumes,” Lovejoy explained. “It’s like we are just a bunch of social primates mutually grooming each other while the environmental lion sneaks up.”

Lovejoy warns that as ACD progresses and temperature limits continue to be exceeded, we are losing parts of the biosphere that we don’t even know exist.

Here in Brazil, I learned of a January 2016 science expedition of 50 scientists who spent 25 days in a remote area of the Amazon and discovered 80 new species.

Lovejoy posed a question for me, that is a warning to us all:

“So what does it matter if we go over these limits and lose a few books in the biological library?”

He warned that as we keep removing books from the library — in other words, causing extinctions — we do not know which book(s) could cause a biological death spiral that could bring down the entire system.

An overview of some of the more stunning scientific reports and climate developments underscore this.

For anyone who thinks the biological library analogy might sound extreme, consider the fact that Stanford biologists recently issued something of a prelude to extinction. Having long since warned that the Sixth Mass Extinction event is already well underway, in a study recently published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers said that billions of populations of animals have already disappeared from Earth, amid what they called a “biological annihilation,” and admitted that their findings revealed a situation that was worse than they’d previously thought. The study showed that more than 30 percent of all vertebrates are experiencing declining populations, and the prime drivers of the annihilation are human overpopulation and overconsumption, especially by the rich, as well as habitat destruction, pollution and of course, ACD.

“The resulting biological annihilation obviously will have serious ecological, economic and social consequences,” reads the study. “Humanity will eventually pay a very high price for the decimation of the only assemblage of life that we know of in the universe.”

Meanwhile, a study recently published in Nature revealed that ice-free areas in the Antarctic will surge by up to a quarter (17,000 square kilometers) by 2100 if CO2 emissions are left unchecked.

As if to underscore that point, in July one of the most massive icebergs ever recorded broke free of the Larsen C Ice Shelf. The iceberg itself measures 5,800 square kilometers and is estimated to weigh one trillion tons.

And there are no indications that things will slow down. Recent research from Harvard University published in the journal, Science Advances, revealed that temperature increases measured over recent decades fail to fully reflect the planetary warming that is already in the pipeline for our planet, and showed that the ultimate heating up of the Earth could be much worse than previously feared.

“The worrisome part is that all the models show there is an amplification of the amount of warming in the future,” Cristian Proistosescu of Harvard University, who led the new research, told the Guardian. And the situation might be far worse, as his work shows climate sensitivity could be as high as a stunning 6C.

“Some have suggested that we might be lucky and avoid dangerous climate change without taking determined action if the climate is not very sensitive to CO2 emissions. This work provides new evidence that that chance is remote,” Bill Collins of the University of Reading in the UK told the Guardian.

On that note, an in-depth article published in July in New York Magazine, titled “The Uninhabitable Earth,” is certainly worth reading. The heavily researched piece, which has generated much controversy, notes:

“The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into.”

Similarly, recently published research generated at Cornell University revealed that by 2100, a staggering 2 billion people, or one-fifth of the total global human population, could become ACD refugees due to rising seas alone.

“We’re going to have more people on less land and sooner than we think,” lead author Charles Geisler, professor emeritus of development sociology at Cornell, said. “The future rise in global mean sea level probably won’t be gradual. Yet, few policy makers are taking stock of the significant barriers to entry that coastal climate refugees, like other refugees, will encounter when they migrate to higher ground.”

The New York Times published an important article highlighting global efforts by scientists to build and protect repositories for things like ice, seeds and mammals’ milk in order to preserve them as evidence of a natural order that is rapidly disappearing. Last October, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault became flooded with rain; thankfully it was saved just in time, because otherwise we could have lost the seed backup plan for thousands upon thousands of species of plants. The San Diego Zoo maintains a frozen zoo of cryogenically preserved living cell cultures, sperm, eggs and embryos for 1,000 species, while the National Ice Core lab in Colorado holds approximately 62,000 feet of rods of ice from rapidly melting glaciers and ice fields in the Arctic, Greenland and Antarctica for future study.

Incredibly, a recently released report showed that only 100 companies are the source of more than 70 percent of the entire planet’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.

Meanwhile, global warm temperature records continue to be set at a staggering pace. Global temperatures for June this year were surpassed only by June in 2015 and 2016. If temperatures continue as expected, 2015, 2016 and 2017 will be the three hottest years ever recorded. Estimates now show that warming has reached levels not seen for 115,000 years.

Earth

Profound changes are evident on land this summer. Abrupt ACD is a consistent and primary feature of previous mass extinction events. While a slight extinction rate is natural and normal, what we are witnessing today is extremely accelerated. History shows us that sudden and dramatic change in climate was the catalytic event that drove previous extinctions. (Having just come out of the middle of the Amazon rainforest, it is particularly clear to me right now that we’ve little idea how much we are losing already.)

Things are changing fast enough that a multimillion-dollar ACD study in the Canadian Arctic had to be canceled — because of ACD. The four-year study, launched by the University of Manitoba and several other universities, had to cancel the first leg of their study due to warming Arctic temperatures that were causing hazardous sea ice to travel much further south than usual, causing safety concerns for the scientists.

Meanwhile, as sea-level rise projections continue to increase, it is currently estimated that at least two billion people will be driven out of their homes by 2100 and be forced into the interior of their countries to look for new places to settle.

Things are getting hot and dry enough in Montana that farmers there have to consider new ways to grow wheat, while in Morocco, a 2014 study revealed that in the previous decade, the number of nomads in one particular region of that country had fallen by 63 percent in one decade, again due to hotter and drier conditions that made their way of life impossible.

Water

As usual, there is ample evidence of ACD’s impacts across the watery realms.

In the Eastern Pacific, massive numbers of jelly-like organisms that are native to tropical seas are now invading Pacific coastal waters from Southern California all the way up into the Gulf of Alaska. Pyrosomes, which are colonies of hundreds to thousands of tiny zooids, have become so widespread as a result of warming ocean waters, they are causing big problems for commercial fisherfolk: They clog nets, completely preventing fishing in some areas. In May, one single scoop with a research net brought up 60,000 pyrosomes.

Another major issue plaguing the fishing industry along the West Coast of the US is worsening ocean acidification. The region’s billion-dollar fishing industry, along with the fragile coastal ecosystems, is suffering as the oceans continue absorbing more CO2 from the atmosphere and becoming more acidic. In Washington State, another pronounced example of this is that the Puget Sound area’s signature oysters are struggling to survive: They and other shellfish appear to be on their way out, due to the increasing acidity of their habitat.

A recently published study has confirmed that Earth’s oceanic basins are warming more rapidly than ever before in recorded history.

Thus, not surprisingly, the fourth largest ice shelf in Antarctica is in the process of melting down to its smallest area ever recorded, and another report shows that sea level rise around the world is accelerating due to how quickly the Greenland Ice Sheet is melting: That Ice Sheet alone is now responsible for one-quarter of all global sea level rise.

In other melting ice news, have a look at this fascinating tool to view how major glaciers in the Alps have dramatically melted over the last century.

At the other end of the water spectrum, a drought in Northern China has now become the worst in recorded history for that country, as economic losses to farmers in that region are now approaching $1 billion for this year alone.

Air

Hot temperature records and extreme heat waves continue to be the norm, and they are intensifying. In late June, the southwestern US was wracked by extreme heat, as Phoenix and Las Vegas cooked. The National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning for parts of Southern California and Arizona, cautioning of “a major increase in the potential for heat-related illness and even death.”

Earlier in the summer, Iran saw temperatures reach new heights: The city of Ahvaz experienced one of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on the planet, coming in at 128.66F. Extreme heat also plagued the UK, France, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, forcing some regions to ration water. Belgium also saw its hottest nighttime temperature ever.

Climate Central, in partnership with the World Meteorological Organization, has created a graphic which you can use to check future temperatures for many major global cities. According to the graphic, up to a dozen cities will heat up so much there is currently no analog on Earth to which we can compare them.

“Khartoum, Sudan’s average summer temperature is projected to skyrocket to 111.4°F (44.1°C) if carbon pollution continues unchecked,” the press release that accompanied the graphic stated. “That shift underscores that unless carbon pollution is curbed, the planet could be headed toward a state humans have never experienced.”

A report in the Hindustan Times revealed that Delhi could become as hot as the United Arab Emirates’ Sharjah by 2100, as the average summer high temperatures in major Indian cities could rise by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius.

As usual in the summers nowadays, there is more bad news on the methane front. Remember, methane is 22 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2 over a 100-year timescale.

The Siberian Times reported recently that two fresh craters were found on the Yamal Peninsula. The newspaper stated that

 “the formation of both craters involved an explosion followed by fire, evidently signs of the eruption of methane gas pockets under the Yamal surface.”

The craters, each of which is approximately 25 feet in diameter and roughly 65 feet deep, can be viewed here.
Fire

The heat wracking the planet this summer has been accompanied by intense wildfires.

In Siberia, multiple blazes kicked off wildfire season across the tundra and boreal forest. The fires burned at a rate unheard of for at least the last 10,000 years, and released vast stores of carbon stored in the trees and soil, creating yet another positive feedback loop for ACD: More wildfires create more heat in the atmosphere, which creates more wildfires, and on, and on. The NASA satellite photos of the burning area are disturbing.

Closer to home in California, raging wildfires forced roughly 8,000 people to evacuate as out-of-control fires destroyed homes and threatened thousands of other structures.

Along coastal Alaska and Canada’s Northwest Territory, large wildfires burned near the shores of the Arctic Ocean — water that was, until recently, frozen. In British Columbia, 14,000 people have fled as more than 1,000 firefighters battle numerous large blazes.

Drier dry spells and higher temperatures mean longer, more intense wildfire seasons, which is precisely what we are seeing. The US this year is on pace to have a record-breaking wildfire year, with at least 3.5 million acres burned already. By April, early on in wildfire season, more than 2 million acres had burned, which is nearly the average consumed in entire fire seasons during the 1980s.

Denial and Reality

There’s never a dull moment in the denial world these days.

In Florida, that state’s extremist ACD-denying Gov. Rick Scott signed legislation making it easier for Florida residents to challenge science that is taught in public schools, so if an ACD-denying parent doesn’t like a science textbook that teaches the basic physics of how greenhouse gases work, the book could end up being banned.

Trump-appointed EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, an ACD denier and pink slipped 38 members of the EPA’s Board of Scientific advisors, which is merely a drop in the bucket compared to dozens of other major environmental roll-backs the Trump administration has pulled off thus far, including forcing NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] to erase human activity references to greenhouse gases in its Annual Greenhouse Gas Index.

Thankfully, reality continues to thrive in other parts of the world: In France, the sale of petrol and diesel cars will be banned beginning in 2040 — just one of the steps that country is taking to meet its portion of the Paris climate agreement.

Surprisingly, in the US a recent poll by Yale University’s Program on Climate Change Communication showed that roughly two-fifths of the population believe ACD is likely to kill off all humans.

In other positive news, slowly but surely more reports addressing overpopulation’s critical role in ACD are surfacing. One published in July in the Guardian suggested people who are serious about doing something about ACD should have fewer children. By way of example, a recent study published in Environmental Research Letters calculated that having one less child would bring a reduction of 58 tons of CO2 for each year of a parent’s life.

This suggests, in turn, that countries that are serious about addressing ACD should be developing strong protections for reproductive rights, increasing the availability of birth control and abortion, working toward gender justice and ensuring that comprehensive sex education is provided in all schools.

A mega-dose of reality for all of us here on Earth: Earth’s sixth mass extinction event is already well underway, the aforementioned event researchers are already referring to as causing the “biological annihilation” of wildlife, and that is already far more severe than previously feared.

“It’s as simple as bacteria in a test tube,” was Lovejoy’s response when I asked his take on the overpopulation crisis. “You can only have so many before you run out of nutrients.”

Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Montreal, July 31, 2017 — Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) demands that the Canadian government immediately review its existing $15 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Over the weekend, news sources published videos and photographs of Canadian-made armoured personnel carriers (APC) being used by the Saudi government to crackdown on Saudi civilian dissidents. The APCs that appear in the video were manufactured by Terradyne Armored Vehicle Inc., a privately owned company in Newmarket, Ontario.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland stated she is “deeply concerned” that Canadian-made armoured vehicles appear to be implicated in this violent crackdown by Saudi authorities. Just last week, prior to the release of photos of the Canadian APCs, Global Affairs Canada admonished Saudi Arabia for government violence against civilians, stating,

“[Security] challenges must be addressed in a manner that abides by international human rights law.”

Global Affairs asserted that if, in fact,

“it is found that Canadian exports have been used to commit serious violations of human rights, the minister will take action.”

The video footage of Terradyne APCs being misused by Saudi authorities demonstrates the urgent need for the Canadian government to review the recent $15 billion dollar deal supplying Ontario-manufactured Light Armoured Vehicles (LAVs) to the Saudi state. CJPME President Thomas Woodley stated,

“The Canadian government must modulate commercial relationships as a function of respect for human rights.”

CJPME has long called for better enforcement of Canada’s export control laws, in addition to ensuring a compliant accession to international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). While existing Canadian export controls explicitly outline that Canada should not export military or defence materials to countries “whose governments have a persistent record of serious violations of the human rights of their citizens,” these controls were effectively disregarded by the Harper and Trudeau governments.

Despite decades of human rights abuses committed by the Saudi government against its own citizens, and repressive breaches of international law in Yemen, the Trudeau government nonetheless went ahead with the $15 billion dollar arms deal. Even prior to the latest photos of the Canadian APCs, there was ample evidence that Saudi Arabia might use Canadian arms to commit human rights abuses. The latest revelation only strengthens the call for a full export control review of Saudi Arabia’s LAV purchase from Canada.

“We [Australians and Britons] can talk to each other as we can with no one else, but you can’t revert to a world that’s now disappeared.” – Allan Gyngel, Sydney Morning Herald, Aug 1, 2017

To hear Boris Johnson, current Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, is to be subjected to the capsuled calls of another kingdom. That kingdom is often a past, where there was glory, and patriots could say they did it for England. Reality is emptied before you, and soothingly, one can bathe in the luminescence of an optimistic, entertaining bumbler who will front, but will never be able to do.

His address at a packed Sydney Town Hall, organised by the Lowy Institute and chaired by Michael Fullilove, was delightful on a certain level.[1] It furnished a reminder of how poor, in comparison, the Australian public speaker or political figure can be: dull, grasping for a humour packaged with canned laughter, lacking in curiosity and essentially staged.

But Johnson’s audience was there to be entertained. He had top billing. His past stint in the antipodes was reflected upon as a cultural baptism that lingered. There were the conscious referents: “Stubbies daks – shorts of appalling brevity”; “bonzer, mate”, conveying a false familiarity from a person whose common ground with the egalitarian Australian “battler” is, in truth, non-existent. He did, however, try to woo, to speak seductively, and familiarly.

Throughout his address, Johnson used the arresting language that convinced British voters on making the most significant decision in generations: leaving the European Union. It was a Tory voice directed at the disaffected, a conservative anarchism dressed up as a patriotic sense of worth before the pen pushers on the continent.

His hook was a thought experiment: to convince his Sydney audience of how unfortunate it would have been had Australia suffered the fate of joining the EU. Imagine the difficulties, the problems, the costs.

Australia could be seen as a model of a country that could thrive without being packed into a tense family of nations.

“I think we can look at Australia today and after 26 years of continuous growth, and with per capital GDP 25 percent higher than in the UK, I think we can say that it was not absolutely necessary for Australia to join the [European] Common Market.” (The foreign secretary had ignored the dangerous overreliance Australia continues to have on commodity sales.)

Apart from the incongruity of the comparison, Johnson was being devilish by omission, not least of all on the enormous advantages that being part of a common trading block had been to Britain, which had been, in the 1970s, an ailing patient on the European scene. There had also been improvements in accountability on the subject of human rights and welfare.

What mattered to Johnson, instead, were the busybody intrusions of standards, diktats and directives issued from the unelected (ignoring, naturally, the role of the European Parliament) on whether a particular food might pass muster, or a certain construction accord to standard. Conveniently omitted were the oversights that have served the British commonweal, rather than undermine it.

Joining ASEAN and such forums, he insisted, was far better than being part of a bloc of states governed by EU strictures. The club fees for the former, he surmised, were far cheaper. Besides, Britain wanted to, as Evelyn Waugh might have said, project its might, notably through the deployment of two aircraft carriers in the South China sea and through the Straits of Malacca.

Well and good, but beyond the laughter was a grave seriousness. After the calisthenics comes the reality. First and foremost, nothing of significance has happened since last year’s referendum, other than Britain asserting its boisterous independence from those nasty little regulators in Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg.

Another tangible result has been the critical weakening of the Tory government. Britain’s Prime Minister, Theresa May, foolishly made the decision to burden the British electorate with yet another ballot, hoping to bury Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour opposition. The result was a richly deserved mauling and hung parliament. Johnson’s efforts at drawing the veil over his boss’s doomed prime ministership were enchanting, though far from convincing.

The Boris narrative would have you believe that Britain has the negotiators (it does not, certainly not those skilled in EU matters); that it has the teams, the means to ensure that nothing, in effect, would really change to the disadvantage of the UK. Stating a line made more in optimism than sober analysis, the EU stood to loose going hard on Britannia.

Boris would also have you believe that those aircraft carriers actually existed, yet these, he had to concede, had yet to be constructed. London had the world’s greatest financial centre, despite the fact that companies have been looking elsewhere to park their centres. The English speakers were, let’s face it, supremely gifted, even if only monolingual – forget those vast cosmopolitan empires of a rather different nature that populate the historical record.

This was Boris Johnson to a tee: promises made of considering fatuity, if not irrelevance. After leaving “the EU, I am confident that Australia will be at, or near, the font of the queue for a new Free Trade Agreement with Britain.” Such spellbinding pluck: the UK barely in the process of hammering out its own negotiations on divorce, let alone having a plan for Brexit, and its foreign secretary speaking of queues. Nothing if not entertaining.

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

Note

[1] https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/2017-lowy-lecture-uk-foreign-secretary-boris-johnson

On December 14, 2016 Tom Suárez spoke at The House of Lords, London, at the invitation of Baroness Jenny Tonge. Drawing from his recently published book State of Terror, he addressed the centennial of the Balfour Declaration and his views on the way toward ending today’s Israel-Palestine “conflict”. The following are Suárez’s remarks. The book was reviewed here by David Gerald Fincham.

***

Good evening, thank you so much for taking time out of what I know are your busy schedules to be here now. My thanks to Jenny Tonge for making this meeting possible; and I would like to thank three people without whom the book would not exist: Karl Sabbagh, my publisher; Ghada Karmi, who inspired the book; and my partner, Nancy Elan, who was my constant alter-ego during my research and without whom I surely would have given up.

My work is based principally on declassified source documents in the National Archives in Kew. When I have had to rely on published works, I have trusted established historians who cite first-hand sources. Everything I will say here tonight is based on such source material.

Our topic is of course the so-called “conflict” in Israel-Palestine, a tragedy that has dragged on for so long that it feels static, indeed almost normalised. But unlike other deadly conflicts, this one is wholly in our power to stop—“our” meaning the United States and Europe. It is in our power to stop it, because we are the ones empowering it.

We are now approaching the centennial of the British Original Sin in this tragedy, the Balfour Declaration. The British role in Palestine was a case of ‘hit & run’: The Balfour Declaration, in which the British gave away other people’s land, was the hit; and thirty years later, Resolution 181—Partition—was the run, leaving the Palestinians abandoned in a ditch.

Zionism was of course among the incarnations of racial-nationalism that evolved in the late nineteenth century. Bigots were Zionism’s avid fans—it was the anti-Semites who championed the Zionists. Gertrude Bell, the famous English writer, traveler, archaeologist, and spy, reported, based on her personal experience, that those who supported Zionism did so because it provided a way to get rid of Jews.

The London Standard’s correspondent to the first Zionist Conference in 1897 I think described Zionism perfectly. He reported that

…the degeneration which calls itself Anti-Semitism [bear in mind that ‘anti-Semitism’ was then a very new term] has begotten the degeneration which adorns itself with the name of Zionism.

Indeed, most Jews and Jewish leaders dismissed Zionism as the latest anti-Semitic cult. They had fought for equality, and resented being told that they should now make a new ghetto—and worse yet, to do so on other people’s land. They resented being cast as a separate race of people as Zionism demanded.

They had had quite enough of that from non-Jewish bigots.

For others, the idea of going to a place where one could act out racial superiority was seductive. As the political theorist Eduard Bernstein put it at about the time the Balfour Declaration was being finessed, Zionism is “a kind of intoxication which acts like an epidemic”.

An Israeli soldier clears out of the way as a specially-built IDF vehicle begins to douse Bethlehem in “skunk spray”, chemical warfare intended to make life miserable for the civilian population. (Photo: T Suárez)

By the time the Balfour Declaration was finalized, thirty-plus years of Zionist settlement had made clear that the Zionists intended to ethnically cleanse the land for a settler state based on racial superiority; and it was the behind-the-scenes demands of the principal Zionist leaders, notably Chaim Weizmann and Baron Rothschild.

First-hand accounts of Zionist settlement in Palestine had already painted a picture of violent racial displacement. I will cite one of the lesser known reports, by Dr. Paul Nathan, a prominent Jewish leader in Berlin, who went to Palestine on behalf of the German Jewish National Relief Association. He was so horrified by what he found that he published a pamphlet in January, 1914, in which he described the Zionist settlers as carrying on

a campaign of terror modelled almost on Russian pogrom models.

A few years later, the Balfour Declaration’s deliberately ambiguous wording was being finalized. Sceptics—and the British Cabinet—were assured that it did not mean a Zionist state. Yet simultaneously, Weizmann was pushing to create that very state immediately. He demanded that his state extend all the way to the Jordan River within three or four years of the Declaration—that is, by 1921—and then expand beyond it.

In their behind-the-scenes meetings, Weizmann and Rothschild treated the ethnic cleansing of non-Jewish Palestinians as indispensable to their plans, and they repeatedly complained to the British that the settlers were not being treated preferentially enough over the Palestinians. And they insisted that the British must lie about the scheme until it is too late for anyone to do anything about it.

In correspondence with Balfour, Weizmann justified his lies by slandering the Palestinians and Jews—that is, the Middle East’s indigenous Jews, who were overwhelmingly opposed to Zionism and whom Weizmann smeared with classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Palestinians he dismissed as, in so many words, a lower type of human, and this was among the reasons he and other Zionist leaders used for refusing democracy in Palestine—if the “Arabs” had the vote, he said, it would lower the Jew down to the level of a “native”.

With the establishment of the British Mandate, four decades of peaceful Palestinian resistance had proved futile, and armed Palestinian resistance—which included terrorism—began. Zionist terror became the domain of formal organizations that attacked anyone in the way of its messianic goals—Palestinian, Jew, or British. These terror organizations operated from within the Zionist settlements and were actively empowered and shielded by the settlements and the Jewish Agency, the recognized semi-autonomous government of the Zionist settlements, what would become the Israeli government.

There was no substantive difference between the acknowledged terror organizations—most famously, the Irgun, and Lehi, the so-called Stern Gang—and the Jewish Agency, and its terror gang, the Hagana. The Agency cooperated, collaborated, and even helped finance the Irgun.

The relationship between the Jewish Agency, and the Irgun and Lehi, was symbiotic. The Irgun in particular would act on behalf of the Hagana so that the Jewish Agency could feign innocence. The Agency would then tell the British that they condemn the terror, while steadfastly refusing any cooperation against it, indeed doing what they could to shield it.

The fascist nature of the Zionist enterprise was apparent both to US and British intelligence. The Jewish Agency tolerated no dissent and sought to dictate the fates of all Jews. Children were radicalised as part of the methodology of all three major organizations, and by extension, the Jewish Agency.

Britain’s wake-up call regarding the Zionists’ indoctrination of children came on the 8th of July, 1938. That day, the Irgun blew up a bus filled with Palestinian villagers. Now, this was not the first time the Irgun had done something of this sort, but this time the British caught the bomber. She was a twelve year old schoolgirl.

Teenagers, both boys and girls, were commonly used to plant bombs in Palestinian markets and conduct other terror attacks. Teachers were threatened or removed if they tried to intervene in the indoctrination of their students, and the students themselves were blocked from advancement if they resisted, even being taught to betray their own parents if those parents tried to instill some moderation. Jews who opposed and tried to warn of the emerging fascism were assassinated, and indeed most victims of Zionist assassinations—that is, targeted, rather than indiscriminate—were Jews.

From the beginning of World War II through to the summer of 1947, there were virtually no Palestinian attacks, even though Zionist terror against Palestinians continued. A British explanation for the Palestinians’ failure to respond in kind was that they understood that the attacks were a trap, intended to elicit a response that the Zionists would frame as an attack against which they would have to ‘defend’ themselves. This was a Zionist tactic noted by the British as early as 1918, and it remains Israel’s default strategy today, most blatantly in Gaza, but also in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

As late as the fall of 1947, the Jewish Agency was concerned by the Palestinians’ failure to respond to its provocation, but when the end of 1947 came and the Jewish Agency could wait no longer for the civil war it needed, it was simply a matter of ratcheting up the terror.

Throughout the Mandate period, the takeover and ethnic cleansing of Palestine remained Zionism’s unwavering goal. As but one illustration, I will summarize a key meeting of twenty people held in London on the 9th of September, 1941.

“To be treated as most secret” is the red ink heading of the transcript. Present were Weizmann, who had called the meeting, David Ben-Gurion, and other Zionist leaders such as Simon Marks (of Marks & Spencer); and the prominent non-Zionist industrialist, Robert Waley Cohen. Discussing the path to the proposed Jewish State, the conversation ran along the lines of George Orwell’s still-to-be-published Animal Farm, in which all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Anthony de Rothschild began by stressing that there would be no “discrimination … against any group of its citizens” in the Jewish state, not even “to meet immediate needs”. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion also assured the sceptics: “Arabs”—Palestinians—would have equal rights. However, they clarified that within that absolute equality, Jewish settlers would have to have special privileges. Weizmann’s ‘absolute equality’ included the transfer of most non-Jews out of Palestine while permitting “a certain percentage of Arab and other elements” to remain in his Jewish state, the insinuation being as a pool of cheap labour.

Anthony de Rothschild’s vision of equality and non-discrimination was equally compelling: it “depended on turning an Arab majority into a minority”, and to achieve this, there would be “no equal rights” for non-Jews.

Cohen found the scheme dangerous, submitting that the Zionists were “starting with the kind of aims with which Hitler had started”. Cohen did not stop there: he suggested that if a state with equality for everyone were indeed intended, the state should be named with a neutral geographic term. He suggested … ‘Palestine’. The others were horrified at this idea, arguing that if the state had a non-Jewish name, “they would never get a Jewish majority”, in effect acknowledging the use of messianic fundamentalism as a calculated political strategy.

In another obvious but rarely spoken admission, Ben-Gurion clarified that the ‘Jewish state’ was not based on Judaism; it was, rather, based on being a ‘Jew’, that is, by the Zionists’ racial definition.

Asked about borders of his settler state, Weizmann continued in the same surreal manner. He replied that he would consider the partition plan proposed by the Peel Commission four years earlier, in 1937, but that “the line” (the Partition) “would be the Jordan”. This was nonsensical: the Jordan was the Commission’s eastern border for the two states, and so Weizmann’s ‘partition’ meant 100% for his state, 0% for the Palestinians. He went further still: he would “very much” like to “cross the Jordan”, that is, take Transjordan along with Palestine.

At the end of the meeting Weizmann sought to put his proposals into effect officially in the name of all Jews worldwide. Those against his proposals were, in his word, “antisemites”.

Meanwhile, World War II was raging. What was the Jewish Agency’s reaction to the most terrible enemy Jewry has ever known? From the beginning, it was to lobby the Yishuv, the Jewish settlers, not to enlist in the Allied struggle against the Nazis, because doing so would not serve Zionism—even taking advantage of May Day 1940 to lecture the Yishuv to stay in Palestine rather than join the war effort. Another reaction was to conduct a massive theft ring of Allied weapons and munitions, “as if”, as one British military record put it, “paid by Hitler himself”.

1952: The IDF militarily commandeers the UN office dedicated to peace-keeping along the Armistice Line in order to block the exposing of its violations. (See Suárez, State of Terror, 301-303.) (Photo: John Scofield)

Much has been written on the collaboration between the Zionists and fascists during the war, the best known of course being the Haavara Transfer agreement that broke the anti-Nazi boycott. One of the least known was Lehi’s attempted collaboration with the Italian fascists. In its nearly concluded ‘Jerusalem Agreement’ of late 1940, Lehi would help the fascists win the war, and in return the fascists would uproot any Jewish communities not in Palestine and force their populations to Palestine.

If this sounds like a scheme so extreme that only fanatical Lehi could have conjured it, it is essentially what the Israeli state ultimately succeeded at in the early 1950s—most catastrophically, when it conducted a false-flag terror campaign against Jews in Iraq to destroy that ancient community and move its population to Israel as ethnic fodder.

Violence targeting Jews was, and I would argue remains, a core tactic of Zionism. In fact, the single most deadly terror attack of the entire Mandate period was not the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 as is commonly thought. Even some of the Irgun’s bombings of Palestinian markets killed more people than the King David attack. But the most deadly single terror attack was the Jewish Agency’s bombing of the immigrant ship Patria in 1940, killing an estimated 267 people, of whom more than 200 were Jews fleeing the Nazis.

The Jewish Agency bombed the Patria because it was bringing the DPs to Mauritius, where the British had facilities for them. The Agency needed the DPs to be settlers in Palestine without delay, and was willing to risk the lives of all aboard in order to get the survivors to remain—which, indeed, they did.

In further violence against its Jewish victims, the Agency framed the dead for the bombing. It spread the lie that the DPs themselves blew up the vessel, that they committed mass suicide rather than not go directly to Palestine, posthumously conscripting the dead to serve the Zionist myth.

This was no aberration, but the driving principle of the Zionist project: Persecuted Jews served the political project, not the other way around.

Another major tactic of violence against Jews by the Jewish Agency and American Zionist leadership was the sabotaging of safe haven in order to force them to Palestine. As but one example, in 1944 US Zionist leaders sabotaged President Roosevelt’s provisional success in establishing a half million new homes for European DPs, most of these homes in the United States and Britain. When Roosevelt’s aide Morris Ernst visited the Zionist leaders in an attempt to save the program, he was, in his words, “thrown out of parlours and accused of treason”— ‘treason’, because he was Jewish, and the Zionists owned Jews.

Nor were those already settled safe. In 1946, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Yitzhak Herzog, conducted a massive kidnapping operation of Jewish orphans that had been adopted by European families when their parents perished years earlier. Removing ten thousand children from their homes was the number he cited to the NY Times as his goal. In the National Archives, I found a copy of his own record of the trip.

Herzog railed against the fierce resistance he met in every country by horrified local Jewish leaders who tried to protect the children. But Herzog used his political clout to circumvent them. In France, for example, facing the steadfast refusal of the Jewish leaders to betray the children, Herzog

met the Prime Minister of France from whom I demanded promulgation of a law which would oblige every family to declare the particulars of the children it houses,

so that those of Jewish background could be exposed and put back in orphanages until they can be shipped to Palestine—quite a Kafkaesque twist on Passover for these children who had just been spared the Nazis.

Herzog’s justification for the kidnappings was that for a Jew to be raised in a non-Jewish home is “much worse than physical murder”. Yet even this ghastly justification fails to explain what was actually taking place, because at the same time Herzog was ‘rescuing’ Jewish orphans from this fate “much worse than physical murder”, his Jewish Agency colleagues were sabotaging Jewish adoptive homes in England for young survivors still in the camps. The real reason for all of it, of course, was that the children were needed to serve the settler project as demographic fodder.

To that end, the Jewish Agency had coerced President Truman to segregate Jewish DPs into Zionist indoctrination camps, despite objections that it echoed Nazi behaviour. For these people who had just survived the unthinkable, then severed from the rest of humanity into these brainwashing camps, there was no such thing as free thought.

The camps nurtured such fanaticism that it shocked a joint US-UK committee that visited in 1946. Before these camps, few DPs wanted to go to Palestine. But now the Committee found them in a delirious state, threatening mass suicide if they did not go to Palestine. Suggestions of new homes in the United States, which had always been the favored destination, were again met with threats of mass suicide.

DPs were also groomed to bring Zionist terrorism to Europe, bombing Allied trains and Allied facilities. The bombing of the British embassy in Rome in 1946, for example, was by DPs brainwashed in these camps, as was a near-catastrophe in the Austrian Alps in 1947 when DPs nearly blew a train off a steep trestle into a deep abyss, which would almost certainly have sent its two hundred civilians and Allied troops to their deaths.

German Jewish immigrants to Palestine during war were outraged by the Zionists’ exploitation of the Nazi horrors they had just fled. This outrage given voice by, among others, the prominent journalist Robert Weltsch, editor of Berlin newspaper until banned by the Nazis in 1938.

Weltsch warned that Zionist leaders

have not yet understood that the enemy seeks the destruction of the Jews … We who have been here only a few years, we know what Nazism is.

Zionists, rather, are “taking part in the crash of European Jewry only as spectators”, fighting the British and keeping Jews from joining the Allied struggle while getting comfortable and rich from their political project in Palestine. Recent immigrants from Germany and Central Europe, he said, have no representation among the Zionist ruling establishment. If they did,

we would have demanded that the Yishuv should put itself at the disposal of Britain for the fight against Hitler and Nazism.

But—and I am still quoting Weltsch—

They do not want to fight against Hitler because his fascist methods are also theirs … They do not want our young men to join the [Allied] Forces … day after day they are sabotaging the English War Effort.

These German Jewish immigrants were shunned by the Zionists, their publications and presses bombed. Even Kiosks were bombed for selling non-Hebrew papers to German Jewish immigrants.

In 1943, a man whom British records describe as “a Jew whose integrity is not open to question” risked his life to warn the British about the threat of Zionism. For his safety, he was referred to only by the code-name ‘Z’.

Z described Zionism as a parallel movement to Nazism. He warned that the Zionist indoctrination of Jewish youth was producing a society of extremists who will use any method necessary to achieve Zionist goals; and he pointed out that, as fascism in Europe has demonstrated, such a society is very difficult to undo once it has taken root. The result, I’m afraid, is what we, or more accurately the Palestinians, are facing today in the so-called ‘conflict’.

How trustworthy is this anonymous testimony? I found at the National Archives a private letter in which Z is identified — he was J.S. Bentwich, the Senior Inspector of Jewish Schools in Palestine.

Zionists

would have got further towards rescuing the unfortunates in Axis Europe, had they not complicated the question by always dragging Palestine into the picture

—so judged a report by US Intelligence in the Middle East, dated the 4th of June, 1943, entitled “Latest Aspects of the Palestine Zionist-Arab Problem”. It described “Zionism in Palestine” as

a type of nationalism which in any other country would be stigmatised as retrograde Nazism,

and stated that anti-Semitism was essential to it. Whereas

assimilated Jews in Europe and America are noted for being … stout opponents of racialism and discrimination,

Zionism has bred the opposite mentality in Palestine,

a spirit closely akin to Nazism, namely, an attempt to regiment the community, even by force, and to resort to force to get what they want.

US intelligence assailed “the crude conception” being spread of the Palestinian people as “a nomad tent-dweller … with a little seasonal agriculture”, as being “too absurd to need refutation”. The report noted the irony that it was from them that Zionist settlers learned the cultivation of Jaffa oranges. Whereas the Palestinians were self-sufficient, the Zionist settlements exist on massive external financing, and should Jews overseas ever tire of supporting the settlers, “the venture will collapse like a pricked balloon”. The conclusion of this early US intelligence report was however naïve, or at least premature: now that the world “has seen the lengths to which the Nazi creed has carried the nations”, it reasoned that the Zionists “are due to find themselves an anachronism”.

After the war, the Jewish Agency discussed its enemies. They were democracy; the Atlantic Charter, which of course became the basis for the United Nations; Reconstruction; and the fall in anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism having always been Zionism’s drug, without which it would be irrelevant. The Agency sought to exploit anti-Semitism and blamed declining anti-Semitism in the United States on America’s so-called “democratic attitude”.

Nor was this merely a post-war abuse. Even as Jews were still being carted off to the death camps, the New Zionist Organization’s Arieh Altman was typical in arguing that anti-Semitism must “form the foundation of Zionist propaganda”, and the Defence Security Officer in Palestine, Henry Hunloke, reported that it was important for the Jewish Agency to “stir up anti-Semitism … in order to force Jews … to come to Palestine”.

Now, today, when anything approaching this topic is raised, it is twisted by some into the pejorative misstatement that the speaker—in this case, me—is blaming Jews for anti-Semitism.

NO. Rather, it is the simple fact that Zionism requires anti-Semitism, is addicted to it, and seeks to insure that it, or at least the appearance of it, never ends. One need look no further than the satisfaction among many Zionists today at the true anti-Semitism of the incoming US administration of Donald Trump, with Israeli journalists like Yaron London openly applauding this anti-Semitism as welcome news. More about that in a few minutes.

I also mentioned Reconstruction. As one former settlement member, a man named Newton, explained, Zionist leaders were afraid that with the improvement of conditions in Europe the pressure on Palestine would subside. Any improvement in Europe was an anathema to their plans.

The ethnic cleansing of Jaffa, 1948, as survivors are rescued by boats. Photographer unknown. (Source: Tom Suarez)

What was the Jewish Agency’s reaction to Britain’s role in defeating the worst enemy Jewry has ever known? It saw an opportunity for extortion. The war had devastated Britain’s economy; but when Britain turned to the US for a long term loan to recuperate from its battle against the Nazis, the Agency tried to pressure Washington to deny the loan unless Britain acceded to Zionist demands. The loan was of course ultimately approved, but still in 1948 Zionists assailed US Congressmen for being pro- Marshall Plan, and the Truman administration itself dangled the loan in front of British officials when they tried to bring attention to Zionist atrocities.

By 1946, Zionist terrorism had become the defining daily challenge of life in Palestine, and one hundred thousand British troops proved unable to contain it. Anyone or anything that kept Palestine a functioning society was a target of the Zionists. Trains, roads, bridges, communications, oil facilities, and Coast Guard stations were constantly being bombed. Utility workers, telephone repairmen, railway workers, bomb disposal personnel were murdered. Police were long a favoured target and were gunned down by the dozens.

Among the smaller terror organizations that popped up was one specifically dedicated to Zionists’ long-running fear of Jews befriending non-Jews, the ultimate fear of course being polluting what for the Zionists was the pure Jewish race. As a sample of its methods, the terror group doused a disobedient Jewish girl with acid, severely injuring her and blinding her in one eye.

Zionist terror was aided by the Jewish Agency’s phenomenal intelligence network. The Agency had informers all the way to high-placed sympathetic US officials that fed them intelligence, such that the British learned not even to trust direct messages to US President Truman.

When the UN’s Palestine committee, UNSCOP, visited Palestine in the summer of 1947, the Agency had replaced the committee members’ drivers with spies; had replaced the waiters at the main restaurant they frequented with spies; and most productively, sent five young women to serve at what was called a “theatre network” of house attendants at the building where the members, all men, were being housed. The young women were required to be smart and educated, but above all, in the Agency’s word, to be “daring”. Whatever ‘daring’ meant, they extracted a wealth of information from the key people who were deliberating Palestine’s future.

Extract from Airborne Field Security, Report No. 54, week ending 19 November 47, regarding Jewish sex workers forced to be Zionist spies. National Archives, Kew, FCO 141/14286.

Jewish sex workers were involuntarily recruited as spies. They were told that upon the Zionist victory they would be executed for ‘sleeping with the enemy’, but might be spared if they cooperated now. The practice was so widespread that a standard questionnaire was printed up that the women were to fill out after each British customer. [note: see document detail, above]

To demonstrate the degree to which Jewish Agency plants infiltrated the government and everyday life, a couple of months after one coast guard station was attacked and bombed by the Hagana, it blew up again … but the British were baffled, because this time there had been no attack. They discovered that the construction crew that had rebuilt the station after the previous attack were Hagana, and had simply embedded explosives in the reconstruction, to be detonated when desired.

But the worst problem of infiltration was in the military service, where deadly sabotage by Zionist plants who had joined the forces led, tragically, to orders to remove all Jews from service in Palestine, because there was no way to tell the Zionists from the Jews.

By 1948, this problem spread to key medical personnel. After the Jewish Agency poisoned the water supply of Acre with typhoid in order to expedite the ethnic cleansing of this city that lies on the Palestinian side of Partition, the bacteriologist hired by the British proved to be a Hagana plant or sympathizer, an obstacle to the availability of the vaccine. [Note: see document detail, below. For the injection of typhoid into the aqueduct at Acre, see e.g., Ilan Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing, pp 100-101, and Naeim Giladi, Ben Gurion’s Scandals, pp 10-11]

Hagana biological warfare and the “obstructive” attitude of the bacteriologist. Extract from telegram No. 1293, from High Commissioner Cunningham, “dispatched 1900 hrs. 8.5.48”, marked “IMMEDIATE. SECRET”. National Archives, Kew, WO 275/79.

Selling terror required effective marketing, and for that the Agency harnessed the plight of European Jews at the same time it was exploiting them. A very brief look at the iconic Zionist immigrant story is illustrative—that is of course the USS Warfield, renamed the Exodus for the obvious Biblical iconography.

The Exodus was sold to the world as the desperate attempt of 4,515 Holocaust survivors to reach their last hope of safety and a new life, their promised land. The British, instead, forced them back, not just to Europe, but to their ultimate nightmare: Germany.

That was the story the US and European public got.

In truth, the Exodus was a monstrous propaganda event, grand theatre, not for benefit but at the expense of Jewish survivors. The Jewish Agency knew that Exodus passengers would be turned back, for, among other reasons, their flooding of Palestine with settlers was a tactic to force its political goals. And remember that the entire Exodus cargo of immigrants equalled less than one percent of President Roosevelt’s resettlement plan that the Zionists sabotaged. The DPs themselves were products of the Zionist camps and had been rehearsed to repeat, as one witness described it, whatever Zionist mumbo-jumbo was demanded of them.

As for the return to Germany, it was the Jewish Agency, not the British, that forced the DPs back to Germany. Attempts were being made to find new homes for the Exodus passengers elsewhere—Denmark was one possibility—but this was sabotaged by Ben-Gurion, because it would spoil the Exodus plot.

There was in fact already an alternative to Germany. All the Exodus DPs had the right to disembark in Southern France rather than Germany, but the Agency used violence to prevent them from leaving. The Exodus show required the pathetic spectacle of their forced return to Germany.

The British decided to call the Agency’s bluff. They visited Golda Meir (then Meyerson), and spoke as though it went without saying that the Agency would do anything to spare the DPs the horrific return to Germany. They said that perhaps the DPs do not realize that they are free to disembark in southern France if they wish, or do not believe the British, and suggested that the Agency send a representative to tell them. Meir refused. To paraphrase Israeli Professor Idith Zertal, the greater the suffering of these survivors of the Holocaust, the greater their political and media effectiveness for the Zionists.

A few months after the Exodus affair, the UN recommended partition, with the assumption that a Zionist state would follow. This decision was directly influenced by the certainty of continuing Zionist terror if they did not, as was the disproportionately large land area the UN gave the Zionists.

According to British Cabinet papers, giving the Zionists so much land up front was an attempt to delay the Zionists’ expansionist wars. They knew they couldn’t stop Israeli expansionism, but they hoped to delay it. This appeasement of course failed: within a few months of Resolution 181, the Zionist armies were already waging their first expansionist war, confiscating more than half of the Palestinian side of Partition.

But in a consummately Orwellian irony, the fact that the British were occupying Palestine enabled Zionist leaders to juxtapose their settler project as a liberation movement against British colonizers, and thus for their 1948 terror campaign of expropriation and ethnic cleansing to be spun instead as a war of ‘independence’ or ‘emancipation’.

This so-called war of independence was in truth, to quote the British High Commissioner at the time, “operations based on the mortaring of terrified women and children”. Its broadcasts boasting of their successes, “both in content and in manner of delivery, are remarkably like those of Nazi Germany”. The Zionists were “jubilant” he reported, with “their campaign of calculated aggression coupled with brutality”.

British intelligence, meanwhile, reported that “the internal machinery of the Jewish State and all the equipment of a totalitarian regime is complete, including a Custodian of Enemy Property to handle Arab lands”.

In the Yishuv itself, “persecution of Christian Jews”, by which I assume they meant converts, “and others who offend against national discipline has shown a marked increase and in some cases has reached mediaeval standards”.

All this, to be sure, was before any Arab resistance.

Finally, on the 15th of May, 1948, Britain fled the scene of its crime, for which the Palestinians have been paying ever since. The post-statehood period continued full throttle with the same violent messianic goals, evolving with the new dynamics.

Now, there is no point in my having taken up your time here, no point any tree wasting its paper on this book, unless I thought that it had some value in the collective effort toward ending the conflict. So … How do I think that this book, how do I think my approach, might be constructive?

The historical record makes plain what should already have been obvious from the present reality—that Israel’s and Zionism’s pretenses regarding Jews and Judaism, and in particular its pretense of being a response to anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution, is a fraud. Indeed quite the opposite, it thrives by exacerbating and capitalizing on these, and has turned them into a cynical, deadly business.

Exposing this, in my opinion, is Israel’s—and the conflict’s—Achilles Heel. And this should be a simple case of the Emperor’s New Clothes—except that every time the child points out that the Emperor is naked, he or she is labelled an anti-Semite and silenced.

The IDF attacks the area between the ‘Azza and Aida refugee camps, Bethlehem, as an ambulance (center, background) tries to rescue victims. December, 2015. (Photo: T Suárez)

The US and other governments empower the conflict for their own geopolitical reasons, but why do the publics of those allegedly democratic countries give their tacit acquiescence?

Israel has one of the world’s largest militaries, but its most powerful weapon, the one without which all its others would be impotent, is its Narrative, its creation myth, its auto-biography.

Under the Twilight Zone of this Narrative, Israel is not merely a political entity like any other nation-state, but is transformed into the Old Testament kingdom whose name it adopted for that strategic purpose, striking a powerful chord in the collective Western sub-conscious.

We all know the Narrative more or less, but in order for that Narrative to be ever-present, Israel has crammed it into a 3-word mantra: ‘The Jewish State’.

This phrase—Israel’s self-identity—is a unique construct in the modern world. It is qualitatively distinct from any other country’s relationship with any other religion or cultural group. Judaism is not Israel’s state religion in the sense of a national faith that any nation might adopt. Rather, it presents itself as THE Jewish state, the metaphysical embodiment of Jewry itself, of Judaism, Jewish history, culture, persecution, and most cynical and exploitative of all, the Holocaust.

No country claims it is the Catholic state. Costa Rica, for example, is a Catholic state; it does not suggest that it owns Catholicism, Catholics, or historic Christian martyrdom. We do not have the British government issuing guidelines as to when criticism of the Costa Rican government becomes anti-Catholic hate speech. Norway is a Lutheran state; Tunisia is one of several nations that maintains Islam as a national faith; Cambodia is a Buddhist state. Israel, in contrast, would never acknowledge even the possibility of another Jewish state because it has body-snatched everything Jewish, and holds it hostage to empower its crimes.

Criticise Israeli terror, you will instead hit this three-word human shield—‘The Jewish State’— that Israel hides behind.
What other country on this earth is permitted this perverse tribal claim over a religious or cultural group? This self-proclaimed exceptionalism should strike us as bizarre—even weird—yet we continue to be party to it.

We hear a lot about anti-Semitism these days, and there is of course anti-Semitism in the world, as there are all varieties of bigotry. But let’s just blurt out the obvious: Virtually all of the alleged anti-Semitism we hear about from the Zionists is a lie, smears calculated to silence anyone who seeks to end the horror.

This smear campaign has been compared to the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s, but it is in truth much worse, because whereas Communism is merely a political and economic theory that one can argue for or against, anti-Semitism is inherently evil. In other words, with McCarthyism, one could ultimately respond by saying, Well, let’s say I am a communist, so what?

Zionism’s abuse of anti-Semitism, its exploitation of Judaism and historic Jewish persecution for immoral ends, is profoundly anti-Semitic. Zionism, taken at its word, makes Judaism complicit in its crimes, and thus—taken at its word—succeeds where all the conventional bigots throughout the centuries were powerless.

Meanwhile, as we are seeing more bluntly than ever in the United States, true anti-Semitism is embraced by Zionists because it is invariably pro-Israel.

One hundred years ago, MP Edwin Montagu accused the British government of anti-Semitism for colluding with the Zionists. History has proven him correct. If Israel is forced to stop this anti-Semitic abuse, if it is forced to come out from hiding behind its human shield, the conflict will be seen for what it is and so could not continue. Israel-Palestine will become a democratic, secular country of equals.

And what more poetic year than the Balfour centennial for that to happen.

Thank you.

***

Foto dos 3 últimos presidentes do Brasil : Temer, Dilma , Lula

Não ao oportunismo, à polarização, ao sectarismo: defender justiça social e direitos humanos no Brasil, não é nem nunca foi sinônimo de apoiar Luiz Inácio nem o PT, muito pelo contrário! Nos porões do poder, riem da nossa cara: quem se lembra?Hoje PT recusa autocrítica e combate críticas externas, como sempre fez mais que por mentalidade rasa: seu autogolpe impossibilita encontro com a consciência

Diante das grandes crises, nenhuma novidade, as sociedades mais vulneráveis (i.e., deseducadas) tendem a se polarizar facilmente. E isso significa perder a lucidez, o equilíbrio, a autonomia reflexiva e serem levadas por toda a sorte de oportunistas, demagogos, vigaristas os quais, no caso particular do Brasil, sempre abundaram os quais, atualmente, evidenciam-se cabalmente ou, no português mais popular, saem grotesca e desavergonhadamente do armário.

Donald Trump as President of the United States was humanity’s hope, or, I should say, the hope of that part of humanity aware of the danger inherent in provoking conflict between nuclear powers. For two decades, the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have thrown sticks, stones, and nasty words at the Russian bear. The US has broken and withdrawn from security agreement after security agreement and has compounded the threat that Russia sees by conducting war games on Russia’s borders, staging a coup in Ukraine, a province of Russia for centuries, and by a continuous stream of false accusations against Russia.

The result of this irresponsible, thoughtless, and reckless policy toward Russia was the announcement a few weeks ago (ignored by the US media) by the Russian high command that Russian military planners have concluded that Washington is preparing a surprise nuclear attack on Russia.

This is the most alarming event of my lifetime. Now that Washington’s criminally insane have convinced Russia that Russia is in Washington’s war plans, Russia has no alternative but to prepare to strike first.  

During the Cold War both sides received numerous false alarms of incoming ICBMs, but because both sides were working to reduce tensions, the alarms were disbelieved. But today with Washington having raised tensions so high, both sides are likely to believe the false alarm. The next false alarm could bring the end of life on earth, and for this there is no one to be blamed but Washington.

Trump’s emphasis on normalizing relations with Russia was a great relief to people sufficiently intelligent to understand the consequences of nuclear war. But none of these people are in Washington, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the military/security complex, or among the presstitutes that pass for a media in America. All of these people want to destroy Trump because he wants to make peace with Russia.

Of the 535 members of the House and Senate, 530 voted in support of a bill that violates the separation of powers and prevents President Trump from removing sanctions on Russia. As the vote is so overwhelming that it is veto proof, the White House has announced that Trump will sign the bill, thus surrendering and giving up on his goal of restoring normal relations with Russia.

The White House believes that as the bill is veto proof, all that Trump could achieve by a veto is to prove the charges that he is a Russian agent and is using his office to protect Russia, and this could easily be turned into an impeachment proceeding.

However, there are things Trump could do, and since defusing the threat that Russia sees is essential to the avoidance of war, it is imperative that Trump do everything he can to prevent the military/security complex and its servants in Congress and the media from locking America into deadly conflict with Russia.

As I wrote yesterday, Trump could take his case to the American people in a major speech and point out that Congress is violating the separation of powers, hamstringing the power of the presidency, and making it illegal for him to reduce the dangerous tensions that previous administrations have created with a major nuclear power.

Trump could also tell Congress that their law is unconstitutional and that he won’t sign or veto the bill, and if Congress persists he will take it to the Supreme Court.

Trump could also get on the telephone with the German politicians and corporate CEOs who have denounced the sanctions as illegal and intended to serve US business interests at the expense of Germany. He should tell them to force Merkel to announce that Germany will not accept the sanctions. The EU leadership also denounces the sanctions. Trump, with a little effort, can organize so much European opposition that he can tell Congress that as the President of the United States he cannot permit a collection of mindless morons, which is what Congress is, to destroy Washington’s empire by driving Europeans out of it. If Trump can get the Europeans to act, he can defeat the bill, which is really nothing but Congress’ service to its political campaign contributors in the military/security complex and the US energy industry.

Trump is a fighter. And this is Trump’s fight. He has everything to gain by rising to the challenge, and so do the rest of us. The entire world should get behind Trump as there is no one else to defuse the tensions that are leading to nuclear war.

I have been amazed at the stupidity and mendacity of the American liberal-progressive-left, who have fallen in line with the military/security complex’s effort to destroy Trump, because peace with Russia takes away the orchestrated enemy so essential to the budget and power of the military/security complex. Of course, America no longer has a left. The left has been displaced by Identity Politics, a Zionist creation, as Gilad Atzmon explains in his books, that is proving effective in destroying the goyim by teaching them to hate one another. In Identity Politics, everyone is the victim of white heterosexual males, whom Identity Politics defines as misogynist, racist, homophobic gun nuts—Hillary’s “Trump deplorables.” As the “deplorables” voted for Trump, the liberal-progressive-left hate Trump and are helping the military/security complex destroy him even it it means nuclear war.

As I predicted would be the case, Trump had no idea how to appoint a government that would be on his side, and obviously failed completely. He is continually contradicted by his UN ambassador, his Secretary of State, his National Security Advisor, his Secretary of Defense. Trump is alone in his government.

So, he might as well fight. Address the American people. Organize the angry Europeans. Take the fight to criminally insane Washington before the criminals destroy the world in war.

Already in the 21st century Washington has destroyed in whole or part seven countries, producing millions of refugees who, together with immigrants claiming refugee status, are altering the populations of European countries and wiping Europe off of the face of the earth.  

This is Europe’s reward for being Washington’s vassal.

Trump should say to Europe: “It is time to tell Washington that you have had enough!”

If Trump doesn’t fight and is led away by the morons advising him into the camp of the ruling oligarchs, Trump, in order to perform in a leadership role will lead American wars against the world. As a war leader he will be supported by the ruling oligarchy, and the dumbshit liberal-progressives, having helped the military/security complex defeat Trump’s initiative for peace with Russia, will have not a leg to stand on.

Here is my prediction. Trump’s personality compels him to be a leader. Trump, having been defeated in his peace initiative by the military/security complex, the liberal-progressive-left, the corrupt Democrats, the corrupt Republicans, and the whores who pass for a media will regain leadership via wars and aggression against foreign enemies. 

Trump has already put illegal sanctions on Venezuela, hoping to overthrow Venezuelan democracy and restore Washington’s rule through the small group of right-wing Spanish who have traditionally dominated Venezuela.

Russia and China had a chance to come to Venezuela’s aid and to prevent the coming overthrow of the democratically elected government by Washington, but both countries lacked the necessary vision. Once Washington overthrows the Venezuelan government, Washington will overthrow the government in Ecuador and have Julian Assange’s diplomatic asylum revoked. Once Assange is tortured into claiming that Wikileaks is a Russian/American organization financed by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Assange will be put to death, and the dumbshit Americans will cheer. Then Washington will overthrow Bolivia and have a purge conducted in Brazil against all political leaders who are not on the CIA’s payroll.  

Then Washington will brand Russia and China “outlaw nations” and surrounded as they will be with US nuclear missiles and ABM sites, Washington will demand surrender or destruction.  

It all seems a fantasy, doesn’t it. But it is very real.

CIA stories are continuously shifting, but “going after ISIS” still seems to carry weight, so it is still used as a fake pretext to target civilians and destroy countries.

Syrians saw through the lies years ago. A recent article from SANA[1] media reports that

(f)oreign and Expatriates Ministry urged the UN Security Council to assume its responsibilities, maintain international peace and security, halt the alleged international coalition’s crimes against the Syrian people and oblige all states to abide by and implement all UNSC resolutions on counterterrorism, particularly resolution No. 2253.

Clearly, the UN is failing in its mandate to maintain international peace, largely because it is increasingly subservient to rogue US-led “coalitions” that are literally responsible for an overseas holocaust.

But Syrians are aware. Amidst a tally of U.S perpetrated massacres on Syrian civilians, the Ministry accurately reports that

terrorism could not grow without the unlimited support provided by the Coalition’s member states to the terrorist organizations, particularly the ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra.

The report also notes that

those attacks contributed to the spread of creative chaos, the killing and destruction which fulfill goals of the coalition and the terrorist organizations in destabilizing security in the region, destroying Syria’s capabilities and prolonging the crisis in a way that serves the interests of the Israeli entity.

“Creative chaos” is a euphemism for overseas holocaust[2] (literally). When the lawless coalition bombs another country, it is bombing civilians, as it recently did in Mosul Iraq where 40,000 civilians[3] were reportedly killed, and as it recently did in Syria.

Chaos and mass destruction is not collateral damage, it is the strategic goal. Thierry Meyssan explains it this way:

 (T)he simplest way to pillage the natural resources of a country over a long period is not to occupy the target, but destroy the state. Without a state, there can be no army. With no enemy army, there is no risk of defeat. Thus, the strategic goal of the US army and the alliance that it controls, the UNO, is exclusively the destruction of states. What then happens to the populations concerned is not Washington’s problem.[4]

Everything makes sense when seen through this lens. Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, have been, or are in the process of being destroyed, so they can be plundered, and rendered subservient to Imperial diktats.

Massacring 40,000 civilians in Mosul was not a mistake, just like slaughtering over 500,000 Iraqi kids under five with pre-war sanctions was not a mistake. These are all strategic decisions.

Prof. Chossudovsky explains that

“The “Liberation” of Mosul constitutes an extensive crime against humanity consisting in actively supporting the ISIS terrorists’ occupation of Mosul, and then waging an extensive bombing campaign to ‘liberate’ the city.”[5]

Martyred journalist Khaled Alkhateb was also aware of Washington’s criminality. In one of his last reports, before being killed by Washington’s terrorists, Alkhateb reported that the Coalition was attacking civilians, hospitals, schools, and food production in the Homs region.

The “Coalition” and its mercenary proxies have been doing this for almost seven years now.

Embassies need to be opened in Syria and beyond, the truth needs to be widely accepted, not ignored, and the carnage must stop.

Notes

[1] “Syria urges UN to assume responsibility, end int’l coalition’s crimes against Syrian people.” SANA, July 30, 2017, (http://sana.sy/en/?p=110969) Accessed August 1, 2017

[2] Dr. Gideon Polya, “An Iraqi Holocaust, 2.7 Million Iraqi Dead From Violence Or War-imposed Deprivation.” “ICH”, March 27, 2015, (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41378.htm) Accessed August 1, 2017.

[3] Patrick Cockburn, “The Massacre of Mosul: More Than 40,000 Civilians Feared Dead.” Counterpunch, July 20, 2017, ( https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/20/the-massacre-of-mosul-more-than-40000-civilians-feared-dead/) Accessed August 1, 2017.

[4] Thierry Meyssan, “The European Union is blind to the military strategy of the United States.” Voltairernet.org, May 14, 2015. (http://www.voltairenet.org/article187588.html) Accessed August 1, 2017.

[5] Michel Chossudovsky, “The Engineered Destruction and Political Fragmentation of Iraq.” Global Research

July 14, 2017. (http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-destruction-and-political-fragmentation-of-iraq-towards-the-creation-of-a-us-sponsored-islamist-caliphate/5386998) Accessed August 1, 2017.

Note: This is the fourth installment in the series which draws links between the crisis in race relations and the super-exploitation of African American labor during the 1960s with the impact of the restructured world economic system on the city of Detroit. Decades of plant closings, the erosion of educational and municipal services, the imposition of emergency management and bankruptcy further illustrates the desire by the ruling class to maintain the status-quo. Socialism is the only viable solution to the crisis of United States political economy and the need to liberate the oppressed nations and the working class.

Developments in the city of Detroit since 1975 have been represented by continuous assaults on the status and well-being of the African American community and working people as a whole. Successive waves of economic crises spawning job losses, the lowering of real wages and the abolition of hundreds of thousands of industrial, service and public sector jobs have left the city with deep scares.

During the summer of 1975 another mini-rebellion erupted along Livernois Avenue on the near northwest side. However, with the intervention of the administration of Young, the unrest was quelled through the indictment of a white bar owner who had shot to death an African American youth accused of burglarizing his vehicle parked outside on the commercial strip.

Renewed rounds of plant closings between the late 1980s and 2009, the continuing white flight to the suburbs, the targeting of homeowners with predatory loan schemes which defrauded people out of their property, would create the conditions for a rapidly declining social situation in Detroit. The Great Recession beginning in 2007-2008 devastated the city’s housing stock turning Detroit from being a majority home owning municipality for African Americans and working class people, to one of majority renters. Tens of thousands of homes were lost through mortgage foreclosures while the city, state and federal governments refused to enact policy measures by the declaration of a state of emergency and the imposition of a moratorium on job losses and home seizures by the banks.

The Moratorium NOW! Coalition to Stop Foreclosures, Evictions and Utility Shut-offs was formed in the spring of 2008. This organization waged public campaigns, demonstrated against the leading financial interests such as the Bank of America, Chase, Bank of New York Mellon, etc., calling for the bailing out of the people and not the banks.

The following year in 2009, drastic cuts in public transportation, educational and municipal services were initiated in Detroit. A People’s Summit and Tent City was erected in Grand Circus Park downtown during June 2009 as a protest action against the ruling class National Summit held at the Renaissance Center, the headquarters General Motors. Moratorium NOW! Coalition brought people in from across the country and staged daily rallies in the park along with two significant demonstrations at GM World Headquarters against plant closings and lay-offs.

This was the period of restructuring and bankruptcy for the automotive industrial giants of Chrysler and GM. The process served as a template for the forced bankruptcy of the City of Detroit some four years later.

Governor Rick Snyder (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

In 2012, the State of Michigan under Governor Rick Snyder would convince a five out of nine majority within the Detroit City Council to vote in favor of a Financial Stability Agreement (FSA) under the guise that this would prevent the appointment of an emergency manager. The FSA would escalate a program of austerity eroding further the authority of the legislative municipal body in subservience to the right-wing pro-corporate regime in Lansing.

Nonetheless, by early 2013, an emergency manager was appointed by Snyder. Several months later the EM would file for bankruptcy in federal court in downtown Detroit. The Moratorium NOW! Coalition would intervene in the EM process and bankruptcy proceedings both within the federal court as well as outside in the streets. The organization filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to acquire thousands of files documenting the disastrous impact of the predatory municipal loans and interest rate swaps which ensnarled the city in an unsustainable economic quagmire. These documents were scanned into digitized formats in early 2013 and posted on the organization’s website as a special entry.

(See www.Detroitdebtmoratorium.org)

This is first time in U.S. history that a community-based organization mounted a protracted struggle not only against the activities of the banks in the area of mortgage foreclosures, it extended this effort to expose the role of predatory municipal financing by the multi-national lending institutions impacting the City of Detroit which precipitated the economic crisis. These actions by Moratorium NOW! Coalition and its allies drove down by $200million a scheme engineered by Barclays Bank to turn over yet another $285million to a host of financial institutions in order to terminate an interest rate swap deal that was purely a gift to the same financial institutions responsible for driving the municipality into economic ruin.

As a negotiating tactic, the EM Kevyn Orr, appointed by Governor Snyder, recommended an 86 percent cut to retirees monthly pension payments. Progressive layers of the municipal employees mobilized under the Stop the Theft of Our Pensions Committee (STOPC). Although a largely rigged process of economic coercion and manipulation resulted in the passage of a so-called “Plan of Adjustment” by a majority of retirees, the actual reductions in pensions were far less severe as desired by the ruling class.

At the height of the struggle against the bankruptcy, the EM ordered the termination of water services for thousands of Detroit households in 2014. Moratorium NOW! Coalition organized weekly demonstrations called “Freedom Fridays” outside the offices of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) during May, June and July of the same year. The largest demonstration against water shut-offs and the bankruptcy was held on July 18.

The annual Net Roots Conference took place in Detroit during this period at Cobo Center downtown attracting thousands to the city. Representatives of National Nurses United (NNU), the largest healthcare labor union in the U.S. encompassing 180,000 members, contacted Moratorium NOW! Coalition to see how their union could assist with the efforts in opposition to the bankruptcy and the massive termination of water services. NNU was scheduled to send in leading officials to the Net Roots Conference and were open to collaboration with local activists.

Moratorium NOW! Coalition proposed that the delegates to Net Roots be lobbied to shut down the conference on Friday July 18 and come out into the streets downtown and join the weekly demonstration. Through a process of consultation, the Moratorium NOW! Coalition proposal was accepted by the conveners of the event. Altogether some 5,000 people, both local activists and conference delegates, marched through downtown prompting the DWSD at the urging of federal bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes to impose a temporary halt to the terminations of water services. This provided the opportunity for thousands of households to make arrangements to pay their over-inflated arrears in water bills.

Nonetheless, the water shut-offs continued afterwards due to the fact that the payment plans were unsustainable. Detroit is still the most impoverished major municipality in the U.S.

With specific reference to the foreclosure crisis, the bank-imposed housing crisis drove down actual property values throughout Detroit. Over assessed property taxes led to another monumental crisis in 2015. Tens of thousands of homes were slated for seizure by the Wayne County Treasurer’s Office and the Detroit Land Bank Authority (DBLA).

Moratorium NOW! Coalition waged a citywide campaign to demand the halt to these unjust foreclosures. A host of community organizations met with the-then interim Wayne Country Treasurer Eric Sabree who rejected the concept of a moratorium on tax foreclosures citing the possible inability to sell bonds to investors.

However, the deadlines for foreclosures were extended and payment plans were structured in a way to mitigate the crisis. However, such measures only forestall home losses. Again the question of poverty stemming from the decades-long economic decline in Detroit and Wayne County was at the source of the problem.

Mike Duggan (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

By documenting the role of the banks in the Detroit crisis, Moratorium NOW! Coalition asserted the need for socialist reconstruction in order to rebuild the city as well as other municipalities across the U.S. The nationally oppressed and the working class must unite with other potential allies to overturn the capitalist system of production and social relations.

African Americans still constitute an overwhelming majority in the city even though a white suburbanite mayor was installed in 2013, the first in 40 years. Mike Duggan’s role is to facilitate the removal of more African Americans, Latinos and working poor households from Detroit utilizing the same rationale of blight removal to create the appearance of a white-dominated city.

The only real solution to the crisis of the cities lies in the unity of the nationally oppressed and working class in an effort to shut down the most egregious forms of repression and exploitation. A broad-based socialist movement imbued with justice and strong organizational leadership can cripple finance capital’s domination of a city by the formation of a revolutionary alliance aimed at reversing the economic decline.

It often appears that “true Afghanistan” is not here in Kabul and not in Jalalabad or Heart either; not in the ancient villages, which anxiously cling to the steep mountainsides.

Many foreigners and even Afghans are now convinced that the “true” Afghanistan is only what is being shown on the television screens, depicted in magazines, or what is buried deep in the archives and libraries somewhere in London, New York or Paris.

It is tempting to think that the country could be only understood from a comfortable distance, from thesafety of one’s living room or from thosebooks and publications decorating dusty bookshelves and coffee tables all over the world.

“Afghanistan is dangerous,” they say. “It is too risky to travel there. One needs to be protected, escorted, equipped and insured in order to function in that wild and lawless country even for one single day, or just a few hours.”

When it comes to Afghanistan, conditioned Western ‘rational brains’ of tenure or emeritus professors (or call them the ‘regime’s intellectual gatekeepers’) often get engaged, even intertwined with those pathologically imaginative minds of the upper class ‘refugees’, the ‘elites’, and of course their offspring. After all, crème de la crème ‘refugees’ speak perfect English; they know the rules and nuances of the game. The results of such ‘productive interaction’ are then imprinted into countless books and reports.

Books of that kind become, in turn, what could be easily defined as the ‘official references’, a ‘certified way’ to how our world perceives a country like Afghanistan. Their content is being quoted and recycled.

How often I heard, from the old veteran opinion makers (even those from the ‘left’) – people that I actually used to respect in the past:

“The Soviet era in Afghanistan was of course terrible, but at least many girls there had access to the education…”

It is no secret that ‘many girls had access to education’ in those distant days, but was it really “terrible”, that era? Was it “of course, terrible?” Baseless clichés like this are actually shaping ‘public opinion’, and can be much more destructive than the hardcore propaganda.

Most of those old gurus never set foot in Afghanistan, during the Soviet era or before, let alone after. All their ‘experience’ is second or third-hand, constructed mainly on sponging up bitterness from those who betrayed their own country and have been collaborating with the West, or at least on the confusion and mental breakdowns of their children.

Based on such recycled unconfirmed ‘facts’, bizarre theories are born. According to them, Afghanistan is ‘officially’ wrecked; it is hopelessly corrupt; it is beyond salvation and repair. It is ‘so divided, ethnically and otherwise’, that it can never function again as one entity.

Then come liberals, and the children of corrupt Afghan diplomats and exiled ‘elites’, who commonly justify their passivity by blaming the entire world for the destruction of their nation: “every country in the world just wants to harm Afghanistan, take shamelessly advantage of it.”

Naturally, if everybody is responsible, than nobody truly is. Therefore, as expected, ‘the grand conclusion’ is – “There is absolutely no hope.” Everyone who can is trying to leave; who in his or her right mind would want to dwell in such mayhem?”

Let’s just write the entire place off! Chapter closed. One of the greatest cultures on Earth is finished. Nothing can be done about it. Goodbye, Afghanistan! Ciao, bella!

For some, especially for those who left the country and slammed the door, it is a tempting and ‘reassuring’ way of looking at the state of things. It justifies their earlier decision. If one accepts such views, than nothing has to be done, because no matter what, things would never improve, anyway. For many, especially for those who are benefiting (even making careers) from doing absolutely nothing to save Afghanistan, such an approach and such theories are actually perfect. Very little of it matters to them, that almost all of this is total rubbish!

*

I never saw any of those professors from the MIT or Cornell University anywhere near the dusty roads cutting through Samar Khel or Charikar. I never saw any reporters from the Western mass media outlets here, in the deepest villages that keep changing hands between Taliban and the government forces, either. If they were here, I’d definitely spot them, as they tend to travel ‘in style’, like some buffoons from bygone eras: wearing ridiculous helmets, bulletproof vests, and PRESS insignias on all imaginable and unimaginable parts of their bodies, while being driven around in armored vehicles, often even with a full military escort.

It would be quite difficult to talk to Afghan people looking like that. There is not much one could actually even see from such an angle and perspective, but that’s the only one they are choosing to have, that is if they come here at all.

*

Let me back-track a bit: in case my readers in the West or elsewhere have never heard about Samar Khel. Well, it is a dusty town not far from Jalalabad, a former ‘grave’ for the Soviet forces and the National Afghan Army. During the “Soviet era”, the US and the Saudi-backed Mujahideen used to fire between 500 and 1,000 missiles from here, all directly towards the city of Jalalabad, day after day.

It is very hard to imagine what went on and what went wrong in Afghanistan during the 1980’s, without feeling that 43⁰C heat of the desert, without chewing dust, without facing those bare, hostile mountains, and without speaking to people who used to live here during ‘those days’, as well as people who have been existing, barely surviving here now.

It is also absolutely impossible to understand the Soviet Union and its ‘involvement’ in Afghanistan, without driving through the countryside and all of a sudden spotting in some ancient and god-forsaken village, a mighty and durable water duct built by Soviet engineers several decades ago, with electricity towers and high voltage wires still proudly spanning above.

*

By now I know that I don’t want to write another academic book. I wrote two of them, one about Indonesia and one about that enormous sprawl of water dotted with fantastic but devastated islands and atolls of the South Pacific – “Oceania”. To write academic books is time consuming and it is, in many ways, ‘selfish’. The true story gets buried under an avalanche of tedious facts and numbers, under footnotes and recycled quotes. Once such a book is read and returned to its place on a shelf, no one is really inspired or outraged, no one is terrified and no one is ready to build barricades and fight.

But most academic books and are never even read from cover to cover.

I see no point in writing books that wouldn’t inspire people to raise flags, to fight for their country and humanity.

I don’t work in Afghanistan in order to compile indexes and footnotes. I am there because the country itself is a victim of the most brutal and ongoing imperialist destruction in modern history. As an internationalist, I’m not here only to document; I’m here to accuse and to confront the venomous Western colonialist narrative frontally.

Afghanistan is bleeding, assaulted and terribly injured. Therefore it deserves to be fought for and not just to be analyzed and described. No cold and detached historic accounts, no texts written from a safe distance, can help this beautiful country to stand on its own feet, to regain its pride and hope, and to fly as it used to in the not so distant past.

It doesn’t need more and more nihilism. On the contrary, it is thirsting for optimism, for new friends, for hope.

Not all countries are the same. Even now, Afghanistan has friends, true friends, no matter how much this fact is being obscured by the Western propagandists, no matter how much pro-Western Afghan elites are trying to prove otherwise.

*

This is not what you are supposed to be reading. All remembrances of the “Soviet Era” in Afghanistan have been boxed and then labeled as “negative”, even “toxic”. No discussion on the topic is allowed in ‘polite circles’, at least in the West and in Afghanistan itself.

Afghanistan is where the Soviet Union was tricked into, and Afghanistan is where the Communist superpower received its final blow. ‘The victory of capitalism over communism’, the official Western narrative shouted. A ‘temporary destruction of all progressive alternatives for our humanity’, replied others, but mostly under their breath.

Wreckage of Soviet tanks

After the horrific, brutal and humiliating period of Gorbachev/Yeltsin, Russia shrunk both geographically and demographically, while going through indescribable agony. It hemorrhaged; it was bathing in its own excrement, while the West celebrated its temporary victory, dancing in front of the world map, envisioning the re-conquest of its former colonies.

But in the end Russia survived, regained its bearings and dignity, and once again became one of the most important countries on Earth, directly antagonistic to the global Western imperialist designs.

Afghanistan has never recovered. After the last Soviet combat troops left the country in 1989, it bled terribly for years, consumed by a brutal civil war. Its progressive government had to face the monstrous terror of the Western and Saudi-backed Mujahideen, with individuals like Osama bin Laden in command of the jihadi genocide.

Socialists, Communists, secularists as well as almost all of those who were educated in the former Soviet Union or Eastern Block countries, were killed, exiled, or muzzled for decades.

Most of those who settled in the West simply betrayed; went along with the official Western narrative and dogma.

Even those individuals who still claimed to be part of the left, repeated like parrots, their pre-approved fib:

“Perhaps the Soviet Union was not as bad as the Mujahideen, Taliban, or even the West, but it was really bad enough.”

I heard these lines in London and elsewhere, coming from several mouths of the corrupt Afghan ‘elites’ and their children. From the beginning I was doubtful. And then my work, my journeys to and through Afghanistan began. I spoke to dozens of people all over the country, doing exactly what I was discouraged to do: driving everywhere without an escort or protection, stopping in the middle of god-forsaken villages, entering fatal city slums infested with narcotics, approaching prominent intellectuals in Kabul, Jalalabad and elsewhere.

“Where are you from?” I was asked on many occasions.

“Russia,” I’d reply. It was a gross simplification. I was born in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, but an incredible mixture of Chinese, Russian, Czech and Austrian blood circles through my veins. Still, the name “Russia” came naturally to me, in the middle of Afghan deserts and deep gorges, especially in those places where I knew that my life was hanging on a thin thread. If I were to be allowed to utter one last word in this life, “Russia” was what I wanted it to be.

But after my declaration, the faces of the Afghan people would soften, unexpectedly and suddenly. “Welcome!” I’d hear again and again. An invitation to enter humble homes would follow: an offer to rest, to eat, or to just drink a glass of water.

‘Why?’ I often wondered. “Why?” I finally asked my driver and interpreter, Mr. Arif, who became my dear friend.

“It’s because in this country, Afghans love Russian people,” he replied simply and without any hesitation.

“Afghans love Russians?” I wondered. “Do you?”

“Yes,” he replied, smiling. “I do. Most of our people here do.”

*

Two days later I was sitting inside an armored UNESCO Land Cruiser, talking to a former Soviet-trained engineer, now a simple driver, Mr. Wahed Tooryalai. He allowed me to use his name; he had no fear, just accumulated anger, which he obviously wanted to get out of his system:

“When I sleep, I still sometimes see the former Soviet Union in my dreams. After that, I wake up and feel happy for one entire month. I remember everything I saw there, until now…”

I wanted to know what really made him so happy ‘there’?

Mr. Wahed did not hesitate:

“People! They are so kind. They are welcoming… Russians, Ukrainians… I felt so much at home there. Their culture is exactly like ours. Those who say that Russians ‘occupied’ Afghanistan have simply sold out. The Russians did so much for Afghanistan: they built entire housing communities like ‘Makroyan’, they built factories, even bakeries. In places such as Kandahar, people are still eating Russian bread…”

I recalled the Soviet-era water pipes that I photographed all over most of the humble Afghan countryside, as well as the elaborate water canals in and around cities like Jalalabad.

“There is so much propaganda against the Soviet Union,” I said.

“Only the Mujahideen and the West hate Russians,” Mr. Wahed explained. “And those who are serving them.”

Then he continued:

“Almost all poor Afghan people would never say anything bad about Russians. But the government people are with the West, as well as those Afghan elites who are now living abroad: those who are buying real estate in London and Dubai, while selling their own country…those who are paid to ‘create public opinion.’”

His words flowed effortlessly; he knew precisely what he wanted to say, and they were bitter, but it was clearly what he felt:

“Before and during the Soviet era, there were Soviet doctors here, and also Soviet teachers. Now show me one doctor or teacher from the USA or UK based in the Afghan countryside! Russians were everywhere, and I still even remember some names: Lyudmila Nikolayevna… Show me one Western doctor or nurse based here now. Before, Russian doctors and nurses were working all over the country, and their salaries were so low… They spent half on their own living expenses, and the other half they distributed amongst our poor… Now look what the Americans and Europeans are doing: they all came here to make money!”

I recall my recent encounter with a Georgian combatant, serving under the US command at the Bagram base. Desperate, he recalled his experience to me:

“Before Bagram I served at the Leatherneck US Base, in Helmand Province. When the Americans were leaving, they even used to pull out concrete from the ground. They joked: “When we came here, there was nothing, and there will be nothing after we leave…” They prohibited us from giving food to local children. What we couldn’t consume, we had to destroy, but never give to local people. I still don’t understand, why? Those who come from the US or Western Europe are showing so much spite for the Afghan people!”

What a contrast!

Mr. Wahed recalled how the Soviet legacy was abruptly uprooted:

“After the Taliban era, we were all poor. There was hunger; we had nothing. Then the West came and began throwing money all around the place. Karzai and the elites kept grabbing all that they could, while repeating like parrots: “The US is good!” Diplomats serving Karzai’s government, the elites, they were building their houses in the US and UK, while people educated in the Soviet Union couldn’t get any decent jobs. We were all blacklisted. All education had to be dictated by the West. If you were educated in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, East Germany or Bulgaria, they’d just tell you straight to your face: Out with you, Communist! At least now we are allowed to at least get some jobs… We are still pure, clean, never corrupt!”

“Do people still remember?” I wonder.

“Of course they do! Go to the streets, or to a village market. Just tell them: “How are you my dear?” in Russian. They’d immediately invite you to their homes, feed you, embrace you…”

I tried a few days later, in the middle of the market… and it worked. I tried in a provincial town, and it worked again. I finally tried in a Taliban-infiltrated village some 60 kilometers from Kabul, and there it didn’t. But I still managed to get away.

*

I met Mr. Shakar Karimi in Pole Charkhi Village. A local patriarch, he used to be a district chief in Nangarhar Province.

I asked him, what the best system ever implemented in modern Afghanistan was?

First he spoke about the Khan dynasty, but then referred to a left-wing Afghan leader, who was brutally tortured and murdered by Taliban after they entered Kabul in 1996:

“If they’d let Dr. Najib govern in peace, that would have been the best for Afghanistan!”

I asked him about the Soviet invasion in 1979.

“They came because they were given wrong information. The first mistake was to enter Afghanistan. The second, fatal mistake was to leave.”

“What was the main difference between the Russians and Westerners during their engagement in Afghanistan?”

“The Russian people came predominately to serve, to help Afghanistan. The relationship between Russians and Afghans was always great. There was real friendship and people were interacting, even having parties together, visiting each other.”

I didn’t push him further; didn’t ask what was happening now. It was just too obvious. “Enormous walls and high voltage wires,” would be the answer. Drone zeppelins, weapons everywhere and an absolute lack of trust… and the shameless division between the few super rich and the great majority of the desperately poor… the most depressed country on the Asian continent.

*

Later I asked my comrade Arif, whether all this was really true?

“Of course!” He shouted, passionately. “100% true. The Russians built roads, they built homes for our people, and they treated Afghans so well, like their brothers. The Americans never did anything for Afghanistan, almost nothing. They only care about their own benefits.”

“If there would be a referendum right now, on a simple question: ‘do you want Afghanistan to be with Russia or with the United States, the great majority would vote for Russia, never for the US or Europe. And you know why? I’m Afghan: when my country is good, then I’m happy. If my country is doing bad, then I suffer! Most people here, unless they are brainwashed or corrupted by the Westerners, know perfectly well what Russia did for this country. And they know how the West injured our land.”

*

Of course this is not what every single Afghan person thinks, but most of them definitely do. Just go and drive to each and every corner of the country, and ask. You are not supposed to, of course. You are told to be scared to come here, to roam through this “lawless” land. And you are not supposed to go directly to the people. Instead you are expected to recycle the writings of toothless, cowardly academics, as well as servile mass media reports. If you are liberal, you are at least expected to say: “there is no hope, no solution, no future.”

At Goga Manda village, the fighting between the Taliban and government troops is still raging. All around the area, the remnants of rusty Soviet military hardware can be found, as well as old destroyed houses from the “Soviet era” battles.

The Taliban is positioned right behind the hills. Its fighters attack the armed forces of Afghanistan at least once a month.

Almost 16 years after the NATO invasion and consequent occupation of the country, this village, as thousands of other villages in Afghanistan, has no access to electricity, and to drinking water. There is no school within walking distance, and even a small and badly equipped medical post is far from here, some 5 kilometers away. Here, an average family of 6 has to survive on US$130 dollars per month, and that’s only if some members are actually working in the city.

I ask Mr. Rahmat Gul, who used to be a teacher in a nearby town, whether the “Russian times” were better.

Right before Taliban moved in

He hesitated for almost one minute, and then replied vaguely:

“When the Russians were here, there was lots of shooting… It was real war… People used to die. During the jihad period, the Mujahideen were positioned over there… they were shooting from those hills, while Soviet tanks were stationed near the river. Many civilians were caught in the crossfire.”

As I got ready to ask him more questions, my interpreter began to panic:

“Let’s go! Taliban is coming.”

He’s always calm. When he gets nervous, I know it is really time to run. We ran; just stepping on the accelerator and driving at breakneck speed towards the main road.

*

Before we parted, Mr. Wahed Tooryalai grabbed my hand. I knew he wanted to say something essential. I waited for him to formulate it. Then it came, in rusty but still excellent Russian:

“Sometimes I feel so hurt, so angry. Why did Gorbachev abandon us? Why? We were doing just fine. Why did he leave us? If he hadn’t betrayed us, life in Afghanistan would be great. I wouldn’t have to be a UN driver… I used to be the deputy director of an enormous bread factory, with 300 people working there: we were building our beloved country, feeding it. I hope Putin will not leave us.”

Then he looked at me, straight into my eyes, and suddenly I got goose bumps as he spoke, and my glasses got foggy:

“Please tell Mr. Putin: do hold our hand, as I’m now holding yours. Tell him what you saw in my country; tell him that we Afghans, or at least many of us, are still straight, strong and honest people. All this will end, and we will send the Americans and Europeans packing. It will happen very soon. Then please come and stand by us, by true Afghan patriots! We are here, ready and waiting. Come back, please.”

*

A son of the super elite Afghan ‘exiles’ living in London, once ‘shouted’ at me, via Whatsapp, after I dared to criticize one of the officially-recognized gurus of the Western anti-communist left, who happened to be his religiously admired deity:

“I’m completely amazed that you’d do such a thing. Then again, you’re Russian… And Russians held a strange superiority complex about dominating the whole Asian & African continents – even when nobody invited or asked them to. Historical examples are plenty… Don’t go to a country to report about what’s actually going on when you can’t even speak the language!”

Poppy growing next to US airforce base in Bagram

This was his tough verdict on Russia and on my work; a verdict of ‘Afghan man in London’, who never even touched work in his entire life, being fully sustained by his morally corrupted family. He never travelled much, except when his father took him on one of the official diplomatic visits. He has been drinking, taking drugs and hating everything that fights, that defies the Empire. From President Duterte in the Philippines, to Maduro in Venezuela, and Assad in Syria. After he was taken out of Afghanistan at an extremely early age, he never set foot on its soil.

All of his knowledge was accumulated ‘second-hand’, but he is quick to pass endless moral judgments, and he is actually taken seriously by one of the most influential and famous ‘opposition’ figures in the West. It is because he is an Afghan, after all, and because he has a perfect English accent, and his ‘conclusions’ are ‘reasonable’, at least to some extent acceptable by the regime, and therefore trustworthy. He and others like him know perfectly well when to administer the required dose of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian sentiments, or when to choose well-tolerated anarcho-syndicalism over true revolutionary fervor.

Again in London, a lady from an Afghan diplomatic circle, who still takes pride in being somehow left-leaning (despite her recent history of serving the West), recalled with nostalgia and boasting pride:

“Once when I got sick, I travelled with my husband from Kabul to Prague, for medical treatment. It was in 80’s, and we took with us 5,000 dollars. You know, in those days in Czechoslovakia this was so much money! Our friends there never saw so much cash in their lives. We really had great time there.”

I listened politely and thought: ‘Damn, in those days, my two Czech uncles were building sugar mills, steel factories and turbines for developing countries like Syria, Egypt, Lebanon. I’m not sure whether they also worked in Afghanistan, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. It was their internationalist duty and they were hardly making US$500 per month. The salary of my father, a leading nuclear scientist, who was in charge of the safety of VVR power plant reactors, was at that time (and at the real exchange) well under US$200 a month. These were very honest, hard-working people, doing their duty towards humanity. And then someone came from Kabul, from the capital of one of the poorest countries in Asia, recipient of aid and internationalist help from basically all Soviet Block countries, and blows 5,000 bob in just a few days!’

In those days, socialist Czechoslovakia was helping intensively, various revolutionary and anti-colonialist movements, all over the world. Even Ernesto Che Guevara was treated there, between his campaign in Congo, and his final engagement in Bolivia.

But the lady did not finish, yet:

“Once we crossed the border and travelled to the Soviet Union by land. You cannot imagine the misery we encountered in the villages, across the border! Life was much tougher there than on our side. Of course Moscow was different: Moscow was the capital, full of lights, truly impressive…”

Was that really so? Or was this official narrative that has been injected through the treasonous elites into the psyche of both Afghans and foreigners?

I listened, politely. I like stories, no matter from which direction they are coming. I took mental notes.

Then, back in Afghanistan, I asked Mr. Shakar Karimipoint blank:

“You were travelling back and forth, between Afghanistan and the former Soviet Union. Was life in the Afghan countryside better than in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan?”

He stared at me, shocked. When my question finally fully sank into his brain, he began laughing:

“Soviet villages were so much richer, there could not be any comparison. They had all necessary facilities there, from electricity to water, schools and medical posts, even public transportation: either train or at least a bus. No one could deny this, unless they’d be totally blind or someone would pay them not to see! Of course Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, was totally different story: it was a huge and very important Soviet city, with theaters, museums, parks, hospitals and universities. But even the villages were, for us, shockingly wealthy. Culture at both sides of the border was, however, similar. And while the Soviets were engaged here in Afghanistan, things began developing at our side of the border, too.”

But who would listen to Mr. Shakar Karimi from Pole Charkhi Village, on the outskirts of Kabul. He hardly spoke English, and he had no idea how to be diplomatic and ‘acceptable’ to Londoners or New Yorkers. And what he was saying was not what was expected from the Afghans to say.

During my previous trip to Afghanistan, over the phone from Kabul, I suggested to my friend, another ‘elite’ Afghan exile, that the next time she should come with me, at least for a few days, in order to reconnect, to breathe the air of the city that she has been claiming she missed so desperately, for so many years. Reply was curt, but somehow predictable:

“Me, coming back like this; incognito? You don’t understand, my family is so important! When I finally go back, it will be a big, big deal!”

It is very strange, but Afghans that I know from Afghanistan are totally different from those I meet in Europe and North America. So are Afghans who are going back, regularly, to their beloved country, and who are ‘connected’, even engaged.

In Rome, I met Afghan Princess Soraya. I was invited to Italy by several left-wing MP’s representing 5 Stelli (‘5 Star Movement’) and during our lunch together, when learning about my engagement in Afghanistan, they exclaimed: “You have to meet ‘our’ Afghan Princess!”

They called her on a mobile phone. She was in her 60s, but immediately she jumped on her bicycle and pedaled to the Parliament area in order to meet me. She was shockingly unpretentious, and endlessly kind. With her, nothing was a ‘big deal’. “Come meet me in the evening in the old Jewish Ghetto,” she suggested. “There will be an opening of a very interesting art exhibition there, in one of the galleries.”

We met again, in the evening. She was very critical of the occupation of her country by the NATO forces. She had no fear, nothing to hide. She had no need to play political games.

“I’m going back to Kandahar, in couple of weeks. Please let me know when you are going back to my country. I’ll arrange things for you. We’ll show you around Kandahar.”

*

Deep ravine of Afghanistan

In the meantime, I got used to Afghanistan; to its terrain, its stunning beauty, to its bitter cold in the winter and stifling heat of the summers, to its curtness, its exaggerated politeness and even to its hardly bearable roughness, which always surfaces at least once in a while. But I never got used to all of those upper-class ‘refugees’, people who have left Afghanistan permanently; to those who later betrayed, and then betrayed again, spreading false information about their country, serving Western media/propaganda outlets or as diplomats of the puppet state abroad, making a lucrative living out of their treason and out of the misery of their own people. I don’t think that I will ever get used to them. In a way, they are even worse than NATO, or at least equally as bad, and more deadly and venomous than the Taliban.

There are many ways how one can betray his or her country. There are also countless reasons and justifications for treason. Historically, Western colonialists developed entire networks of local, “native” collaborators, all over the world. These people have been ready and willing to run down their devastated countries, on behalf of the European and later, US imperialists, in exchange for prominent positions, titles and ‘respect’. Unfortunately, Afghanistan is not an exception.

On 21 January 2010, even Kabul Press had apparently enough, and it published damning article “Afghan UN Ambassador’s $4.2 million Manhattan apartment”, referring to the super-luxury residence of then Afghan UN Ambassador, Zahir Tanin:

“Among the billions of dollars being spent propping up the Karzai government are some choice bits of New York City real estate. Number 1 is a 2,400 sq. ft. 3-bedroom corner apartment in the Trump World Tower, one of the world’s most expensive addresses. It was chosen by Zahir Tanin, Afghanistan’s Ambassador to the United Nations, who lives there with his wife.”

“According to Kabul press sources, eight other diplomats working in the Mission’s offices live about one hour away. The average rent for them is over $20,000 per month—extremely pricey even for Manhattan real estate. The previous Ambassador, Mr. Farhadi paid only $7,000 per month for all rent and expenses.”

“Other ambassadors, like Taib Jawad (Afghan Ambassador to the U.S.) are living in luxury residences, why not me?” our source quotes Tanin as saying.”

*

So many Afghans have left, many betrayed, but others are refusing to bend, remaining proud and honest.

During my previous visit to the country, I worked along the road separating the districts 3 and 5 in Kabul, photographing literally decomposing bodies of drug-users.

In June 2017 I returned, but this time I dared to film the people living under the bridges, and in deep infested hovels. Later I walked on the riverbank, trying to gain some perspective and to film from various angles.

Someone was making threatening gestures from the distance; someone else aimed a gun at me. I ducked for cover.

“Not very welcoming place, is it?” I heard loud laughter behind my back. Someone spoke perfect English.

One of the ways of filming in Afghanistan

I turned back. A well-dressed man approached me. We exchanged a few words. I explained what I was doing here and he understood immediately.

“Here is my card,” he said. Muhammad Maroof (Sarwan), Vice-President of the Duniya Construction Company,” it read. He continued:

“I came to this warehouse here to deliver my products, and I saw you filming. You’re lucky you were not hit by a bullet.”

“I want to talk,” he said, pointing his hand at the bridge. “Don’t film me, just take notes. You can quote me, even use my name.”

He explained that he used to work for the US military, as an interpreter.

Then he began speaking, clearly and coherently:

“The biggest mafias here are directly linked to both UK and US. The West lies that they want to stop trade with drugs in Afghanistan; they never will allow it to stop.”

“My brother is a writer and he has images of the U.S. army giving water pumps, studs and other basic stuff, for the growth of poppies. The biggest supporter of drugs production in Afghanistan, and the export, is the UK government. They are dealing directly with the locals, even giving them money… The UK is also the major market for the export. Helmand, Kandahar, you name it, from there, directly, transport planes are taking off and going straight towards Europe, even the US. The Westerners are people who physically put drugs into the airplane at our airports.”

“My relative was an interpreter for the British… He was killed by them, after he had been witnessing and interpreting at a meeting between the UK officials, and the local drug mafias.”

I was wondering whether he was certain he wanted to speak on the record. My interpreter was standing by, apparently impressed by what he was witnessing. Mr. Maroof did not hesitate:

“I have nothing to hide. They are destroying my country right in front of my eyes. What could be more horrifying than that? The Western occupation is ruining Afghanistan. I want the world to be aware of it, and I don’t care what could happen to me!”

*

Not all the opposition to the present regime in Kabul is fighting for true independence and progressive ideals. Some have close links with the West, or/and with the Mujahideen.

In Kabul, in June 2017, inside a makeshift camp built near the site of a devastating explosion which in May killed at least 90 people, injuring 400, I met with Ramish Noori, the spokesperson of Haji Zahir Qadir’s “Uprising for Change”. The powerful “Uprising” counts on at least a 1,000-men strong militia, one which is locked in brutal combat with ISIS (Daesh), and which has already beheaded several terrorist fighters in ‘retaliatory’ actions.

Mr. Noory clearly indicated that the goal of his group is to force the present government to resign, even if that would have to happen with the help of foreign countries:

“We were shot at in Kabul and 6 protesters were killed, 21 injured. Professional Special Forces of Ashraf Ghani shot those who were killed point blank, in the face. Instead of killing terrorists, this government is killing innocent protesters; people who came to demand security after that barbaric terrorist attack which took lives of 90 people. We actually believe that many government officials are responsible for the killings. We also think that the government is helping to coordinate attacks of the terrorists.”

Mr. Samir, one of the protesters, began shouting in anger:

“The government is killing its own people, and so we want both Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah to resign. We want an entire reset of the Afghan system. Look what is happening all around the country: killings, bomb blasts and unbridled corruption!”

But when I press them hard, I feel that behind their words there is no sound ideology, just geographically swappable ‘civil society talk’. And perhaps some power struggle as well.

I don’t know who is supporting them, who is behind them, but I feel that someone definitely is. What they say is right, but it is how they say it that worries me.

I ask Ramish Noori about the NATO occupation of Afghanistan, and suddenly there is a long pause. Then a brief answer in a slightly uncomfortable tone of voice:

“We are ready to work with any country that is supporting our position.”

“Can I stop by later today?” I ask

“Of course. Anytime. We’ll be here till the morning. We are expecting the Mujahideen to join us in the early hours.”

“Mujahideen?”

Next time I will investigate further.

*

I visited the British Cemetery in Kabul. Not out of some perverse curiosity, but because, during my last visit, I was given this tip by a Russian cultural attaché:

“See how patient, how tolerant Afghan people are… After all that has been done to them…”

I’m glad that I went. The cemetery puts the events of the last 2 centuries into clear perspective. To a clear British perspective…

Full of patriotic sentimentality, The Telegraph once described this place as: “Afghanistan: The corner of Kabul that is forever England.”

There was no repentance, no soul-searching, no questions asked, like: What was England doing here, thousands of miles away from its shores, again and again… and again?”

Above the names of fallen English soldiers, there was a sober but unrepentant dedication:

“This memorial is dedicated to all those British officers and soldiers who gave their lives in the Afghan wars of the 19^th and 20^th Century. Renovated by the officers and soldiers of the British Contingent of the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul. February 2002. “We Shall Remember Them””

The cemetery is well kept. There is no vandalism and no graffiti. In Afghanistan, the death of Englishmen, Spaniards and other foreigners is respected.

Soviet tanks cemetery

Unfortunately, the death of Afghan people is not even worth commemorating, anymore.

How many Afghans did those British troops massacre, in two long centuries? Shouldn’t there be a monument, somewhere in Kabul, to those thousands of victims of British imperialism? Perhaps there will be… one day, but not anytime soon.

*

Again I drove to Bagram, filming the monstrous walls of the US military and air force base.

Again I saw children with toy guns, running and imitating landing combat helicopters.

Again I saw misery, right next to the gates of the base; poor women covered by burkas, babies in their arms, sitting in stifling heat on speed bumps, begging.

I saw amputees, empty stares of poor local people.

All this destitution, just a few steps away from tens of billions of dollars wasted on high-tech military equipment, which has succeeded in breaking the spirit of millions of Afghan people, but never in ‘liberating the country from terrorism’, or poverty.

I drove to the village of Dashtak, in Panjshir Valley, to hear more stories about those jihadi cadres who were based here during the war with the Soviet Union.

I was stopped, detained, interrogated, on several occasions, sometimes ten times per day: On the Afghan-Pakistani border which has recently experienced fighting between two countries, in Kabul, Jalalabad, Bargam. I lost track of who was who: police, army, security forces, local security forces, or militias?

In front of Jalalabad Airport I tried to film an enormous US blimp drone, on its final approach before landing. I asked my driver to make a U-turn, my drift HD camera ready. One minute later, the military stopped the car, aiming its guns at us. I had to get out, put my hands on a wall, and surrender my mobile phones. After our identity was verified from Kabul, one of the soldiers explained:

“Yesterday, exactly the same Toyota Corolla drove by, made the same U-turn and then blew itself up, next to this wall…”

In Jalalabad, I spoke to a police officer wounded at the national Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) station, during a terrorist attack.

Conflict at the Afghan-Pakistani border

It all felt surreal. The entire country seems to be dissolving; yet it is refusing to fall, to collapse. It is still standing. And despite rubble, fighting and the insane cynicism of the elites, there is still hope, and even some optimism left.

I’m trying to understand.

“Afghans living abroad keep spreading false rumors that we are finished, that everybody wants to leave,” explains Arif, my driver and interpreter. “But it’s not true. More and more people want to stay home, to improve things, to rebuild our motherland. She is beautiful, isn’t she?”

We are passing through a winding road, enormous mountains on both sides, and a river with crystal-clear water just a few meters away.

“She is,” I say. “Of course she is.”

*

We stopped near a small mosque, almost clinging to a cliff. It was the month of Ramadan. Arif was diligent; he went to pray. I also left the car and went to look into a deep and stunning ravine. Another car arrived; an off-roader, most likely an armored vehicle. The driver killed the engine. Three heavily armed men descended. They left their machine guns near the entrance to the mosque, washed their feet, and then went inside to pray.

Before they entered, we all nodded at each other, politely.

Surprisingly, I did not feel threatened. I never did, in Afghanistan.

The scenery reminded me of South America, most likely of Chile – tremendous peaks, a deep valley, serpentines and powerful river down below.

I felt strong and alive in Afghanistan. Many things have gone wrong in this country, but almost everything was clear, hardly any bullshit. Mountains were mountains, rivers were rivers, misery was misery and fighters were fighters, good or bad. I liked that. I liked that very much.

“Arif,” I asked, sipping Argentinian jerba mate from my elaborate metal straw, as we were gradually approaching Kabul. It was Malta Cruz, a common, harsh mate, but a decent one.

“Do you think I can get Afghan citizenship if we kick out Yanks and Europeans, defeat Taliban and Daesh, and rebuild socialist paradise here?”

I was joking, just joking, after a long and exhausting day of work around Jalalabad.

However, Arif looked suddenly very serious. He slowed the car down.

“You like? You like Afghanistan that much?”

“Hmmm,” I nodded.

“I think, if we win, they’ll make sure to give you Afghan nationality,” he finally concluded.

We were still very far from winning. After returning me to my hotel, he categorically refused to take money for his work. I insisted, but he kept refusing.

It all felt somehow familiar and good. Back in my hotel room, exhausted, I collapsed onto the bed, fully dressed. I fell asleep immediately.

Then, late at night, there were two loud explosions right under the hill.

Afghanistan is here. You love it or hate it, or anything in between. But you cannot cheat: you are here and if you know how to see and feel, then you slowly begin to know. Or you are not here, and you cannot understand or judge it at all. No book can describe Afghanistan, and I’m wondering whether even films can. Maybe poetry can, maybe a theatre play or a novel can, but I’m not sure, yet.

All I know is that it is alive, far from being finished. Its heart is pulsating; its body is warm. If someone tells you that it is finished, don’t trust him. Come and see for yourself; just watch and listen.

*

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and  “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. View his other books here. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

All images in this article are from the author.

As a legalized concept of international acceptance, Human Rights is considered a ’modern’ instrument, brought by the United Nations in 1948 after the ‘horrors of the Second World War’. However, the legal protection of individuals under arrest can be traced centuries before. Persian king Cyrus the Great issued 2559 years ago a law establishing civil rights for all, to be applied even to those defeated in war, which included the detainees. The Romans followed suit in its “natural law” codex, then the Magna Carta of 1215, the French Revolution’s ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ of 1789, etc.

Through that historical context, it is difficult to find a more flagrant – and also a more comprehensive– violation to the individuals’ civil rights, than the practice of ‘extraordinary renditions’. In essence, ‘extraordinary rendition’ is about the kidnapping of a foreign citizen by Intelligence or enforcement government agencies, act which is perpetrated in yet another country. This practice was commenced by the US government in 1987, with the abduction of a Lebanese citizen from a yacht that was in Italian waters.

After 2001, the U.S. implementation of ‘extraordinary renditions’ has required the secret collaboration of some EU governments and others around the world. For instance, Sweden collaborated secretly with the CIA in the rendition of two refugees that were transported from a Stockholm airport to a torture site in Egypt. Because of that, the United Nations HR sanctioned Sweden for violating the UN’s Absolute Ban on Torture. Furthermore, Lithuania and Poland had faced denounces of arbitrary detention and renditions before the European Court of Human Rights. These last named were two countries in Europe where CIA secretly held its prisoners, the so called ‘black sites‘.

In terms of infringements against human rights conventions and international law, extraordinary renditions are notably comprehensive; they accumulate multiple offences in one act. The abduction itself (kidnapping) is a crime penalized by all legislation. Also, human rights authors add the arbitrary arrest, the forced transportation, the forced medication, denial of consular assistance to the abducted, etc. And to this constellation of infringement has to be added the perpetration of torture in a variety of cases, as it has been documented.

U.S. extraordinary renditions far beyond the “Global war on terror”

‘Extraordinary renditions’ did not come as an isolated instrument of coercion, but emerged in an epoch of multiple transgressions against civil rights and international law.

When the imperialistic order began to redesign its geopolitics, also the use of a new kind of illegal enforcement emerged concomitantly. These are not measures intended exclusively for the “Global war on terror”, but they were enhanced (or designed) to serve as well other enforcing commitments or even geopolitical aims at large. In this line, the practice of extraordinary renditions has come to replace in many cases legal extradition processes. An illustration of this ‘policy’ is given in the abductions by the U.S. of Russian citizens, as it was the case of Yuri Martishev, Konstantin Yaroshenko and Roman Seleznev.

Source: The New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, “Outsourcing Torture“

The detention of the three Russian citizens presents important additional issues, which combined could show a pattern of behaviour. Their detention took the form of the classic renditions, meaning, secret collaboration of enforcement officials in a foreign country, transporting to another country-destination than arresting site. In addition, two harsh (long) sentences based in ‘sting operations’, and –according to press reports– also in cases where no actual crimes have been committed. One of the sentences (in the case imputing cyber crimes), allegedly hits in the U.S. the record in severity for such charges. Secondly, the U.S. agencies apparently acted in disregard to the 1999 bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Russia on mutual legal assistance in criminal matters. Thirdly, according to one of the prisoner’s lawyer, the U.S. would also have ignored the U.N. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Regardless geopolitical motivations and/or constructions, the question will remain, has the U.S. (or any other country, for that part), the right to arbitrary exercise or impose its own legislation in other countries ­and to the extent of disrespecting the international or bilateral treaties they have signed? What would be, for instance, the future of bilateral agreements on extradition?

Adding the crime of torture

Another hallmark of the above-described process of arbitrary measures infringing the civil and human rights, has been the public ‘acceptance’ by some head of states of the use of torture at interrogations, euphemistically called, “enhanced interrogation techniques”. President Bush, for instance, authorized the ‘Secret detention program’, or ‘black sites’, where CIA kept detainees. There are some concerns, among other raised in the Washington Post, that a draft of an executive order on “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants”, which has been leaked, it “appeared designed to make it possible for the Trump administration to return to Bush policy of secret kidnapping, detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.” (Washington Post, 9 February 2017). It is also reported that Trump has publicly backed away from some aspects contained in the order-draft.

The reports of a variety of abhorrent or cruelty treatment and degradation of detainees, for example the cases of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, should also be present makes in these discussions. They also have signified deprivation of basic legal rights for detainees; among others, the right to have its case treated in court. And then we have cases of long arbitrary detentions without the arrested being charged of any crime.

The threats of extraordinary renditions on whistleblowers

The new imperialistic order has felt increasingly threatened by the whistleblower movement. The U.S. establishment’s position against the organization WikiLeaks, founded by the independent publisher Julian Assange, is perhaps the most prominent cases in this regard.

The protracted arbitrary detention in which Mr Assange has been subject by Sweden and the UK is in my opinion a most clear illustration of this development towards the neglecting of the Human Rights Declaration and the U.N.International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

As a matter of fact, the eventual extraordinary rendition of the WikiLeaks founder has also been in the suggested measures to silent the organization. SWEDHR earlier denounced this initiative in “Pro-Clinton media calls UK to suspend diplomatic immunity of Ecuador Embassy over WikiLeaks publication…“

Nevertheless, the disregard by the countries involved in this arbitrary detention in abiding with the recommendations of the UNWGAD panel continues unabated.

The same situation of an incumbent extraordinary rendition was intended in the case of Edward Snowden. In the assumption that Mr Snowden was on-board of the Bolivian presidential aircraft transporting President Evo Morales, then traveling from Moscow, the plane was forced to land in Austria for 14 hours. This followed orders given by the US to the EU governments of Spain, France, Portugal and Italy to close their airspace to to that flight. During the US hunt for Snowden, President Morales’ plane was forced to land in Austria for 14 hours after Spain, France, Portugal and Italy closed their airspace under pressure from the US.

Why a new universal declaration of human rights has become necessary

The prevalent Human Rights Declaration by the United Nations, from 1948, was deemed necessary after the ‘horrors of the Second World War’–as it was argued– perpetrated by the Nazis. In fact, there were yet other horrifying episodes of vast devastation against civilian populations exercised by ‘Western democracies’, most notably the bombardment of Dresden and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For the reasons above, because of this new emerging practices from governments which disregard the civil and human rights agreed upon in 1948, and continuing infringes the ensuing international treaties that supported those rights, we believe that is highly the time for the international community to agree and secure a new Declaration of Human Rights. Issues of extraordinary renditions, arbitrary detention, ‘black sites’, disregard for legal processes of extradition between countries, etc. has to be promptly addressed. And there are also other issues to add to the new chart, such as the issue of migration and refugee status, which are nowadays constantly manipulated by Western governments on behalf of their geopolitical interests.

The long and historic tradition of respect for civil rights has to be reestablished, to help averting war, and thus to preserve not only the human rights, but humanity as a whole.

Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli is professor emeritus of epidemiology, medicine doktor i psykiatri (PhD, Karolinska Institute), and formerly Research Fellow  at Harvard Medical School. He is the founder and chairman of Swedish Professors and Doctors for Human Rights and editor-in-chief of The Indicter. Also publisher of The Professors’ Blog, and CEO of Libertarian Books – Sweden. Author of “Sweden VS. Assange – Human Rights Issues.” Op-ed articles published in Dagens Nyheter (DN), Svenska Dagbladet (Svd), Aftonbladet, Västerbotten Kuriren, Dagens Medicin,  Läkartidningen and other Swedish media. He also has had exclusive interviews in DN, Expressen, SvD and Aftonbladet, and in Swedish TV channels (Svt 2, TV4, TV5) as well as in international TV (e.g. UK, Norway, Italy TG, Television Nacional Chile, RT, Russia Channel 1, Rossiya 24, etc.) and media (DN, SvT, Aftonbladet, Expressen, Aftenposten,Ystad Allehanda,Tass, Izvestia, El Telégrafo, etc.).

Reachable via email at [email protected], [email protected]

The above text is an extended version based on an article originally published in Izvestia.

This article was first published by The Indicter.

Not long ago, Americans were secure about a few things. Our form of government was the best ever devised, we claimed with total confidence. Our society was the most advanced, we said, our way of life the most desirable and progressive.

But most of those certainties are gone now. Our political and social systems, we see, are seriously flawed; worse yet, they seem to breed corruption.

Most societies can’t even meet the most basic human needs – for shelter, food, and health care for all. And our way of life? In truth it could be the single largest factor in the violent disruption of nature all over the planet. We are no longer secure.

Even the richest among us, the very few for whom capitalism still works, will admit that the price of our domination and wasting of nature may be too high for us to pay. We may be coming to the end of all certainty about our long-term existence on the planet. And this change dwarfs almost every event in human history. We can’t avoid living with the consequences of that now.

We are certainly no longer secure.

The whole idea of nature as something independent of human will, with its own rules, may become obsolete. But most of the solutions we hear don’t look to the restoration of nature. What they focus on is “global management,” new forms of manipulation designed to compensate for the older forms that produced the mess.

Most of the Donald’s tweets amount to street brawling with his political enemies, but occasionally one of them slices through Imperial Washington’s sanctimonious cant. Indeed, Monday evening’s 140 characters of solid cut right to the bone:

The Amazon Washington Post fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad…..

Needless to say, we are referencing not the dig at the empire of Bezos, but the characterization of Washington’s anti-Assad policy as “massive, dangerous and wasteful”.

No stouter blow to the neocon/Deep State “regime change” folly has ever been issued by an elected public official. Yet there it is – the self-composed words of the man in the Oval Office. It makes you even want to buy some Twitter stock!

Predictably, the chief proponent of illegal, covert, cowardly attacks on foreign governments via proxies, mercenaries, drones and special forces, Senator McWar of Arizona, fairly leapt out of his hospital bed to denounce the President’s action:

“If these reports are true, the administration is playing right into the hands of Vladimir Putin.”

That’s just plain pathetic because the issue is the gross stupidity and massive harm that has been done by McCain’s personally inspired and directed war on Assad – not Putin and not Russia’s historic role as an ally of the Syrian regime.

Since 2011, Senator McCain has been to the region countless times. There he has made it his business to strut about in the manner of an imperial proconsul – advising, organizing and directing a CIA recruited, trained and supplied army of rebels dedicated to the overthrow of Syria’s constitutionally legitimate government.

At length, several billions were spent on training and arms, thereby turning a fleeting popular uprising against the despotic Assad regime during the 2011 “Arab spring” into the most vicious, destructive civil war of modern times, if ever. That is, without the massive outside assistance of Washington, Saudi Arabia and the emirates, the Syrian uprising would have been snuffed out as fast as it was in Egypt and Bahrain by dictators which had Washington’s approval and arms.

As it has happened, however, Syria’s great historic cities of Aleppo and Damascus have been virtually destroyed – along with its lesser towns and villages and nearly the entirety of its economy. There are 400,000 dead and 11 million internal and external refugees from an original population of hardly 18 million. The human toll of death, displacement, disease and disorder which has been inflicted on this hapless land staggers the imagination.

Yet at bottom this crime against humanity – there is no other word for it – is not mainly Assad’s or Putin’s doing. It can be properly described as “McCain’s War” in the manner in which (Congressman) Charlie Wilson’s War in Afghanistan during the 1980’s created the monster which became Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

Even the fact that the butchers of ISIS were able to establish a temporary foothold in the Sunni villages and towns of the Upper Euphrates portion of Syria is the direct doing of McCain, Lindsay Graham and their War Party confederates in the Congress and the national security apparatus. That’s because Syria’s air force and army would have stopped ISIS cold when it invaded in 2014 if it had not been weakened and beleaguered by Washington’s oppositions armies.

But why did Washington launch McCain’s War in the first place?

The government of Syria has never, ever done harm to the American homeland. It has no military capacity to attack anything much beyond its own borders – including Israel, which could dispatch Assad’s aging air force without breaking a sweat.

Moreover, even if a purely sectarian civil war in this strategically irrelevant land was any of Imperial Washington’s business, which it isn’t, Senator McCain and his War Party confederates have been on the wrong side from the get-go. The Assad regime going back to the 1970 was Arab Baathist – a form of nationalistic and anti-colonial socialism that was secular and inclusive in its religious orientation.

Indeed, as representatives of the minority Alawite tribes (15% of the population, at best), the Assad regime was based on Syria’s non-Sunni Arab minorities – including Christians, Druze, Kurds, Jews, Yazidis, Turkomans, and sundry others. Never once did the Assad’s seek to impose religious conformity – to say nothing of the harsh regime of Sharia Law and medieval religious observance demanded by the Sunni jihadists.

The point is, the Syrian opposition recruited by Washington for McCain’s War exploited the grievances of ordinary Sunni citizens, but it was led by radical jihadist military commanders. Washington’s endless charade of “vetting” these opposition fighters to ensure that aid only went to “moderates” was a sick joke.

Such moderates as existed were mainly opportunistic politicians who operated far from the battle in Turkish safe havens – or even from temporary residences in the beltway. It is a proven fact that most of the weapons supplied by the CIA and the gulf states were either sold to the Nusra Front and other jihadist factions or ended up in their hands when the CIA’s “moderate” trainees defected to the radicals.

So the question recurs. Why did Washington embark on this tremendous, pointless folly?

The answer is straight forward. Washington has become an Imperial City populated by a permanent class of sunshine patriots and self-appointed global field marshals like Senator McCain, who do the bidding of the military/industrial complex and its far-flung Warfare State apparatus.

That is, they identify and demonize the enemies and villains that are needed to keep the money flowing into the Empire’s $700 billion budget. In this case, Assad drew the short straw because as a member of the greater Shiite confession in the Islamic world he was naturally allied with the Shiite regime of Iran.

In part 2 we will take up the real reason for McCain’s War in Syria. It was a proxy war and a provocation designed to prosecute the real neocon target – the endlessly vilified Shiite regime in Tehran.

Part 2

Syria was never meant to be a real country. Its borders were scratched on a map in 1916 by Messrs. Picot and Sykes of the French and British foreign office, respectively, and was an old-fashioned exercise in dividing the spoils of war amidst the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It was most definitely not a product of what in the present era Imperial Washington is pleased to call “nation-building”.

The short history of the next hundred years is that Syria never worked as a nation because the straight lines traced to the map by the Sykes-Picot ruler encompassed an immense gaggle of ethnic and sectarian peoples, tribes and regions that could not get along and had no common bonds of nationality. The polyglot of Sunni and Alawite (Shiite) Arabs, Sunni Kurds, Druse, Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Turkmen, and sundry more were kept intact under the unitary state in Damascus only due to a succession of strongmen and generals who took turns ruling the gaggle by bribe and sword.

At length, Syria became a pawn in the cold war when the anti-communism obsessed Dulles brothers decided to stiff Colonel Nasser of Egypt for not sharing their Christian zeal against the godless rulers of the Kremlin. The latter then offered to build the Aswan Dam when Washington canned the funding.

That led, in turn, to the short-lived Egypt-Syria merger, a failed CIA coup in Damascus and the eventual permanent alliance of Hafez Assad (Bashar’s father) with the Soviets after he consolidated power in the early 1970s.

Whether Washington’s animosity to the Syrian regime owing to its choice of cold-war patrons ever made any difference to the security and safety of the American people is surely debatable, but when the cold war ended so should have the debate. Whatever happened in the polyglot of Syria thereafter had absolutely no bearing on the security of the American homeland – including indirectly via its nearby ally in Israel.

That is, once the cold war was over and the Soviet Union descended into economic and military senescence after 1991, the Israelis had overwhelming military superiority over Damascus, and needed no help from Washington. But that pregnant opportunity for Washington to put Syria out of sight and out of mind entirely was killed in the cradle at nearly the moment it arose.

In a word, the Washington War Party desperately needed an enemy once the Soviet Union was no more – in order to justify the massive girth of its global empire and the vastly elevated spending levels for conventional war-making (600 ship Navy, new tanks and fighters, airlift and cruise missiles etc.) that Ronald Reagan had unfortunately set in place. So the neocons in the administration of Bush the Elder seized on the Iranians.

Needless to say, with memories of the prolonged hostage crisis in Tehran of a decade earlier still fresh in the memories of the American public, it was easy for Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, et al. to vilify Tehran as the seat of an America-hating Islamist theocracy. But so doing, they put America on the wrong side of the 1300-year old Sunni/Shiite divide.

That’s because the minor sliver of Islam motivated by fanatical jihadism and the duty to eradicate nonbelievers and apostates is rooted in the Wahhabi branch of the Sunni confession and is domiciled in Arabia, not the Shiite communities on its periphery. The latter are spread in a crescent arcing from Iran through lower Iraq and extending to the Alawite and Shiite communities of Syria and southern Lebanon – including the territories dominated by Lebanon’s largest political party (Hezbollah).

The 40 years prior to 1991 had given the Iranians plenty of cause to despise Washington, beginning with the CIA-sponsored coup against the democratically elected Mosaddeq in 1953. That move, in turn, paved the way for the rapacious and brutal regime of the Shah until 1978 when he was overthrown by a massive uprising of the Iranian people led by Shiite clerics.

But to add insult to injury, the Reagan White House effected a “tilt” to Saddam Hussein after he invaded Iran in September 1980, and provided the satellite based tracking services that enabled Saddam’s horrific chemical attacks on Iranian troops in the field, many of them barely armed teenagers.

So Tehran had valid reasons for its rhetorical assaults on Washington, but there was no symmetry to it. That is, Washington had no honest beef against Tehran, and no dog in the Sunni-Shiite fight.

The only fig leaf of justification we’ve ever heard is that the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 by local Shiite militants was allegedly aided by the Iranians. But your editor sat on the national security council at the time and recalls vividly that Ronald Reagan’s decision was not to take the fight to Tehran, but to question why the Marines needed to be in harms’ way in the first place and to “reposition” them quickly to the safety of a Naval aircraft carrier deep in the Mediterranean

In any event, the Iranians elected a moderate President in 1988, and Rafsanjani did seek rapprochement with Washington – even helping to free some American hostages in Lebanon as a good will gesture to the incoming George HW Bush Administration.

But it was for naught once Cheney and his neocon henchman piled into the equation. The military-industrial complex needed an enemy and Cheney & Co. saw to it that the Shiite regime in Tehran became just that.

And that get’s us to our Part 1 thesis about McCain’s War in Syria and its prototype in Charlie Wilson’s War in Afghanistan during the 1980s. In fact, the latter wasn’t just a model; it was the proximate cause.

That is, Wilson’s War via the covert CIA training and arming of the Mujahedeen and the recruitment of Sunni Arab fighters from Saudi Arabia and other Sunni tribes ultimately gifted the world with al-Qaeda, but even then it took the feckless Imperial arm of Washington to complete the nightmare.

Bin-Laden was actually celebrated as a hero in the West until 1991. Thereupon history flowed around a hinge point marked by the demise of the Soviet Union on one side and George HW Bush’s utterly pointless war against Saddam Hussein in February 1991 on the other.

In this case Washington’s pretext for intervention was a petty squabble over directional drilling in the Rumaila oil field which straddled the border of Kuwait and Iraq. But there wasn’t an iota of homeland security at issue in that tiff between opulent Emir of Kuwait and the bombastic dictator from Baghdad.

In fact, Kuwait wasn’t even a real country; it was (and still is) essentially a large bank account with its own oilfield that had been scratched on a map by the British in 1913 as part of its maneuvering for hegemony in the Persian Gulf region.

Likewise, Iraq was also the product of the infamous Sykes-Picot straight-edged ruler of 1916, but the world price of oil would not have changed in the longer run by a single cent – whether Kuwait remained independent or was incorporated as the 19th province of the arbitrary but serviceable state of Baathist Iraq.

Beyond the false case of oil economics was the even more ridiculous underlying proposition that the oilfield boundary in dispute – which had been haggled out in an Arab League meeting in 1960 – implicated the safety and security of American citizens in Lincoln NE and Springfield MA.

No it didn’t – not in the slightest. But what did dramatically implicate their security was George HW Bush’s peevish insistence that Saddam be given a good, hard spanking, which resulted in 500,000 pairs of “crusader” boots on the sacred soil of Arabia.

Right there bin-Laden swiveled on a dime and launched his demented crusade to rid the “land of the holy shrines” of the American occupation. Right there the mujahedeen became al-Qaeda, modern jihadi terrorism was born and the catastrophe of 9/11 and all that followed was set in motion.

Yes, it took the even greater folly of Bush the Younger to actually light the fuse with his insensible and idiotic “shock and awe” demolition of Iraq after March 2003. But that did open the gates of Hell – even if the actual agents were the mujahedeen fighters and their followers and assigns who assembled in (Sunni) Anbar province after it was laid to waste by the Pentagon.

In a word, Bush and his neocon warriors destroyed the serviceable state of Iraq and the tenuous Sunni/Shiite/Kurd modus vivendi that Saddam had enforced with the spoils of the oilfields and the superiority of his arms. In that context the idea that the government in Baghdad represented a nation and fielded an Iraqi national army was a sheer fairy tale.

What Bush and Obama left behind was a vengeful, incompetent, corrupt sectarian government backed by sundry Shiite militia. To spend $25 billion – as Washington did – training and arming a ghost nation was an act of incomparable folly.

It guaranteed a hot war between the Sunni and Shiite, and that the billions of state of the art weapons Washington left behind for the self-defense of the nation it hadn’t built would fall into the hands of the Sunni terrorists.

At length, they did. The crucible of Anbar gave rise to ISIS and the tens of thousands of Humvees, tanks, heavy artillery pieces and millions of light weapons bivouacked in Mosul fell into its hands when the Shiite militias fled from Iraq’s second city and predominately Sunni enclave in June 2014.

And then McCain’s proxy War in Syria against the Iranians did its part. That is, the Sunni villages and towns of the Euphrates Valley had always been the most tenuous components of the Assads’ system of rule.

But when the McCain/CIA rebel armies badly impaired Assad’s military and economic capacity to pacify his country in the normal middle eastern manner of repression, a giant power vacuum was created into which ISIS rushed and from which the Islamic caliphate was born.

In a word, Wilson’s War begat Sunni jihadism; HW Bush’s war turned it against America; Dubya’s War opened the gates of Hell in Anbar province; and McCain’s War enabled the destruction of the Syrian state and the rise of a medievalist chamber of butchery and demented Sharia extremism in Raqqa, Mosul and the hapless Sunni lands in between.

At last, however, this chain of imperial pretense and insanity has been broken with a 140 character Tweet.

Bravo, Donald!

By sending the War Party into a paroxysm of denunciation and self-righteous indignation Trump actually provoked the Deep State into spilling the beans.

To wit, its neocon megaphone at the Washington Post, David Ignatius, penned an unhinged column immediately after Trump’s tweet about ending “massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad”, lamenting that the US hadn’t given jihadist “rebels” antiaircraft missiles!

But in a full bore eruption of outrage, Ignatius also revealed new information based on a quote from an official with initimate knowledge of the CIA program:

Run from secret operations centers in Turkey and Jordan, the program pumped many hundreds of millions of dollars to many dozens of militia groups. One knowledgeable official estimates that the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years.

Whether that was an exaggeration or proximate expression of the truth doesn’t really matter. It means Imperial Washington has been carrying on a world-scale war in Syria with not even the pretense of a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or authorization for the use of force as in Iraq in 2003.

So that’s McCain’s War. Eleven million refugees, a destroyed country, 400,000 civilians dead and a decimated army of a nation that poses a zero threat to the American homeland. And all for the purpose of hazing the rulers of Tehran who never did have a program to get a nuke, according to Washington’s own 17-agency NIEs (national intelligence estimates); and gave it up anyway with ironclad mechanisms for international enforcement.

We have no idea where this will lead, but by the day it increasingly looks as if McCain’s War is indeed being shutdown.

We can only hope for a respite to the folly, and that the Donald keeps on tweeting exactly this sort of madman’s stab at rationality.

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

The Trump administration is filled with people who, for whatever reason, hate Iran. These people are attempting to break the “nuclear deal” with Iran and other powers. Their propaganda accuses Iran of every “evil” in this world. Their position is fully in line with the Israeli-Saudi anti-Iran axis.

Since the U.S., the UK and the Saudis wage war against Yemen they claim that Iran is allied with the Zaydi people of northern Yemen who, together with the Yemeni army, resist the Saudi invasion. Iran is regularly accused of smuggling weapons to them even as no evidence for this has ever been shown.

Reuters jumps into the breach with this fantastic fake-news item: Exclusive: Iran Revolutionary Guards find new route to arm Yemen rebels:

LONDON (Reuters) – Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have started using a new route across the Gulf to funnel covert arms shipments to their Houthi allies in Yemen’s civil war, sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters.
…
For the last six months the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has begun using waters further up the Gulf between Kuwait and Iran as it looks for new ways to beat an embargo on arms shipments to fellow Shi’ites in the Houthi movement, Western and Iranian sources say.Using this new route, Iranian ships transfer equipment to smaller vessels at the top of the Gulf, where they face less scrutiny. The transhipments take place in Kuwaiti waters and in nearby international shipping lanes, the sources said.

“Parts of missiles, launchers and drugs are smuggled into Yemen via Kuwaiti waters,” said a senior Iranian official. “The route sometimes is used for transferring cash as well.”

The writer of that Reuters piece is one Jonathan Saul. Other most recent piece on his Reuters page are: European banks struggle to solve toxic shipping debt problem, Global shipping feels fallout from Maersk cyber attack and Lenders to ramp up pressure on holders of toxic shipping debt – survey. Older stories by Saul have similar headlines. Saul writes from London about the global shipping industry. That surely qualifies him as an expert on Yemen.

But even an expert can err. The Houthi are not Shia in the sense that Iran is predominantly Shia. They are Zaidi and follow the Hanafi school of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence. They pray in same mosques as Sunni believers do. Using the term Shia for the Zaidi side of the Yemen conflict is a lazy repeat of unfounded Saudi claims which try to set any local conflict in the Middle East into a “Sunni-Shia” frame even when that is completely inappropriate. As the Carnegie Endowment states:

Claims of Iran’s influence over the Houthis have been overblown. While the Houthis do receive some support from Iran, it is mostly political, with minimal financial and military assistance. However, since the Houthis took control of Sanaa, the group has increasingly been portrayed as “Iran-backed” or “Shia,” often suggesting a sectarian relationship with the Islamic Republic. Yet until after the 2011 upheavals, the term “Shia” was not used in the Yemeni public to refer to any Yemeni groups or individuals.

The Reuters piece comes with this rather unhelpful map.

While that map (bigger, original link) is headlined “Iran’s new route to Yemen” it shows no route at all.

Pushing anonymous rumors of Iranian weapon transfers at high sea the Reuters piece totally fails to explain how these weapons would then be transported INTO Yemen. There is no route shown for that. Saudi Arabia and its al-Qaeda allies on the ground blockade and control all sea and land routes into Yemen. Millions of Yemenis are near starving and a huge Cholera epidemic is ravaging the country with 400,000 infected and hundreds dying each day. Hardly any food and no medicine comes through. How please are Iranian weapons supposed to jump from some Daus into the hands of the Houthi when not even food can be passed along?

The claim of weapon transfers near in the upper Persian Gulf makes no sense at all. It is about 2,000 kilometers from the area to the Yemeni coast. There are many much shorter routes from Iran to Yemen which small ships could use without any higher risk. Deeper down the Reuters piece even admits that and thereby contradicts itself:

“Smaller Iranian ports are being used for the activity as major ports might attract attention,” [a second senior Iranian official said.]

Another sign that the Reuters piece is utter bullshit is the claimed sourcing from three(!) anonymous “senior Iranian officials”. Are we to believe that multiple “senior Iranian officials” admit to a shipping correspondent in London that Iran is willfully breaching UN resolutions by smuggling weapons into Yemen? Why would they do that? Why would they confirm Saudi anti-Iran propaganda?

The Reuters piece makes a fantastic claim that has no practical logic. The author lacks knowledge of the actual conflict at hand. The sourcing is extremely dubious. Reuters itself can not find “Iran’s new route” on the map it provides.

Reuters is the major British news agency. Britain is heavily involved in the conflict in Yemen and the Saudis and their allies are the biggest customers of British weapon manufacturers. The piece on the ominous “new route” will surely make a splash but it disqualifies Reuters as a reliable source of information.

We’ve noted for many months that the DNC emails were leaked by an insider, not hacked by the Russians.

Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh – who revealed in 1974 that the CIA was spying on Americans, who broke the story of the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Iraq prison torture scandal – said in a recent phone interview linked by WikiLeaks:

[The DC police took Seth Rich’s computer, but couldn’t get past his password.] So they call the FBI cyber unit.

***

The Feds get through [the password-protection on Rich’s computer], and this is what they find. This is accoring to the FBI report.

***

What the report says is that – some time in late spring or early summer – he [Rich] makes contact with WikiLeaks. That’s in his computer.

***

They [the FBI] found what he [Rich] had done was he had submitted a series of documents – of emails, of juicy emails – from the DNC.

By the way, all this shit about the DNC, where the hack, it wasn’t hacked …

He offered a sample, an extensive sample, I’m sure dozens of emails, and said I want money. [Remember, WikiLeaks often pays whistleblowers.]

Later, WikiLeaks did get the password. He [Rich] had a dropbox, a protected dropbox, which isn’t hard to do.

***

They got access to the dropbox. That’s in the FBI report.

He [Rich] also let people know with whom he was dealing … the word was passed, according to the FBI report, “I also shared this box with a couple of friends, so if anything happens to me, it’s not going to solve your problem”.

***

But WikiLeaks got access, before he was killed.

***

I have a narrative of how that whole fucking thing began. It’s a [former CIA director John] Brennan operation. It was an American disinformation [campaign].

CARACAS — According to the U.S., its allies, and an ever-obedient mainstream media, Venezuela’s election this past Sunday was a “sham.” The vote itself had been particularly controversial in Venezuela and abroad, as it sought to elect candidates to a new national constituent assembly, a body which will have the power to rewrite the Venezuelan constitution.

The Trump administration called Sunday’s election “another step toward dictatorship,” warning that it “won’t accept an illegitimate government” in Venezuela. Sanctions were subsequently imposed on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Maduro’s sham election is another step toward dictatorship. We won’t accept an illegit govt. The Venezuelan ppl & democracy will prevail.

— Nikki Haley (@nikkihaley) July 30, 2017

The U.S.’ sanctions and ominous statements rang on deaf ears in Caracas, however, as President Maduro struck a defiant tone Sunday night after the voting had concluded, telling a crowd of supporters that “A spokesperson for emperor Donald Trump said that they would not recognize the results of Venezuela’s constituent assembly election. Why the hell should we care what Trump says? We care about what the sovereign people of Venezuela say.”

He responded similarly to news of the sanctions, stating during a public address that

“I feel proud to be sanctioned Mr Imperialist Donald Trump.” “Impose whatever sanctions you like but I am the leader of the free people,” he added.

As MintPress has reported on several occasions, not everything in Venezuela is as it seems. The U.S. has long been involved in attempting to destabilize the government of Venezuela ever since Hugo Chávez was first elected nearly two decades ago. After decades of backing several failed coup attempts and years of economic warfare, the United States is very much involved in the nation’s crisis, yet has gone to great lengths to try to obscure its role in agitating the nation’s increasingly chaotic situation.

With Venezuela’s massive oil reserves, the largest in the world, as well as its government’s frequent rebuke of U.S. corporations and influence over the years, the country has long been on the U.S. government’s hitlist. Furthermore, with some members of the Trump administration having expressed a personal vendetta to bring about the end of the Chavistas and the latest warning that the U.S. “won’t accept” a government they have now labeled “illegitimate,” it seems quite possible that Venezuela may very well be Trump’s first foray into the U.S.’ long-standing practice of destabilizing and deposing democratically-elected, leftist governments in Latin America.

What really happened during Sunday’s election

Mainstream reporting on the constituent assembly election has centered around what the assembly might do once elected. It has been portrayed as a step towards dictatorship, even though the president of Venezuela is authorized by the current constitution to convene such an assembly. These dictatorship claims are based on the possibility that the assembly will draft a constitution that will dissolve the legislature and give Maduro unlimited power, moves that no one in Maduro’s party nor he himself has ever stated a desire to see.

According to the current government of Venezuela, the constituent assembly was convened with the purpose of safeguarding certain “achievements” claimed by the Chavista movement over nearly two decades. It is also intended to end the impasse between the opposition-controlled legislature and the executive branch of the government by allowing groups from both sides to draft a new constitution and re-initiate dialogue.

However, the opposition parties boycotted the election, despite having called for constituent assembly elections for several years – that is, until Maduro called for one. For that reason, the results of Sunday’s election led to victories for mostly Maduro supporters and allies, as the main opposition group in Venezuela, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), chose not to participate, thereby undermining the entire process. Other minor opposition parties chose to participate.

Help share the voices that every other media outlet across the spectrum refuses to acknowledge about the major election Sunday in #Venezuela https://t.co/1YuxwDop6E

— Abby Martin (@AbbyMartin) July 29, 2017

Mainstream media reports in both English and Spanish have repeatedly stated that 70 percent of Venezuelans themselves opposed Sunday’s vote. However, this figure came from a poll conducted by the firm Datanalisis, whose president, Luis Vicente León, has made his personal distaste for the constituent assembly and the Maduro-led government well known. In fact, León has proven himself in recent months to be more of a right-wing, pro-opposition political pundit than a pollster, calling the objectivity of his firm’s polling results into question.

However, his firm’s polls have been taken as objective by the mainstream media. For example, NBC News cited exit polls conducted by Datanalisis, along with a New York investment bank, Torino Capital, as proof that turnout in Sunday’s election was much lower than officially reported, with 3.6 million voters participating, or 18.5 percent of the constituency. These numbers were echoed by leaders of the political opposition, who supposedly boycotted the entire process, yet somehow managed to confidently claim that less than 3 million Venezuelans voted. Venezuelan election authorities – who actually tallied the votes – stated that 8.1 million Venezuelans participated, a 41.5-percent turnout.

Turnout in controversial elections for new constituent assembly in Venezuela was 41.5%, electoral commission says https://t.co/MsEa5oAqQM

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) July 31, 2017

Also absent from media coverage was the violence carried out by the opposition. While police did engage opposition protesters, as protests were banned in the days leading up to the election, opposition violence was significant, as hundreds of voting machines were burned and one of the candidates running in Sunday’s election was gunned down in his own home. However, only mentions of the police crackdown made it into mainstream reports.

Elections results “widely opposed” exclusively by U.S. allies

In the aftermath of Sunday’s vote, it was also reported across numerous media outlets that the results of Sunday’s election were “widely opposed” by a slew of countries. However, of those who expressed their condemnation of the election, all are closely allied with the United States. Latin American countries that condemned Venezuela for the vote included Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Paraguay, in addition to U.S. allies like the EU and Canada.

Colombia, Peru and Mexico all have presidents who have touted themselves as close U.S. allies, often choosing U.S. government and corporate interests over those of their own people. Brazil and Paraguay have also turned sharply towards Washington ever since their left-leaning presidents were ejected from office and replaced with right-wing figures via “soft” coups. Chile, despite being a “democracy,” has remained tightly aligned with U.S. foreign policy since the Allende government was overthrown by the U.S. in 1973. Argentina’s right-wing president Mauricio Macri has also been shown to have close ties to the United States and has made deals to let the U.S. expand its military presence in the country during his short time in office.

Other nations that are not allied with the U.S. supported Venezuela’s election and opposed U.S.-led efforts to impose sanctions. These included Russia, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Ecuador.

Several Latin American leaders have accused Maduro of having lost the legitimacy to lead due to his less than stellar approval rating of 30 percent, though opposition-linked polling firm Datanalisis places the figure at 20.8 percent. This figure is being cited by the media as another reason why the constituent assembly could not possibly represent the desires of Venezuelans, even though the voting was unrelated to Maduro’s approval rating.

However, what has not been mentioned is that many of these same Latin American leaders have approval ratings well below Maduro’s, suggesting that they too must also have lost the legitimacy to lead, were their arguments on point. For instance, Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico has an approval rating of 12 percent, while Michelle Bachelet of Chile has a 20-percent approval rating. Brazil’s right-wing and unelected president Michel Temer takes the cake with an absurdly low approval rating of just 5 percent. Yet, in mainstream media reports, only Maduro’s name is repeatedly prefaced by the term “unpopular” (see here, here and here).

Congratulations to @MichelTemer! 5% approval rating makes you the most unpopular president in Brazilian history! ??? https://t.co/9bGlvBEQqT

— Andrew Fishman (@AndrewDFish) July 28, 2017

Given that the countries opposing Venezuela in the aftermath of Sunday’s vote are exclusively the U.S. and its allies, this “chorus” of condemnation seems little more than an attempt to generate an “international consensus” that the Maduro-led government, though democratically-elected, is both isolated and illegitimate, ultimately making it an easier target for destabilization and regime change.

U.S. actions targeting Venezuela continue to heat up

The weekend before the election, the U.S. government gave several indications that its efforts to change the course of Venezuelan politics were heating up. Last Friday, Vice President Mike Pence called controversial opposition leader Leopoldo López, confirming that the Trump administration would take drastic economic action against the Maduro-led government were elections to be held on Sunday. Pence praised López, who was involved in the failed 2002 U.S.-backed coup attempt, for his “courage and outspoken defense of Venezuelan democracy.”

Also on Friday, the U.S. State Department ordered family members of government personnel to leave the U.S. embassy in Caracas and also issued a travel advisory warning U.S. citizens against traveling to Venezuela. Such drastic action normally occurs before increasing instability or violence is anticipated. The U.S. was likely aware in advance that the opposition would call for “war in the streets” following Sunday’s election.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is also known to currently be involved in the destabilization of Venezuela. A failed coup attempt in late June, for instance, was linked to both the CIA and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Confirmation of current CIA involvement in Venezuela came earlier this week, when the Director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, stated that the U.S. is working towards a “transition” in Venezuelan governance in coordination with the governments of Colombia and Mexico. More specifically, Pompeo stated that he was “hopeful that there can be a transition in Venezuela and the CIA is doing its best to understand the dynamic there.”

Soon after, he added:

“I was just down in Mexico City and in Bogota a week before last talking about this very issue, trying to help them understand the things they might do so that they can get a better outcome for their part of the world and our part of the world.”

#SkyNews "The United States has criticised Venezuela for a sham election, calling it a power grab…" ?????? RIP irony…

— Dumbo's Feather (@Communitaria71) July 31, 2017

Furthermore, in a matter of months, the U.S. is set to lead military drills with three South American nations, two of which border Venezuela. The drills, dubbed “Operation: America United,” will involve the installation of a temporary military base on the triple border shared by Colombia, Peru and Brazil. Experts have pointed out that the drills are of particular interest to the U.S., as they present an opportunity to focus on the political situation in Venezuela. According to Telesur, President Donald Trump had already met with the presidents of Peru and Colombia to discuss the U.S.’ interest in Venezuela prior to the official announcement of the drills. At the very least, the military show-of-force will come at a time of further crisis and vulnerability for Venezuela and will likely keep Maduro on edge.

A coup on the horizon?

Having spent well over $100 million on funding the Venezuelan opposition, the U.S. government is unlikely to passively sit back and wait to let the Venezuelan people decide their own fate. The U.S. mindset is easily summed up by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger – who has met with Trump several times – and his infamous statement regarding the socialist Allende government in Chile that he helped overthrow:

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.”

The U.S. has shown for the years that it refuses to recognize people’s right to self-determination, particularly when a government unfriendly to the U.S. empire comes to power.

According to a leaked recording from 2013, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado detailed how Ramon Guillermo Aveledo, the chairman of the opposition umbrella group Mesa de la Unidad Democrática, told the State Department that

“the only way to resolve this (salir de esto) is by provoking and accentuating a crisis, a coup or a self-coup. Or a process of tightening the screws and domesticating to generate a system of total social control.”

The opposition leaders’ boycott of the constituent assembly elections on Sunday is their best way of accentuating the crisis, essentially amounting to an international psy-op that will justify greater U.S. and international meddling in Venezuelan affairs as democracy is perceived to be “in danger.” With opposition figures like Leopoldo López already in communication with high-ranking U.S. officials, as well as continued calls for military coups, the real fight for Venezuelan democracy is reaching the boiling point. It is up to the independent media to blow the whistle on the realities of the situation in Venezuela in order to prevent U.S. involvement in yet another “color revolution” regime change operation, which – if it succeeds – will mark Trump’s first coup.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect a decision by the Trump administration to impose new sanctions on Venezuela following the results of the national constituent assembly vote on Monday evening.

Whitney Webb is a MintPress contributor who has written for several news organizations in both English and Spanish; her stories have been featured on ZeroHedge, the Anti-Media, 21st Century Wire, and True Activist among others – she currently resides in Southern Chile.

As Government ministers and highly-paid fire chiefs cavort about on holiday beaches, 181 Tower Blocks in 51 areas of UK have so far failed fire tests, putting over 20,000 residents at risk of being burned alive in their beds or suffocated by highly toxic hydrogen cyanide gas, as they sleep.

It is an unprecedented national scandal in Britain today that Local Authorities up and down the land have abdicated their basic responsibilities and allowed architects, contractors and developers to clad residential buildings, schools and hospitals in insulating materials that have been known, since the 1970s, to be highly dangerous, poisonous fire accelerants.

In these fetid, money-grabbing, profit-orientated, back-handing, deal-making, high-salaried, council offices of today’s local and central government with their fire security chiefs and building inspectors – the safety and well-being of ordinary citizens have been contemptuously dismissed.

Where is the legal responsibility, traditional civic duty and pride? What has happened to make us a Britain in which tens of thousands of ordinary citizens go to sleep in fear for their lives? The United Kingdom needs a ‘root and branch’ clear-out of so-called public servants, many of whom have enriched themselves at the expense of the lives and well-being of those they are paid to serve.  It is a national tragedy, the depth and extent of which is only now being recognised.

The obvious way forward is a General Election to bring in a national democratic government that will ensure security and safety for all British citizens regardless of their social standing or family income. Then maybe Britain will become once again, great and proud, with a national and local administration that together works in the public interest as the elected representative of the people, and not as politicians who put harm in the path of those who elected them.

Speaking today on the Today Show, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R – SC) talked up the idea of attacking North Korea, saying that he’d been assured by President Trump that there is a military solution to the situation, and that “if thousands die,” it would be in North Korea.

Graham shrugged off the idea of thousands dying, saying it “may be provocative, but not really,” since those thousands weren’t Americans and that’s not where the president’s “allegiance” lies in the first place.

Graham had been pressed on a number of military experts saying there is “no good military option,” dismissing them all as wrong, and saying that anything which ended with the destruction of North Korea would be a good option.

While Sen. Graham is given to furious tirades and predictions of massive global wars, in this case he claimed to be presenting President Trump’s position on the matter, and said Trump had told him all of this personally.

Graham also claimed to believe that China could solve the situation at any time if they really wanted to, which certainly adds to the suggestion that he is parroting Trump’s position.

The “Russia hacking” flap has nothing to do with Russia and nothing to do with hacking. The story is basically a DNC invention that was concocted to mitigate the political fallout from the nearly 50,000 emails that WikiLeaks planned to publish on July 22, 2016, just 3 days before the Democratic National Convention. That’s what this is really all about. Russia didn’t hack anything, it’s a big diversion that was conjured up on-the-fly to keep Hillary’s bandwagon from going down in flames.

Put yourself in Hillary’s shoes for a minute. She knew the deluge was coming and she knew it was going to be bad. (According to Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, DNC contractor Crowdstrike claimed to find evidence of Russian malware on DNC servers just three days after WikiLeaks announced that it was about “about to publish “emails related to Hillary Clinton.” Clearly, that was no coincidence. The plan to blame Russia was already underway.) Hillary knew that the emails were going to expose the DNC’s efforts to rig the primaries and torpedo Bernie Sanders campaign, and she knew that the media was going to have a field-day dissecting the private communications word by word on cable news or splashing them across the headlines for weeks on end. It was going to be excruciating. She knew that, they all knew that.

And how would her supporters react when they discovered that their party leaders and presidential candidate were actively involved in sabotaging the democratic process and subverting the primaries? That wasn’t going to go over well with voters in Poughkeepsie, now was it? Maybe she’d see her public approval ratings slip even more. Maybe she’d nosedive in the polls or lose the election outright, she didn’t know. No one knew. All they knew was that she was in trouble. Big trouble.

So she reacted exactly the way you’d expect Hillary to react, she hit the panic button. In fact, they all freaked out, everyone of them including Podesta and the rest of the DNC honchoes. Once they figured that their presidential bid could go up in smoke, they decided to act preemptively, pull out all the stops and “Go Big”.

That’s where Russia comes into the picture. The DNC brass (with help from allies at the CIA) decided to conjure up a story so fantastic that, well, it had to be true, after all, that’s what the 17 intel agencies said, right? And so did the elite media including the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN. They can’t all be wrong, can they? Sure, they goofed-up on Saddam’s WMDs, and Iran’s imaginary nukes program, and Assad’s fictional chemical weapons attack, but, hey, everyone makes mistakes, right? And, besides, have I told you how evil Putin is lately and how much he reminds me of Adolph Hitler? (sarcasm)

In any event, they settled on Russia mainly because Russia had rolled back Washington’s imperial project in both Ukraine and Syria, so the media was already in full demonetization-mode and raring to go. All the DNC needed to do was utter the words “Russia meddling” and they’d be off to the races.

Does any of this sound even remotely believable? Former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern seems to think so, because he expounded a very similar scenario about a month ago in an interview on YouTube. Check it out:

Ray McGovern– “What did Hillary do? …Hillary gathered her war council together and one fellow says, “I know what we can do. We’ll blame it on the Russians.”

And someone else says, “But it wasn’t the Russians it was WikiLeaks.”

(Guy number 1 says)”Well, that’s a twofer. We hate them both equally , so we’ll say WikiLeaks is working with the Russians.”

(Ray McGovern) That was two days before the convention.

And someone else says, “What would the rationale be?”

(Guy number 2 says) “C’mon, the Russians clearly want Trump to win.”

(Number 1) “But what about the major media?”

(Number 2) “Well, the major media really want Hillary to win, so if we get the major media on board, well, we really got it wired.”

(Ray McGovern again) “And if you watch the coverage since the WikiLeaks leak, two days before the convention, the media content was not ‘how did Hillary steal the election’ but ‘How did the Russians do it?”’

He’s right, isn’t he? Hillary and Co. pulled off the whole ruse without a hitch. The media focused on the “Russia meddling” angle, and the calculating Ms. Clinton slipped away with nary a scratch. It’s amazing!

But there was one glitch to the ‘Blame Russia’ scheme. There was no hard evidence of Russian involvement. And, now, 10 months into multiple investigations of Russian hacking, there’s still no evidence. How can that be?

Well, for one thing, the FBI was never given access to the DNC computers.

Let me repeat that: In the biggest and most politically-explosive investigation in more than a decade, an investigation that has obvious national security implications– alleged cyber-espionage by a hostile foreign power, alleged collusion by high-ranking officials in the current administration, alleged treason or collusion on part of the Chief Executive, and the possible impeachment of a sitting president– the FBI has not yet secured or examined the servers that may or may not provide compelling forensic evidence of cyber-intrusion by Russia.

Why? Why would the FBI accept the analysis of some flunky organization that no one has ever heard of before (Crowdstrike) rather than use all the tools at their disposal to thoroughly investigate whether or not the hacking actually took place or not? Isn’t that their job?

Yer damn right it is. The reason the FBI never insisted on examining the DNC servers, is because they knew the story was baloney from the get go. Otherwise they would have kicked down the doors at the DNC, seized the computers through brute force, and arrested anyone who tried to stop them. Those computers are Exhibit A in the Trial of the Century. They should be under lock and key at FBI Headquarters not collecting cobwebs in the basement of the DNC-HQ. The fact that the servers have not been seized and examined just proves what a joke this whole Russia-deal really is.

You see, when a law enforcement agency like the FBI fails so conspicuously in carrying out its duties, you have to assume that other factors are involved, mainly politics. It’s all politics, right? There is no rational explanation for the FBI’s behavior other than it is following a political script that coincides with the agenda and ambitions of the DNC and other power players behind the scenes. Investigative journalist Gareth Porter summed it up perfectly in a brilliant article titled Foisting Blame for Cyber-Hacking on Russia. He said:

“…the history of the US government’s claim that Russian intelligence hacked into election databases reveals it to be a clear case of politically motivated analysis by the DHS and the Intelligence Community. Not only was the claim based on nothing more than inherently inconclusive technical indicators but no credible motive for Russian intelligence wanting personal information on registered voters was ever suggested.” (“Foisting Blame for Cyber-Hacking on Russia“, antiwar.com)

Right on, Porter. Facts don’t matter in the Russia hacking case. They never have. The whole approach from Day 1 has been to drown the public with innuendo and baseless accusations, while the MSM Carnie barkers pretend that “Russia meddling” is already settled science and that only “Putin puppets” would ever doubt the veracity of the media’s loony claims. Got that?

But facts do matter and so does evidence. And on that score we’re in luck because McGovern’s group, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), released a blockbuster report last week that produced the first hard evidence that Russia most certainly DID NOT hack the DNC servers. It was a DNC insider. Here’s an excerpt from the VIPS article titled “Was the “Russian Hack” an Inside Job?”

“Independent cyber-investigators have now …come up with verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of the alleged Russian hack. They found that the purported “hack” of the DNC …was not a hack…(but) originated with a copy …by an insider. The data was leaked after being doctored with a cut-and-paste job to implicate Russia….

Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Of equal importance, the forensics show that the copying and doctoring were performed on the East coast of the U.S.” (“Was the “Russian Hack” an Inside Job?“, CounterPunch)

Capisce? There was no hack. Someone working inside the DNC (a disgruntled employee?) –who had access to the computers, and who worked on the East Coast– copied the data onto a storage device and transferred it to WikiLeaks. That’s what you call a “leak” not a “hack”. There was no hack. Russia was not involved. The official narrative is bullshit. End of story.

Naturally, the MSM has completely ignored the VIPS report just as they ignored Sy Hersh’s brilliant article that proved that Assad DID NOT launch a chemical weapons attack in Syria. That bit of information has been locked out of the MSM coverage altogether as it doesn’t jibe with Washington’s “Assad must go” policy. So too, McGovern’s “verifiable forensic evidence” that the Russians did not hack the DNC servers will likely be consigned to the memory hole like every other inconvenient factoid that doesn’t fit with Washington’s foreign policy objectives.

The fact that the FBI has not seized the DNC computers is just one of many glaring omissions in this farcical investigation, but there are others too. Like this: Did you know that there are two eyewitnesses in the case that have not yet been questioned? That’s right, there are two people who claim to know the identity of the person who gave the stolen emails to WikiLeaks; Julian Assange and Craig Murray.

Murray, who is the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan and a human rights activist, claims he met the person who took the emails from the DNC in a wooded area in Washington DC last year. In other words, Murray can settle this matter once and for all and put an end to this year-long witch-hunt that has consumed the media and Capital Hill, prevented the Congress from conducting the people’s business, and increased the probability of a conflagration with nuclear-armed Russia.

But here’s the problem: The FBI has never interviewed Murray or made any effort to interview him. It’s like he doesn’t exist. In other words, we have a credible witness who can positively identify the person who leaked the emails, gave them to WikiLeaks and set off a political firestorm that has engulfed the Capital and the country for the last year, and the FBI hasn’t interviewed him?

Will someone explain that to me, please?

That’s why I remain convinced that the Russia hacking story is pure, unalloyed bunkum. There’s not a word of truth to any of it.

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

Featured image is from Veni | CC BY 2.0.

After months of imposing new sanctions against Russia, US diplomats reacted with shock and outrage after Russia imposed retaliatory sanctions against them over the weekend, calling the retaliation “uncalled for”
and threatening further retaliation to that.

Russia announced Friday that the US Embassy in Moscow will be limited to 455 employees in the future, and that they will be seizing a pair of properties owned by the embassy. These echo seizures and expulsions the US did to Russia back in December.

Though the embassy properties aren’t to be seized until September 1, the US Embassy claimed that Russia had locked them out of the dacha along the Moscow River today.

The Russian Foreign Ministry insisted that the US isn’t really “locked out” of the site yet, but that the embassy had sent trucks to the site without getting prior permission, which they would need since the property is inside a conservation area.

The dacha is primarily a recreation area for embassy staff, used for weekends outside the city and for parties. This was the same as the two sites the US seized back in December, which were both primarily recreational areas for Russia’s embassy staff.

Jason Ditz is news editor of Antiwar.com. View all posts by Jason Ditz

Featured image is from NEWS.am.

On June 9, both India and Pakistan became simultaneously members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a Eurasian economic, political and mutual security organization largely dominated by China and Russia. 

While the SCO with headquarters in Beijing is not officially a “military alliance”, it nonetheless serves as a geopolitical and strategic “counterweight” to US-NATO and its allies. It also plays a significant role in the development of  Eurasian trade, e.g. in support of China’s Belt and Road initiative, oil and gas pipeline corridors linking SCO member states, etc. 

In the course of the last few years, the SCO has extended its cooperation in military affairs and intelligence. War games were held under the auspices of the SCO. 

The members of  the SCO include China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Pakistan and India are now full members since June 9, 2017. Iran is an Observer Member slated to shortly become a full member.

The SCO now encompasses an extensive region which now comprises approximately half of the World’s population.

SCO Enlargement

While the Western media casually acknowledged that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif had met in Astana, Kazakhstan, ahead of the SCO summit (June 9), the geopolitical implications of India and Pakistan’s full membership of the SCO was barely  addressed.

With both countries now full members of the SCO, conditions have emerged which favor the normalization of relations between Delhi and Islamabad. In the words of Pakistan’s PM Nawaz Sharif, who congratulated his Indian counterpart:

“As leaders, we should leave a legacy of peace and amity for our future generations, not a toxic harvest of conflict and animosity. Instead of talking about counter-weights and containment, let us create shared spaces for all,”

Sharif also endorsed the proposal of China’s President Xi Jinping to establish “a five-year treaty for good neighbourliness among SCO members”.

Historic Shift in Geopolitical Alignments

The simultaneous instatement of both countries as full members of the SCO is not only symbolic, it marks a historic shift in geopolitical alignments, which has a de facto bearing on the structure of economic and military agreements. Moreover, it has also a bearing on the inner-conflict between India and Pakistan which dates back to the countries’ Independence.

Inevitably, this historic shift constitutes a blow against Washington, which has defense and trade agreements with both Pakistan and India.

While India remains firmly aligned with Washington, America’s political stranglehold on Pakistan (through military and intelligence agreements) has been weakened as a result of Pakistan’s trade and investment deals with China, not to mention the accession of both India and Pakistan to the SCO, which favors bilateral relations between both countries as well as cooperation with Russia, China and Central Asia at the expense of  their historical links with US.

In other words, this enlargement of the SCO weakens America’s hegemonic ambitions in both South Asia and the broader Eurasian region. It has a bearing on energy pipeline routes, transport corridors, borders and mutual security, maritime rights.

US-Pakistan Relations

This ongoing Pak-India conflict has been carefully nurtured by Washington since the Cold War era. Moreover, Washington had envisaged a scenario of political disintegration in Pakistan for more than ten years. According to a 2005 report by the US National Intelligence Council and the CIA, Pakistan was slated to become a “failed state” by 2015.

The US –with the support of Britain had favored the geographical and political fracture of Pakistan. The separatist movement in Baluchistan had been supported covertly by British intelligence. (For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Pakistan, Global Research, December 2007).

Military scholar Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters writing in the June 2006 issue of The Armed Forces Journal, suggests, in no uncertain terms that Pakistan should be broken up, leading to the formation of  a separate country: “Greater Balochistan” or “Free Balochistan” (see Map below). The latter would incorporate the Pakistani and Iranian Baloch  provinces into a single political entity.

In turn, according to Peters, Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) should be incorporated into Afghanistan “because of its linguistic and ethnic affinity”. This proposed fragmentation, which broadly reflects US foreign policy, would reduce Pakistani territory to approximately 50 percent of its present land area. (See map). Pakistan would also loose a large part of its coastline on the Arabian Sea.

Although the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training program at NATO’s Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, have  most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles. Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Pakistan, Global Research, December 2007)

Ralph Peters Map: The Project for the New Middle East

With the development of Pakistan’s bilateral relations with China, since 2007, the US clutch on Pakistan politics — which largely relied on America’s military presence as well as Washington’s links to Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment– has indelibly been weakened.

Pakistan’s full membership of the SCO, its links with China and Iran should contribute to weakening secessionist movements, while reinforcing the powers of the Islamabad government.

The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)

Pakistan and China have implemented a so-called “Economic Corridor” which is part of Beijing’s Eurasian Belt and Road trade and investment project. In many regards, the CPEC is a slap in the face for Washington and its failed Trans Pacific Partnership agreement, which sought to integrate Asia and the Pacific into a hegemonic economic project.

The CPEC is a 2400km, economic corridor (including an extensive railway system) from Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of western China to the Pakistani port of Gwadar on the Arabian sea. The infrastructure of the Gwadar port was largely funded by China.

The CEPEC is part and parcel of China’s Belt and Road initiative. The CPEC was originally valued at $46 billion, it is estimated in 2017 at $62 billion. ​

Source: Interfax 

The accession of  both Pakistan and India to full SCO membership is intended to reinforce the CPEC as well as, from Beijing’s standpoint, include India in a broader corridor which will ultimately favor trade and cooperation between Pakistan and India, leading also to the negotaiation of integrated economic corridors from Iran, through Pakistan and India onto China and Central Asia.

India

With regard to India, its historical links with Russia –which prevailed during the Cold War, were undermined in the early 1990s with the assassination of Prime minister Radjiv Gandhi in 1991.

A  Congress government largely committed to neoliberal economic reforms and the “Washington consensus” was installed in 1991 (with Manmohan Singh, a former World Bank official as Finance Minister who later became Prime Minister). In recent developments, Washington has developed a comprehensive military cooperation agreement with India.

The question is how will Indian politics evolve in relation to Washington and the West, now that India is a full member of the SCO. How will the conflict between India and Pakistan evolve now that both countries are full members of the SCO.

India-Iran

At present, India’s trade corridors with with Iran avoid transit through Pakistan. They are governed by an “India, Iran, Afghanistan” tripartite agreement which bypasses Pakistan, which links the  Iranian port of Chabahar on the Arabian into a “transit hub”, which bypasses Pakistan.

In turn the underwater gas pipeline project linking the Iranian port of Chabahar to Mumbai, which was the result of bilateral negotiations between Tehran and Delhi in March 2016:

In a decision of far-reaching strategic implications, India is all set to ink a deal to have a direct undersea gas pipeline from Iran, by circumventing Pakistan. Not only this, New Delhi has approved a three-pronged push towards Iran and Central Asia.

It will fund a rail link between the Iranian port city of Chabahar and city of Zahedan, located on the tri-junction of Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan. The rail link, when concluded, will join Chabahar port with International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) to provide direct access to Central Asia. (Tribune India, March 14, 2016, emphasis added)

The question is whether this bilateral project circumventing Pakistan will go through, now that both India and Pakistan are full SCO members, involved in partner relations with China, Iran and Russia.

Will that tripartite agreement signed in May 2016 prevail unchanged now that both India and Pakistan are full members of the SCO? (and Iran and Afghanistan are Observer Members of the SCO).

Screenshot Al Jazeera, May 5, 2016

Regime Change in Pakistan?  The Political Demise of Nawaz Sharif ?

Barely two months following the SCO summit in Astana on July 28, 2017, Pakistan is experiencing a deep-seated political crisis.

PM Nawaz Sharif, who had negotiated his country’s membership in the SCO was obliged to step down as prime minister following a ruling by Pakistan’s Supreme Court on corruption allegations.

Coming with less than a year to go in his term, his ouster adds to a grim and long list of civilian governments cut short in Pakistan — including two of his own previous terms as prime minister. And it will further roil the country’s tumultuous political balance, as his rivals vie to exploit his fall.

When Mr. Sharif returned to office in 2013, it was as a widely popular party leader with a deep grudge against the country’s powerful military establishment. He moved quickly to try to establish civilian authority in areas that had long been dominated by generals, especially foreign policy.

The latest reports from Pakistan confirms that parliament will elect a new interim prime minister on August 1, “Shahid Khaqan Abbasi expected to become interim leader until Sharif’s own brother is eligible.” (Independent, July 30, 2017).

What are the broad implications of this political crisis in Pakistan? What are its impacts on the SCO?

On June 9, both India and Pakistan became simultaneously members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a Eurasian economic, political and mutual security organization largely dominated by China and Russia. 

While the SCO with headquarters in Beijing is not officially a “military alliance”, it nonetheless serves as a geopolitical and strategic “counterweight” to US-NATO and its allies. It also plays a significant role in the development of  Eurasian trade, e.g. in support of China’s Belt and Road initiative, oil and gas pipeline corridors linking SCO member states, etc. 

In the course of the last few years, the SCO has extended its cooperation in military affairs and intelligence. War games were held under the auspices of the SCO. 

The members of  the SCO include China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Pakistan and India are now full members since June 9, 2017. Iran is an Observer Member slated to shortly become a full member.

The SCO now encompasses an extensive region which now comprises approximately half of the World’s population.

SCO Enlargement

While the Western media casually acknowledged that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif had met in Astana, Kazakhstan, ahead of the SCO summit (June 9), the geopolitical implications of India and Pakistan’s full membership of the SCO was barely  addressed.

With both countries now full members of the SCO, conditions have emerged which favor the normalization of relations between Delhi and Islamabad. In the words of Pakistan’s PM Nawaz Sharif, who congratulated his Indian counterpart:

“As leaders, we should leave a legacy of peace and amity for our future generations, not a toxic harvest of conflict and animosity. Instead of talking about counter-weights and containment, let us create shared spaces for all,”

Sharif also endorsed the proposal of China’s President Xi Jinping to establish “a five-year treaty for good neighbourliness among SCO members”.

Historic Shift in Geopolitical Alignments

The simultaneous instatement of both countries as full members of the SCO is not only symbolic, it marks a historic shift in geopolitical alignments, which has a de facto bearing on the structure of economic and military agreements. Moreover, it has also a bearing on the inner-conflict between India and Pakistan which dates back to the countries’ Independence.

Inevitably, this historic shift constitutes a blow against Washington, which has defense and trade agreements with both Pakistan and India.

While India remains firmly aligned with Washington, America’s political stranglehold on Pakistan (through military and intelligence agreements) has been weakened as a result of Pakistan’s trade and investment deals with China, not to mention the accession of both India and Pakistan to the SCO, which favors bilateral relations between both countries as well as cooperation with Russia, China and Central Asia at the expense of  their historical links with US.

In other words, this enlargement of the SCO weakens America’s hegemonic ambitions in both South Asia and the broader Eurasian region. It has a bearing on energy pipeline routes, transport corridors, borders and mutual security, maritime rights.

US-Pakistan Relations

This ongoing Pak-India conflict has been carefully nurtured by Washington since the Cold War era. Moreover, Washington had envisaged a scenario of political disintegration in Pakistan for more than ten years. According to a 2005 report by the US National Intelligence Council and the CIA, Pakistan was slated to become a “failed state” by 2015.

The US –with the support of Britain had favored the geographical and political fracture of Pakistan. The separatist movement in Baluchistan had been supported covertly by British intelligence. (For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Pakistan, Global Research, December 2007).

Military scholar Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters writing in the June 2006 issue of The Armed Forces Journal, suggests, in no uncertain terms that Pakistan should be broken up, leading to the formation of  a separate country: “Greater Balochistan” or “Free Balochistan” (see Map below). The latter would incorporate the Pakistani and Iranian Baloch  provinces into a single political entity.

In turn, according to Peters, Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) should be incorporated into Afghanistan “because of its linguistic and ethnic affinity”. This proposed fragmentation, which broadly reflects US foreign policy, would reduce Pakistani territory to approximately 50 percent of its present land area. (See map). Pakistan would also loose a large part of its coastline on the Arabian Sea.

Although the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training program at NATO’s Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, have  most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles. Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Pakistan, Global Research, December 2007)

Ralph Peters Map: The Project for the New Middle East

With the development of Pakistan’s bilateral relations with China, since 2007, the US clutch on Pakistan politics — which largely relied on America’s military presence as well as Washington’s links to Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment– has indelibly been weakened.

Pakistan’s full membership of the SCO, its links with China and Iran should contribute to weakening secessionist movements, while reinforcing the powers of the Islamabad government.

The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)

Pakistan and China have implemented a so-called “Economic Corridor” which is part of Beijing’s Eurasian Belt and Road trade and investment project. In many regards, the CPEC is a slap in the face for Washington and its failed Trans Pacific Partnership agreement, which sought to integrate Asia and the Pacific into a hegemonic economic project.

The CPEC is a 2400km, economic corridor (including an extensive railway system) from Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of western China to the Pakistani port of Gwadar on the Arabian sea. The infrastructure of the Gwadar port was largely funded by China.

The CEPEC is part and parcel of China’s Belt and Road initiative. The CPEC was originally valued at $46 billion, it is estimated in 2017 at $62 billion. ​

Source: Interfax 

The accession of  both Pakistan and India to full SCO membership is intended to reinforce the CPEC as well as, from Beijing’s standpoint, include India in a broader corridor which will ultimately favor trade and cooperation between Pakistan and India, leading also to the negotaiation of integrated economic corridors from Iran, through Pakistan and India onto China and Central Asia.

India

With regard to India, its historical links with Russia –which prevailed during the Cold War, were undermined in the early 1990s with the assassination of Prime minister Radjiv Gandhi in 1991.

A  Congress government largely committed to neoliberal economic reforms and the “Washington consensus” was installed in 1991 (with Manmohan Singh, a former World Bank official as Finance Minister who later became Prime Minister). In recent developments, Washington has developed a comprehensive military cooperation agreement with India.

The question is how will Indian politics evolve in relation to Washington and the West, now that India is a full member of the SCO. How will the conflict between India and Pakistan evolve now that both countries are full members of the SCO.

India-Iran

At present, India’s trade corridors with with Iran avoid transit through Pakistan. They are governed by an “India, Iran, Afghanistan” tripartite agreement which bypasses Pakistan, which links the  Iranian port of Chabahar on the Arabian into a “transit hub”, which bypasses Pakistan.

In turn the underwater gas pipeline project linking the Iranian port of Chabahar to Mumbai, which was the result of bilateral negotiations between Tehran and Delhi in March 2016:

In a decision of far-reaching strategic implications, India is all set to ink a deal to have a direct undersea gas pipeline from Iran, by circumventing Pakistan. Not only this, New Delhi has approved a three-pronged push towards Iran and Central Asia.

It will fund a rail link between the Iranian port city of Chabahar and city of Zahedan, located on the tri-junction of Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan. The rail link, when concluded, will join Chabahar port with International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) to provide direct access to Central Asia. (Tribune India, March 14, 2016, emphasis added)

The question is whether this bilateral project circumventing Pakistan will go through, now that both India and Pakistan are full SCO members, involved in partner relations with China, Iran and Russia.

Will that tripartite agreement signed in May 2016 prevail unchanged now that both India and Pakistan are full members of the SCO? (and Iran and Afghanistan are Observer Members of the SCO).

Screenshot Al Jazeera, May 5, 2016

Regime Change in Pakistan?  The Political Demise of Nawaz Sharif ?

Barely two months following the SCO summit in Astana on July 28, 2017, Pakistan is experiencing a deep-seated political crisis.

PM Nawaz Sharif, who had negotiated his country’s membership in the SCO was obliged to step down as prime minister following a ruling by Pakistan’s Supreme Court on corruption allegations.

Coming with less than a year to go in his term, his ouster adds to a grim and long list of civilian governments cut short in Pakistan — including two of his own previous terms as prime minister. And it will further roil the country’s tumultuous political balance, as his rivals vie to exploit his fall.

When Mr. Sharif returned to office in 2013, it was as a widely popular party leader with a deep grudge against the country’s powerful military establishment. He moved quickly to try to establish civilian authority in areas that had long been dominated by generals, especially foreign policy.

The latest reports from Pakistan confirms that parliament will elect a new interim prime minister on August 1, “Shahid Khaqan Abbasi expected to become interim leader until Sharif’s own brother is eligible.” (Independent, July 30, 2017).

What are the broad implications of this political crisis in Pakistan? What are its impacts on the SCO?

Professor Jules Dufour relentlessly wrote this article, his last article on his hospital bed. In his last hours his main concern was to dismantle the media propaganda which supports US-led wars. He passed away a few days later on August 6.

Jules Dufour will live forever. I spoke to him shortly before his passing. While on his death bed from a terminal illness, both his mind and his heart had become embedded in the future of humanity. We spoke about Hiroshima and the threats of nuclear war. 

Jules Dufour lives. His incisive thoughts and analysis live. In the words of Albert Einstein which vividly describe Jules Dufour, “Only a life lived for others is worth living.”

During his entire life, his research and teachings were geared towards revealing the unspoken truth concerning the  American empire, how it kills and destroys people’s lives, impoverishes entire populations.

“The Worldwide control of humanity’s economic, social and political activities is under the helm of US corporate and military power. Underlying this process are various schemes of direct and indirect military intervention. These US sponsored strategies ultimately consist in a process of global subordination.

Among his Global Research articles is his analysis of US military bases on foreign soil first published in 2007. 

The Worldwide Network of US Military Bases By Prof. Jules Dufour, March 07, 2016

According to Jules Dufour:  

The US tends to view the Earth surface as a vast territory to conquer, occupy and exploit. The fact that the US Military splits the World up into geographic command units vividly illustrates this underlying geopolitical reality.

Humanity is being controlled  and enslaved by this Network of US military bases.

Distinguished professor of Geography at the University of Quebec,  Jules Dufour was a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.  He was a true internationalist combining an understanding of poverty in Latin America and Africa with a focus on social, economic and environmental  issues in Canada and Quebec, including extensive research on the rights of first nations, fieldwork in Canada’s Northern territories, and the Arctic.  

Michel Chossudovsky, August 6, 2017

***

It is important to tell the truth. Terrorism in its various manifestations is generated and fomented by the aggressions of the West throughout the world.

Aggressions against whole nations. Aggressions of the past, but above all domination, plunder and the slow and inexorable destruction of national economies and the social fabric of a increasingly large number of countries.

A total of 55 wars implemented directly or by proxy by the West including US-NATO since the beginning of the 20th century.

The fallacious discourse propagated in the international political arena continues to legitimize Western warfare operations, by hiding the factors behind them. This assertion is corroborated by all those who have understood the underlying stratagems of propaganda of power politics. Two of them, Noam Chomsky and André Vltchek, proposed an analysis of this global situation in a book published by Éditions écosociété, entitled “The Wes’ Terrorism [L’Occident Terroriste]. From Hiroshima to the Drones’ War”. They give a picture of past centuries:

“There are certainly two ways of talking about terrorism, because terrorism is not considered as such when it is practiced (and in a much more deadly form) by those who, Their power, are adorned with virtue. ”

“Since the end of the Second World War, Western colonialism and neo-colonialism have caused the death of 50 to 55 million people, most often in the name of lofty ideals such as freedom and democracy. Yet the West manages to escape with impunity and to maintain, in the eyes of the rest of the world, the myth that it is invested with some moral mission.”

How does it work? Both authors criticize the fatal legacy of colonialism and the shameless exploitation of natural resources of the planet in the West. This book of interviews is augmented by two articles published in the wake of the attack on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, denouncing Western hypocrisy for terrorism ‘It has largely contributed to developing’.

The theses propagated in the West are those of the conquerors. All those who oppose the policies of intervention in the world by the Western powers are labeled terrorists or enemies of democracy. In this context, there is no mention of the process of militarization of economies and societies.

The capitalist state takes over the world’s political and social scene and acts in a dictatorial way in collaboration with the mainstream media which echo this situation by normalizing it in the eyes of the public.

Lies and false truths are then propagated ad nauseam, all supported by experts selected to corroborate them. It is the spread of the single thought so much decried in recent decades. It is the general wandering which develops the syndrome of the enemy and attacks on the individuals with the so-called terrorist profile according to the definition proposed by the Western experts.

I. Terrorism defined by the West

People gathering, chalk drawings and flowers for the victims. The largest message says (translated from French), Brussels is beautiful, with further inscriptions of Stop violence, Stop war, Unity, and Humanity. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Terrorism defined in the West (by the Western establishment) corresponds to all forms of activity that threaten the interests of those who control the heart of the capitalist world. The popular demonstrations in the streets of major metropolitan areas demanding the protection of their rights and social justice, associations fighting for the protection of these rights and, strictly speaking, progressive states are considered as a threat.

The attacks in Paris in November 2015 and those in Brussels in March 2016 made it possible to reaffirm the fallacious discourse of the Westerners. This tracking of the jihadists, this concentration of the news directed towards so-called radicalized and dangerous individuals has not yet allowed a reflection on the true supporters of international terrorism. Yet the war on terror should be elucidated in the eyes of the general public. On the contrary, it is being sought to speak of it as a search for individuals around the world who “threaten” the global security of the planet. 

II. Terrorism practiced by the West

It is important to tell the truth. The attacks in Paris and in Brussels lead nation states to adopt measures to control the people and thus militarize the civil society and it institutions. This regime, Latin America has known it for decades with the prolonged reign of several dictatorships and, in particular, in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile. A permanent state of siege and the loss of all civil rights and fundamental freedoms. This is what is now taking shape in Europe’s Shengen space. Deployment of police and armed forces, increased control of people’s movements, multiple searches, monitoring of strategic sites such as nuclear power stations and military bases. It will increasingly be the expression of state terrorism exercised over all citizens. A worrying prospect at the highest point.

III. Radicalization. A concept that applies well to the contingents of national armies

Another misleading conception diffused from all sectors of human activity: The phenomenon of radicalization. Individuals would be trained to develop radical thinking and to act violently to the detriment of innocent citizens. According to this view, this behavior appears to be the result of indoctrination and deep deviance. In this speech, it is forgotten that soldiers of the national armed forces around the world are trained to perform warlike actions, to kill human beings and, above all, to obey the orders dictated by the commandments. Can their actions be characterized as radical? These soldiers accept two elements: “Kill or be killed”. How can we conceal this reality and repeat that these soldiers are there to defend their country? They are trained to destroy an “enemy” that is taken care of in collective thought.

IV. Double Standards.

The West’s victims are acknowledged. The victims in poor countries are “statistics”. Examples: Brussels and Aden

This is exactly what we saw with the attacks in Brussels and those that took place a few days later, on March 25, in Yemen. The Brussels attacks, which killed 34 people and more than 200 wounded, resulted in a considerable deployment of police and armed forces and caused a global shock and concern. Yemeni suicide car bombs against three dams held by loyalist forces in the large port city of southern Yemen killed at least 22 people (Journal Le Devoir, 26 and 27 March 2016, P. 5). A dispatch appears at the bottom of an inner page. No tribute is paid to the victims. These events, which took place in Yemen as well as those that mark the invasion wars of the West in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Conclusion

The Paris and Brussels attacks revealed, once again, the blindness of the West over the terrorist actions which they continue to perpetrate in vast regions of the world.

The Global War on Terror delivered by the United States since 2001 Caused the Death of 1.3 Million People according to a Report entitled “Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the War on Terror” Organizations International Association of Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW, 1985 Nobel Peace Prize), Physicians for Social Responsibility and Physicians for Global Survival.

This report asserts, based on various sources, including governmental, that the death toll of 1.3 million deaths is “a low estimate” and does not take into account other countries in conflict (Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria ). 500 deaths a day in Iraq.

Here we take up the conclusion of Michel Collon analyzing the attacks in Brussels:

“The attacks are not inevitable, they are the result of a policy. Conducted in Washington. Then to London and Paris. Brussels following slavishly. Gentlemen, you are therefore jointly responsible. Do we have the right to debate it – in “democracy” – or will you still be pressing for the media to be silent? “.

***

Translated from the French original

Jules Dufour, Ph.D., C.Q. is Professor Emeritus, Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG),  Knight (Chevalier) National Order of Quebec, Member of the World Commission on Protected Areas the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Gland, Switzerland, Member of the Universal Circle of Ambassadors for Peace, Paris.

Sources

AFP. 2016. Le Yémen secoué par trois attentats. Journal Le Devoir, les 26 et 27 mars 2016, p. C 5.

CHOMSKY, Noam et André Vltchek.  L’Occident terroriste. D’Hiroshima à la guerre des drones. Montréal, Éditions écosociété. 176 pages.  Traduit de l’anglais par Nicolas Calvé.

COLLON, Michel. 2016. Attentats de Bruxelles : non, monsieur le premier ministre ! Mondialisation.ca et investigaction.net. Le 23 mars 2016. En ligne :

http://www.mondialisation.ca/attentats-de-bruxelles-non-monsieur-le-premier-ministre/5516181

DUFOUR, Jules. 2010. L’Occident et la diabolisation : Pour un changement radical du discours global. En ligne :

http://www.mondialisation.ca/l-occident-et-la-diabolisation-pour-un-changement-radical-du-discours-global/21739

DUFOUR, Jules. 2015. La militarisation planétaire s’intensifie. Les drones de combat sèment la terreur et la mort. Montréal, Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation (CRM). Le 3 mars 2015. En ligne :

http://www.mondialisation.ca/la-militarisation-planetaire-sintensifie-les-drones-de-combat-sement-la-terreur-et-la-mort/5434583

DUFOUR, Jules. 2015. L’aube du XXIème siècle. Plus d’armements. Plus de guerres. La spirale de la terreur et de la mort se poursuit (1ère partie). Montréal, Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation (CRM). Le 2 avril 2015. En ligne :

http://www.mondialisation.ca/laube-du-xxieme-siecle-plus-darmements-plus-de-guerres-la-spirale-de-la-terreur-et-de-la-mort-se-poursuit/5440161

DUFOUR, Jules. 2015. L’aube du XXIème siècle. Plus d’armements. Plus de guerres. La spirale de la terreur et de la mort se poursuit.  Les interventions et occupations militaires de l’Occident dans le monde. Irak, Syrie, Libye et Gaza (2ième partie). Montréal, Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation (CRM). Le 6 avril 2015. En ligne :

http://www.mondialisation.ca/laube-du-xxieme-siecle-plus-darmements-plus-de-guerres-la-spirale-de-la-terreur-et-de-la-mort-se-poursuit-2ieme-partie/5440984

DUFOUR, Jules. 2015. Le grand réarmement planétaire 2015. L’humanité se retrouve face à un grave danger d’extinction. Montréal, Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation (CRM). Le 14 novembre 2015. En ligne:

http://www.mondialisation.ca/le-grand-rearmement-planetaire-2015/5488806

IPPNW GERMANY, PSR (Physician for Social R[J1] [J2] [J3] [J4] [J5] [J6] responsibility) et PGS (Physician for Global Survival). 2015. Body Count. Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the “War on Terror” Iraq Afghanistan Pakistan. Mars 2015. 100 pages. En ligne :

http://www.ippnw.de/commonFiles/pdfs/Frieden/Body_Count_first_international_edition_2015_final.pdf

REUTERS ET AFP. 2016. 34 morts et plus de 200 blessés dans les attentats de Bruxelles revendiqués par l’État islamique. JOURNALDEMONTREAL.COM. Le 22 mars 2016. En ligne :

http://www.journaldemontreal.com/2016/03/22/attaques-a-bruxelles

WIKIPÉDIA. Terrorisme d’État. Dernière mise à jour : Le 23 février 2016. En ligne :

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorisme_d%27%C3%89tat

WIKIPÉDIA. Guerre contre le terrorisme. Dernière mise à jour : Le 22 février 2016. En ligne :

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerre_contre_le_terrorisme

Note: The text has been revised  by Lolita Memi, inf,,Quebec City, Canada

To go further, on the terrorist attacks in Brussels, see articles in English by Michel Chossudovsky:

Is the ISIS Behind the Brussels Attacks? Who is Behind the ISIS?, 22 mars 2016

Fake Video Used in News Coverage of Brussels Terror Attacks, 22 mars 2016

Media Manipulation: More Fake Video Reports of the Brussels Terror Attacks, 23 mars 2016

Paris, Brussels… The Role of “Massive Casualty Producing Events”. The Roadmap to a Police State, 24 mars 2016

The Brussels Attacks: What is True, What is Fake? Three Daesh Suspects at Brussels Airport, 25 mars 2016

Featured image: Les Murray (Source: SBS TWG)

“The growth, popularity and success of football in Australia today is absolutely a reflection of [Les Murray’s] passion and advocacy for the game he loved.” – SBS statement, Jul 31, 2017

It is important to stress this: the word football. A word associated with the pure use, aesthetic, skillful, or clumsy, of feet, legs and head (leaving aside arms), but which means different things to different audiences – and countries. In Australia, it became soccer, and, as it did in the United States, assumed the status of an invalid, not rising beyond an amateur status till the league was formalised.

Over the decades, there was one distinct name in the commentary box that broadcast through the stands and in the homes of immigrants and naturalised Australians: Les Murray. Not that it was his original name, one shared with Australia’s foremost poet. (At times, there was confusion.) 

Neither the man, nor the sport he commentated upon, were understood as what they were in Australia. One was Hungarian refugee László Ürge; the other was football, at times as alien on Terra Australis as the European fox.  

For the people who listened to him, there was only one universal sport, the top banana in the teeming plantation. His message was a universal one, albeit delivered from the undergrowth of ethnic cover, the secure barricades of the station called SBS.

If any extra-terrestrial could play a sport, it would surely be football, rather than the cacophonous rabble of an Australian Rules skirmish, or the bruising, physical mania of Rugby League. Football was the only true “World Game” for Murray, a point he insisted on as an article of faith.

His link with Australia is that of promoter, converter, industrious immigrant who fled Hungary as a refugee in 1956 after Soviet tanks flattened a reformist communist government keen to direct its ire against Stalinism. But it was not politics that lingered on the brain as an Australian arrival, except in one instance: the man who assisted his family flee across the Austro-Hungarian border.

“I owe him by freedom,” recounted Murray. “I get this stuff about protecting our borders and all that – I get that. But one of these days we’re going to have a look at ourselves in the mirror and ask: what kind of country is it we’re actually trying to protect?”

On arrival in Wollongong, his missionary work began.

“I started on this mad mission to convert Australians to football in the schoolyard. That’s where it started, not when I became a broadcaster, that was just the continuation of it.”[1]

With the launch of the National Soccer League in 1977, Murray could bathe, wash and breathe in the game he adored to distraction. He could even earn from it.

Sorties on an unsuspecting Australian populace were initially launched from Channel 10. In 1980, he found his journalistic stripes for SBS, having had a stint at the now defunct The Sun. There, he joined former Australian Socceroo Johnny Warren, another football missionary. From 1986, he began the coverage of what would amount to eight Football World Cups.

Together with Warren, the world game was pushed through with proselytising dedication. Updates were compiled with encyclopaedic thoroughness on a weekly basis, giving audiences their weekend fill on matches that had taken place on the other side of the globe. As much of a global, trans-continental focus was sought and conveyed.

“If Les hasn’t seen every match ever played,” wrote Graham Williams in 2006, “he certainly remembers every detail of those he has.”[2]

Writers and sports commentators more familiar with the Anglicised breed would stumble over names Warren’s continental tongue would wrap around.

“No-one could pronounce club names like Fenerbache (Turkey)[sic], Pannathinaikos (Greece)[sic] or Kaiserslautern with such accuracy and panache as Murray,” remembered sports reporter for The Australian, Ray Gatt.[3]

Then again, he simply tried in a way Gatt, evidenced by his efforts at spelling those club names, did not.

For Murray, there was football, and not much else besides. His memoir is indicative of that all-consuming project, earth, liquid, mineral, a memorial less to himself as to a sweet, incessant love that never dies. By the Balls, remarked one reviewer, has little to say about Hungary other than football, and little about women – other than football.

It was a love so striking as to be blinding, perhaps indifferent to the muddying guise of sports governance. Murray’s association with FIFA’s ethics committee was deemed self-defeating, a wolf masquerading as a principled vegetarian. 

The Saturday Paper certainly thought as much as the entire FIFA edifice seemed to be crumbling before prosecution writs and investigations from anti-corruption authorities.[4]  His response involved a reflection on that insular Australian tendency to “beat up on each other” notably “every time a stink bomb goes off in Zurich”.[5] FIFA, he explained, could be reformed from within, and rather than “barking from the outside”, he was keen on fixing matters gone rotten from the inside.

When speaking to the Lowy Institute in August 2006, Murray explained that Australia’s role in the World Cup had invariably improved its image globally. The World Game assimilated Terra Australis; the island continent gave in return. Australia was, at long last, at home. 

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

Notes

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/31/les-murray-sbs-football-commentator-dies-aged-71

[2] http://www.smh.com.au/news/book-reviews/by-the-balls/2006/06/05/1149359650700.html

[3] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/opinion/the-man-who-brought-football-world-to-australia/news-story/4d9147f55fa3bca0933cada2f50651a5

[4] https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2015/06/06/les-murray-and-the-fifa-scandal/14335128001972#.VXgkiEYXhra

[5] http://theworldgame.sbs.com.au/blog/2015/06/16/truth-about-fifa-scandal-and-me

A multi-centre study was presented at the just concluded 4th International Workshop on ‘Applications of ICTs in Education, Healthcare and Agriculture’ sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology and its international partners.

The lead presenter on ICTs in Health, Prof. Philip Njemanze, in a 10-year work done in Imo State, demonstrated that malaria prevalence was linked to collection of rainwater around homes and land streams dug for drainage and for collection of water for farming and processing of farm produce like palm oil.

In the report published in the Journal of Environmental Neuroscience and Biomedicine, it was disclosed that the monthly cycle demonstrated two peak months (February and August) in the dry season and two low incidence months (June and October) in the wet season.

These observations of the behaviour of the mosquito vector and the life cycle of the malaria parasite plasmodium led the investigators to propose a solution to malaria control never proffered until now.

The investigators proposed that if all citizens of Nigeria would take antimalarials at the same time four times a year, all would be free of the malaria parasite at the same periods such that biting by mosquito would not transmit the parasite and if sustained within 2-4 years before 2022 Nigeria could be free of malaria as a public health problem.

They further suggested that if extended across ECOWAS countries the entire region could be free of malaria by 2025.

The paper was greeted with enthusiasm by participants and a resolution was adopted to make the proposal as part of the South-South Cooperation and a Presidential Initiative in a new Expanded Roll-Back Malaria initiative that includes control of environmental factors, provision of potable water, and adequate nutrition.

Featured image is from the author.

Government forces, led by the Syrian Arab army (SAA) Tiger Forces liberated more villages on the west bank of the Euphrates River in Raqqah province and entered the northwestern part of Deir Ezzor province.

Last weekend, the Tiger Forces and their allies captured Muqla Saghira, Al-Rabyeh, Al-Jubayli, Salim al-Hammad, Abu Hammad and Ghanim al-Ali, Wadi Al Tarab, Tal Al-Tarab, Al-Rujum, Wadi Al Kharayj and Wadi Hamamiya. ISIS had counter-attacked near Ghanim al-Ali and allegedly destroyed 3 SAA vehicles with ATGMs and killed over 20 SAA servicemen. However, the terrorist group was not able to retake the village.

On Monday, government forces started clearing the ISIS pocket in the Sabkah area. The crossroad town of Madaan located in about 67 km from the city of Deir Ezzor besieged by ISIS will likely become the next target of the operation. The Bishri Triangle is another high priority target for the advancing government forces. Capturing these sites, the SAA will establish control over the two key road heading to Deir Ezzor from the northwestern direction.
In Deir Ezzor city, the Republican Guard repelled an ISIS attack in the Al-Makbarah area and separately cut off the ISIS supply line to the cemetery area with a 280 meters long trench trapping the terrorists between the airbase and the government-held part of the city. An intense fighting is ongoing.

A new group of tribal fighters called the Euphrates Hawks joint the government advance on Sukhna signaling that more and more members of the Syrian tribes join the ranks of the Syrian government forces. Currently government forces are clashing with ISIS terrorists southwest of the town. The SAA controls a number of important high points, including Rajm Sabboun, Mount Qulaylat, Um Khasm hills and a part of Jabal Tuntur, that allows to predict that they will be able to develop advance further in coming days.

At least 18 ISIS members, two vehicles and a fuel tanker as well as a large fuel tanks convoy were destroyed by Syrian and Russia airstrikes in the eastern Hama countryside. The Russian and Syrian air forces had intensified airstrikes in the area ahead of another upcoming attempt to reach the key ISIS defense point of Uqayribat.

According to pro-Kurdish sources, last weekend, Turkish soldiers entered the villages of Siftik Wastani, Siftik Fawqani and Bubana in northern Aleppo but were pushed to retreat after a short confrontation with the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) dominated by Kurdish militias. If true, Ankara has just been testing the US reaction to possible limited military operations against Kurdish militias in northern Syria.

If you’re able, and if you like our content and approach, please support the project. Our work wouldn’t be possible without your help: PayPal: [email protected] or via: http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront

Chemical/biological warfare is the term used to describe the use of chemical or biological agents as weapons to injure or kill humans, livestock, or plants. Chemical weapons are devices that use chemicals to inflict death or injury; biological weapons use pathogens or organisms that cause disease. Pathogens include bacteria, viruses, fungi, and toxins (poisons produced by animals or plants). – Library of Congress, Science Reference Services

Since March 2015, the US has supported Saudi Arabia and its allies in their criminal war of aggression against Yemen, committing daily war crimes, especially against civilians, who are now suffering a cholera epidemic with more than 400,000 victims. Cholera is caused by the bacteria Vibrio cholera and has been weaponized by the US, Japan (in World War II), South Africa (under apartheid), Iraq (under Saddam), and other states. To be most effective, cholera must be spread through water supplies. That’s what’s happening in Yemen now. More than two years of bombing has largely destroyed Yemen’s infrastructure, water and sewage systems are destroyed, hospitals and clinics are destroyed, and the population of about 25 million has almost no protection against the spread of cholera. The UN says Yemen’s cholera epidemic is “the largest ever recorded in any country in a single year since records began.”

This may not be literal biological warfare, but it is certainly biological warfare by other means. This is biological warfare in reality, if not in law. This is biological warfare in one of the world’s poorest countries, supported across two American administrations, with no sign of letting up. US slaughter of civilians has been ratcheting up in recent months, not only in Afghanistan but in places like Iraq (Mosul) and Syria (Raqqa). This is what empires do, especially as their authority begins to wane..

And in Yemen, the US continues to support and participate in this panoply of criminal acts with little objection from Congress, most news media, or the general public. Few seem to care about the deliberate spread of a toxin that affects mostly children and that “causes a person’s intestines to create massive amounts of fluid that then produces thin, grayish brown diarrhea.” Where treatment is unavailable or impossible, cholera can be lethal in a matter of days. As a NOVA program on bioterror put it,

“because cholera is readily treated with proper medical attention, it is less likely to be used as an agent of terror in the United States.”

And since rehydration is essential to recovery, cholera is most effectively deployed in a place like Yemen where the water and sewage systems have been bombed into a state of high lethality.

There are laws against all this, not that it matters much..

At present, 124 nations are member states of the International Criminal Court (ICC), established by international treaty (the Rome Statute) to have jurisdiction over the international crimes of aggression, genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The United States is not among the member states, having signed the original treaty and then withdrawn its signature. Sudan, Israel, and Russia also signed the original treaty, then withdrew. Yemen voted in 2007 to ratify the treaty, then re-voted to retract ratification. There are 41 other countries, including India, Pakistan, Turkey, and China, that have rejected the treaty..

The US did not sign the war crimes treaty until December 31, 2000, when President Clinton was a lame duck who had not asked the Senate to ratify the treaty. On May 6, 2002, John R. Bolton, the Bush administration’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, communicated the US position to the UN. Here is the full text of the letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan:

This is to inform you, in connection with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court adopted on July 17, 1998, that the United States does not intend to become a party to the treaty. Accordingly, the United States has no legal obligations arising from its signature on December 31, 2000. The United States requests that its intention not to become a party, as expressed in this letter, be reflected in the depositary’s status lists relating to this treaty..

There was a time when the US, lacking “legal obligations” not to commit war crimes, might still have felt some moral obligation not to do so (as well as the capacity to overcome it, for example, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Now our national interests, usually undefined, put us in the company of thuggish police states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Kuwait in their unprovoked, savagely genocidal assault on a defenseless Yemeni population whose Houthi minority had the effrontery to want to be left alone and was willing to fight for that right..

There was a time, before there was a United States, that this country fought for the same right. We’ve long since become a country that doesn’t want to leave anyone else alone. Now we have a president who demands complete personal loyalty, and who’s more than happy to molest anyone who even appears to fall short, which happens to include the majority of Americans. This can’t end well.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

As a prominent Whitehead process theologian, scholar David Ray Griffin attracted much attention when the first of his ten books about 9/11 came out (“The New Pearl Harbor,” 2004).

Since the appearance of that book – which built on the work of several scholars and analysts – a worldwide movement has grown up challenging the official account of 9/11 and its tragic sequelae, Islamophobia and the all-consuming “war on terror.”

In his new book, Griffin updates the evidence from his last book (“9/11 Ten Years Later,” 2011), and points to extensive new research on the Twin Towers from a large body of architects and engineers, and also to the investigations of the international 22-member 9/11 Consensus Panel.

From 2012-2014, Griffin turned to a full analysis of the climate crisis. His 2015 book, “Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive the CO2 Crisis?” was described by an expert reviewer from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as “the best book today on the issue of all issues of all time.”

Griffin’s new book on the Bush-Cheney administration shows that both 9/11 and the climate crisis derive from the neoconservatives who came to power in 2000 as the Bush-Cheney administration.

Using the great lie of 9/11, and never ceasing to drill into the pubic the fear of terrorism, the neocons and their media have metastacized into a full-blown “neoconservative movement” that has gradually come to dominate both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Looking more deeply than the captured media, Griffin shows that the neoconservatives have been “the major source of the violence, illegal regime change, killings, and dislocations of millions of people since the attacks of September 11, 2001” – including the destruction of Iraq and Libya.

Yet for more than 15 years, the 9/11 attacks have enabled a primitive neocon/media drumbeat telling us that we should fear the aggression of Iran and the Muslim world. Most recently we are urged to fear the “unsubstantiated claims that Putin interfered in the US presidential election.”

This is all propaganda serving America’s war for the “greater Middle East,” which began in 1953 and has led to global chaos.

The public needs protection from the increasingly incoherent media lies so that democracy can once again stand on a platform of truth.

Dr. Griffin’s new book is a reliable and readable tool for people who want to base their thinking on solid evidence and lucid scholarship.

***

Title: Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World

Author: David Ray Griffin

Publisher: Olive Branch Pr (August 16, 2017)

ISBN-10: 1566560616

ISBN-13: 978-1566560610

Click here to order.

Image is from Amazon.

We should be scared to death that Sally Q. Yates served as a prosecutor in the Justice (sic) Department for 27 years. In the New York Times Sally takes high umbrage to Trump’s criticism of his attorney general, Sessions, and blows Trump’s disappointment with Sessions into an attack by Trump on the rule of law. 

Sally has it backwards. The rule of law is being attacked by the appointment of a special prosecutor to find something on Trump in the absence of any evidence of a crime.

In 1940 US attorney general Robert Jackson warned federal prosecutors against

“picking the man and then putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense—that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views or being personally obnoxious to, or in the way of, the prosecutor himself.”

Robert Jackson has given a perfect description of what is happening to President Trump at the hands of special prosecutor Robert Mueller. Trump is vastly unpopular with the ruling establishment, with the Democrats, with the military/security complex and their bought and paid for Senators, and with the media for proving wrong all the smart people’s prediction that Hillary would win the election in a landslide.

From day one this cabel has been out to get Trump, and they have given the task of framing up Trump to Mueller. An honest man would not have accepted the job of chief witch-hunter, which is what Mueller’s job is.

Sally Q. Yates (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The breathless hype of a nonexistent “Russian collusion” has been the lead news story for months despite the fact that no one, not the CIA, not the NSA, not the FBI, not the Director of National Intelligence, can find a scrap of evidence. In desperation, three of the seventeen US intelligence agencies picked a small handful of employees thought to lack integrity and produced an unverified report, absent of any evidence, that the hand-picked handful thought that there might have been a collusion. On the basis of what evidence they do not say.

That nothing more substantial than this led to a special prosecutor shows how totally corrupt justice in America is.

Furthermore the baseless charge itself is an absurdity. There is no law against an incoming administration conversing with other governments. Indeed, Trump, Flynn, and whomever should be given medals for quickly moving to smooth Russian feathers ruffled by the reckless Bush and Obama regimes. What good for anyone can come from ceaselessly provoking a nuclear Russian bear?

The new Russian sanctions bill passed by Congress is an act of reckless idiocy. It was done without consulting Europe which will bear the cost of the bill and might reject it, thus sending shock waves through the fragile American empire.

Congress’ thoughtless bill is a violation of the separation of powers. Foreign policy is the executive branch’s arena. The feckless Obama put the sanctions on. Obviously, if a president can put sanctions on, a president can take sanctions off.

Trump should take his case to the American people, not via Twitter, but with a major speech. Fox News and Alex Jones, either of which has a larger audience than CNN and the New York Times, would broadcast Trump’s speech. Trump should make the case that Congress is over-reaching its constitutional authority and also preventing a reduction in dangerous tensions between nuclear powers. Trump should ask the American people forthright if they want to be driven into war with Russia by gratuitous provocation after provocation.

Because of the powers that Bush and Obama thoughtlessly gave the presidency, Trump can declare a national emergency, cancel Congress, and arrest whomever he wishes. Of course, the presstitute media would do everything possible to sway the people and the US military against the state of emergency, but if there were a real “Russian collusion,” Trump would have Putin initiate a major crisis that would bring the people and the military to Trump’s side. That no such thing will happen is total proof that there is no “Russian collusion.”

Even the Washington Post, an initiator and leader of the breathless “Russion collusion” lie has now published an article, “The quest to Prove Collusion is Crumbling,” that concludes that the entire orchestration is a hoax.

As the Washington Post article says, “the story that never was is not happening.”

So the great “superpower America,” the “exceptional, indispensable country,” has wasted 7 months of a new presidency in a hoax when it could have been repairing the relations with Russia and China that were seriously damaged by the criminal Bush and Obama regimes. What are the utter fools that comprise the American Establishment thinking? Why do the morons want high tensions with the two powers that can remove the United States and its impotent European and British vassals from the face of the earth in a few minutes? Who gains from this? What is wrong with the American people that they cannot understand that they are being driven to their destruction? Insouciant America is clearly not a sufficiently strong term.

To come back to the ridiculous Sally Q. Yates, clearly Sally is the embodiment of the Insouciant American. She says she spent 27 years as a Justice (sic) Department prosecutor. Yet, she is able to write this utter nonsense:

“I know from first hand experience how seriously the career prosecutors and agents take their responsibility to make fair and impartial decisions based solely on the facts and the law and nothing else”

US attorney Rudy Giuliani (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Where was Sally Q. Yates when US attorney Rudy Giuliani used the presstitute media to frame up Michael Milken and Leona Helmsley? Giuliani never had any valid indictment against Milken but used the media and FBI harrassment of Milken’s relatives to force Milken into a plea bargain and then had Milken double-crossed by the bimbo judge, who was denied her reward to the Supreme Court because it came to light that she illegally employed illegal aliens.

Today, thanks to the corrupt American media, 99.9% of people who remember the Milken case think that Milken was convicted of insider trading, a charge for which no evidence was ever presented and which was totally absent from the coerced plea bargain that the media helped Giuliani secure.

As best I remember my investigation of the Helmsley case, Rudy dropped charges against a corrupt accountant in exchange for false testimony against Helmsley. As I remember, both Judge Robert Bork and Alan Dershowitz, attorneys in the case, told me that the charge of tax evasion against Helmsley was preposterous. The Helmsley hotels were fully depreciated and were surviving by guest rentals alone. If the Helmsleys had wanted to reduce their income tax, all they needed to do was to sell their existing depreciated holdings and purchase other hotels in order to crank up the depreciation that reduces income tax.

Whatever Justice (sic) Department case you look at, it stinks to high heaven. It is extremely difficult to find any justice in America.

But Sally is certain that President Trump’s criticism of his weak AG means the end of the rule of law in the US. As many on the left would say, the US has never had a rule of law. It has a rule of power. How else do we explain the enormous war crimes of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes, and the war crimes to come from the Trump or successor Pence regime, that never will be tried at Nuremberg?

«Ciò che avviene oggi in Libia è il nodo di una destabilizzazione dai molteplici aspetti»: lo ha dichiarato il presidente Emmanuel Macron celebrando all’Eliseo l’accordo che «traccia la via per la pace e la riconciliazione nazionale».

Macron attribuisce la caotica situazione del paese unicamente ai movimenti terroristi, i quali «approfittano della destabilizzazione politica e della ricchezza economica e finanziaria che può esistere in Libia per prosperare». Per questo – conclude – la Francia aiuta la Libia a bloccare i terroristi. Macron capovolge, in tal modo, i fatti. Artefice della destabilizzazione della Libia è stata proprio la Francia, unitamente agli Stati uniti, alla Nato e alle monarchie del Golfo.

Nel 2010, documentava la Banca mondiale, la Libia registrava in Africa i più alti indicatori di sviluppo umano, con un reddito pro capite medio-alto, l’accesso universale all’istruzione primaria e secondaria e del 46% alla terziaria. Vi trovavano lavoro circa 2 milioni di immigrati africani. La Libia favoriva con i suoi investimenti la formazione di organismi economici indipendenti dell’Unione africana.

Usa e Francia – provano le mail di Hillary Clinton – si accordarono per bloccare il piano di Gheddafi di creare una moneta africana, in alternativa al dollaro e al franco Cfa (moneta che la Francia impone a 14 sue ex colonie africane). Fu la Clinton – documenta il New York Times – a far firmare al presidente Obama «un documento che autorizzava una operazione coperta in Libia e la fornitura di armi ai ribelli», compresi gruppi fino ad allora classificati come terroristi.

Poco dopo, nel 2011, la Nato sotto comando Usa demolisce con la guerra (aperta dalla Francia) lo Stato libico, attaccandolo anche dall’interno con forze speciali. Da qui il disastro sociale, che farà più vittime della guerra stessa soprattutto tra i migranti.

Una storia che Macron ben conosce: dal 2008 al 2012 fa una folgorante (quanto sospetta) carriera alla Banca Rothschild, l’impero finanziario che controlla le banche centrali di quasi tutti i paesi del mondo. In Libia la Rothschild sbarca nel 2011, mentre la guerra è ancora in corso. Le grandi banche statunitensi ed europee effettuano allo stesso tempo la più grande rapina del secolo, confiscando 150 miliardi di dollari di fondi sovrani libici. Nei quattro anni di formazione alla Rothschild, Macron viene introdotto nel gotha della finanza mondiale, dove si decidono le grandi operazioni come quella della demolizione dello Stato libico. Passa quindi alla politica, facendo una folgorante (quanto sospetta) carriera, prima quale vice-segretario generale dell’Eliseo, poi quale ministro dell’economia. Nel 2016 crea in pochi mesi un suo partito, En Marche!, un «instant party» sostenuto e finanziato da potenti gruppi multinazionali, finanziari e mediatici, che gli spianano la strada alla presidenza. Dietro il protagonismo di Macron non ci sono quindi solo gli interessi nazionali francesi. Il bottino da spartire in Libia è enorme: le maggiori riserve petrolifere africane e grosse riserve di gas naturale; l’immensa riserva di acqua fossile della falda nubiana, l’oro bianco in prospettiva più prezioso dell’oro nero; lo stesso territorio libico di primaria importanza geostrategica all’intersezione tra Mediterraneo, Africa e Medioriente.

C’è «il rischio che la Francia eserciti una forte egemonia sulla nostra excolonia», avverte Analisi Difesa, sottolineando l’importanza dell’imminente spedizione navale italiana in Libia. Un richiamo all’«orgoglio nazionale» di un’Italia che reclama la sua fetta nella spartizione neocoloniale della sua ex colonia.

Manlio Dinucci

Rwandans will go to the polls to elect a president on August 4, but asking whether General Paul Kagame will win is like asking whether bears shit in the woods. I nevertheless asked David Himbara, author of Kagame’s “Economic Mirage” and “Kagame’s Killing Fields,” just to get this conversation started.

Ann Garrison: David Himbara, who’s going to win next week’s election?

David Himbara: General Paul Kagame will win. There is no doubt about that.

AG: And what makes you so sure?

DH: Kagame is running against himself. Credible opposition figures are in prison, in exile, or blocked from competing against him—if they haven’t been assassinated.

AG: President Kagame “won” by 93% last time. What percentage do you imagine he’ll claim this time?

DH: 99.9%.

AG: That’s a hysterically high number, very close to the Ethiopian ruling party’s 100% in 2015.

DH: Well, the numbers keep going higher. Kagame won the referendum changing the constitution by 98%. Parliament voted for the change of the constitution by 99%. The Senate voted for it by 100%. So Kagame will probably win by 99.9%. His people will give the remaining tenth of a percent to the other two candidates to share.

AG: Could you explain the constitutional referendum?

DH: Kagame engineered the constitutional amendment that removed presidential term limits so that he could cling to power beyond two 7-year terms. The amended constitution allows Kagame to rule until 2034. Rwandan parliamentarians who engaged in nationwide discussions in preparation for the referendum claimed that they found only ten people opposed to removing term limits. Voters allegedly approved the referendum by over 98%.

AG: During the 2010 election year, two candidates went to prison and another went into exile after the vice president of his party was found by a riverbank with his head cut off. Journalists were shot or threatened, and Kagame’s assassins were at work in at least three more African countries. What happened this year?

DH: There was no violence this time for the simple reason that the regime has had nothing to fear. There are no genuine opposition leaders except Diane Rwigara, and she wasn’t allowed to run. Bernard Ntaganda went to prison for trying to run in the 2010 election. He’s free now, but Rwandan law prohibits anyone who has served time in prison from running for president. Victoire Ingabire of course remains in prison. And there is no independent media. The New Times of Rwanda exists to glorify General Kagame. He has tightened his totalitarian grip.

AG: Who manages the voting process itself?

DH: The National Electoral Commission, which is not independent of the regime.

AG: In your book “Kagame’s Killing Fields,” you wrote, “From the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, each administration has invested significantly in the Rwandan military. Whether it was a Republican or Democratic presidency, the United States consistently poured millions of dollars into Rwanda’s military machine.”

Kagame (right) with Congolese President Joseph Kabila (left) at a peace summit with Thabo Mbeki, and George W. Bush in September 2002. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

You also quoted Chris Smith, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Africa, Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations:

“Kagame has been considered a hero on the international stage, and has long been immune to public criticism… There are credible reports that the RPF government has commissioned assassins to kill dissidents… By largely avoiding criticism of Rwandan human rights issues, the Bush and Obama administrations raised appropriations to Rwanda from $39 million in fiscal year 2003 to $188 million in fiscal year 2014.”

None of this is likely to change because of this year’s election farce, but what happened last week when you went to Washington to speak to someone at the US State Department?

DH: The State Department was chaotic. The United States government is currently preoccupied with domestic issues, and Rwanda is not even on the radar. The administration hasn’t yet staffed many offices in the State Department that are concerned with Africa. For example, there is no Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. And in the lower ranks, some of them have left and some are new. So I think it will take a while for the United States to recover its interest in Africa and in Rwanda. In the meantime, the money will continue to flow because the tap’s already turned on. And that goes for the British government as well. It is currently consumed by its divorce from the European Union. Of course these two countries, the US and the UK, are General Kagame’s main backers.

AG: One of their excuses for funding Kagame’s killing fields is his claim that, under his leadership, Rwanda has risen from the ashes of genocide to become a development miracle. But you write that “only 303,550 Rwandans are employed in the formal economy, while 5.6 million are in subsistence agriculture or eking out a living in urban and rural informal sectors. Put in another way, 93 percent of Rwandan adults aged sixteen to sixty-five work outside the formal economy.” How does Kagame sustain this development-miracle myth with numbers like that?

DH: Kagame is a genius at lying, and he gets plenty of help from Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Howard Buffett, and his other powerful friends in the West. American universities also help perpetuate this big lie by inviting Kagame to speak about his so-called development miracle.

AG: In “Kagame’s Killing Fields,” you also wrote,“By 1997, Kagame had become the predominant occupying power in DRC [the Democratic Republic of the Congo], a vast country ninety times larger than Rwanda.” How would you describe Rwanda’s presence in DRC now?

DH: The current situation in DRC is ideal for Kagame, because the international community is not paying particular attention to the region and the country is caught up in his own struggle to remain in power past two terms. You can be sure that right now Kagame is arming militias to loot and destabilize DRC. The latest US State Department’s human rights report on Rwanda says that almost all 400 disarmed M23 rebels held in Rwanda have vanished. Where are they? No doubt in DRC plundering resources and wreaking havoc.

David Himbara is a Rwandan Canadian, a professor of international development at Canada’s Centennial College, and the author of “Kagame’s Economic Mirage” and “Kagame’s Killing Fields.” In March 2017, he was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize. He can be reached at [email protected].

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected].

Anti-Semitism should not be used as an issue in discussions and debates over the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Ever since the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine and all throughout the unfolding of Zionist policy, Jews like Chaim Weizmann have expressed the idea that Zionist crimes in Palestine are to be deplored, not so much because of their nature as acts of butchery against a largely unarmed Palestinian Arab population, 80% of whom were agrarian, but because of the negative impact such crimes, once broadcast, would have on the well-being of Jews worldwide. In his autobiography Trial and Error, he writes:

I have said that the terrorist groups in Palestine represented a grave danger to the whole future of the Jewish state. Actually their behavior has been next door to anarchy. The analogy which is usually drawn between these groups and what happened in Ireland or South Africa presents only a half truth. It leaves out of account that one fundamental fact with which the Jews have to reckon primarily; namely that they have many hostages all over the world. And although Palestine is the primary consideration, it must not, it has no right to, endanger the situation of Jews outside of Palestine. Apart from which it must be remembered that after all the building of Palestine will depend to a large extent on the good will of the Jews outside.

As is well known by now, the building of Palestine in the form of Israel did, in fact, depend, and continues to depend in large part, on the good will of the Jews “outside,” many as Norman H. Finkelstein writes in American Jewish History, deriving renewed pride in their religion and their connections to Israel with each Israeli military victory.

The irony/tragedy is that Israeli governments throughout history, including now with the Trump/Bannon merger, work with anti-Semites to promote Jewish immigration to Israel. Zionist collaboration with Nazis is also documented. Nevertheless, anti-Semitism should not be taking center stage either in arguments against Palestinians or in pro-Palestine arguments.

Anti-Semitism is a fake issue when it is used by Israel in its PR arsenal against Palestinian Arabs. Tony Greenstein, for example, has published statistics on his blog with the headline: “More Fake News – Zionist Claims that Anti-Semitism has increased by 30% in one year: Despite the headlines – Anti-Semitism in Britain is DECLINING not increasing;  a decline in anti-Semitism doesn’t serve Zionist interests”. This is his attempt to counter Israel’s fierce campaigns in the UK and elsewhere to conflate anti-Semitism with criticism of anti-Zionist policy.

And we are still seeing approaches that use the same argument against Israel’s oppression as that used by Weizmann.  In Haaretz, Tony Klug has an opinion piece titled: If Israel’s Occupation Doesn’t End, anti-Semitism Worldwide Will Rise to Sinister Heights. By “occupation”, he means, not the totality of the Zionist project in Palestine, but the following, as expressed in the sub-heading: “50 years of occupation have reawakened latent prejudices and old stereotypes not only against Jews, but also against Arabs and Muslims. But many still deny Israel’s increasingly oppressive control is a crucial factor”.

Tony Klug, through Haaretz and Mondoweiss, is addressing other Jews. He blames Israel, correctly in my view, not only for a potential rise in anti-Semitism worldwide, but also for the rising Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism which Jewish organizations foster in Israel’s name. Arab and Muslim violence, he implies, is connected to denial of the cause of the violence. In a way, he wants to scare Jews into awareness and action against the occupation of 50 years, though not necessarily against the occupation of 70 years.

Appealing to people’s rational self-interest in making an argument is effective. But there is a problem for Palestinians in this approach, because not appealing to someone’s altruism obfuscates people’s sense of justice and fairness. And it is ultimately the interest of Palestinians rather than Jews that is at stake here.

But the heart of Klug’s argument is this: he is worried that, “the moral appeal of Israel’s case will consequently [as a result of the denial of the oppression of the occupation] suffer and this will further erode her level of international support, although probably not among organized opinion within the Jewish diaspora.”

Contrary to what Klug says above, this is an argument that might work only with “organized opinion [by which I understand organized by Zionists] within the Jewish diaspora”. Such opinion is organized to safeguard the existence of the Jewish state at any cost – even the cost of a smaller Israel. In his autobiography commenting on Great Britain’s White Paper regarding the partitioning of Palestine, Weizmann remarks

“that God promised Palestine to the children of Israel, but I do not know what boundaries He set.”

In other words, boundaries may be vague, but the “moral” claim (here expressed in religious terms) to Palestine is unquestionable.

Klug speaks for Palestinians as “yearning for independence” without truly understanding himself what Palestinian fundamental human rights are and how these rights are trampled, not only by the occupation, but also by the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

In making an appeal to Jews or anybody, Palestinians must certainly not frame their appeal the way Klug, a consultant to the Palestine Strategy Group and the Israel Strategic Forum, does. Rather, they must frame their appeal on the litmus test of principles of justice, human rights and equality – i.e., principles that that the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement embodies.

Yes, what we need in Jewish communities and public opinion generally are “transformations”, but not ones, as Nada Elis says, based on exclusivity.

I am grateful both for the activism of [Jewish Voice for Peace] JVP, and for [Jewish liberation theologian Marc] Ellis’ prodding of his religious community to acknowledge Israel’s violations of the human rights of the Palestinian people beginning in 1948. Yes, there is an urgent need for accountability and transformation.  But maintaining claims to exclusivity is a hindrance, not a contribution to a solution that hinges on co-resistance to racism. As Israel openly embraces Jewish supremacy and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, a hushed denunciation of “the occupation” falls short of the necessary “transformation,” and cannot be considered progressive.  And as we seek to co-exist, after successfully co-resisting apartheid and genocide, we cannot attribute a deeply-engrained commitment to justice to one community over another.

Klug writes about “denial” when he himself is in denial of the Nakba of 1948, if not the 1967 occupation. Palestinians badly need Jews to advocate for them. But I envision such activism along the lines that K Sheshu Babu does in a comment on my article Jews Worldwide Must Support the Palestinian Cause:

“Jews round the world must unite to pressurise Israeli government to liberate Palestinians and free their lands. But more than that, Jews in Israel must rebel against their own government and fight for justice to Palestinians. They must organise mass movements in solidarity with Palestinians.”

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

San Francisco–The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled to affirm the U.S. Federal District Court’s dismissal of the Nuclear Zero lawsuit, brought by the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). 

The lawsuit sought a declaration that the United States was in breach of its treaty obligations under Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and international law, and asked the court to order that the United States engage in good-faith negotiations.

The suit also contended that the United States clearly violated its legal obligations to pursue nuclear disarmament by spending large sums of money to enhance its nuclear arsenal. The U.S. plans to spend an estimated $1 trillion on nuclear weapons over the next three decades. President Trump has said he wants to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal to ensure it is at the “top of the pack,” saying the United States has “fallen behind in its nuclear weapons capacity.”

The case was initially dismissed on February 3, 2015 on the jurisdictional grounds of standing and political question doctrine without getting to the merits of the case. Oral arguments were then heard in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on March 15, 2017.

The ruling today from the court held that Article VI was non-self-executing and therefore not judicially enforceable. The panel also found that the Marshall Islands’ claims presented inextricable political questions that were nonjusticiable and must be dismissed.

Laurie Ashton, lead attorney representing the Marshall Islands commented,

“Today’s decision is very disappointing. But it is also more than that, because it undercuts the validity of the NPT. There has never been a more critical time to enforce the legal obligations to negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament. While the Ninth Circuit decision focuses on its inability to judicially determine the parameters of such negotiations, which are at the discretion of the Executive, with respect, the Court failed to acknowledge the pleading of the RMI, supported by the declarations of experts, that such negotiations have never taken place. At issue was whether Article VI requires the US to at least attend such negotiations, or whether it may continue to boycott them, as it did with the Nuclear Ban Treaty negotiations. To that we have no answer.”

Marshall Islanders suffered catastrophic and irreparable damages to their people and homeland when the U.S. conducted 67 nuclear tests on their territory between 1946 and 1958. These tests had the equivalent power of exploding 1.6 Hiroshima bombs daily for 12 years.

Mushroom cloud from the largest atmospheric nuclear test the United States ever conducted, Castle Bravo. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The Marshall Islands did not seek compensation with this lawsuit. Rather, it sought declaratory and injunctive relief requiring the United States to comply with its commitments under the NPT and international law.

Rick Wayman, Director of Programs for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF) and a consultant to the Marshall Islands in their lawsuit, stated,

“This ruling from the Ninth Circuit continues the trend of a complete lack of accountability on the part of the U.S. government for its nuclear proliferation, active participation in a nuclear arms race, and refusal to participate in nuclear disarmament negotiations.” 

Wayman continued,

“The Marshall Islanders made a valiant and selfless effort to bring the U.S. into compliance with its existing legal obligations. I deeply appreciate the RMI’s courageous leadership on today’s most pressing existential threat. Together with willing non-nuclear countries and non-governmental organizations around the world, we will continue to work until the scourge of nuclear weapons is eliminated from the earth.”

The full opinion can be found at http://bit.ly/9th-opinion

Featured image: Diana, Princess of Wales while at The Leonardo Prize ceremony in 1995 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

There is no rational explanation for this, even after searching for the coded meanings culture throws up. A not very bright, propelled on a wave of the pre-Kardashian phenomenon of celebrity for its own meaning; a youthful flower, gathered by the Grim Reaper while speeding off with her lover in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. That was the fate of the Princess of Wales.  

As Christopher Hitchens was to observe, the orgy of sentimentality and reaction to the death of Princess Diana in 1997 was excruciating, dangerous, and debilitating. It silenced dissent about the late princess, reconstituting Britain, however briefly, as a “one-party state” replete with emotive ridden foot soldiers.  

It also supplied the new Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the material of naked publicity, a moment to peak ever higher in the opinion polls by feeding the Cult of Diana. New Labour, New Britain, New Sentiment. 

Jonathan Freedland confessed on cringing in the aftermath of the princess’s death.

“It is our collective moment of madness, a week when somehow we lost our grip.”[1] 

Outside Buckingham Palace were hundreds of thousands of cellophane protected bouquets.  

The celebrity as pox syndrome persists in the context of the anniversary of Diana’s death, which has been spiced by the debate on whether Channel 4 should release video tape interviews drawn from encounters between the princess and her speech coach and actor Peter Settelen. (Settelen had been retained by Diana between 1992 and 1993.) These form the subject of yet another yawn inducing product of the Princess Industry, a documentary titled Diana: In Her Own Words set to be released on the twentieth anniversary of her death. 

The Spencer family, led by Earl Spencer, was determined to assert control over the tapes and foil the use of the private conversations. They had initially found their way into the possession of Scotland Yard in 2001 after a raid on the home of former royal butler, Paul Burrell.  

The American broadcaster NBC broadcasted teasing excerpts in 2004, but the BBC, which was considering a commemoration documentary ten years after the event, abandoned the project. Channel 4’s management felt otherwise, wanting to make some mileage on the insipid nature of the whole matter. The unconvincing view, nothing more of a sales pitch, was that the tapes “provide a unique insight”. 

Aggressive pots have been calling similarly aggressive kettles black. The original sinner, Burrell, felt that the channel’s decision to broadcast the tapes was a “seedy” gesture akin to “raiding her diary”.[2] 

The seediness of his own less than noble history was lost on Burrell, who milked the cash cow of experience after Diana’s death much to the consternation of Princes Harry and William. A Royal Duty (2003) went into the personal drawers and the details with relish. Burrell, in the true bravado of one who betrays, labelled his own effort a “tribute to their mother”. 

Rosa Monckton, another touted friend of the princess, tweeted that,

“Friend of Diana urges Channel 4 to scrap ‘intrusive’ documentary. If you agree with me, please write to Channel 4.”[3] 

To The Guardian, Monckton explained that the tapes did not belong to the public domain, featuring those silly confidences that Diana should never have parted with.

“It is a betrayal of her privacy and of the family’s privacy.” 

The material is hardly incendiary, but accords with the worst tendencies of the pop-fluff market of reality television.  (Diana, indeed, would have been a suitable pioneer in the cannibalising disgrace of a Big Brother Household.)

“He chatted me up – like a bad rash,” notes Diana in describing her soon to be husband, Prince Charles – “he was all over me.” 

Prince Charles speaking at the 2015 United Nation Climate Change Conference – COP21 (Paris, Le Bourget) (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Charles had just lost his great uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, a high calibre casualty of the IRA. The prince needed companionship, comforting. The emotional raw spot drew sympathy from the Diana, but she had played a false stroke. Charles, sensing a chance “leapt upon me and started kissing me and everything”. How delightful.

The romps and travails of the House of Windsor have become the tabloid link via the people and the monarchy, a trashy reminder that flawed relationships transcend the straightjacket (apt, that) of class. This is vulgarity in its true meaning: the common, the vernacular, the dirt earthy. We can call be dysfunctional together.  

For a country like Australia, whose head of state remains the Queen, interest piqued by such revelations remains.  Anniversary issues are being released for readers of The Herald and The Courier Mail, if they indeed deserve the name, as issues to keep. Get your copy now!  Expect, however, little by way of substance, critique or self-awareness. 

The Cult of Diana may have been subjected to a more trenchant analysis in recent years, leaving aside the conspiracy pedlars at The Express who have blamed everybody from the French to aliens for her demise. But in an age of Trump, a revival is being prodded and fanned. As former royal spokesman Dickie Arbiter explained to the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire, Channel 4 was “laughing all the way to the bank.”[4] 

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

Notes

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/aug/13/britishidentity.monarchy

[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4747468/Diana-s-ex-butler-Paul-Burrell-condemns-Channel-4.html

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/30/friend-of-diana-urges-channel-4-to-scrap-intrusive-documentary

[4] http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-40774810

The media is now filled with headlines about North Korea’s missile test on Friday, which demonstrated that its ICBMs may be able to reach the continental U.S. What isn’t mentioned in any of these stories is how we got to this point — in particular, what Dan Coats, President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, explained last week at the Aspen Security Forum.

North Korea’s 33-year-old dictator Kim Jong-un is not crazy, said Coats. In fact, he has “some rationale backing his actions” regarding the country’s nuclear weapons. That rationale is the way the U.S. has demonstrated that North Korea must keep them to ensure “survival for his regime, survival for his country.”

Kim, according to Coats, “has watched, I think, what has happened around the world relative to nations that possess nuclear capabilities and the leverage they have and seen that having the nuclear card in your pocket results in a lot of deterrence capability.” In particular, “The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes …  is, unfortunately: If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them.”

This is, of course, blindingly obvious and has been since the U.S. helped oust longtime Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011. But U.S. officials have rarely if ever acknowledged this reality. Here’s the timeline:

In December 2003, Libya announced that it would surrender its biological and chemical weapons stockpiles, as well as its rudimentary nuclear weapons program.

In celebrating Libya’s decision, President George W. Bush declared that the rest of the world should take away the message that

“leaders who abandon the pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them, will find an open path to better relations with the United States and other free nations.”

Paula DeSutter, Bush’s Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance, explained that

“we want Libya to be a model for other countries.”

In 2011, the U.S. and NATO conducted a bombing campaign to assist Libyan rebels in overthrowing the Gaddafi government. Gaddafi himself was captured by one rebel faction, who apparently sodomized him with a bayonet and then killed him.

You would definitely expect this to get the attention of North Korea’s ruling clique — especially given that Iraq had also disarmed and then been invaded, with its dictator executed by a howling mob.

And, indeed, North Korea said this explicitly at the time. Its foreign ministry stated,

“The Libyan crisis is teaching the international community a grave lesson,” which was that the deal to rid Libya of weapons of mass destruction had been “an invasion tactic to disarm the country.”

Yet the Obama administration shamelessly denied this. A reporter told State Department spokesperson Mark Toner that

“North Koreans are looking at this” and it didn’t “give them a lot of incentive to give up their nuclear weapons.” Toner replied that “where [Libya is] at today has absolutely no connection with them renouncing their nuclear program and nuclear weapons.”

Moreover, North Koreans and other countries can read, and so understand what America’s foreign policy elite has repeatedly explained why we want small countries to disarm. It’s not because we fear that they will use WMD in a first strike on us, since nations like North Korea understand that would immediately lead to their obliteration. Instead, our mandarins explicitly say the problem is that unconventional weapons help small countries deter us from attacking them.

There are many examples. For instance, in a 2001 memo, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated:

Several of these [small enemy nations] are intensely hostile to the United States and are arming to deter us from bringing our conventional or nuclear power to bear in a regional crisis. …

[U]niversally available [WMD] technologies can be used to create “asymmetric” responses that cannot defeat our forces, but can deny access to critical areas in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia…“asymmetric” approaches can limit our ability to apply military power.

The think tank Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative pressure group that had a heavy influence on George W. Bush’s administration, made the same point in an influential paper called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”:

The United States also must counteract the effects of the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction that may soon allow lesser states to deter U.S. military action by threatening U.S. allies and the American homeland itself. Of all the new and current missions for U.S. armed forces, this must have priority. …

In the post-Cold War era, America and its allies, rather than the Soviet Union, have become the primary objects of deterrence and it is states like Iraq, Iran and North Korea who most wish to develop deterrent capabilities.

In fact, even Dan Coats himself has said this, in a 2008 op-ed he co-wrote.

Daniel Ray Coats (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

“An Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear weapons capability would be strategically untenable,” Coats said, because it would possess a “deterrent” against U.S. attack. And to prevent Iran from acquiring the ability to deter us, he explained, we might have to attack them.

See video of Coats speaking and his full remarks here.

DAN COATS: It has become a potential existential threat to the United States and it is of great concern.

LESTER HOLT: And in terms of the number of options available publicly we know that there aren’t a lot of great options there, and a lot of it is trying to see into Kim Jong-un’s head and that’s I suspect that most difficult kind of intelligence trying to predict someone’s behavior.

COATS: Well, he’s demonstrated behavior publicly that really raises some questions about who he is and how he thinks and how he acts, what his behavior is, but our assessment has come — has pretty much resulted in the fact that while he’s a very unusual type of person, he’s not crazy. And there is some rationale backing his actions which are survival, survival for his regime, survival for his country, and he has watched I think what has happened around the world relative to nations that possess nuclear capabilities and the leverage they have and seen that having the nuclear card in your pocket results in a lot of deterrence capability. The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes and Ukraine giving up its nukes is unfortunately if you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them, and we see a lot of nations now thinking about how do we get them and none more persistent than North Korea …

Lisa Ling, US Air Force whistleblower who exposed secrets of the American drone program in the documentary National Bird, has been discussing why she decided to blow the whistle, what interests are behind the use of drones, and the outlook given the lack of accountability by the US government.

Edu Montesanti: Lisa Ling, thank you so very much for granting this so important interview. When, how and why did you blow the whistle against US drone program ?

Lisa Ling: I blew the whistle on the drone program by going on the record in Sonia Kennebeck’s documentary film National Bird. It wasn’t something I took lightly after spending so many years in the military. I am not against my fellow service members in the U.S., or abroad; I am against policies that can claim lives and limbs of innocent non-combatants even in places we are not at war.

I believe that if it is something where we are unwilling to send troops, and have the public be fully aware of what is being done in our name, than there is something definitely wrong about it that must be addressed. I also believe that governance over such a massive system is important and that discussion and public awareness is the only way that will happen.

I knew I was going to speak out and that I am against weaponized drones, but it wasn’t until Sonia Kennebeck approached me during a veterans conference that I had any idea of how it would be possible for me to speak out. Since the film, I have had numerous opportunities to engage with people and learn how little the public knows about the drone program.

Sonia Kennebeck discovered how little was known or talked about with regard to the military drone program, and that service members who worked in the drone program had actually taken their own lives. She did an enormous amount of preliminary research before making the film; much of her research she showed me after several meetings where we discussed my participation.

Finally after much thought, I said I would do it, and be on the record. It was a difficult decision, but I still believe it was the right one. I have nothing but respect and trust for Sonia and her team for giving me the opportunity to share my story, and most importantly for giving the Afghan victims an opportunity to share their story with the world. That was one thing that really motivated me to participate in the film.

Edu Montesanti: When the Obama administration discussed drone strikes publicly, it offered assurances that such operations are a more precise alternative to boots on the ground and are authorized only when an “imminent” threat is present and there is “near certainty”; that the intended target will be eliminated. How do you see such a “policy”, that of substituting boots on the grounds by drones – in the case of the Obama administration, using it much more than the Bush administration? And how precise are drones?

Lisa Ling: I do not think drones are a good alternative to human intelligence. I do not see how technology, no matter how “good” it is, is an effective replacement for human beings in the current situation. I do not see how a two dimensional image is good enough to replace the situational awareness of trained soldiers on the ground. All lives of innocent human beings require the same reverence; in my view no life of innocent non-combatants is more important than another. Here in the United States, we are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and even then innocent people are imprisoned. That is a much higher standard; one I believe should be met, especially in countries where we are not at war. The people on the ground do not have an ID card, or a driver’s license. Many people in Afghanistan do not know the exact date they were born. It is not always clear who is and who is not an enemy combatant, under these conditions nothing can really be “precise”.

Edu Montesanti: As President Trump is giving the CIA more freedom to attack with drones, things are going to get worse… no?

Lisa Ling: What is needed is human intelligence, and the CIA, I believe, is the organization responsible for gathering it. The intelligence community seems to have lost its way. Instead of studying different cultures or appreciating social and traditional nuances it is depending on technology and quantity of data collected – not quality actionable information.

The data gathering and collecting capacity means nothing if there is too much to actually analyze effectively by those who understand the cultural or traditional implications found in it.

Oversight and governance globally and locally is necessary to keep this immense power in check. This will never happen in the hands of any clandestine organization. It could take years for the public to find out about faults costing thousands of innocent human lives, and the ability to correct any disparity could take decades. Keeping an eye on the proportionality legally required would be exceedingly difficult if it were even possible at all.

The world is now our battlefield; this already violates the Nuremburg principles and other international laws. I do not see how effective governance or oversight is practical or achievable under these conditions.

Edu Montesanti: How do you see the official version in the US government involving drone “efficient” attacks as they actually kill much more civilians?

Lisa Ling: Technology will never replace real situational awareness and without that, how can we know who lives and who dies with any certainty at all. Efficient is an interesting word to use. Wouldn’t “efficient” mean a quick end to these wars? I am not sure how to use the word efficient in the context of wars that have lasted as long as these wars have with no end in sight.

Peace is efficient, and preferable. I assume efficient could mean a clear winner and looser in the context of war, and yet as it stands this doesn’t seem to be where we are. War is not efficient by it’s very nature. Killing other human beings is not a matter of efficiency and relegating human lives to such sanitized terms seems cruel to me.

I do not think armed drones are efficient or proportional when used to seek out individual human beings. I do not think armed drones are efficient or even ethical in this context. Sending Drones is also enabling war to be invisible, there is no weighing it against sending troops so there is less of a connection to it. There is less discussion or assertion because it isn’t publicly announced like it often is when we deploy troops.

It has made a kind of new normal of constant war. There is a dangerous separation that is allowing the wars to continue with very little pushback, no one says send our troops home when fewer and fewer troops are being deployed.

It is easier to send drones without loosing political capital, it makes endless war too easy and we are living with the evidence of this, and more importantly the innocent civilians living under drones are living with it.

Those living under armed drones are living in constant terror. I don’t think we can fight a war on terror with more terror.

Professos Doctor Azadeh Shahshahani of American Civil Liberties Union, observes that: a) In the domestic (US) context, they be used for artistic or investigative purposes. For example, they can be used to investigate agribusinesses to see if they are engaging in animal abuse or not. In that sense, they can play an important and legitimate role. However, their use needs to be regulated to ensure that they are used for surveillance by law enforcement agencies. b) Per international humanitarian law, drones can only be used with bombs in an active armed conflict and even then with certain restrictions including military necessity, humanity, distinction, and proportionality. Only combatants or civilians who are directly participating in hostilities may be targeted. Targeting of other civilians is prohibited and may constitute a war crime. How much the US government is respecting these principles, Lisa, using drones both as surveillance and bombs?

In my view, it is not possible in the absence of ground troops, to know the answer to this question with any certainty. Much of their use is in secret, which is another reason it is hard to be certain.

It is difficult to tell who is and isn’t an enemy combatant. It is not like there is a uniformed opposing military force and the battle lines are clear. This is global and borders don’t seem to matter.

This is why I believe global governance specific to armed and unarmed drones is necessary. I believe drone specific agreements between nation states must be made. I also believe there should not be weapons on drones; I believe that the missiles and bombs should be removed.

Proportionality does not seem attainable when weaponized drones have relegated war to a kind of hunter vs. prey. The truth is that living under drones when you don’t know if and when something is going to come down from the sky and kill you or someone you love is terror by it’s very definition.

Drones have killed people of all ages and professions. No one has respite; they can’t say I am holding an infant so it will not come for me or I am a doctor, it will not attack me. I couldn’t imagine living like that. That is one reason I think the weapons should be removed from drones.

Edu Montesanti: Given all this, why do you think US government and the CIA insist on using drones? What are the real interests behind it?

Lisa Ling: There is a lot of money to be made; there is political expedience when a drone is sent instead of someone’s son or daughter. There are so many possible answers to this question; many are well above my pay grade.

What I know is that these wars are still going on, and that blowback is a thing that happens. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers are still dying both at home and overseas. There is still no end in sight to the devastation in countries like Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan and all the other places where armed drones fly.

I know that as a nation when we set our collective agency to a goal, we generally achieve it. The global arms trade is a powerful thing. President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned U.S. citizens about the military–industrial; in his farewell address. Perhaps we are now in the place he warned us about.

That being said, it is time to rearrange our collective priorities to a place where humanity and the sanctity of all human life are at the top of the list. We all must start doing all that we can to ensure that is the case.

Edu Montesanti: How are drones going to affect humanity in the near future, being used this way both in wars and surveillance by the US?

Lisa Ling: We are now at a pivotal point in the use of armed drones. Soon, if not already, drones will be stealth and capable of deployment to developed countries such as our own. Artificial intelligence will be implemented and human intervention will become unnecessary. When this happens, how will the Global West react? Will we choose global governance? Will we change the precedence we are setting by what we do? It is illogical to believe that the use of any military technology will not be used against us at some point in time.

Maybe speaking this truth will get others to engage in the realities of what the future has in store if we leave things as they are. Maybe by acknowledging that weapons have a way of proliferating out of control, things will change. It is not that I believe that lives of people in the Global West are any more valuable than the lives of people from any other place on earth; it is just that if something is happening “over there” we tend to think as if it has nothing to do with us.

How we treat humanity has everything to do with all of us and I believe that is the most important thing we ought to consider when we talk about drones and other military technology. It is true that what goes around comes around, it is just a matter of when.

***

Edu Montesanti is an independent analyst, researcher and journalist whose work has been published by Truth Out, Pravda, Global Research, Brazilian magazine Caros Amigos and numerous other publications across the globe.

This article was originally published by teleSUR.

Featured image: German Economics Minister Brigitte Zypries (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The German government has again weighed in with strong criticism of the latest US sanctions bill.

The latest comments have come from German Economics Minister Brigitte Zypries, who is reported by Reuters to have said the following

We consider this as being against international law, plain and simple. Of course we don’t want a trade war. But it is important the European Commission now looks into countermeasures.

(bold italics added)

These are exceptionally strong words coming from the Economics Minister of the country which is the US’s most important ally.

They also underscore the folly of the latest sanctions bill. In saying that the proposed sanctions go against international law Germany is now publicly contesting the US doctrine of the universal worldwide applicability of US law.

To be clear this doctrine has never had any legal basis and is in fact contrary to international law exactly as Brigitte Zypries says. However the US is passionately committed to it, and its allies have up to now passively cooperated with it. However by going against the fundamental economic interests of its own allies the US has now provoked the most powerful of them – Germany – to contest it publicly.

I would add that a suggestion from the German Economics Minister to the European Commission to look at countermeasures against the US sanctions is all but an order from Germany to the European Commission that it do just that.

There is a political dimension to this strong German position. Germany has parliamentary elections later this year, and with German public opinion strongly opposing the latest US sanctions neither of the two parties that make up the ruling coalition – the SPD or the CDU – will want to look like they are backing down before the US on this issue. Brigitte Zypries is from the SPD, which appears to be positioning itself as the champion of German national interests against the US sanctions bill. Merkel and the CDU will not want to be put in a position where they appear to be conceding this role to the SPD.

Though President Trump has indicated that he will sign the new sanctions law, there is actually still scope for negotiation between the US and Germany. President Trump would have to make an Executive Order before German or European companies which participate in Russian pipeline projects or in Nord Stream 2 could be fined under this new sanctions law. He may have no wish to do so or he could – following negotiations with Germany and the EU – sign an Executive Order that safeguards the positions of German and European companies which participate in such projects. My guess is that this is what will eventually happen.

However the US should never have put itself into this position in the first place. A thoughtless law overwhelmingly carried by the US Congress because of a domestic quarrel will have no significant impact on Russia’s economy but has already provoked a Russian response which threatens to tear the heart out of the US diplomatic and intelligence presence in Russia whilst setting the US against Germany and its other key European allies.

It would be difficult to think of anything more counterproductive but that is the route legislators in the US Congress have overwhelmingly chosen to take.

Alexander Mercouris is Editor-in-Chief at The Duran. 

The Lebanese Al-Hadith news agency believes that the construction of numerous military bases in Syria by the United States is a meaningless task from the security and military perspectives. These bases are far from each other and in some cases, not more than a dozen soldiers are stationed in them.

The geopolitical template of the entire European Union is undergoing one of its most profound changes since the collapse of the Soviet Union more than twenty-five years ago. At the June 30 meeting in Ankara of the Turkish-Hungarian Business Forum Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary “stands by its friends” and it is on Turkey’s side in its current war of words with the European Union. The Hungarian Prime Minister also praised Turkey’s role in preventing a huge further refugee flow into the EU, noting that “Without Turkey Europe would have been flooded with many millions of immigrants,” stating that for this Turkey “deserves respect.” Behind the comments, calculated to enrage the EU and its unelected, faceless bureaucrats, stands far more than the issue of refugees and rights of national sovereignty .

There’s a major tectonic shift underway not only in Hungary but also across the entire Balkans. The shift involves Erdogan’s Turkey and also Putin’s Russia. The outlines of a new Balkans geopolitics are emerging and it’s opening huge fault-lines within the EU between die-hard NATO Atlanticists and pragmatic EU states more keen on economic development and the health and safety of their countries than in defending a bankrupt declining USA Superpower.

Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán was in Turkey for no casual photo op. He was there to talk business, economic business. He brought with him half of his cabinet and around 70 business leaders to discuss areas of increased bilateral economic cooperation. Orbán also met privately with Turkish President Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yildirim.

Energy Hub for Southeast Europe

Though it was played down in media releases, a central issue discussed in Ankara was the prospect of Russian natural gas imports via Turkey’s Turkish Stream gas pipeline.

With the legally dubious new US sanctions bill targeting European companies investing in the Russian-German Nord Stream II gas pipeline, which would bypass Ukraine, Russia is accelerating its priority to complete construction of its Turkish Stream gas pipeline from the already-built gas pumping station near Anapa in Southern Russia, going beneath the Black Sea, that will pass through Turkey to the Bulgarian and perhaps Greek borders.

The latest incredibly foolish US Congressional sanctions, aiming as well at Iran and North Korea, punish German and Austrian companies investing in the northern EU Nord Stream II pipeline from near St Petersburg, claiming it’s illegal under international law for a US President to sanction companies outside their territorial jurisdiction, legally termed extra-territoriality.

Nord Stream landfall in Germany (Source: Gazprom)

The announcement of new sanctions aimed at Nord Stream II has led Russia to accelerate laying of its Black Sea Turkish Stream line, currently running ahead of plan. Gazprom contractor Swiss Allseas has laid about 15 miles of the pipeline under the Black Sea since May. The first of two parallel pipelines is due to open in March 2018, the second in 1919. The annual capacity of each leg is estimated to reach 15.75 billion cubic meters of natural gas or a total of almost 32 bcm for both.

Here is where things get interesting.

Here is where things get interesting.

In early July newly elected Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov announced that he intended to sign an agreement on transit of gas from the Russian-Turkish Turkish Stream pipeline. He also signed an agreement with neighbor Serbia, not an EU member– and not likely ever to become one because of her strong ties with Russia among other things. Under the new agreement, Serbia will ultimately receive 10 billion cubic meters of Gazprom Turkish gas.

On June 29 as Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić took the office of Serbian President, Ana Brnabic became Prime Minister. She told Parliament that she would seek a “balanced foreign policy” and her government would especially seek good relations with Russia and China. Serbia’s new Defense Minister, Alexandar Vulin, was bitterly opposed by Washington among other things for his known pro-Russian orientation. Aleksandar Vučić himself met with Vladimir Putin the week before his election as President and reaffirmed the close relations between Russia and Serbia.

On July 5, Hungary’s government also signed an agreement to receive gas from Turkish stream. Earlier this year Russia’s President went to Budapest where he and Prime Minister Orbán discussed Hungarian participation in Turkish Stream as well as Russian construction of nuclear plants in Hungary.

At the World Oil Congress on July 9-11 in Istanbul Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made clear that Turkey aims to become an energy hub between east and west, north and south. In short all the elements of a major new realignment are coming together between Balkan states, Russia and Turkey.

Turkish Stream

In December 2014 after the Brussels EU Commission, backed by Washington, pressured the Bulgarian government to cancel the agreement to land Gazprom gas via the South Stream pipeline to the Bulgarian port of Burgas, Russian President Putin announced that South Stream was dead. At the same time Russia began negotiations with Turkey on the Turkish Stream alternative.

Turkish stream (Source: turkstream.info)

To avoid punitive EU laws, Gazprom’s Turkish Stream pipeline passing through Turkey will end at the Turkish-Bulgarian border, with the second possibly ending at Lüleburgaz in the Marmara region of Turkey, close to Turkey’s border with Greece. From there it would be up to the purchasing countries to contract their own pipelines and construct them for the use of the Turkish Stream. EU law forbids Gazprom from building and operating its own gas pipelines inside the EU.

The Baltic Shift

In recent months as Brussels EU policies become more and more onerous, the countries of eastern Europe, especially Hungary, Czech Republic and Bulgaria have turned their sights eastward to Eurasia and especially Russia and China and their growing infrastructure investments in OBOR and other Eurasian infrastructure networks.

In February 2017 during a visit of Russian President Putin to Budapest, Hungary signed a $17 billion contract with the Rosatom Group, Russia’s state nuclear power company for construction of two reactors at Paks Nuclear Power Station, the only nuclear plant in the country. Russia also has 51% stake in a Czech project company, Nuclear Power Alliance, together with Czech Skoda JS that will bid for several planned Czech nuclear plants. The latest Czech national energy plan views nuclear electricity as a safe way to meet EU CO2 emission reduction targets as does Hungary.

The Turkish government has also chosen Russia’s Rosatom to build its first nuclear power plant, the Akkuyu NPP, with four reactors near the Mediterranean in southern Turkey across from Cyprus. The first unit costing $20 billion is being built by a Russian-Turkish consortium together with the Turkish construction group, Cengiz-Kalyon-Kolin (CKK). It will be operational in 2023.

Today, as the USA and most of Western Europe have frozen investment in nuclear power technology and has lost qualified trained manpower, Russia emerges as the world leader in export of nuclear technology with over 60% of the global market.

Areva, Europe’s largest nuclear plant producer based in France has not won a foreign contract since 2007. In the USA Westinghouse, the largest US nuclear plant provider historically, has undergone troubling times to put it mildly. The Pittsburg group’s nuclear power business was sold and today is owned by Japan’s Toshiba group. The Westinghouse nuclear group, which recently contracted to supply four new domestic US plants, their first in thirty years, is plagued by cost overruns and law suits and Westinghouse Electric has been forced to declare bankruptcy. Russia by contrast currently has contracts to build 34 reactors in 13 countries, with an estimated total value of $300 billion.

The significance of these natural gas and nuclear electricity deals by Russia with Hungary, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Bulgaria and Turkey are creating the horror of Washington, a shift of a disillusioned Baltic region from a politically bankrupt Brussels EU and a Germany which has lost its bearings.

Notable in this context is the latest confirmation by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of the $2.4 billion purchase of several units of the advanced Russia’s S-400 anti-aircraft defense systems, despite fierce efforts by the Trump Administration and by NATO to stop it. The advanced S-400 is considered by military experts as the most capable and lethal long-range air defense missile system on the planet, far more formidable than the US Patriot system that Washington wanted to have Turkey buy.

The fact that now several nations of the Balkans are clearly upgrading their economic relations with Russia and with Turkey underscores the reality of a European Dis-union rather than the promised European Union. The foolish EU Commission decision to take Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland to EU court for rejecting mandatory Brussels refugee quotas has also widened the divide between the EU east and the west.

Top-down political constructions such as today’s EU and all its anti-democratic institutions such as the EU Commission and the European Parliament which stomp on basic national sovereign rights, much like sado-masochistic personal relations, are inherently unviable. As the last quarter century of experience with Washington as the world Sole Superpower since the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrate, Top Dog-Under-Dog is no viable model for healthy peaceful international relations. The hysterical sound of who is most loudly barking says it all.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image is from the author.

Government forces, led by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) Tiger Forces and pro-government tribal forces, have liberated the villages Wadi Kharrar, Subayat, Salim Hammad, Abu Hammad, Muqla Saghir, and Muqla Kabir and fully encircled ISIS terrorists in the Sabkah area in the southern part of Raqqah province.

Following the full encirclement of this area, the SAA and its allies started pressuring ISIS in Zawr Sham, Jibil, Rahbi, and Sabkah. In turn, ISIS members launched a series of counter-attacks in the area and even temporarily entered Ghanim Ali.  Intense fighting is now ongoing in the area. However, government forces, backed up by the Russian Aerospace Forces, have an upper hand in this battle.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and Hezbollah made a ceasefire deal in the Jaroud Arsal area at the Syrian-Lebanese border.  According to the deal, HTS members are withdrawing from Jaroud Arsal to the province of Idlib.  This will allow Hezbollah to launch the second phase of the operation in Jaroud Arsal and to focus on combating ISIS in the area.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), supported by the US-led coalition, have further advanced against ISIS in the districts of Shahada and Husham Abdulmalik in the city of Raqqah.  The SDF is attempting to isolate the Old Raqqah area from the southern direction in order to launch another attempt to seize this area from ISIS.

The Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) have repelled another ISIS attack in the border area with Syria, the PMU media wing reported on Monday.  According to the report, the PMU killed 100 ISIS members and destroyed 26 ISIS vehicles during the clashes.  However, without photos or videos, these numbers remain unconfirmed.

According to the Iraqi government, the Iraqi Army and the PMU will soon launch a joint military operation to liberate Tal Afar, one of the last remaining ISIS strongholds in Iraq.

Voiceover by Harold Hoover

If you’re able, and if you like our content and approach, please support the project. Our work wouldn’t be possible without your help: PayPal: [email protected] or via: http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront

Results have recently been published from surveys of 68,759 people in 69 countries around the world during 2016 by WIN/Gallup International, which organization had asked each of these scientifically sampled persons:

“In general, do you personally feel very happy, happy, neither happy nor unhappy, unhappy, or very unhappy about your life?”

The resulting raw percentages were posted online at “WIN/Gallup International’s 40th Annual Global End of Year Survey”, but the nations weren’t ranked there; W/G’s report is more like a data-dump than like a report. 

So, based upon their numbers, I have here actually ranked the 69 nations, from the happiest, to the unhappiest, according to WIN/Gallup’s own calculations of “Net happiness,” which are their study’s bottom-line figures for each nation. WIN/Gallup says that “Net happiness (happy minus unhappy) globally is +59%,” and this indicates that the world’s average person is happy with his/her life, but not very happy with it. That’s good performance, but not terrific, worldwide.

However, as will be explained below this first-ever presentation of W/G’s rankings, the figures upon which the “Net happiness” calculations were based could be deceptive, because they largely reflect people’s expectations of whether things are getting better in their country, or instead getting worse there; this measure of ‘happiness’ is an indication “about your life,” instead of a report that necessarily reflects how they feel right now (or how they did feel at the time they were answering the question). Nobody knows for certain about his/her “life,” but only about what it was or has been, at times that a pollster’s question might specify in the most recent past, such as “yesterday” — anything that’s in the future, even “tomorrow,” or the totality of “your life,” is partly speculative, and might be somewhat unrealistic. (Furthermore, people might be more optimistic in some cultures, and more pessimistic in others, and yet the difference might have little to do with how happy the people there are.) A survey to determine a population’s actual “happiness” shouldn’t invite its respondents to be at all speculative. This is a fundamental methodological flaw in the WIN/Gallup study, but it’s common for pollsters to be so sloppy about wording the questions they’re asking; and no poll-results can be any clearer (i.e., any more meaningful) to interpret, than were the questions which were asked. WIN/Gallup is normal in this regard. They’d deserve a “C” rating on meaningfulness. But that’s still something; their findings aren’t total trash — these data weren’t an utter waste of their time and money to produce (and of readers’ attention to consider), but the results do indicate some combination of how happy a person is, mixed in with how happy the person expects the rest of his/her life to be. And they should be interpreted in that light.

Here, then, were the poll’s actual findings:

NET HAPPINESS RANKINGS, pp. 23-24, WIN/Gallup Int’l., 2016 end-yr. report:

To help understand these findings in perspective, WIN/Gallup explains:

The most optimistic countries about economic prosperity are Ghana and Bangladesh (+67% net optimistic each). In contrast, South Korea, Hong Kong and Greece are the most pessimistic (-62%, -56% and -53% respectively).

On page 6, W/G shows that, to a large extent, there is a correlation between, on the one hand, a country’s “Happiness Index” (Happiness minus Unhappiness “about your life”), and, on the other hand, each of two other measures in that poll, both of which were based upon different questions: the “Hope Index,” and the “Economic Optimism Index.” In other words: countries where “Hope” and “Economic Optimism” are high (and this reflects not where people currently are, in their happiness, but where they think they are heading) are generally scoring high also in W/G’s “Net Happiness.”

One might therefore say that Iraqis had the least optimism and hope, whereas Fijians, Colombians, and Chinese, had the most. Of course, if two other countries besides Iraq, which were also recently invaded and destroyed by the U.S. — such as Syria and Libya — had been surveyed by W/G, they might have scored even lower than Iraq did, but Syria and Libya were excluded from W/G’s poll. So: scoring at the bottom of these 69 countries doesn’t necessarily mean being the worst in the world.

Generally, high-population countries, such as China, and Indonesia, scored higher in “happiness” than small-population ones, such as Iraq, Hong Kong, and Greece. That fact (plus the favorable global economic trend, that most of the world’s nations are improving economically, not declining) might help to explain why the global average in W/G’s system is a rather high 59% — clearly in the positive range of “Net happiness,” or at least of “Hope” and of “Economic Optimism.”

The fact that U.S., Bosnia, Estonia, and UK, occupy spots 33 through 36, right in the middle of the list of the 69 countries, and yet they have 47% to 48% net-happiness, which is considerably lower than the 59% global average of happiness, is due to the smaller-population countries dominating the lower half of the list, and the larger-population countries dominating the upper half. The bigger-population group above these middle four, tend to be the larger-population countries.

OTHER RECENT RANKINGS OF NATIONS’ HAPPINESS

To provide a fuller picture of “happiness” or “welfare” around the world, the findings by other prominent systems for ranking “Happiness” or “Well-Being” in the world’s nations will here be summarized.

The U.N. has commissioned annual studies of this, which are done not by WIN/Gallup, but by the original Gallup organization, which is based in the U.S. The latest of these is the “World Happiness Report 2017”, and here are the top 20 in that system:

1. Norway (7.537)

2. Denmark (7.522)

3. Iceland (7.504)

4. Switzerland (7.494)

5. Finland (7.469)

6. Netherlands (7.377)

7. Canada (7.316)

8. New Zealand (7.314)

9. Australia (7.284)

10. Sweden (7.284)

11. Israel (7.213)

12. Costa Rica (7.079)

13. Austria (7.006)

14. United States (6.993)

15. Ireland (6.977)

16. Germany (6.951)

17. Belgium (6.891)

18. Luxembourg (6.863)

19. United Kingdom (6.714)

20. Chile (6.652)

Here are the bottom 20 of the 155 nations ranked there:

136. Malawi (3.970)

137. Chad (3.936)

138. Zimbabwe (3.875)

139. Lesotho (3.808)

140. Angola (3.795)

141. Afghanistan (3.794)

142. Botswana (3.766)

143. Benin (3.657)

144. Madagascar (3.644)

145. Haiti (3.603)

146. Yemen (3.593)

147. South Sudan (3.591)

148. Liberia (3.533)

149. Guinea (3.507)

150. Togo (3.495)

151. Rwanda (3.471)

152. Syria (3.462)

153. Tanzania (3.349)

154. Burundi (2.905)

155. Central African Republic (2.693)

That report also includes, on page 88, a remarkable table “Figure 4.2: Ranking of Happiness in Africa, 2014-2016,” at the top of which, as the happiest African nations, are (and this notably includes Libya, after the 2011 U.S. invasion):

Visitors to the Frick Collection in New York City will likely be familiar with the magnificent Self Portrait (1658) of Rembrandt that hangs in the main gallery. The artist presents himself as an imposing father-figure, like some patriarch of old. His dress is formal, and utterly distinctive – a gold apron, a red sash – while his prominent and imposing hands proclaim his trade. And yet beneath that intimidating, almost royal, exterior is an unmistakable vulnerability, a strength borne of having suffered life’s calamities, and emerged from the awful trials that the world inflicts upon one and all.

The Frick Collection is currently hosting a show focused on a handful of smaller but no less breathtaking works by the Dutch master, Rembrandt van Rijn (1696-1669), devoted to certain events in the life of another patriarch, Abraham – progenitor of the Jews and acknowledged father of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Henry C. Frick House on 5th Avenue in New York, today contains the Frick Collection. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The crown of the show is Abraham Entertaining the Angels (1646), which depicts the story of the foretelling of the birth of Isaac to the elderly couple Abraham and Sarah: “The Lord appeared to [Abraham] by the terebinths of Mamre, as he sat in the door of the tent in the heat of the day” (Genesis 18:1). Abraham is ninety-nine years old, and it is only a few days since his circumcision. Though still physically recovering, he sits at the entrance of the tent to see if there is a passerby whom he might take into his house. Abraham, we are told, lifted up his eyes and saw three men standing near him.

In Jewish commentary, these were angels – specifically, Rafael, Gabriel, and the greatest of them, Michael – in the form of humans. According to Rashi, one was to announce the birth of Isaac to Sarah, one to destroy Sodom, and one to heal Abraham, “for one angel does not two errands.” Christian apologists wanted to view Abraham’s heavenly visitors as an Old Testament allusion to the Holy Trinity. Rembrandt seems to weave between Jewish and Christian exegesis, and in the process, charts a course of his own, developing a distinctive interpretation.

The painting, oil on oak panel, offers us a kind of progressive revelation. The angel whose back is to the viewer reflects only the slightest degree of light, his wings are folded and tucked behind him, and his bare feet protrude from under his garb, giving him the appearance of an ordinary traveler. The second angel, whom we see in profile, reflects more of the light received from the incandescent being at center. His wings are not fully unfurled but beginning to stretch out. Only with the third celestial visitor, whose face is to us, do we have a glimpse of the divine per say: he is clothed all in white, and he radiates a luminous glow, the light accumulating in the folds of his gown; while his wings, unfolded and outstretched, affirm his deific stature.

Only a faint trace of the light settles on Abraham’s sleeve, though we can detect in his attitude the growing awareness that something miraculous is taking place. As Sarah stands and looks on from the shadows she expresses disbelief that she will bear a child at her advanced age – and the divine reply comes in the form of a rhetorical question: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”

Abraham Entertaining the Angels, 1646 (Source: The Frick Collection)

Abraham’s firstborn son is Ishmael, whom he fathered with the slave Hagar. Rembrandt’s 1637 etching of Abraham Casting Out Hagar and Ishmael, depicts the scene in which mother and son are banished as a consequence of Isaac’s birth. In Chapter 21 of Genesis, Sarah tells her husband to expel Ishmael and his mother from their home; and ultimately God will speak to Abraham and command him to do as Sarah says – reaffirming the promise made earlier that his son Isaac will inherit his covenant, while Ishmael will also become the father of a great nation. Sarah smiles with satisfaction as the forlorn Hagar makes her way, a sturdy young Ishmael by her side; and almost regal Abraham stands inactive on the threshold of his lavish home, outstretched arms underscoring his subjection.

An etching, Abraham Caressing Isaac (ca. 1637-45), does not depict a specific biblical episode. This is a different Abraham than the one that cast out Hagar and Ishmael. No magnificent finery: this is a more modest and rural Abraham. He fondly holds the boy Isaac, while on his brow we can see the pensiveness, the somber and searching gaze of the father who will be commanded by God to make a sacrificial offering of his son.

Abraham Caressing Isaac, ca. 1637–45 (Source: The Frick Collection)

An etching from 1645, Abraham and Isaac, takes its inspiration from Chapter 22 of Genesis, a moment of dialogue between father and son: Isaac asks his father, as he holds a bundle of wood for the burnt offering, ‘Why is no lamb present?’ And Abraham tells his son, ‘God will provide the lamb’ – and as he does so, Rembrandt has him gesture upwards to the heavens. A deep shadow is cast over Isaac’s face, heightening the sense of foreboding, and consistent with the reading that at this point “Isaac understood that he was going to be slaughtered.”

The Sacrifice of Isaac (ca. 1652-54) is a startling work for the terrible violence it brings into focus. Abraham covers the boy’s mouth to stifle his cries, but his eyes are left open to witness the knife. The father is apparently unaware of the angel above him, senseless to the angel’s hand on his head. Abraham has become as pitiless as the command he’s obeying – and it is precisely that obedience, that complete and utter preparedness to go to the end, which is truly frightening, inasmuch as it has become so very real.

Rembrandt’s etching of the Sacrifice of Isaac (1655) strikes a very different tone. The emphasis here is on Abraham’s inwardness, his inner conflict. Now the father covers his son’s eyes, and draws the boy’s head to his own body, a small but significant gesture of comfort, far removed from the harrowing filicide of the earlier drawing. Isaac calmly bares himself, innocently submitting to the knife, while Abraham, apparently insensible of the angel that his holding him from behind and staying him from the deed, fixes his darkened eyes on the ram that will replace his son as the burnt offering. The angel’s face is close to Abraham but remains unseen by the patriarch, who listens inwardly rather to the unknown voice.

The Akedah takes the measure of man’s faith, presenting the ultimate test of our obedience and submission to God. In Rembrandt’s drawing of the sacrifice, he does not shy away from the brutal reality of what is unfolding. Rembrandt renders us an Abraham not unlike the portrait that we find in Hegel: “Love alone was beyond [Abraham’s] power; even the one love he had, his love for his son, even his hope of posterity… could depress him, trouble his all-exclusive heart and disquiet it to such an extent that even this love he once wished to destroy, and his heart was quieted only through the certainty of the feeling that this love was not so strong as to render him unable to slay his beloved son with his own hand.”

Rembrandt’s Abraham reveals a complex and emotional engagement with the story of the patriarch. The artist’s understanding of his Biblical subject was anything but static: his drawings, etchings and paintings are evidence of a searching, questioning orientation – an openness to readings that acknowledge the burden of faith, the trials of fatherhood, and the ineradicable mystery of being.

Sam Ben-Meir, PhD is an adjunct professor at Mercy College. His current research focuses on environmental ethics and animal studies. [email protected] Web: www.alonben-meir.com

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 S.I. 2005 No.1541 is a statutory instrument, applicable in England and Wales. The Order places the responsibility on individuals within an organisation to carry out risk assessments to identify, manage and reduce the risk of fire. The Order came into force on 1 October 2006.

It applies, inter alia, to premises in multiple occupation and in relation thereto provides for statutory fire precautions to take measures related to:

1.     reducing the risk of fire on the premises and the risk of the spread of fire;

2.     the means of escape from the premises;

3.     the means for fighting fires on the premises;

4.     the means for detecting fire on the premises and giving warning in case of fire on the premises; and

5.     to the arrangements for action to be taken in the event of fire on the premises, including—

6.     to the instruction and training of employees; and

7.     to mitigate the effects of the fire.

By adopting a fire risk assessment approach, the responsible person(s) will need to look at how to prevent fire from occurring in the first place, by removing or reducing hazards and risks (ignition sources) and then look at the precautions to ensure that people are adequately protected, if a fire were still to occur.

Article 12 of the Act specifically provides that:

‘To ensure the risk to relevant persons related to the presence of dangerous substances is either eliminated or reduced by replacing the dangerous substance with a substance or process, which either eliminates or reduces the risk. Where the risk cannot be eliminated, he must apply measures to control the risk and mitigate the detrimental effects of a fire’.

It is contended that the Chief Fire and Rescue Advisor (CFRA) together with Chief Fire Officers (CFOs) in London, Manchester and elsewhere are, and were, in gross breach of the law(s) relating to fire safety, and should answer to these charges.

The Chief Fire and Rescue Adviser (CFRA) is employed by the Home Office and provides strategic advice and guidance to ministers, civil servants, fire and rescue authorities in England and other partners (including the devolved administrations, the police and Health and Safety Executive), on the structure, organisation and performance of fire and rescue authorities.

CFRA is part of the Home Office and, therefore, the government itself i.e. the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, have vital questions to answer. Such questions, it is contended, are of sufficient urgency for the House to be recalled as a matter of national importance in view of the potentially serious threat to life.

Featured image is from 21st Century Wire.

The British supremo, General Haig, thought he could take advantage of the troubles experienced by the French to try once again to achieve a decisive breakthrough of the German lines. This time he planned an offensive in the vicinity of Ypres, in the infamous Flanders’ Fields. Battles had already been fought there in the fall of 1914 and the spring of 1915, so Haig’s initiative was to go down in history as the Third Battle of Ypres. It was to be an extremely violent affair. 

Haig’s new “big push” was prepared very thoroughly. Things got going with a kind of prelude on June 7. The British, who had dug tunnels under the German lines, blew up the enemy positions to the south of Ypres with mines. The explosion was so loud that it could be heard on the other side of the English Channel. The British infantry attacks that followed succeeded in pushing back the German lines by about seven kilometres in the course of a week, which reduced the enemy pressure on Ypres. This so-called Battle of the Mines at Messines (or second Battle of Messines) was also a success in the sense that, for the very first time, there were more men killed on the side of the defending Germans than the attacking Tommies, namely 25,000 versus 17,000. In any event, the result was yet another plentiful harvest for the Grim Reaper. The craters carved into the Flemish soil by the explosion of the mines were to fill gradually with water, thus creating ponds like the one in the village of Wijtschate, known today as the Pool of Peace.

Soldiers of an Australian 4th Division field artillery brigade on a duckboard track passing through Chateau Wood, near Hooge in the Ypres salient, 29 October 1917. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

On July 31, the Third Battle of Ypres started officially with a large-scale British attack on German positions to the east and north of the city. Once again, the German defence proved to be particularly resolute. Two factors played an important role. First, in front of their own first lines, on carefully chosen strategic spots within the no man’s land, the Germans had constructed small concrete bunkers – nicknamed pillboxes by the British – whence they could mow down attackers with their machine guns even before they reached the first German trenches. Second, the Germans relied increasingly on a new kind of soldier, handpicked, highly motivated, thoroughly trained, and armed to the teeth, especially with machine guns and grenades. These “storm troops” (Sturm- orStoßtruppen) had first made an appearance at the front towards the end of 1915. (And the Russians had used a similar type of soldier during the Brusilov Offensive of 1916.) Their specialty was the infiltration of enemy trenches, and it is in this capacity that they would be used massively during the great German offensive in the spring of 1918. But they also performed very well defensively, and it was these storm troopers, ensconced in pillboxes, that would inflict heavy losses on the attacking British and Canadians in the Third Battle of Ypres, for example in the vicinity of the village of Passchendaele, whose surroundings had been transformed by endless rain into a sea of stinking mud. It is not a coincidence that the Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest British war cemetery in the world, situated at a stone’s throw from that village, was constructed on the remains of three German pillboxes. With respect to the storm troopers, it should be noted that they were to serve as model for the brown-shirted militia of Hitler’s Nazi party.

After particularly nasty fighting, the Third Battle of Ypres concluded in November 1917 with the capture of Passchendaele by the Canadians, of whom no less than 17,000 were killed or wounded in the course of that action. A British general who subsequently came to inspect that sector of the front could not believe his eyes when he saw how the men had had to advance through the mud and past numerous pillboxes before they had been able to conquer the German positions on the high ground of Passchendaele village.

“Good God,” he cried out, “did we really order the men to go and fight in this?”

The British generals had most certainly given such an order, and it had cost the British and Imperial forces a quarter of a million of men killed or wounded. The German lines had been pushed back, but the breakthrough of which Haig had dreamed had never even come close to materializing. That did not prevent Haig from proclaiming loudly that the Third Battle of Ypres had produced a most splendid British triumph.

During the month preceding the start of his offensive in Flanders’ Fields, Haig had received orders from above to “dismount” the cavalry and to transfer its men to the infantry. It was the intention to ship the horses via Egypt to the front in Palestine. Over there, in contrast to the western front, the cavalry continued to be useful in the mobile war against the Ottomans. Haig protested and opposed this decision because the cavalry was his favourite weapon, and in spite of the experiences of the Battle of the Somme, he planned to involve the men on horseback in his new offensive, albeit with less ambitious objectives than in the previous year. He was allowed to keep enough cavalry to keep on dreaming of a heroic, and possibly decisive, role for it, and opined that the cavalrymen might be able to take advantage of opportunities created by the infantry, perhaps in cooperation with tanks. Nothing was to come of this, but Haig continued to fantasize about glory for his horsemen until October, when heavy autumn rains soaked the battlefield and made any use of the cavalry chimerical.

In the Austro-Hungarian army, most units of the aristocratic cavalry had already been dissolved in the spring of 1917 on account of their uselessness. A Hungarian officer sadly noted that “the cavalry, the pride of [the] army, the jewel in its military crown, the men with the finest uniforms, is to be wound up,” and he concluded that “one more piece of the old Europe is disappearing.” The cavalrymen only continued to be used for escorting prisoners of war, for patrols behind the lines, and, of course, for parades. But he acknowledged that it had not been possible to use the mounted troops effectively in this modern war, and that all too often great numbers of men and horses had been mowed down by machine guns. Another problem was that the horses ate too much. it was not such mundane economic considerations but “the aesthete and the snobbish side of him” that made this officer bemoan the demise of the cavalry. In the spring of 1918, the majority of the cavalrymen of the French army would likewise have to dismount. They did so all the more reluctantly because they now had to join the humble footsoldiers in the trenches. The latter did not hide their Schadenfreude, because for years they had resented the fact that the gentlemen of the cavalry had been able to lead a comparatively safe and leisurely life behind the lines, waiting for the day when they would be able to gallop through a gap in the German defences.

It was in this inglorious fashion that everywhere in Europe – with the exception of the Balkans and a few sectors of the eastern front – the role of the cavalrymen in the Great War was terminated in 1917. The opening stages of the conflict, in August 1914, are still associated with images of the cavalry, more specifically paintings of German uhlans and French cuirassiers, sporting fur hats or shiny helmets and armed with sabre or lance, appearing proudly on the scene as vanguards of armies on the march. On the photos taken on the battlefields in 1918, however, the men on horseback are absent and we see infantrymen being transported to the front in trucks or advancing in the no man’s land behind tanks, with airplanes circling overhead. And yet the upper classes, especially the nobility, had hoped that their favourite weapon would distinguish itself in this war.

Featured image is from History Learning Site.

Featured image: A TransCanada oil pipeline. (Source: shannonpatrick17 via VisualHunt, CC BY )

As President Trump‘s State Department took steps to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, the project’s owner, TransCanada, lobbied on two bills in Montana which will ease the company’s regulatory burden in the state. 

Those bills, HB 365 and SB 109, moved along in the state’s legislature with no media coverage despite the state being the first crossed in the pipeline’s proposed journey from Alberta, Canada to Steele City, Nebraska. HB 365, which passed in May, will allow TransCanada to escape civil liability for any potential damages suffered by its contracted land surveyors. Meanwhile, SB 109 would have required environmental reviews for infrastructure projects in Montana to consider impacts beyond state lines, but failed to pass.

TransCanada spent $4,348 on its Montana lobbying efforts for the 2017 session, according to its post-session disclosure form, including $830 wining and dining the 10-member Montana American Indian Caucus. The slated 830,000 barrel-per-day oil pipeline would pass near the Fort Peck Indian Reservation and cross the Missouri River, a water source for 7,000 Assiniboine and Sioux tribe members.

Source: Montana Commissioner of Political Practices

Members of the Montana American Indian Caucus and TransCanada lobbyist Ken Morrison did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Keystone XL has come under fierce opposition by Montana’s Native American Tribes, who have signed resolutions in opposition to Keystone XL. The original Keystone pipeline, which carries tar sands oil through North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, has spilled over a dozen times. Its most recent incident occurred in 2016 when 16,800 gallons spilled in South Dakota. Keystone XL would also cross the Yellowstone River, a tributary of the Missouri River which also saw two pipelines spill over 100,000 gallons of oil into its waters since 2011.

Legislative Details

HB 365 appears to offer civil lawsuit immunity to companies like TransCanada when its contractors lay pipelines and utility lines under the ground, instead passing potential tort lawsuit liability to them. Under tort law, civil courts allow plaintiffs to sue corporations and individuals for damages committed against them.

“An underground facility owner is not liable for any damages suffered by the registered land surveyor or any person under the control of the registered land surveyor,” reads the bill’s key language, which amends Montana state code 69-4-502.

The new bill also strikes language which holds liable any “other person having the right to bury underground facilities.” This change extends potential civil liability to individuals previously exempt. However, a company like TransCanada would be off the hook as an “underground facility owner.”

HB 365 was sponsored by Republican state Rep. Ray Shaw. Though a company representative did not testify on behalf of the bill, TransCanada’s lobbyist Ken Morrison attended the hearing for the bill and registered in support of it on a sign-in sheet.

In juxtaposition, SB 109 was short-lived and did not make it out of committee after being sponsored and introduced by Democratic Rep. Mike Phillips.

The bill would have changed the Montana Environmental Policy Act, expanding review of a project’s environmental impacts beyond state borders. Specifically, it called for “the integrated use of the natural and social sciences and the environmental design arts in planning and in decisionmaking for a state-sponsored project that may have an impact on the human environment,” here substituting “human” for “Montana” in the existing law and broadening beyond state borders the environment which could be considered impacted in the bill at-large.

Keystone XL would join the broader Keystone Pipeline System, crossing many other states in its sojourn to Port Arthur, Texas and the Houston Ship Channel. President Barack Obama‘s State Department completed a federal environmental impact statement, pointing to multiple potential environmental and climate impacts from the Alberta tar sands oil which would flow through the pipeline.

But under the current version of the Montana Environmental Policy Act, only potential environmental impacts of projects like Keystone XL that occur inside state boundaries can be considered during environmental reviews.

While TransCanada did not attend the hearing for SB 109, it did lobby against the bill, according to lobbying disclosure records. Those lobbying for the bill included a representative from the environmental group Audubon Montana.

“We are in support of restoring what we believe to be the ultimate ‘good neighbor policy’ — a policy that directs analysis of state-project impacts beyond Montana’s political border,” wrote the Audubon representative in her hearing testimony. “The wildlife and diverse habitats in our state (including sagebrush, prairie pothole wetlands, a diversity of forests and valuable river bottoms) have no regard for state boundaries, but are determined by a set of climatic and geological factors. These factors should be allowed to guide our review of potential state project impacts.”

‘Keystone Academy’

During its 2017 session, the Montana Legislature also passed Senate Joint Resolution 10, which called for Keystone XL‘s approval. The bill, also lobbied for by TransCanada and sponsored by Republican Rep. Mike Lang, bears the same language as one passed by the legislature in 2015 and similar language to an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model resolution.

TransCanada is a corporate dues-paying member of ALEC, and the company funded — and ALEC convened — a trip for state legislators to the Alberta tar sands in 2012. That trip was called the “Keystone Academy.”

As DeSmog reported, TransCanada has also recently upped the ante on its federal lobbying efforts, hiring a lobbyist who had served as head legal counsel of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources.

Montana’s Democratic Governor Steve Bullock, who signed into law both HB 365 and Senate Joint Resolution 10, has taken over $36,000 from the oil and gas industry throughout his political career.

Despite all the lobbying efforts, however, it remains unclear whether the pipeline will ever open for business. On one hand, environmental groups have brought a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging its Keystone XL permitting process violates the National Environmental Policy Act. On the other hand, TransCanada itself is unsure whether market demand still exists for the pipeline.

By the year’s end, TransCanada expects to make a final decision on whether to proceed with Keystone XL.

In the three months since Internet monopoly Google announced plans to keep users from accessing “fake news,” the global traffic rankings of a broad range of left-wing, progressive, anti-war and democratic rights organizations have fallen significantly.

On April 25, 2017, Google announced that it had implemented changes to its search service to make it harder for users to access what it called “low-quality” information such as “conspiracy theories” and “fake news.”

The company said in a blog post that the central purpose of the change to its search algorithm was to give the search giant greater control in identifying content deemed objectionable by its guidelines. It declared that it had “improved our evaluation methods and made algorithmic updates” in order “to surface more authoritative content.”

Google continued,

“Last month, we updated our Search Quality Rater Guidelines to provide more detailed examples of low-quality webpages for raters to appropriately flag.”

These moderators are instructed to flag “upsetting user experiences,” including pages that present “conspiracy theories,” unless “the query clearly indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.”

Google does not explain precisely what it means by the term “conspiracy theory.” Using the broad and amorphous category of fake news, the aim of the change to Google’s search system is to restrict access to alternative web sites, whose coverage and interpretation of events conflict with those of such establishment media outlets as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

By flagging content in such a way that it does not appear in the first one or two pages of a search result, Google is able to effectively block users’ access to it. Given the fact that vast amounts of web traffic are influenced by search results, Google is able to effectively conceal or bury content to which it objects through the manipulation of search rankings.

Just last month, the European Commission fined the company $2.7 billion for manipulating search results to inappropriately direct users to its own comparison shopping service, Google Shopping. Now, it appears that Google is using these criminal methods to block users from accessing political viewpoints the company deems objectionable.

The World Socialist Web Site has been targeted by Google’s new “evaluation methods.” While in April 2017, 422,460 visits to the WSWS originated from Google searches, the figure has dropped to an estimated 120,000 this month, a fall of more than 70 percent.

Even when using search terms such as “socialist” and “socialism,” readers have informed us that they find it increasingly difficult to locate the World Socialist Web Site in Google searches.

Referrals from Google searches to the WSWS have fallen by about 70 percent

According to Google’s webmaster tools service, the number of searches resulting in users seeing content from the World Socialist Web Site (that is, a WSWS article appeared in a Google search) fell from 467,890 a day to 138,275 over the past three months. The average position of articles in searches, meanwhile, fell from 15.9 to 37.2 over the same period.

David North, chairperson of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS, stated that Google is engaged in political censorship.

“The World Socialist Web Site has been in existence for nearly 20 years,” he said, “and it has developed a large international audience. During this past spring, the number of individual visits to the WSWS each month exceeded 900,000.

“While a significant percentage of our readers enter the WSWS directly, many web users access the site through search engines, of which Google is the most widely used. There is no innocent explanation for the extraordinarily sharp fall in readers, virtually overnight, coming from Google searches.

“Google’s claim that it is protecting readers from ‘fake news’ is a politically motivated lie. Google, a massive monopoly, with the closest ties to the state and intelligence agencies, is blocking access to the WSWS and other left and progressive web sites through a system of rigged searches.”

In the three months since Google implemented the changes to its search engine, fewer people have accessed left-wing and anti-war news sites. Based on information available on Alexa analytics, other sites that have experienced sharp drops in ranking include WikiLeaks, Alternet, Counterpunch, Global Research, Consortium News and Truthout. Even prominent democratic rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International appear to have been hit.

A broad range of left-wing, progressive, and anti-war sites have had their traffic rankings fall in recent months

According to Google Trends, the term “fake news” roughly quadrupled in popularity in early November, around the time of the US election, as Democrats, establishment media outlets and intelligence agencies sought to blame “false information” for the electoral victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

On November 14, the New York Times proclaimed that Google and Facebook “faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election’s outcome,” and they would be taking measures to combat “fake news.”

Ten days later, the Washington Post published an article, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” which cited an anonymous group known as PropOrNot that compiled a list of “fake news” sites spreading “Russian propaganda.”

The list included several sites categorized by the group as “left-wing.” Significantly, it targeted globalresearch.ca, which often reposts articles from the World Socialist Web Site.

After widespread criticism of what was little more than a blacklist of anti-war and anti-establishment sites, the Washington Post was forced to publish a retraction, declaring,

“The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings.”

On April 7, Bloomberg News reported that Google was working directly with the Washington Post and the New York Times to “fact-check” articles and eliminate “fake news.” This was followed by Google’s new search methodology.

Three months later, out of the 17 sites declared to be “fake news” by the Washington Post ’s discredited blacklist, 14 had their global ranking fall. The average decline of the global reach of all of these sites is 25 percent, and some sites saw their global reach fall by as much as 60 percent.

“The actions of Google constitute political censorship and are a blatant attack on free speech,” North stated. “At a time when public distrust of establishment media is widespread, this corporate giant is exploiting its monopolistic position to restrict public access to a broad spectrum of news and critical analysis.”

This article was originally published by World Socialist Web Site on July 27, 2017.

There were a number of errors (by me) in this original posting and therefore I have decided to remove it now I have seen the judgment itself. That these errors were in large part caused by erroneous mainstream media reports is a fact, but not an excuse for my being so outraged I rushed in without checking.

In fact, the judgment does accept there is a longstanding crime of waging aggressive war as part of international law, and does not (contrary to the Guardian’s report) argue at all that the international law only came into existence recently.

It argues however that international law is only captured in UK Law when this is done specifically through an Act of Parliament. Indeed the judgement goes so far as to state:

“the clear principle that it is for Parliament to make such conduct criminal under domestic law. Parliament deliberately chose not to do so.”

This surely is problematic. The judgment states that the UK, deliberately, does not follow international law in its domestic law. So the UK is an institutionalised rogue state. Its internal arrangements allow its rulers, its armed forces and other actors to commit international crimes and flout international law with no fear of domestic repercussion as a matter of conscious choice.

It would not be beyond the wit of man to draft domestic legislation making it a crime for those acting in service of the British state to breach international law; it would not be necessary to have separate legislation enacting each piece of international law individually. Separate legislation is however possible and often done – when in the FCO I was often concerned with the enactment of treaty or other international obligations into domestic law, which is generally by secondary legislation.

When Sir Michael Wood, the FCO’s chief legal adviser, told Jack Straw it would be illegal to invade Iraq, Straw replied that there was no court that could try the case. The full significance of that did not really strike me until today. It is no accident; the UK is deliberately set up to be psychopathic entity, its elite breaking international law at will, with no fear of retribution.

“Telling the truth is always difficult….It’s extremely difficult in conditions of empire. And it’s extremely difficult in conditions of empire threatened, which is basically what we have today.”

– Professor Mark Crispin Miller (October 2016)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

In recent years, as documented on this site and on the Global Research News Hour radio program, we have seen an acceleration in the level of propaganda and its ability to shape common narratives around war.

The Assad government is blamed for virtually all the blood being spilt in Syria in recent years, in spite of evidence to the contrary. Russia, not NATO, is being blamed for an imperialist agenda for Ukraine and Eastern Europe. And a McCarthyist narrative accusing President Putin of interference in the 2016 US Presidential elections has taken hold in spite of an almost complete lack of evidence upholding that narrative.

More to the point, reporters risk being tagged ‘conspiracy theorists’ or ‘Russian agents’ if they dare to challenge these and other official narratives.

Billions of dollars of investment, not to mention political careers are dependent on maintaining these narratives, so it is understandable that dissident perspectives will sooner or later come under attack if the body politic begins to be influenced by them.

This is why media criticism and independent reporting has become such an important tool for building democratic resistance to corporate and State power. .

Project Censored is one of the key resources for highlighting and breaking down news media censorship in the US. Founded in 1976 by Dr. Carl Jensen of Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park California, the media research project’s mission has been to educate students and the public about the importance of a free press for democratic self-government, while expressing and opposing all forms of news censorship, promoting independent journalism, independent investigative journalism and critical thinking.

On October 21st, the organization put together a ‘Media Freedom Summit‘ as part of its 40th anniversary celebrations,

PC presented a round table discussion that touched on a number of crucial themes including the ‘conspiracy theory’ meme, the reporting that frustrated plans to launch an assault on Syria, threats to authentic reporting, and the distorted reporting around the 2016 election campaign which was ongoing at the time of this summit.

Abby Martin is the creator and host of The Empire Files, a weekly investigative news program airing on Telesur English, She is the past host of RT’s Breaking the Set, and the co-founder of the independent citizen journalism project known as Media Roots. She served as moderator for the discussion.

Mnar Muhawesh is the founder and editor in chief of Minneapolis based independent media outlet Mint Press News. She also hosts Behind the Headline for that news outlet. Her coverage of Syria earned her a place in Project Censored’s Top 25 most censored stories of 2015-2016.

Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, and author of numerous articles on media censorship and election fraud, He is the author of several books, including Boxed In: The Culture of TV, and The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder. He is also the editor of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. He is the curator of Open Road media series Forbidden Bookshelf, which re-publishes titles of America’s repressed history.

David Talbot is the best selling author of the The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and America’s Secret Government. He is the Founding editor of Salon.com. His most recent endeavour is Hot Books, a new imprint in partnership with Skyhorse publishing putting out titles on key contemporary issues often escaping the attention of the mainstream media.

Attention broadcasters! Some mildly offensive language is used in this broadcast. Listener discretion is advised.

Audio courtesy of Mint Press News and Project Censored.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . The show can be heard on the Progressive Radio Network at prn.fm. Listen in everyThursday at 6pm ET.

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in  at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.

Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.

CORTES COMMUNITY RADIO CKTZ  89.5 out of Manson’s Landing, B.C airs the show Tuesday mornings at 10am Pacific time.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 6am pacific time.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 10am.

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday Morning from 8:00 to 9:00am. Find more details at www.caperradio.ca

The English translation of German journalist Udo Ulfkotte’s best-selling book, Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists) appears to have been suppressed throughout North America and Europe.  On May 15, 2017 Next Revelation Press, an imprint of US-Canadian-based publisher Tayen Lane, released the English version of Bought Journalists, under the title, Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News.

Tayen Lane has since removed any reference to the title from its website. Correspondingly Amazon.com indicates the title is “currently unavailable,” with opportunities to purchase from independent sellers offering used copies for no less than $1309.09. The book’s subject matter and unexplained disappearance from the marketplace suggest how powerful forces are seeking to prevent its circulation.

Gekaufte Journalisten was almost completely ignored by mainstream German news media following its release in 2014. “No German mainstream journalist is allowed to report about [my] book,” Ulfkotte observed. “Otherwise he or she will be sacked. So we have a bestseller now that no German journalist is allowed to write or talk about.”{1]

Along these lines, publication of the English translation was repeatedly delayed. When this author contacted Ulfkotte in early December 2015 to inquire on the book’s pending translation, he responded,  “Please find the link to the English edition here,”

http://www.tayenlane.com/bought-journalists

The above address once providing the book’s description and anticipated publication date now leads to an empty page.[2] Tayen Lane has not responded to emails or telephone calls requesting an explanation for the title’s disappearance.

When a book publisher determines that it has acquired a politically volatile or otherwise “troublesome” title it may embark on a process recognized in the industry as “privishing.” “Privishing is a portmanteau meaning to privately publish, as opposed to true publishing that is open to the public,” writes investigative journalist Gerald Colby.

It is usually employed in the following context: “We privished the book so that it sank without a trace.” The mechanism used is simple: cut off the book’s life-support system by reducing the initial print run so that the book “cannot price profitably according to any conceivable formula,” refuse to do reprints, drastically slash the book’s advertising budget, and all but cancel the promotional tour.”[3]

Privishing often takes place without the author knowing, simply because it involves breach of contract and potential liability. Tayen Lane will likely not face any legal challenge in this instance, however. Ulfkotte died of a heart attack on January 13, 2017, at age 56.[4]

Udo Ulfkotte was a prominent European journalist, social scientist, and immigration reform activist. Upon writing Gekaufte Journalisten and becoming one of the most significant media industry and deep state whistleblowers in recent history, Ulfkotte complained of repeated home searches by German state police and expressed fear for his own life. He also admitted previous health complications stemming from witnessing a 1988 poisoned gas attack in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Ulfkotte’s testimony of how intelligence agencies figure centrally in Western journalism is especially compelling because he for many years functioned in the higher echelons of mainstream newsworkers. The German journalist explains how he was recruited during the 1980s to work in espionage. This began through an invitation proffered by his graduate school advisor for an all-expense-paid trip to attend a two-week seminar on the Cold War conflict in Bonn.

After Ulfkotte obtained his doctorate he was given a job as a reporter at “the leading conservative German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, oddly appointed despite no journalistic training and hundreds of other applicants. Serving as a correspondent throughout the Middle East, Ulfkotte eventually became acquainted with agents from the CIA, German intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Britain’s MI6, and Israel’s Mossad, all of whom valued his ability to travel freely in countries largely closed to the West. His editors readily collaborated in such intelligence gathering operations,”[5] for which journalist possess “non-official cover” by virtue of their profession.

“Non-official cover” occurs when a journalist is essentially working for the CIA, but it’s not in an official capacity,” Ulfkotte explains. “This allows both parties to reap the rewards of the partnership, while at the same time giving both sides plausible deniability. The CIA will find young journalists and mentor them. Suddenly doors will open up, rewards will be given, and before you know it, you owe your entire career to them. That’s essentially how it works.”[6]  He likewise ruefully admits to “publishing articles under my own name written by agents of the CIA and other intelligence services, especially the German secret service.”[7]

Ulfkotte’s insider knowledge of the relationship between mainstream media and the intelligence community has special relevance in terms of informing the CIA’s antipathy toward Wikileaks, as well as the media campaign centering on the Trump administration’s alleged “ties to Russia,” while also lending credence to Trump’s frequent claims of the US media’s political biases and deep state ties. Indeed, Ulfkotte “Tweeted” about these very subjects just two days before he passed.

+++ Trump nennt CNN FakeNews…+++https://t.co/uLJhQbic7a

— Udo Ulfkotte (@UdoUlfkotte) January 11, 2017

Ulfkotte’s explosive revelations still have the potential to further intensify the much-deserved scrutiny corporate news media presently face. In a society that pays more than lip service to freedom of thought and expression Journalists for Hire would be required reading for college students—and particularly those studying in journalism programs intending to seek employment in the media industries.

In fact, journalism professors, some of whom have migrated to the academy following long careers at renowned news outlets, possess similar insider knowledge of the relationships Ulfkotte readily explains. As both journalists and educators they have a twofold burden of responsibility. This is the case more so than ever because the entire professional and intellectual enterprise they are engaged in (and one directly linked to the nation’s accelerating civic deterioration) has been made a farce. Journalists for Hire’s suppression suggests how Ulfkotte’s posthumous censors refuse for this important examination and cleansing to proceed.

Notes

[1] Ralph Lopez, “Editor of Major German Newspaper Says He Planted Stories for CIA,” Reader Supported News, February 1, 2015.

[2] Udo Ulfkotte to James Tracy, email correspondence, December 6, 2015. In author’s possession.

[3] Gerard Colby, “The Price of Liberty,” in Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, Kristina Borjesson, ed., Amherst NY: Prometheus Books, 2002, 15-16.

[4] Former US military intelligence officer L. Fletcher Prouty relates a similar experience of how publication of his book, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, was greeted in 1972. “Then one day a business associate in Seattle called to tell me that the bookstore next to his office building had had a window full of books the day before, and none the day of his call. They claimed they had never had the book. I called other associates around the country. I got the same story from all over the country. The paperback had vanished. At the same time I learned that Mr. Ballantine had sold his company. I traveled to New York to visit the new ‘Ballantine Books’ president. He professed to know nothing about me, and my book … The campaign to to kill the book was nationwide and worldwide. It was removed from the Library of Congress and from College libraries as letters I received attested all too frequently.” Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, New York: SkyHorse Publishing, 2008, xii.

[5] Ronald L. Ray, “Reporter Admits Most Media Work for CIA, MI6, Mossad,” American Free Press, October 26, 2014. See also Tyler Durden, “German Journalist Blows Whistle on How CIA Controls the Media,” Zerohedge, October 9, 2014; Udo Ulfkotte, “German Politicians Are US Puppets,” Center for Research on Globalization, November 9., 2014.

[6] Durden, “German Journalist Blows Whistle on How CIA Controls the Media.”

[7] Lopez, “Editor of Major German Newspaper Says He Planted Stories for CIA.”

It’s a beautiful sight in it’s natural habitat , but the snow leopard (Panthera uncia) a large cat native to the mountain ranges of Central and South Asia is endangered. It is listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List of threatened species, because, as of 2003, the size of the global wild population was estimated at 4,080–6,590 adults. According to Wiki, fewer than 2,500 individuals may be reproducing in the wild. As of 2016, estimates for the size of the global population vary from at least 4,080 to about 8,700 individuals only. Are they headed for extinction or only found in zoos, in the future?

Snow leopards inhabit alpine and subalpine zones at elevations from 3,000 to 4,500 m. They have been classified as Uncia uncia since the early 1930s. Interestingly, both the latinized genus name, Uncia, and the occasional English name ounce are derived from the Old French once, originally used for the European Lynx.

Snow leopards are slightly smaller than the other large cats like lions, and they have a relatively short body. However, the tail is quite long, at 80 to 100 with only the domestic cat being relatively longer-tailed. They are stocky and short-legged big cats, standing about 60 cm at the shoulder.

They have long, thick fur, and their base colour varies from smoky gray to yellowish tan, with whitish underparts. They have dark grey to black open rosettes on their bodies, with small spots of the same colour on their heads and  legs and tails. Unusually among cats, their eyes are pale green or grey in colour.

Image, Source Wikipedia

Living in a cold, mountainous environment their bodies have adapted. They are stocky, their fur is thick, and their ears are small and rounded, all of which help to minimize heat loss. Their paws are wide, which distributes their weight better for walking on snow, and have fur on their undersides of the paws, to increase their grip on steep  surfaces. Sadly, they cannot roar, because of the absence of the larynx. Instead they hiss, mew, growl and wail.

Today, the snow leopard is a highly threatened due to poaching, the loss of habitat and wild prey due to human habitation spreading, infrastructure development and conflict with herding communities, according to WWF. This has put the snow leopard on the brink of extinction. Exact numbers are unknown, but experts estimate that there may only be less than 4000 animals left in the wild Various conservation organizations, including the Snow Leopard Trust, WWF, NABU, Snow Leopard Conservancy, WCS and Panthera, are working with local partners across the cat’s range to protect it.

These organizations have joined forces to launch a campaign for the snow leopard’s survival. In the campaign, which is called #SaveSnowLeopards, wildlife supporters around the world are invited to sign a petition, urging leaders from snow leopard range countries to take immediate action to save the cat.

“Conflict with local herder communities might be the most pressing threat snow leopards face today”, says Michael Despines, the Snow Leopard Trust’s Executive Director. “Many of these people live below poverty lines, and can ill afford to lose livestock to attacks from predators. In desperation, they sometimes retaliate against snow leopards. To break this vicious circle, we need to support these communities and help them coexist with the cat.”

“TRAFFIC’s analysis found that a minimum of four snow leopards were poached every week since 2008; we strongly encourage all 12 range States to combat these unacceptably high levels of poaching and are ready to support these efforts by providing information to help target interventions to stop snow leopard poaching and trafficking,” said James Compton, TRAFFIC Senior Programme Director for Asia.

Even if poaching were brought under control, the snow leopard would still face urgent threats, such as the loss of its habitat and wild prey.

“Most snow leopard range states are developing countries or emerging economies. Many of them are planning or undertaking large-scale infrastructure or mining projects to boost growth. Such projects can be extremely disruptive to the fragile ecosystems that snow leopard’s call home. It’s critical for the snow leopard that they be well-planned to avoid damage”, says Rishi Kumar Sharma of WWF-India.

Specific requests to the countries where the cat is found include a strategy to combat poaching and banning the illegal trade of snow leopards, ensuring infrastructure development is sustainable, and driving investments in sustainable rural development that help decrease poverty while respecting the needs of wildlife.

Marianne Furtado de Nazareth is adjunct faculty, St. Joseph’s College, freelance Science and Environment Journalist contributing to the Hindu & has submitted her PhD thesis to the Madurai Kamaraj Iniversity.

Featured image is from the author.

The Washington Post in an article titled, “Al-Qaida in Syria snuffs out competition in northwest,” clumsily reveals what many following the Syrian conflict have known all along – that the so-called uprising never existed, and that the US and its allies are directly arming, aiding, and abetting Al Qaeda in Syria.

The article admits:

Syrian rebels and activists are warning that an al-Qaida-linked jihadi group is on the verge of snuffing out what remains of the country’s uprising in northwestern Syria, after the extremists seized control of the opposition-held regional capital, Idlib, last weekend.

However, the so-called “uprising” has been allegedly supported since 2011 by the US, Europe, and the West’s collective allies across the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year in weapons, training, logistics, and even vehicles, and now even direct military support.

This significant support has been reported on numerous times by Western papers, including the Washington Post itself. If such support was truly being given to a secular, pro-democratic opposition inside of Syria, who then has supplied “Al Qaeda-linked jihadi groups” with enough support to meet or exceed it on the battlefield? The answer is, there was never a secular, pro-democratic opposition in Syria.

The Washington Post fails to inform readers that Al Qaeda’s consolidation in the northwest of Syria is a logistical necessity, with the West unable to sustain token opposition groups any further if Damascus and its allies are to be prevented from exercising further control over its own territory before the conflict draws to a relative close.

The Washington Post – in a way – already admits this in its article. It states (emphasis added):

The Nusra Front is one of the many names for the al-Qaida-affiliate that now heads the mighty Hay’at Tahrir al Sham militant alliance — Arabic for Levant Liberation Committee — that seized the city of Idlib, as well as two border crossings with Turkey to feed its coffers. It is also known as HTS.

The Washington Post acknowledges that an Al Qaeda affiliate is sustaining its fighting capacity in Syria through supply lines leading out of Turkey – a NATO member since 1952. It is also a Western ally, with multiple Western nations still supplying the state with weapons, including 86 million British pounds sold to Ankara by the UK. Turkey, alongside Saudi Arabia, represent two state-sponsors of terror contradicting Western narratives revolving around a “War on Terror” allegedly being fought. In fact, it appears that instead of fighting terror, the West is propping up the largest nations on Earth driving it.

Worse than the West fueling terrorism by proxy, the Washington Post also obliquely mentions that militant groups in Syria supported directly by the US CIA are coordinating with the very Al Qaeda-affiliates it claims is “snuffing out” the opposition.

It claims:

Other factions, including many once financed and armed in part by the CIA, kept to the sidelines. They are hoping to win a share of the revenues from the lucrative Bab al-Hawa border crossing, said a Turkey-based opposition activist who liaises with Syrian rebels and their state sponsors. He asked for anonymity so as not to jeopardize his position.

In other words, Al Qaeda-controlled border crossings are being jointly used and exploited by groups “once” financed and armed by the CIA. More likely, this was the case before the conflict even began, with the US simply using Al Qaeda in Syria, just as it had in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, as the global mercenary army of choice to go and do where and what US troops cannot.

The Washington Post’s article appears to be a final attempt to salvage long-exposed disinformation, misinforming the public about the true nature of both the Syrian crisis and the alleged “opposition” fighting it on the West’s behalf. The article concludes, claiming that US programs to arm militants in Syria are drawing to a close, and that the US is “leaving Syria in Russia’s hands.”

In reality, the US will only leave Syria once its options have been fully confounded and exhausted by Syria and its allies. While it may not be able to continue funding terrorists in Syria’s northwest, it still maintains a military presence with US troops and proxies in the nation’s east. It openly plans to occupy these regions – and from them – incrementally expand them until eventually Syria is either dissolved as a unified state, or regime change can eventually be achieved.

Al Qaeda’s “emergence” in northwest Syria, and its dominance of “opposition” groups admittedly funded to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, can only be explained if those hundreds of billions of dollars were actually being fed into Al Qaeda’s hands. Admitting that Al Qaeda now infests Syria’s northwest allows the “opposition” to use any and all tactics required to keep or even claw back territory from forces loyal to Damascus, with papers like the Washington Post tasked  now with obfuscating and ignoring the reality that Al Qaeda does this with logistical routes leading directly into NATO territory, and arms and supplies acquired with NATO complicity.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.    

Featured image is from the author.

A year on from the Brexit referendum Britain feels like it is in shambles. It’s been noted that the extensive and outright visible damage has been done to its domestic politics, as the Conservative Party has been in turmoil for a while now. The London Evening Standard says that Gideon Skinner, head of political research at Ipsos MORI confined to one of its reports the following:

The turnaround in Mrs May’s ratings is unprecedented in our previous data on Prime Ministers – from a historic high at the start of the campaign to a historic low just one month after an election, while also seeing her position among her own party supporters weakening and Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign surge continuing.

The same extent of damage, most experts agree, has been inflicted upon Britain’s global standing, which is lower than it has been at any time since the Suez crisis in 1956.

The Economist experts argue that for decades Britain’s foreign policy has rested on three pillars: the United States, the European Union and the emerging world. As a former imperial power, Britain had close ties with dozens of African and Asian countries. With one of Europe’s largest economies, it had a big say in Europe’s future, often acting as a counter-balance to the Franco-German axis.

However, one must note that the UK has always been second-division players in Europe. Yet, Britain’s membership in the EU would be increasing its influence in America just as its close relations with America increased its clout in the EU. The EU magnified Britain’s global power, bringing with it trade deals with 53 other countries.

However, today the relations between the US and Britain have hit an all time low. There’s no unified position on Trump and his actions across the British political elites, that is why Washington has been reevaluating the ties it enjoyed with London for so long. The recent visit of Donald Trump to France on Bastille Day may serve as the most visible indication of this process. At the same time, Trump’s possible trip to Britain is up in the air. Berlin is as eager as Paris to take part in the contest that should determine Washington’s next supporting pillar in Europe.

As for emerging markets, rapidly developing economies will be more interested in dealing with great power blocks than with a small country with idiosyncratic rules and volatile politics.

To make the matters worse the situation at home doesn’t look any better in the UK. The British society has set foot on a slippery slope of moral degradation. This process is exemplified by the recent occurrences such as the growth of nationalistic hurray-patriotism and xenophobia in Britain, which are both extremely regrettable and unpleasant.

According to various British media sources, including the Independent, since the Brexit vote there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of crimes committed on the basis of racial and religious hatred. Religious communities across the kingdom are now complaining about an ever increasing number of discrimination cases.

According to the UK police, in the 12 months since the referendum on the withdrawal of the UK from the EU, the number of such incidents in the country has increased by 23% compared to the same period last year. The largest increase in the number of hate crimes was recorded in Gwent County in Wales, where this number grew by 77%. Just a bit less significant increase was observed in the counties of Kent, Warwickshire and Nottinghamshire.

The reasons for the growth of xenophobia just like the widespread of lack of tolerance can be explained by the fact that Brits have naturally inherited racist views from their ancestors, while the absolute majority of the media sources in the kingdom exploit this repulsive aspect of the British character in order to attract readers and earn more money. Under a deceptive and attractive mask of patriotism, newspapers are more than willing to expose examples of “non-British” behavior to encourage their readers to hate and despise foreigners.

It’s been noted that the decline of Christianity is perhaps the biggest single change in Britain over the past century. For the first time in recorded history, those declaring themselves to have no religion have exceeded the number of Christians in Britain. Inevitably, the question of what is to be done about national Christian institutions will arise. Is it still appropriate to swear on the Bible in UK courts, since new Members of Parliament routinely refuse to do so?

Jean Périer is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook“.

Featured image is from the author.

Legislating a warmongering bill is seemingly effortless for the US Congress than passing a healthcare for all. 

What does “Making America Great Again” actually mean?

The poster below talks about the newly passed sanctions against the three ‘rogue’ enemies of the very peace-loving United States.

The United Nations made a call Friday for Venezuela’s National Constituent Assembly (ANC) elections to be respected following two days of violent unrest that claimed seven lives across the South American country.

“The wishes of the Venezuelan people to participate or not in this election need to be respected. No one should be obliged to vote, while those willing to take part should be able to do so freely,” a spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a press briefing.

During the press conference, the international human rights watchdog additionally called on Venezuelan authorities to “guarantee people’s rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly”, likewise urging “those opposing the election and the Assembly to do so peacefully”.

The Maduro government’s bid to convene a citizens’ assembly to draft a new constitution as a solution to the current political standoff has drawn harsh rebuke from both the country’s right-wing opposition as well as foreign governments, including Washington, which has threatened “strong and swift economic actions” if Sunday’s vote goes ahead. On Wednesday, the Trump administration slapped sanctions on 13 top Venezuelan officials involved in organizing the ANC.

The UN statement comes on the heels of a two-day national strike called by Venezuela’s right-wing opposition coalition, the MUD, as part of an effort to derail Sunday’s ANC vote.

While the strike went generally unheeded nationally with the majority of the population going about their daily business, the call to action did spark pockets of violent confrontation between demonstrators and authorities.

In Merida state, the Public Prosecution (MP) is investigating the death of Rafael Balsa Vergara (30) during a protest in Ejido on Wednesday afternoon. The cause of death is disputed with local opposition-aligned press accusing the National Guard of firing at point blank range, a version of events authorities have denied.

Source: daily-sun.com

Elsewhere in the Andean state, police officer Oneiver Quiñones Ramirez (30) was shot in the head while attempting to clear a street barricade at midday on Thursday, according to the MP report. The state police officer was hospitalized and died in the early hours of Friday morning. One National Bolivarian Police officer and a National Guard sergeant were also suffered gunshot wounds while attempting to disperse violent protests in Caracas Thursday.

In the northern Merida town of Timotes, the MP is investigating the fatal shooting of Enderson Caldera (24) during violent clashes between opposition militants and authorities on Wednesday, which saw the latter set fire to the town hall and local police headquarters.

Meanwhile in Carabobo state, opposition supporter Leonardo Gonzalez Barreto (49) was reportedly shot by local police in the vicinity of a protest on Thursday. The officers suspect in the case have been arrested by Venezuela’s special investigative police, the CICPC, and are awaiting charges.

In the Lara municipality of Cabudare, a state prosecutor has also been commissioned to investigate the killing of Jose Miguel Pestano (23) during confrontations between anti-government protesters and authorities on Thursday. Further details concerning exact cause of death have yet to be made available.

In the northeastern state of Anzoategui, Rafael Canache (28) was shot dead in a looting, according to the MP. At least 14 people have been killed in lootings across Venezuela since April.

Lastly, in the greater Caracas region of Petare, 16-year-old Jean Carlos Aponte was fatally wounded during a demonstration in the 5 de Julio neighborhood on Thursday. A Caracas district attorney has been dispatched to investigate.

The latest fatalities bring the total death toll in 17 weeks of anti-government to 115, including at least 14 deaths at the hands of authorities and 29 attributable to opposition political violence.

In response to the latest round of anti-government mobilizations, Interior Minister Nestor Reverol announced a temporary ban on public protests aimed at interrupting Sunday’s vote, deploying 146,000 national police officers to voting centers across the country.

The Venezuelan government has decreed all voting centers temporary special protection zones and any action aimed at deterring people from voting will be punished with 5 to 10 years jail time.

Despite the temporary ban, the opposition has called on its supporters to take to the streets Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in order to prevent the controversial vote from taking place.

Featured image is from daily-sun.com.