When President-elect Donald Trump sent his talent scouts to the attack-dog kennel run by defense industry giant General Dynamics, in order to recruit former Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis to be secretary of defense, cries of apprehension were drowned out by smug one-percent reassurances.
Those who “know what’s best for the country” insisted: “NOT TO WORRY; actually Mattis is a Renaissance Man. Yes, he thinks, and says, it’s fun to shoot people. But after taking a hot shower in the evening, he reads Greek epic poetry.
Syria
Last Sunday, Mattis told CBS it’s gonna be more fun again. At a time when civilian casualties are extremely high in Syria, thus spake James Renaissance Man Mattis to CBS’s Face the Nation:
“We have already shifted from attrition tactics, where we shove them from one position to another in Iraq and Syria, to annihilation tactics where we surround them.”
Mattis was asked what about civilian casualties.
“Civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation,” he replied, adding that the U.S. military does “everything humanly possible consistent with military necessity.”
This brings to mind the Feb. 7, 2002 Executive Order signed by President George W. Bush authorizing another kind of war crime – torture. That Memorandum concluded with identical reassurance – in this case, that detainees would be “treated humanely, and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.”
Afghanistan
Worse still (if there can be a “worse still”), Mattis reportedly is weighing how many thousands more troops from the US poverty draft to send to – hold your breath – AFGHANISTAN!
Instead of reading Homer and reflecting on the Trojan War 33 centuries ago, Mattis ought to fast forward and read more “modern” history on Afghanistan. He might fast forward to “just” 27 centuries ago, when Alexander the Great made, but did not follow through on, an abortive attempt to conquer Afghanistan. “Abortive” is the key word here. He faced stiff resistance from the locals, who for some reason did not like being invaded and lacked the respect due the “sole superpower the world” of those times.
Alexander was smart enough to realize that he had bit off more than he could chew. He brought his army back west, before many more of them got killed, to where he knew what he was doing. On that count alone he deserves the moniker “Great.” Unlike those who have tried to conquer Afghanistan in the 22 centuries that followed, he decided the game was not worth the candle.
This adage is attributed to Alexander:
“There is nothing impossible to him who will try.”
The corollary, of course, is that some things DO happen to be well nigh impossible – and, as such, not worth the cost of trying for some dimly perceived, nonessential gain.
Fools Walk In
In the centuries that followed, many powerful “statesmen” – powerful, but not so “Great” in terms of knowing when to avoid trying the impossible – have attempted to subdue those incorrigible tribes in Afghanistan. The long, sad, fools’ list includes: Arabs, Mongolians, Persians, Indians, British, Russians – and now Americans.
Let’s hope ‘Renaissance Man” Mattis will leave Homer and the Trojan War behind and read up more “recent” history. A good way to start would be to get a hold of Barbara Tuchman’s classic “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.”
Scene of the Kabul bombing (Source: BBC)
The bomb blast last night in Kabul that killed more than 80 and wounded 300 will probably tempt Mattis and his delusional boss to lash out militarily. That could include the next surge in the fool’s errand into Afghanistan. It would be a piece of what Mattis’s predecessors browbeat the benighted Barack Obama into doing as soon as he came into office, playing on his campaign rhetoric that Afghanistan was some kind of “good war,” in contrast to the one in Iraq.
Since greeting WBTE (Wet-Behind-The-Ears) Barack Obama in March 2009 with a piece titled “Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President,” I have tried to keep at it. The effort runs no risk of getting boring, given the high stakes involved. A lot of people are dying – just a small portion of whom are the American “heroes” celebrated over the weekend as “the fallen; the lost.” (They were neither lost nor fallen; they were pushed to death – many of them with the help of a supremely unjust poverty draft).
But the vast majority of dead and injured are non-American “others” – mostly civilians – a fact of death, which Mad Dog Mattis rationalizes as “a fact of life … consistent with military necessity.”
Maybe someone can give him a history book about Alexander the Great and how it was not such a bad idea to “chicken out” and withdraw from Afghanistan. He could be told that history would be happy to call him “Mad Dog The Great,” should that appeal to him. He desperately needs to educate himself on the indomitable folks in that poor country (and their equally determined supporters across the border in Pakistan). Please, someone suggest to Mattis that it would be “Renaissance-Man-like” to follow Alexander’s example and avoid confronting the impossible – even aside from the human and other costs – when it is “a fact of life” that neither the strategic stakes nor “military necessity” warrant it.
It would be nice, too, if one of his aides could replace Homer with one or two of the following articles under his pillow – on the chance he can be brought to realize that it’s not “fun” – just dumb – to go around shooting people. And that that goes in spades for Afghanistan.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and CIA analyst for a total of 30 years and now servers on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Reprinted with permission from his website.
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.
In the anti-war campaign, Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the Centre for Research on Globalization is calling for a new movement of counter-propaganda and activism to delegitimise the lies that prop up the military-industrial complex.
Breaking the “big lie”, which upholds war as a humanitarian undertaking, means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force. This profit-driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into “unconscious zombies.”
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid condemned the attack, saying its fighters had nothing to do with it. Kabul’s 1TV channel reported ISIS claiming responsibility for what happened.
Air strikes in Iraq and Syria have: “ … destroyed 6,000 buildings with over 40,000 bombs and missiles have inevitably killed much higher numbers of civilians.” Apocalyptic horror. Of course US and UK presence in air and on the ground in Syria are entirely illegal.
The EU Commission (EC) has announced that it is planning to extend authorisation for glyphosate for a further ten years. The decision is based on the latest evaluation published by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) declaring glyphosate to be safe. The EC has actually approved 14 new import authorisations for genetically engineered plants resistant to herbicides. All these plants will contain residues from spraying. Several of the genetically engineered plants recently approved for import are not only resistant to glyphosate but also to combined applications of other dangerous herbicides, such as 2,4-D, dicamba, glufosinate and isoxaflutole.
Not so Margaret Court, one of the most successful tennis players of all time, who forgot herself when she decided that her opinions seemed to be the stuff of gold, valued because she had done something with ball and racket.
Her mouth was loosened by the stance taken by the Australian airliner Qantas that it would support same sex marriage.
Recently, the price of a Bitcoin has skyrocketed, rising in a few weeks from $1,000 to $2,200. Two explanations suggest themselves. One is that the Federal Reserve has decided to rid itself of a competing currency and is driving up the price with purchases while accumulating a large position, which then will be suddenly dumped in order to crash the market and scare away potential users from Bitcoins. Remember, the Fed can create all the money it wishes and, thereby, doesn’t have to worry about losses.
On a scale not seen since the ‘great’ world depression of the 1930’s, the US political system is experiencing sharp political attacks, divisions and power grabs. Executive firings, congressional investigations, demands for impeachment, witch hunts, threats of imprisonment for ‘contempt of Congress’ and naked power struggles have shredded the façade of political unity and consensus among competing powerful US oligarchs.
For the first time in US history, the incumbent elected president struggles on a daily basis to wield state power. The opposition-controlled state (National Public Radio) and corporate organs of mass propaganda are pitted against the presidential regime. Factions of the military elite and business oligarchy face off in the domestic and international arena. The oligarchs debate and insult each other. They falsify charges, plot and deceive. Their political acolytes, who witness these momentous conflicts, are mute, dumb and blind to the real interests at stake.
The struggle between the Presidential oligarch and the Opposition oligarchs has profound consequences for their factions and for the American people. Wars and markets, pursued by sections of the Oligarchs, have led opposing sections to seek control over the means of political manipulation (media and threats of judicial action).
Intense political competition and open political debate have nothing to do with ‘democracy’ as it now exists in the United States.
In fact, it is the absence of real democracy, which permits the oligarchs to engage in serious . The marginalized, de-politicized electorate are incapable of taking advantage of the conflict to advance their own interests.
What the ‘Conflict’ is Not About
The ‘life and death’ inter-oligarchical fight is not about peace!
None of the factions of the oligarchy, engaged in this struggle, is aligned with democratic or independent governments.
Neither side seeks to democratize the American electoral process or to dismantle the grotesque police state apparatus.
Neither side has any commitment to a ‘new deal’ for American workers and employees.
Neither is interested in policy changes needed to address the steady erosion of living standards or the unprecedented increase in ‘premature’ mortality among the working and rural classes.
Despite these similarities in their main focus of maintaining oligarchical power and policies against the interests of the larger population, there are deep divisions over the content and direction of the presidential regime and the permanent state apparatus.
What the Oligarchical Struggle is About
There are profound differences between the oligarch factions on the question of overseas wars and ‘interventions’.
The ‘opposition’ (Democratic Party and some Republican elite) pursues a continuation of their policy of global wars, especially aimed at confronting Russian and China, as well as regional wars in Asia and the Middle East. There is a stubborn refusal to modify military policies, despite the disastrous consequences domestically (economic decline and increased poverty) and internationally with massive ethnic cleansing, terrorism, forced migrations of war refugees to Europe, and famine and epidemics (such as cholera and starvation in Yemen).
Cholera outbreak in Yemen (Source: EPA)
The Trump Presidency appears to favor increased military confrontation with Iran and North Korea and intervention in Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.
The ‘Opposition’ supports multilateral economic and trade agreements, (such as TTP and NAFTA), while Trump favors lucrative ‘bilateral’ economic agreements. Trump relies on trade and investment deals with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates and the formation of an aggressive military ‘axis’ (US-Saudi Arabia-Israel -Gulf Emirates) to eventually overthrow the nationalist regime in Iran and divide the country.
The ‘Opposition’ pursues wars and violent ‘regime change’ to replace disobedient ‘tyrants’ and nationalists and set up ‘client governments’, which will provide bases for the US military empire. Trump’s regime embraces existing dictators, who can invest in his domestic infrastructure agenda.
The ‘opposition’ seeks to maximize the role of Washington’s global military power. President Trump focuses on expanding the US role in the global market.
While both oligarchical factions support US imperialism, they differ in terms of its nature and means.
For the ‘opposition’, every country, large or small, can be a target for military conquest. Trump tends to favor the expansion of lucrative overseas markets, in addition to projecting US military dominance.
Oligarchs: Tactical Similarities
The competition among oligarchs does not preclude similarities in means and tactics. Both factions favor increased military spending, support for the Saudi war on Yemen and intervention in Venezuela. They support trade with China and international sanctions against Russia and Iran. They both display slavish deference to the State of Israel and favor the appointment of openly Zionist agents throughout the political, economic and intelligence apparatus.
These similarities are, however, subject to tactical political propaganda skirmishes. The ‘Opposition’ denounces any deviation in policy toward Russia as ‘treason’, while Trump accuses the ‘Opposition’ of having sacrificed American workers through NAFTA.
Whatever the tactical nuances and similarities, the savage inter-oligarchic struggle is far from a theatrical exercise. Whatever the real and feigned similarities and differences, the oligarchs’ struggle for imperial and domestic power has profound consequence for the political and constitutional order.
Oligarchical Electoral Representation and the Parallel Police State
The ongoing fight between the Trump Administration and the ‘Opposition’ is not the typical skirmish over pieces of legislation or decisions. It is not over control of the nation’s public wealth. The conflict revolves around control of the regime and the exercise of state power.
The opposition has a formidable array of forces, including the national intelligence apparatus (NSA, Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, etc.) and a substantial sector of the Pentagon and defense industry. Moreover, the opposition has created new power centers for ousting President Trump, including the judiciary. This is best seen in the appointment of former FBI Chief Robert Mueller as ‘Special Investigator’ and key members of the Attorney General’s Office, including Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosenstein. It was Rosenstein who appointed Mueller, after the Attorney General ‘Jeff’ Session (a Trump ally) was ‘forced’ to recluse himself for having ‘met’ with Russian diplomats in the course of fulfilling his former Congressional duties as a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This ‘recusal’ took significant discretionary power away from Trump’s most important ally within the Judiciary.
The web of opposition power spreads and includes former police state officials including mega-security impresario, Michael Chertoff (an associate of Robert Mueller), who headed Homeland Security under GW Bush, John Brennan (CIA), James Comey (FBI) and others.
The opposition dominates the principal organs of propaganda -the press (Washington Post, Financial Times, New York Times and Wall Street Journal), television and radio (ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS/ NPR), which breathlessly magnify and prosecute the President and his allies for an ever-expanding web of unsubstantiated ‘crimes and misdemeanors’. Neo-conservative and liberal think tanks and foundations, academic experts and commentators have all joined the ‘hysteria chorus’ and feeding frenzy to oust the President.
The President has an increasingly fragile base of support in his Cabinet, family and closest advisers. He has a minority of supporters in the legislature and possibly in the Supreme Court, despite nominal majorities for the Republican Party.
The President has the passive support of his voters, but they have demonstrated little ability to mobilize in the streets. The electorate has been marginalized.
Outside of politics (the ‘Swamp’ as Trump termed Washington, DC) the President’s trade, investment, taxation and deregulation policies are backed by the majority of investors, who have benefited from the rising stock market. However, ‘money’ does not appear to influence the parallel state.
The divergence between Trumps supporters in the investment community and the political power of the opposition state is one of the most extraordinary changes of our century.
Given the President’s domestic weakness and the imminent threat of a coup d’état, he has turned to securing ‘deals’ with overseas allies, including billion-dollar trade and investment agreements.
The multi-billion arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates will delight the military-industrial complex and its hundreds of thousands of workers.
Political and diplomatic ‘kowtowing’ to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu should please some American Zionists.
But the meetings with the EU in Brussels and with the G7 in Siciliy failed to neutralize Trump’s overseas opposition.
NATO’s European members did not accept Trump’s demands that they increase their contribution to the alliance and they condemned his reluctance to offer unconditional US military support for new NATO members. They showed no sympathy for domestic problems.
In brief, the President’s overseas supporters, meetings and agreements will have little impact on the domestic correlation of forces.
Moreover, there are long-standing ties among the various state apparatuses and spy agencies in the EU and the US, which strengthen the reach of the opposition in their attacks on Trump.
While substantive issues divide the Presidential and Opposition oligarchs, these issues are vertical, not horizontal, cleavages – a question of ‘their’ wars or ‘ours’.
Trump intensified the ideological war with North Korea and Iran; promised to increase ground troops in Afghanistan and Syria; boosted military and advisory support for the Saudi invasion of Yemen; and increased US backing for violent demonstrations and mob attacks in Venezuela.
Protest against the Maduro government in Venezuela
The opposition demands more provocations against Russia and its allies; and the continuation of former President Obama’s seven wars.
While both sets of oligarchs support the ongoing wars, the major difference is over who is managing the wars and who can be held responsible for the consequences.
Both conflicting oligarchs are divided over who controls the state apparatus since their power depends on which side directs the spies and generates the fake news.
Currently, both sets of oligarchs wash each other’s ‘dirty linen’ in public, while covering up for their collective illicit practices at home and abroad.
The Trump’s oligarchs want to maximize economic deals through ‘uncritical’ support for known tyrants; the opposition ‘critically’ supports tyrants in exchange for access to US military bases and military support for ‘interventions’.
President Trump pushes for major tax cuts to benefit his oligarch allies while making massive cuts in social programs for his hapless supporters. The Opposition supports milder tax cuts and lesser reductions in social programs.
Conclusion
The battle of the oligarchs has yet to reach a decisive climax. President Trump is still the President of the United States. The Opposition forges ahead with its investigations and lurid media exposés.
The propaganda war is continuous. One day the opposition media focuses on a deported student immigrant and the next day the President features new jobs for American military industries.
The emerging left-neo-conservative academic partnership (e.g. Noam Chomsky-William Kristol) has denounced President Trump’s regime as a national ‘catastrophe’ from the beginning. Meanwhile, Wall Street investors and libertarians join to denounce the Opposition’s resistance to major tax ‘reforms’.
Oligarchs of all stripes and colors are grabbing for total state power and wealth while the majority of citizens are labeled ‘losers’ by Trump or ‘deplorables’ by Madame Clinton.
The ‘peace’ movement, immigrant rights groups and ‘black lives matter’ activists have become mindless lackeys pulling the opposition oligarchs’ wagon, while rust-belt workers, rural poor and downwardly mobile middle class employees are powerless serfs hitched to President Trump’s cart.
Epilogue
After the blood-letting, when and if President Trump is overthrown, the State Security functionaries in their tidy dark suits will return to their nice offices to preside over their ‘normal’ tasks of spying on the citizens and launching clandestine operations abroad.
The media will blow out some charming tid-bits and ‘words of truth’ from the new occupant of the ‘Oval Office’.
The academic left will churn out some criticism against the newest ‘oligarch-in-chief’ or crow about how their heroic ‘resistance’ averted a national catastrophe.
Trump, the ex-President and his oligarch son-in-law Jared Kushner will sign new real estate deals. The Saudis will receive the hundreds of billions of dollars of US arms to re-supply ISIS or its successors and to rust in the ‘vast and howling’ wilderness of US-Middle East intervention. Israel will demand even more frequent ’servicing’ from the new US President.
The triumphant editorialists will claim that ‘our’ unique political system, despite the ‘recent turmoil’, has proven that democracy succeeds . . . only the people suffer!
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, have become a ubiquitous feature of contemporary warfare.
Their use has proliferated to such an extent that even non-state actors boast entire fleets of drones, including ISIS and its seemingly inexhaustible fleet of quadrocopters. Nearly every national military operates a drone force of some sort, starting with lightweight, shoulder-launched battlefield UAVs and ending with the infamous Predators and Reapers or their equivalents. But relatively few countries can boast drones at the high end of that spectrum represented by the HALE, or high-altitude long endurance, family. The onset of flight testing of the Altius-M HALE UAV indicates Russia is about to join that elite group.
As the acronym itself suggests, HALE drones are meant for what essentially are high-importance intelligence gathering missions. The high altitudes at which they operate combined with long loiter times and heavy payloads mean they can provide reconnaissance capabilities second only to those of large electronic surveillance aircraft at fraction of the cost and with far fewer political ramifications.
To cite but one example of their utility, NATO’s US-manufactured Global Hawk UAVs have been performing regular flights over Ukraine in order to monitor the battlefield situation in the Donbass. These missions have attracted far less international attentions than had these missions were flown by multirole fighters fitted with reconnaissance pods or heavy electronic surveillance aircraft.
Sending NATO aircraft on what would be a de-facto combat mission over a war zone would have been universally perceived as a profound and provocative political statement, while using Global Hawks for the same purpose had no political repercussions. One can even envision HALE drones being sent on intelligence gathering “kamikaze” missions into other countries’ airspace, with the aim of gathering and transmitting as much information as possible before being shot down. While doing that would be extremely provocative and costly with manned aircraft, the use of a drone has a built-in “plausible deniability” because such incursions can be chalked up to equipment malfunctions.
While Russia’s interest in HALE drones predates the wars in Ukraine and Syria, these conflicts made the need for such a vehicle felt more acutely. In order to monitor the events in both conflict zones, Russia had to resort to its small fleet of Tu-214 and Il-20 aircraft. While highly capable aircraft, they were both too much and too little for that task. Too much, because the level of sensor coverage these aircraft provide is geared to high-intensity conflicts with large opposing forces equipped with long-range air defenses. Too little, because the small number of such aircraft made it difficult and costly to establish continuous coverage. Being cheaper to procure and operate, and yet carrying powerful sensors, HALE drones are an important addition to any country’s electronic surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.
Photo: Taken from official site militaryrussia.ru
The Altair and Altius-M HALE UAV is intended to become that addition, with the former being intended chiefly for civilian uses such as environmental monitoring and pipeline surveillance.
Product of the Simonov Design Bureau in Kazan, the project already exists in the form of two prototypes that are being used for testing purposes. The drone itself exhibits many features of other aircraft in the same category: long, straight wings and extensive use of composites in order to guarantee the necessary altitude and range. It is propelled by two 500hp high fuel efficiency diesel engines.
These features give the 7-ton take-off weight vehicle maximum latitude of 12km and range of 10,000km at a cruising speed of 150-250km/hr, which translates into flight endurance of 48 hours. Altius-M’s two-ton payload will enable the drone to carry not only the usual range of optical and thermal sensors, but also a synthetic-aperture ground-surveilance radar with the resolution of .1 meter at the range of 35km and 1 meter at the range of 125km. Its communications equipment allows real-time data transmission at the rate of 30 Mbps to ground stations, UAV retranslators, and satellites. The total budget for the entire program is estimated at about 6 billion rubles, and the vehicles are to become operational in the early 2020s. In addition to the obvious economic and military benefits to HALE drone use, they will also establish Russia as one of the world leaders in heavy UAV development.
The Left Forum, the country’s largest leftist conference, has banned four of five panels on the Deep State track from this year’s line-up due to baseless antisemitic charges. The Left Forum, wearing thought police hats, have arbitrarily determined some ideas are too dangerous for their constituency to hear.
Pleasepublicize this pernicious threat to free speech and academic debate, and support an alternative speaking venue the organizers and speakers have proactively put together called the “Left Out Forum.”
The Left Forum will be held on June 2-4, 2017, at John Jay Criminal College in New York City. Approximately 3,000 people attend the annual conference to hear up to 250 panels and plenaries. The alternative “Left Out Forum” panels will be on Sunday, June 4.
The four banned Deep State panels are:
Political Correctness: The Dangers of Thought Crime Police
“Terrorism”: Fake Enemies, Fraudulent Wars
False Flags: Staged, Scripted, Mass Psy-Op Events
9/11 Truth: Ground Zero for a Resistance Movement
In April, the Left Forum had received two letters with contorted, out-of-context allegations claiming some panelists were antisemitic and should not be allowed to speak. The Left Forum Board subsequently rejected three of the five panels submitted by the grassroots organizers less than a month before the conference start.
The Left Forum shared both letters with the panel organizers, whose only recourse was to email vigorous responses rebutting the false and libelous accusations. Panel speakers and many supporters wrote letters of protest as well, all of which went unanswered. The Board refused to reverse their decision to allow the three panels. The entire process had the hallmarks of a secretive grand jury.
Source: leftforum.org
Then on May 28, mere days before the conference start, the Left Forum capitulated to yet more specious allegations and cancelled a fourth panel. Supposedly a “big German organization” erroneously claimed one of the speakers was a “Holocaust denier.” Without any input from the Deep State panel organizers or speakers, ironically the Left Forum decreed verboten the panel on Political Correctness: The Dangers of Thought Crimes.
The Left Forum’s capitulation to shadowy pressure must be contextualized as part of a brazen repression of academics and activists whose alternative perspectives challenge official versions of controversial events. Many academics—including several Deep State panel speakers—have been fired or suspended, almost all without reprieve. It has been well documented that much of this thought policing (though not all) is a sophisticated, organized meta strategy to oppose any criticism of Israel.
The following are just a few examples of silencing dissent by labeling it “antisemitic” based on an extreme, warped interpretation of hate speech.
The criminal machinations of terrorist-troll Josh Goldberg, who hides behind multiple online personalities in order to frame non-Jews on trumped-up antisemitic charges
The witch hunt of Alison Weir, founder of If Americans Knew and a leading advocate for the human rights of Palestinians
The Canary Missionwebsite which publicizes and monitors alleged “antisemitic” academics
Amazon’s banishment (i.e., cyber book burning) of scores of books with alternative views on WWII
Given the conference theme is “Resistance,” it is alarming that the Left Forum is using neo-McCarthyist tactics to thwart resistance by grassroots activists of official narratives that in the United States of America should be allowed free, open, unobstructed inquiry.
The organizers and speakers of the banned panels are resisting this Left Forum censorship by presenting the four banned panels at a location near the Left Forum’s John Jay Criminal College venue.
Due to a pattern of harassment by Zionists elements to shut down free speech, the location of the banned panels will not be announced until Sunday, June 4, 9:00am EST at http://noliesradio.org/secret.
The Deep State panel line-up on Sunday, June 4 will be:
”Left Out Forum” – Banned Panels
10:00-11:50 – Political Correctness: The Dangers of Thought Crime Police
12:00-1:50 – Co-Opting the Left: Infiltration by the Corporate State to Neutralize Resistance
Speakers: Kevin Zeese, Glen Ford
Moderator: Cheryl Curtiss
Room 1.91, John Jay Criminal College
See attached for a full description of the five Deep State panels and panelist bios.
An important sister panel—Deep State 2.0: Against Anti-Semitism, But Critical of Zionism—features Alison Weir and will be presented on Saturday, 10:00 a.m., Room 1.93, John JayCriminal College. Weir has authored an extraordinary landmark report that documents an international Zionist campaign to criminalize criticism of Israel as antisemitic.
Additionally, see the revealing 1:45-minute video of ex-Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky, explaining the “antisemitic” trick.
Another sister panel to be presented at the Left Forum is How New 9/11 Legal Actions Redefine Resistance, Saturday, 12:00 p.m., Room 1.93, John JayCriminal College.
All Deep State panels will be live video-streamed on the Internet courtesy of No Lies Radio. More information is available at http://noliesradio.org/leftfor um
The Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) have repelled a large ISIS attack in western Nineveh near the Iraqi-Syrian border.
On Monday, the PMU reached the border with Syria and started digging trenches and preparing positions in order to secure the recently liberated border area and to prepare for a push to liberate villages north of the important ISIS-held town of al-Baaj.
The PMU advance will be actively supported by the Iraqi Air Force. The same approach was implemented during the liberation of Qairawan in May.
If PMU fighters are able to liberate al-Baaj from ISIS, they will significantly expand their control zone along the border with Syria and will set a foothold for possible operations in the direction of Qaim, the Iraqi side of the Syrian al-Bukamal border area.
The successful anti-ISIS operation of the PMU in the border area faced a cold response from US-backed forces in Syria. Kurdish security forces affiliated with the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) declared the PMU a threat to the SDF-held area. Then, reports appeared in pro-SDF media that the US-backed force will not tolerate any kind of corridor between Iran and ‘the Syrian regime’ and will oppose any PMU attempt to enter the Syrian territory.
Meanwhile, sources in US-backed militant groups operating in southeastern Syria revealed that the US-led coalition increased supplies, including vehicles and anti-tank guided missiles, to its proxies operating in the al-Tanf area near the border with Iraq.
On Wednesday, the PMU spokesperson, Ahmed al-Assadi, said
“armed troops either from army, al-Hashd al-Shaabi [the PMU] or the army’s elite Counter-Terrorism Service crossing the Iraqi borders requires voting by Iraqi parliament as constitution does not allow intervention in other countries’ affairs.”
However, this statement is just a formal declaration. Fighters of some PMU factions such as Hezbollah al-Nujabaa and the Al-Imam Ali Battalions, are already deployed in Syria.
The campaign in Baaj runs simultaneously with government troop operations in Mosul, the biggest ISIS stronghold in Iraq. Iraqi security forces are working to tighten the siege on ISIS terrorists in Old Mosul and in the nearby areas and are preparing for a final push into the ISIS-held area. The terrorist group is in no-win situation.
Candidate Trump promised he’d move America’s embassy to Jerusalem, claiming an “unbreakable bond” and “special (bilateral) relationship.”
An earlier statement on his behalf said he
“acknowledged that Jerusalem has been the eternal capital of the Jewish people for over 3,000 years, and that the United States, under a Trump administration, will finally accept the long-standing congressional mandate to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel.”
The 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, passed by Congress to relocate America’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the international city, calls Jerusalem an “undivided city in which the rights of every ethnic and religious group are protected.”
It urged the executive branch to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move America’s embassy there, calling the city “the spiritual center of Judaism.”
It’s religiously important for Muslims, Christians and Jews. For Zionists, it’s the symbol of Judaism’s revival and prominence. For Christians, it’s where Jesus lived and died.
For Muslims, it’s their third holiest site (location of the Al-Aqsa Mosque) – after Mecca’s Sacred Mosque and Mosque of the Prophet in Madina.
After its 1967 annexation, East Jerusalem underwent legal and bureaucratic changes to its physical, cultural and spiritual character under Israel’s Judaization plan.
Settlements were established and expanded on stolen Palestinian land. Decades of ethnic cleansing, home demolitions, the Separation Wall, and other draconian measures followed, aiming to entirely Judaize the city.
Palestinian culture and religious heritage are threatened by the establishment of “facts on the ground,” a process ongoing for half a century this month.
Trump earlier said Israel wants America’s embassy there.
“Well, I am for that 100%,” he blustered, adding “I will be very good to Israel.”
US and Israeli media reports now say he’s expected to renew the waiver on keeping Washington’s embassy in Tel Aviv before a Thursday midnight deadline – though he still envisions an eventual move, according to unnamed senior White House officials.
His waiver will reportedly delay moving America’s embassy for six months, reconsideration again at that time.
According to an unnamed White House official, relocating America’s embassy to Jerusalem is
“something (he) supports…If he signs a waiver (as expected), that will not be indicative of him reversing his opinion.”
“It will just be a question of timing. It will be when (relocation occurs), not if…Israeli government institutions are in Jerusalem. (The) definition of a capital is where (a) government is headquartered.”
Arab leaders and others warned Trump against making the move, explaining it would incite anti-American hostility throughout the Muslim world more than already.
It would kill another peace process attempt before initiated. Trump administration officials are divided on the move.
Supporters include chief White House strategist Steve Bannon, Trump’s Zionist ambassador to Israel David Friedman and neocon UN envoy Nikki Haley.
Secretary of State Tillerson, Defense Secretary Mattis and National Security Advisor McMaster oppose the move.
On May 25, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee commemorated the 50th anniversary of Israel’s June 1967 Six-Day War (of aggression) and Jerusalem’s reunification under its control – by unanimous bipartisan voice vote.
The action reaffirmed the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, calling the city “the capital of the State of Israel.” Full Senate and House action are expected to follow.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
Let’s start with 28 EU leaders discussing the Western Balkans at a recent summit and blaming – what else – “Russian aggression” in the EU’s backyard.
Cue to a Montenegro prosecutor raging that “Russian state bodies” staged a coup attempt during the October 2016 elections to stop the country from joining NATO.
And cue to President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker warning that Donald Trump’s anti-EU rhetoric could lead to war in the Balkans. Juncker, condescending as ever, maintains that,
“If we leave them to themselves — Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska, Macedonia, Albania, all of these countries — we will have a war again.”
The Balkans may be about to explode – all over again. Yet with a twist; unlike 1999, NATO won’t get away with bombing a defenseless Belgrade for 78 days. A new generation of Russian missiles would easily prevent it.
The 1999 tragedy in the Balkans was essentially stirred up by fake massacres in Kosovo set up by the BND – German intelligence — using local Albanians and BND agent provocateurs, who shot both sides to stir up a war and break up Yugoslavia.
All Eyes on Albania
What’s evolving at the current geopolitical juncture is even murkier.
The usual suspects do what they usually do; blame Russia, and damn any evidence.
So let a knowledgeable insider, Dr. Olsi Jazexhi (image on the right), director of the Free Media Institute in Tirana, Albania, be our guide.
In December 2016, the CIA’s John Brennan went to Albania and issued a fatwa for “war against Russia” – especially in Macedonia.
“after Brennan left Edi Rama, Prime Minister of Albania, a close friend of George Soros, gathered all Albanian political parties in Macedonia and ordered them to support Zoran Zaev against Nikola Gruevski. Gruevski is seen as filo-Russian and anti-NATO, while Zaev is a lapdog of Soros. As a result, Gruevski was boycotted by Albanians and Zaev had their support to form a government. The promise of Zaev to Albanians is that Macedonia will adapt Albanian as an official language and create a third (half) Albanian state in the Balkans. Macedonians are resisting, but Tirana and Edi Rama are orchestrating Albanian political parties against Gruevski. The end game is to make Macedonia a NATO member.”
Meanwhile, in Kosovo – essentially a nasty narco-Mafioso scam posing as a state and housing Camp Bondsteel, the largest overseas US military base on the planet — Hashim Thaci, the president and former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) goon, is “building an army for Kosovo. The final aim is to integrate Kosovo into NATO even though Serbia rejects this for its former autonomous province.”
Jazexhi also details how,
“in Albania, we have two major terrorist organizations being protected by the Americans and the Europeans.”
The first is what Ankara describes as the Fetullah Gulen Terror organization (FETO), allegedly instrumentalized by German intelligence;
“Turkey is protesting why Albania hosts the FETO group but the Americans host them against Erdogan.”
The second is Mojahedin-e Khalq (MKO), which fights against Tehran;
“Albania is being turned into the center of MKO. John Bolton was recently in Tirana, with other international supporters of MKO, and they are attacking Iran and calling for regime change.”
The MKO’s wacky Marjam Rajavi has also visited Tirana, developing plans to “topple the Ayatollahs” in Iran.
The key issue, as Jazexhi emphasizes, is that
“after turning the Balkans into a recruiting center for ISIS/Daesh during the Syria war, now the Americans are turning Albania into a jihad 2.0 state.”
So what is developing is “the same historical mistake as made by the Albanians of Kosovo, who have 100% linked their future with Camp Bondsteel and would will be instantly re-invaded by Serbia in case NATO or the US leave (which they will, sooner or later, inevitably).
Meanwhile, the European Union and the Americans, who want to de-radicalize the Wahhabi Muslims of Europe, keep mum about the Iranian jihadis.”
The “Invisible” Enemy
So the key piece of the puzzle is the configuration of Albania as the center of Jihad 2.0 — against the Slavs in Macedonia, against Tehran, and also against Ankara. No wonder the chief adviser of the Albanian government, until a few months ago, was a certain Tony Blair.
But then there is the “invisible” enemy that really matters.
In late March, Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic went to Beijing in his last official visit before the April 2 elections. Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed that economic cooperation with Serbia – and the Balkans at large – is a priority for China.
No question. In 2014, Beijing created a fund that will invest 10 billion euros in Central and Eastern Europe. Last year, China Everbright bought Tirana’s airport in Albania. China Exim Bank is financing highway construction in both Macedonia and Montenegro.
In Serbia, China Road and Bridge Corporation built the 170 million euro Pupin bridge over the Danube in Belgrade – a.k.a. the “Sino-Serbian Friendship Bridge”, inaugurated in 2014 and 85% financed by a China Exim Bank loan.
And the cherry in the (infrastructure development) cake is the 350 km, $2.89 billion high-speed rail line between Athens and Budapest, via Macedonia and Belgrade.
The EU has set off alarm bells on the flagship $1.8 billion Budapest-Belgrade stretch, investigating whether the Hungarian section violated strict EU laws according to which public tenders are a must for large transportation projects.
Inbuilt is the proverbial Western haughtiness, ruling that the Chinese could not possibly be capable of building high-speed rail infrastructure as well if not better – and for a lower cost – than in Europe.
Budapest-Belgrade happens to be the crucial stretch of the Land Sea Express Route that Beijing pledged to build, way back in 2014, with Hungary, Serbia and Macedonia. That’s the crux of the Southeastern Europe node of the New Silk Roads, now Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); a trade corridor between the container port of Pireus, in the Mediterranean – co-owned by China Ocean Shipping Company since 2010 – all the way to Central Europe.
NATO’s official spin is that it must be planted in the Balkans to fight the “threat of terrorism.” According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (image on the left, source: NATO),
“I recently visited Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo, and I’m encouraged to see how focused they are on countering the threat of foreign fighters.”
Well, the “foreign fighters” happen to be right at home, not only in Kosovo but soon in Albania, the capital of Jihad 2.0. NATO after all excels in creating emerging “threats” that are essential to justify its existence.
Jihad 2.0 may be directed against Slavs in Macedonia, against Iran and against Turkey. Not to mention against the Russian underbelly. The invisible angle is that they can always be deployed to jeopardize China’s drive to integrate southeast Europe as a key node of the New Silk Roads.
“Uma ordem internacional baseada nas normas, que promova a paz entre as nações, salvaguarde a soberania, a integridade territorial e a independência política de todos os Estados e assegure a proteção dos direitos humanos”: é o que dizem querer os líderes do G7 realizado em Taormina, ao lado da base de Sigonella, centro estratégico no Mediterrâneo para a guerra e operações secretas dos EUA e da Otan que destruíram o Estado líbio e tentaram fazer o mesmo na Síria, aumentando o trágico êxodo de migrantes por cujos direitos humanos o G7 se diz preocupado.
As declarações reproduzem a da Cúpula da Otan de Bruxelas: o G7 é formado pelos seis maiores países da Otan mais o Japão, principal aliado dos EUA e da Otan na Ásia. Não faltam as divergências econômicas e políticas, camufladas pelas posições divergentes sobre o clima e os migrantes.
Na Cupula da Otan Trump irritou Merkel e outros, recordando que “os EUA gastam com a defesa mais do que todos os demais países da Otan juntos”. Exigiu em tom peremptório que todos os aliados mantenham o compromisso que assumiram em 2014 com o presidente Obama, de destinar ao setor militar ao menos 2% do PIB. Até agora, além dos EUA, somente a Grécia, a Estônia, a Grã Bretanha e a Polônia superaram esse piso.
A Itália, calcula o Sipri (Instituto Internacional de Pesquisas sobre a Paz de Estocolmo, sigla em inglês) gasta com o setor militar 1,55% do PIB, ou seja, cerca de 70 milhões de euros por dia. Chegando ao nível da Grécia (2,36%, apesar da crise econômica), despenderia mais de 100 milhões ao dia; se chegasse ao nível dos EUA (3,61%), gastaria mais de 160 milhões de euros por dia. 2%, insiste Trump, é insuficiente para os crescentes compromissos da Aliança.
A Cúpula de Bruxelas anunciou que a Otan entra na “Coalizão global para derrotar o Isis” (sob comando dos EUA como da Otan), de que já são membros os 28 países da Aliança. A Otan fornecerá aviões Awacs e forças especiais para operações que, com a motivação de combater o Isis (na realidade funcional à estratégia dos EUA e da Otan de destruir Estados), visam a penetrar na Síria para desmembrar seu território e cercar o Irã.
A Cúpula também anunciou um aumento das tropas da Otan no Afeganistão, que hoje totalizam 13 mil homens.
Na Europa a Otan continua sua expansão para o Leste: entra como o 29° membro, já convidado à Cúpula, Montenegro, que apesar de sua pequena dimensão, é importante por sua posição geoestratégica e pelos seus bunkers, para os quais a Otan deslocará enormes quantidades de armas, provavelmente também nucleares, e caças-bombardeiros.
A Otan – declarou na Cúpula o secretário geral Stoltenberg – “deve reagir”, porque tem diante de si uma “Rússia que usa a força militar para mudar as fronteiras na Europa com as suas ações agressivas contra a Ucrânia, anexando ilegalmente a Crimeia e continuando a desetabilizar a Ucrânia oriental”. Ultrapassando o próprio Trump, que falou em geral das “ameaças provenientes da Rússia às fronteiras orientais da Otan”, a Cúpula relançou a acusação à Rússia de pretender mudar as fronteiras na Europa com um uso agressivo da força militar. Acusação que renova a da velha guerra fria, prevendo um cenário de tanques de guerra russos invadindo a Europa.
A promessa eleitoral de Trump de abrir uma negociação com Moscou se arrebenta na parede, invisível mas possante, dos círculos dominantes estadunidenses e europeus que, apontando para uma nova guerra fria, bloqueiam toda tratativa com Moscou ameaçando o próprio Trump de impeachment sob a acusação de conivência com o inimigo.
A sombra da derrotada Clinton persegue Trump, sentando-se como uma convidada de pedra nas Cúpulas da Otan e do G7.
O Daily Mail de Londres, num artigo de 2013, confirmou a existência de um projecto anglo-americano endossado pela Casa Branca (com a assistência do Qatar) para efectuar um ataque com armas químicas na Síria e atribuir a culpa a Bashar Al Assad.
O artigo seguinte no Mail Online foi publicado e a seguir removido. Note-se o discurso contraditório: “Obama emitiu advertência ao presidente sírio Bashar al Assad”, “Casa Branca dá sinal verde a ataque com armas químicas”.
Esta reportagem no Mail Online publicada em Janeiro de 2013 foi removida a seguir.
Para mais pormenores clique aqui .
O treino do Pentágono de “rebeldes” (também conhecidos como terroristas do Al Qaeda) na utilização de armas químicas.
A CNN acusa Bashar Al Assad de matar seu próprio povo enquanto também reconhece que os “rebeldes” não só estão na posse de armas químicas como também que estes “terroristas moderados” filiados à Al Nusra são treinados na utilização de armas químicas por especialistas sob contrato com o Pentágono.
Numa lógica enviesada, o mandato do Pentágono era assegurar que os rebeldes alinhados com a Al Qaeda não adquiririam ou utilizariam ADM, ao realmente treiná-lo na utilização de armas químicas (soa contraditório):
“O treino [em armas químicas], o qual está a realizar-se na Jordânia e na Turquia, envolve como monitorar e proteger stocks de matérias-primas e manusear sítios e materiais com armas, de acordo com as fontes. Alguns dos empreiteiros estão no terreno na Síria a trabalhar com os rebeldes para monitorar alguns dos sítios, segundo um dos responsáveis.
A nacionalidade dos treinadores não foi revelada, embora os responsáveis previnam contra a hipótese de serem todos americanos. ( CNN , 09/Dezembro/2012).
Captura de écran do artigo da CNN.
O link original foi redireccionado para blogs da CNN.
Quem está a efectuar o treino de terroristas na utilização de armas químicas? De fonte confiável: a CNN
E estes são os mesmos terroristas (treinados pelo Pentágono) que são os alegados alvos da campanha de bombardeamento anti-terrorista de Washington iniciada por Obama em Agosto de 2014:
“O esquema estabelecido pelo Pentágono em 2012 consistiu em equipar e treina rebeldes Al Qaeda na utilização de armas químicas, com o apoio de empreiteiros militares contratados pelo Pentágono – e a seguir sustentar que o governo sírio era responsável por utilizar as ADM contra o povo sírio.
O que está a desdobrar-se é um cenário diabólico – o qual é uma parte integral do planeamento militar – nomeadamente uma situação em que terroristas da oposição aconselhados pelos empreiteiros ocidentais da defesa estão realmente na posse de armas químicas.
Isto não é um exercício de treino rebelde em não-proliferação. Enquanto o presidente Obama declara que “você será responsabilizado” se “você” (referindo-se ao governo sírio) utilizar armas químicas, o que é contemplado como parte desta operação encoberta é a posse de armas químicas pelos terroristas patrocinados pelos EUA-NATO, nomeadamente “pelos nossos” operacionais filiados à Al Qaeda, incluindo a Frente Al Nusra, a qual constitui o mais eficaz grupo combatente financiado e treinado pelo ocidente, em grande parte integrado por mercenários estrangeiros. Numa distorção amarga, Jabhat al-Nusra, um “activo de inteligência” patrocinado pelos EUA, foi colocado recentemente na lista de organizações terroristas do Departamento de Estado.
O ocidente afirma que vem para resgatar o povo sírio, cujas vidas estão alegadamente ameaçadas por Bashar Al Assad. A verdade é que a aliança militar ocidental não só está a apoiar os terroristas, incluindo a Frente Al Nusra, como também a tornar disponíveis armas químicas para a sua “oposição” de forças rebeldes.
A fase seguinte deste cenário diabólico é que as armas químicas nas mãos de operacionais da Al Qaeda serão utilizadas contra civis, o que potencialmente poderia levar toda uma nação a um desastre humanitário.
A questão mais ampla é: quem é uma ameaça para o povo sírio? O governo sírio de Bashar al Assad ou a aliança militar EUA-NATO-Israel, a qual está a recrutar forças terroristas de “oposição”, as quais estão agora a ser treinadas na utilização de armas químicas” ( Michel Chossudosvsky , 08/Maio/2013).
The bailout measures of late 2008 may have consequences at least as grave for an open society as the response to 9/11 in 2001. Many members of Congress felt coerced at the time into voting against their inclinations, and the normal procedures for orderly consideration of a bill were dispensed with.
The excuse for bypassing normal legislative procedures was the existence of an emergency. But one of the most reprehensible features of the legislation, that allowed Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to permit bailed-out institutions to use public money for exorbitant salaries and bonuses, was inserted by Paulson after the immediate crisis had passed.
According to Congressman Peter Welch (D-Vermont) the bailout bill originally called for a cap on executive salaries, but Paulson changed the requirement at the last minute. Welch and other members of Congress were enraged by “news that banks getting taxpayer-funded bailouts are still paying exorbitant salaries, bonuses, and other benefits.”[1] In addition, as the Associated Press reported in October 2008, “Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. questioned allowing banks that accept bailout bucks to continue paying dividends on their common stock. ‘There are far better uses of taxpayer dollars than continuing dividend payments to shareholders,’ he said.”[2]
Even more reprehensible is the fact that after the bailouts, Paulson and the Treasury Department refused to provide details of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) spending of hundreds of billions of dollars, while the New York Federal Reserve refused to provide information about its own bailout (using government-backed loans) that amounted to trillions. This lack of transparency was challenged by Fox TV in a FOIA suit against the Treasury Department, and a suit by Bloomberg News against the Fed.[3]
The financial bailout legislation of September 2008 was only passed after members of both Congressional houses were warned that failure to act would threaten civil unrest and the imposition of martial law.
U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., and U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., both said U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson brought up a worst-case scenario as he pushed for the Wall Street bailout in September. Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO, said that might even require a declaration of martial law, the two noted.[4]
Here are the original remarks by Senator Inhofe:
Speaking on Tulsa Oklahoma’s 1170 KFAQ, when asked who was behind threats of martial law and civil unrest if the bailout bill failed, Senator James Inhofe named Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as the source. “Somebody in D.C. was feeding you guys quite a story prior to the bailout, a story that if we didn’t do this we were going to see something on the scale of the depression, there were people talking about martial law being instituted, civil unrest… who was feeding you guys this stuff?,” asked host Pat Campbell. “That’s Henry Paulson,” responded Inhofe. “We had a conference call early on, it was on a Friday I think – a week and half before the vote on Oct. 1. So it would have been the middle… what was it – the 19th of September, we had a conference call. In this conference call – and I guess there’s no reason for me not to repeat what he said, but he said – he painted this picture you just described. He said, ‘This is serious. This is the most serious thing that we faced.’”[5]
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA 27th District) reported the same threat on the Congressional floor:
The only way they can pass this bill is by creating a panic atmosphere… Many of us were told that the sky would fall… A few of us were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no. That’s what I call fear-mongering, unjustified, proven wrong.[6]
So it is clear that threats of martial law were used to get this reprehensible bailout legislation passed. It also seems clear that Congress was told of a threat of martial law, not itself threatened. It is still entirely appropriate to link such talk to the Army’s rapid moves at the time to redefine its role as one of controlling the American people, not just protecting them. In a constitutional polity based on balance of powers, we have seen the emergence of a radical new military power that is as yet completely unbalanced.
The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century
Author Name: Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, EditorsISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-3-9
The Army’s New Role in 2001: Not Protecting American Society, but Controlling It. This new role for the Army is not wholly unprecedented. The U.S. military had been training troops and police in “civil disturbance planning” for the last three decades. The master plan, Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, or “Operation Garden Plot,” was developed in 1968 in response to the major protests and disturbances of the 1960s.
But on January 19, 2001, on the last day of the Clinton administration, the U.S. Army promulgated a new and permanent Continuity of Operations (COOP) Program. It encapsulated its difference from the preceding, externally oriented Army Survival, Recovery, and Reconstitution System (ASRRS) as follows:
a. In 1985, the Chief of Staff of the Army established the Army Survival, Recovery, and Reconstitution System (ASRRS) to ensure the continuity of essential Army missions and functions.
ASRRS doctrine was focused primarily on a response to the worst case 1980’s threat of a massive nuclear laydown on CONUS as a result of a confrontation with the Soviet Union.
b. The end of the Cold War and the breakup of the former Soviet Union significantly reduced the probability of a major nuclear attack on CONUS but the probability of other threats has increased. Army organizations must be prepared for any contingency with a potential for interruption of normal operations.
To emphasize that Army continuity of operations planning is now focused on the full all-hazards threat spectrum, the name “ASRRS” has been replaced by the more generic title “Continuity of Operations (COOP) Program.[7]
This document embodied the secret Continuity of Government (COG) planning conducted secretly by Rumsfeld, Cheney and others through the 1980s and 1990s.[8] This planning was initially for continuity measures in the event of a nuclear attack, but soon called for suspension of the Constitution, not just “after a nuclear war” but for any “national security emergency”. This was defined in Reagan’s Executive Order 12656 of November 18, 1988, as “any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.” The effect was to impose on domestic civil society the extreme measures once planned for a response to a nuclear attack from abroad.[9] In like fashion, ARR 500-3 Regulation clarified that it was a plan for “the execution of mission-essential functions without unacceptable interruption during a national security or domestic emergency.”
Donald Rumsfeld, who as a private citizen had helped author the COG planning, promptly signed and implemented the revised ARR 500-3. Eight months later, on 9/11, Cheney and Rumsfeld implemented COG, a significant event of which we still know next to nothing.[10] What we do know is that plans began almost immediately – as foreseen by COG planning the 1980s – to implement warrantless surveillance and detention of large numbers of civilians, and that in January 2002 the Pentagon submitted a proposal for deploying troops on American streets.[11]
Then in April 2002, Defense officials implemented a plan for domestic U.S. military operations by creating a new U.S. Northern Command (CINC-USNORTHCOM) for the continental United States.[12] In short, what were being implemented were the most prominent features of the COG planning which Oliver North had worked on in the 1980s.
“Deep Events” and Changes of Party in the White House
Like so many other significant steps since World War Two towards a military-industrial state, the Army’s Regulation 500-3 surfaced in the last days of a departing administration (in this case the very last day). It is worth noticing that, ever since the 1950s, dubious events – of the unpublic variety I have called deep events – have marked the last months before a change of party in the White House. These deep events have tended to a) constrain the incoming president, if he is a Democrat or, alternatively, b) to pave the way for the incomer, if he is a Republican.
Consider, in the first category, the following (when a Republican was succeeded by a Democrat):
– In December 1960 the CIA secured approval for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and escalated events in Laos into a crisis for which the Joint Chiefs proposed sending 60 000 troops. These events profoundly affected President Kennedy’s posture towards Cuba and Indochina.
– In 1976 CIA Director George H.W. Bush installed an outside Team B intelligence unit to enlarge drastically estimates of the Soviet threat to the United States, eventually frustrating and reversing presidential candidate Jimmy Carter’s campaign pledge to cut the U.S. defense budget.[13]
Equally important were events in the second category (when a Democrat was succeeded by a Republican):
– In late 1968 Kissinger, while advising the Johnson administration, gave secret information to the Nixon campaign that helped Nixon to obstruct the peace agreement in Vietnam that was about to be negotiated at the peace talks then taking place in Paris. (According to Seymour Hersh, “The Nixon campaign, alerted by Kissinger to the impending success of the peace talks, was able to get a series of messages to the Thieu government” in Saigon, making it clear that a Nixon presidency would offer a better deal. This was a major factor in securing the defeat of Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey.[14] Kissinger was not the kind of person to have betrayed his president on his own personal initiative. At the time Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell (one of the very few in on the secret), told Hersh, “I thought Henry [Kissinger] was doing it because Nelson [Rockefeller] wanted him to. Nelson asked Henry to help and he did.”[15]
– In 1980 the so-called October Surprise, with the help of people inside the CIA, helped ensure that the Americans held hostage in Iran would not be returned before the inauguration of Reagan. This was a major factor in securing the defeat of incumbent Jimmy Carter.[16] Once again, the influence of the Rockefellers can be discerned. A CIA officer later reported hearing Joseph V. Reed, an aide to David Rockefeller, comment in 1981 to William Casey, the newly installed CIA Director, about their joint success in disrupting Carter’s plans to bring home the hostages.[17]
Both the financial bailout, extorted from Congress and the escalated preparations for martial law can be seen as transitional events of the first category. Whatever the explanations for their timing, they constrained Obama’s freedom to make his own policies. Moreover they have the consequence of easing this country into unforeseen escalations of the Afghan war.
SPECIAL: Global Economic Crisis + Globalization of Poverty
Author Name: Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, Editors | Michel Chossudovsky
Let us deal first with the preparations for martial law. In late September 2008, at the height of the financial meltdown, The Army Times announced the redeployment of an active Brigade Army Team from Iraq to America, in a new mission that “may become a permanent part of the active Army”:
The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.
Now they’re training for the same mission – with a twist – at home.
Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks… After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one… They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control.[18]
This announcement followed by two weeks the talk of civil unrest and martial law that was used to panic the Congress into passing Paulson’s bailout legislation. Not only that, the two unprecedented events mirror each other: the bailout debate anticipated civil unrest and martial law, while the announced positioning of an active Brigade Combat Team on U.S. soil anticipated civil unrest (such as might result from the bailout legislation).
Then on December 17, 2008, U.S. Northern Command chief General Renuart announced that “the US military plans to mobilize thousands of troops to protect Washington against potential terrorist attack during the inauguration of president-elect Barack Obama.”[19]
The U.S. Army War College also raised the possibility of the U.S. Army being used to control civil unrest, according to the Phoenix Business Journal:
A new report by the U.S. Army War College talks about the possibility of Pentagon resources and troops being used should the economic crisis lead to civil unrest, such as protests against businesses and government or runs on beleaguered banks.
“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” said the War College report.
The study says economic collapse, terrorism and loss of legal order are among possible domestic shocks that might require military action within the U.S.[20]
It is clear that there has been a sustained move in the direction of martial law preparations, a trend that has been as continuous as it has been unheralded. Senator Leahy was thus right to draw our attention to it on September 29, 2006, in his objections to the final form of the Fiscal Year 2007 National Defense Authorization Act, which gave the president increased power to call up the National Guard for law enforcement:
It… should concern us all that the Conference agreement includes language that subverts solid, longstanding Posse Comitatus statutes that limit the military’s involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law. There is good reason for the constructive friction in existing law when it comes to martial law declarations.[21]
This quiet agglomeration of military power has not “just growed”, like Topsy, through inadvertence. It shows sustained intention, even if no one has made a public case for it.
*1 BOX = 30 BOOKS – SPECIAL OFFER: The Global Economic Crisis
Author Name: Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, EditorsISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-3-9
1. WCAX, Burlington, Vermont, http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S= 9567271, 22 December 2008; Cf. CNBC, http://www.cnbc.com/id/27423117, 30 October 2008: ” ‘You can get paid $30 million under this program’, says Michael Kesner, who heads Deloitte Consulting executive compensation practice, ‘There’s no limit on what you can get paid.’ “ 2. John Dunbar, AP, http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081025/meltdown_evolving_bailout.html, 25 October 2007. 3. David Hirst, “Fox Joins Battle cry for Details of US Bail-out”, BusinessDay, http://www.businessday.com.au/business/fox-joins-battle-cry-for-details-of-us-bailout-20081223-74eh.html?page=-1, 24 December 2008. 4. Mike Sunnucks, “Ariz. Police say they are Prepared as War College warns Military must prep for Unrest; IMF warns of Economic Riots”, Phoenix Business Journal, http://phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2008/12/15/daily34.html, 17 December 2008. 5. 1170 KFAQ, “Paulson Was Behind Bailout Martial Law Threat”, Blacklisted News, http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-2367-0-13-13–.html, 23 November 2008. 6. Rep. Brad Sherman, in the House, 8:07 EST PM, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaG9d_4zij8&NR=1, 2 October 2008; Rep. Sherman later issued the following clarification: “I have no reason to think that any of the leaders in Congress who were involved in negotiating with the Bush Administration regarding the bailout bill ever mentioned the possibility of martial law – again, that was just an example of extreme and deliberately hyperbolic comments being passed around by members not directly involved in the negotiations.” See Rep. Sherman, Alex Jones Show, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bH1mO8qhCs. 7. Army Regulation 500-3, “Emergency Employment of Army and Other Resources”, Army Continuity Of Operations (COOP) Program, http://www.wikileaks.org/leak/us-army-reg-500-3-continuity-2001.pdf, emphasis added; Tom Burghardt, “Militarizing the ‘Homeland’ in Response to the Economic and Political Crisis: NORTHCOM’s Joint Task Force-Civil Support”, Global Research, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10534, 11 October 2008. 8. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2007, p. 183-87; James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, New York, Viking, 2004, p. 138-45. 9. Peter Dale Scott, Road to 9/11, op. cit., p. 183-87. 10. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Report, p. 38, 326; 555, footnote 9; Peter Dale Scott, Road to 9/11, op. cit., p. 228-30. 11. Ritt Goldstein, “Foundations are in Place for Martial Law in the US”, Sydney Morning Herald, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/ 2002/07/27/10274974183 39.html, 27 July 2002. 12. Peter Dale Scott, Road to 9/11, op. cit., p. 240-41. 13. Ibid., p. 60-61. 14. Robert Parry, “Henry Kissinger, Eminence Noire”, ConsortiumNews, http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/122808.html, 28 December 2008: “Kissinger… – while serving as a peace-talk adviser to the Johnson administration – made obstruction of the peace talks possible by secretly contacting people working for Nixon, according to Seymour Hersh’s 1983 book, The Price of Power”, p. 21. 15. Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power, 1983, p. 18; Jim Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of America, New York, William Morrow, 1978, p. 435: “Kissinger, married to a former Rockefeller aide, owner of a Georgetown mansion whose purchase was enabled only by Rockefeller gifts and loans, was always the protégé of his patron, Nelson R[ockefeller], even when he wasn’t directly employed by him.” 16. Peter Dale Scott, Road to 9/11, op. cit., p. 93-118. 17. Ibid. p. 82-87, 91, 104-05. 18. Gina Cavallaro, “Brigade Homeland Tours Start Oct. 1”, Army Times, http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland _090708w/, 30 September 2008; Michel Chossudovsky, “Pre-election Militarization of the North American Homeland, US Combat Troops in Iraq Repatriated to ‘Help with Civil Unrest’”, Global Research, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? context= va&aid=10341, 26 September 2008. 19. AFP, Agence France-Presse, http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iTBOy3JF8pVAthIthq8C1NrMf4Cg, 17 De- cember 2008. 20. Mike Sunnucks, “Ariz. Police say they are Prepared as War College warns Military must prep for Unrest; IMF warns of Economic Riots”, Phoenix Business Journal, http://phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2008/12/ 15/daily34.html, 17 December 2008. 21. Remarks Of Sen. Patrick Leahy, “National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2007 Conference Report”, Congressional Record, http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200609/092906b.html, 29 September 2006.
Recently, terrorist attacks have unfolded across Indonesia, a militant network disrupted along the Thai-Malaysian border and full-scale military operations including aerial bombing deployed as Philippine troops fought to take back Marawi City on the southern island of Mindanao, all linked or affiliated with the Islamic State.
A dangerously deceptive narrative is being crafted by US and European media organisations, the same sort of narrative that was used to conceal the true source of the Islamic State’s fighting capacity across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region beginning as early as 2011.
An eruption of violence in the southern Philippines and suicide bombings in Indonesia this week highlight the growing threat posed by militant backers of the Islamic State in Southeast Asia.
While the timing of the Jakarta bombings and the fighting on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao appears to be coincidental, experts on terrorism have been warning for months that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has provided a new basis for cooperation among extremists in the region.
However, back in reality, the Islamic State is no different than any other military force. Its members require food, water and shelter daily. They require weapons and ammunition. They require uniforms. They need transportation, which in turn requires fuel, maintenance personnel and spare parts. And most important of all, the Islamic State requires a steady stream of recruits made possible only through organised education and indoctrination.
For the scale the Islamic State is doing this on, stretching across MENA and now reaching into Southeast Asia, confounding the response of not just individual nation-states but entire blocs of nations attempting to confront this growing threat, it is abundantly clear the Islamic State is not fulfilling these prerequisites on its own.
Its doing this all through state sponsorship, a reality rarely mentioned by the New York Times, Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, CNN, the BBC and others. Those acquiring their worldview through these media organisations are setting themselves up and those depending on their analysis for tragic failure.
Education and Indoctrination: Who is Feeding the Fire?
The ranks of the Islamic State in Southeast Asia are being filled by a regional network of extremist indoctrination conducted in institutions posing as Islamic boarding schools known as madrasas. Those institutions indoctrinating local populations with notions of extremism and inspiring them to take up violence and terrorism share a common denominator; Saudi funding.
Former US President Barack Obama with Saudi King Salman (Source: New Eastern Outlook)
Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University, Yousaf Butt, in a Huffington Post article titled, “How Saudi Wahhabism Is the Fountainhead of Islamist Terrorism,” would put Saudi funding of such extremist networks into perspective, stating:
It would be troublesome but perhaps acceptable for the House of Saud to promote the intolerant and extremist Wahhabi creed just domestically. But, unfortunately, for decades the Saudis have also lavishly financed its propagation abroad. Exact numbers are not known, but it is thought that more than $100 billion have been spent on exporting fanatical Wahhabism to various much poorer Muslim nations worldwide over the past three decades. It might well be twice that number. By comparison, the Soviets spent about $7 billion spreading communism worldwide in the 70 years from 1921 and 1991.
The article also lays out the cause and effect between Saudi funding and the predictable terrorism, violence and instability that follows. Yousaf Butt concludes by aptly stating:
The House of Saud works against the best interests of the West and the Muslim world. Muslim communities worldwide certainly need to eradicate fanatical Wahhabism from their midst, but this will be difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish if the West continues its support of the House of Saud. The monarchy must be modernized and modified — or simply uprooted and replaced. The House of Saud needs a thorough house cleaning.
The United States under the administration of President Donald Trump just sealed a $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, following tens of billions of dollars of weapon deals under the previous administration of President Barack Obama, and in turn following a pattern of decades of military, political and economic support for the Persian Gulf state. Western support for the House of Saud appears to be fully intact and in no danger of changing any time soon.
US President Donald Trump in Saudi Arabia, May 2017 (Source: New Eastern Outlook)
The direct connection between terrorism ranging from Al Qaeda to the Islamic State and Saudi-funded indoctrination is clear. Yet US and European media organisations attempt to muddle the issue with unwarranted ambiguity.
Over the next four decades, in non-Muslim-majority countries alone, Saudi Arabia would build 1,359 mosques, 210 Islamic centers, 202 colleges and 2,000 schools. Saudi money helped finance 16 American mosques; four in Canada; and others in London, Madrid, Brussels and Geneva, according to a report in an official Saudi weekly, Ain al-Yaqeen. The total spending, including supplying or training imams and teachers, was “many billions” of Saudi riyals (at a rate of about four to a dollar), the report said.
And continues by stating:
That is the disputed question, of course: how the world would be different without decades of Saudi-funded shaping of Islam. Though there is a widespread belief that Saudi influence has contributed to the growth of terrorism, it is rare to find a direct case of cause and effect. For example, in Brussels, the Grand Mosque was built with Saudi money and staffed with Saudi imams. In 2012, according to Saudi diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, one Saudi preacher was removed after Belgian complaints that he was a “true Salafi” who did not accept other schools of Islam. And Brussels’ immigrant neighborhoods, notably Molenbeek, have long been the home of storefront mosques teaching hard-line Salafi views.
After the terrorist attacks in Paris in November and in Brussels in March were tied to an Islamic State cell in Belgium, the Saudi history was the subject of several news media reports. Yet it was difficult to find any direct link between the bombers and the Saudi legacy in the Belgian capital.
Yet commonsense, when applied, takes into consideration the substantial intelligence networks and police states that exist across the European Union’s various members and the fact that in the aftermath of most recent terrorist attacks it is revealed that security services across Europe often had foreknowledge of suspects, their criminal backgrounds and activities as well as their ties to extremism both within their own communities in Europe and abroad upon battlefields in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya.
It is well within the means of US and European intelligence and security agencies to establish a direct link between terrorism and Saudi funding. What is lacking is the political will to do so.
A Global Expeditionary Force That Goes Where Western Troops Cannot
It is clear that despite the New York Times attempting to make a connection between Saudi-funded indoctrination at mosques and madrasas and terrorism as ambiguous as possible, Saudi funding is the primary factor driving extremism and filling the ranks of terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Coupled with covert, indirect and direct military support when these extremists reach various battlefields around the world, Saudi-funded extremism represents what is essentially a mercenary expeditionary force, auxiliaries used in pursuit of modern day empire.
As witnessed in Libya and Syria, the purpose behind the United States and Europe supporting Saudi Arabia and turning an intentional blind-eye to its global network of extremist indoctrination and the terrorist organisations these networks feed into, is targeting and overthrowing governments the United States and Europe are incapable of overthrowing directly with military force.
Source: New Eastern Outlook
Saudi-funded indoctrination filling the ranks of this virtual global mercenary force, can be used as a tool for regime change. Saudi-funded extremists were instrumental in overthrowing the Libyan government in 2011, and have led the fight to oust the Syrian government.
Saudi-funded indoctrination can also be a useful tool of geopolitical coercion, opening up opportunities for the US to sell a greater military presence in any given country targeted by Saudi-funded extremism.
Since the early 2000s, the United States has stationed military advisers in the southern Philippines to aid in the fight against Abu Sayyaf and other Islamic extremists.
Richard Javad Heydarian, a political science professor at De La Salle University in Manila, said that Mr. Duterte was under mounting pressure to address the crisis in his home island, Mindanao, and that he may need further assistance from Washington.
During a period when the Philippines finds itself pivoting away from the United States and toward Beijing and other regional allies, needing “further assistance from Washington” is a circumstance too convenient to be coincidental.
Considering how the US has used Saudi-funded extremism it has enabled elsewhere, there is need for concern not only in the Philippines, but across all of Asia regarding the Islamic State’s “sudden interest” in the region.
Asian Policymakers Only As Good As Their Sources
As obvious as the truth behind the Islamic State’s presence and perpetuation in Asia seems to be, many policymakers, politicians and people in the media across Asia appear to be mesmerised by US and European headlines and intentionally misleading analysis.
Eagerly republishing and repeating these headlines and analysis, policy and media circles find themselves mired in a deepening swamp of delusion. Within this swamp of delusion they are exposing Asia to the same threat the MENA region is now facing.
For a variety of reasons, extremism was allowed to take root and spread in nations like Libya and Syria, where political deals and cooperation with the US and Europe led toward greater violence and destabilisation, not toward resolving the issue of extremism, terrorism and national or regional security.
Source: New Eastern Outlook
Likewise in Asia, should the root of extremism and terrorism not be addressed, namely Saudi-funding and America’s and Europe’s aiding and abetting of the House of Saud, this threat will continue to be cultivated and leveraged by its creators at the cost of its Asian hosts.
While it may not be politically popular to openly expose, condemn and otherwise confront US-Saudi sponsored terrorism in fear of being ostracised from US-European media and policy circles, Asian policymakers, politicians and media should consider the fate of their MENA counterparts and the state of Libya and Syria now versus pre-2011 when there was still a chance to head off a regional humanitarian catastrophe.
The inability of Asian policymakers to clearly single out and deal with Saudi-funded, US-backed terrorism in the region allows political demagogues to play entire ethnic and religious groups off against one another, further compounding factors that fuel instability and even war. Coupled with socioeconomic factors, foreign interests seeking vectors into Asia to coerce, control or even overthrow regional governments have a wide variety of options to pick from.
Eliminating these options and closing the door to outside interference means that the Asian public must be fully and properly informed, and all forms of foreign funding and support, whether it be “schools” or nongovernmental organisations, should be called into question. It is clear that part of this process should include national and regional calls and mechanisms to end Saudi funding to organisations posing as charities, educational institutions and other fronts propagating divisive extremism.
Considering the fate of the MENA region, Asia may have only one chance to get this right. Those policymakers who prove themselves incapable of objective, truthful analysis and who find themselves simply helping along foreign interference should no longer be deferred to as policymakers, and perhaps take up a more appropriate title; lobbyists.
Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, sent a letter to senior Israeli officials on 23rd of May, urging them to cancel open tenders offering Palestinian lands declared as state property in the West Bank because Israel has no legal authority over the 1967 occupied territories.
Lawyer Suhad Bishara, director of Adalah’s Land and Planning Rights unit, wrote in the letter to Israel Land Authority (ILA) director Shimron Adiel, construction minister Yoav Galant, finance minister Moshe Kahlon, and attorney general Avichai Mandelblit that
“the ILA does not have the legal authority to offer land tenders in the West Bank.”
During 2016 and 2017, the ILA published open tenders for available plots of land in illegal West Bank settlements including Givat Ze’ev, Ma’ale Adumim, Alfei Menashe, Ariel, Beitar Illit, Karnei Shomron, and Oranit.
“The territories included in these tenders are being managed as if they are part of the State of Israel to which Israeli state law applies. This practice, for all intents and purposes, therefore annexes these territories to the State of Israel,” lawyer Bishara wrote.
“The Basic Law on Israel Lands determines that Israeli land is ‘land in Israel belonging to the state, a development authority, or to the Jewish National Fund.’ In other words: land within the territory of the State of Israel,” the letter reminded.
Adalah emphasized that this Israeli practice is a violation of the international law, which determines that any long-term changes imposed upon occupied territories must be in the interests of the protected local civilian population.
International law also forbids the occupying power from exploiting occupied territories for its general use, it added.
Trump’s first trip to a foreign country as US President was anything but dull. During his time in Saudi Arabia, there was sword dancing, glowing orb madness and a whole other host of strange behaviour. In between all of this weirdness however, there was one thing that was entirely orthodox for a US President to do when in Arabia: agree to arm the Saudis to the teeth.
The US and Saudi Arabia sealed the largest arms deal in US history during Trump’s visit, a deal worth approximately $350 billion over the next decade, although Senator Rand Paul is expected to try and block a portion of the deal. Trump’s slimeball son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was heavily involved in the negotiations, reportedly helping to get the Saudis a better deal.
This agreement once again reveals that Trump will serve the military-industrial complex well during his reign in office, as the share price of the giant war contractors soared after news of the deal broke. In the words of the former US congressman and host of the Liberty Report, Ron Paul, the military-industrial complex was the special interest that gained the most from Trump’s Saudi visit:
“This trip I would consider not a diplomatic trip. This was well-staged to serve a few special interests; and I would say the most powerful special interest that the President has kowtowed to would be the military-industrial complex. It’s up to 350 billion dollars over the next 10 years and who knows what, and Trump is just excited about this” (from 3:55 into the show).
The US-Saudi arms deal comes a month and a half after Trump launched 59 Raytheon-made Tomahawk cruise missiles at a military base controlled by the Syrian government, one of the main powers fighting against ISIS and associated ‘moderate rebels.’ The illegal military action led to an immediate surge in the value of Raytheon shares, as well as in the stocks of other war contractors whose technology was also used in the missile launch.
Since Trump’s inauguration on the 20th of January, the former real estate mogul has clearly shown a prominent militaristic side, a side which elates the military-industrial complex. In fact, some of the giants of the military-industrial complex contributed to Trump’s record-breaking inaugural fund, with both Boeing and Lockheed Martin donating $1 million each, according to a US filing.
Trump’s first prosed budget – for the fiscal year that begins on the 1st of October – is yet more confirmation that we can expect a continuation of the perennial wars under the ‘anti-interventionist’ commander-in-chief. The budget includes a 10% increase for the Pentagon (yes, the same Pentagon that couldn’t account for $6.5 trillion during the 2015 fiscal year), which will put the national security budget at over $600 billion if it is approved.
Tomahawk cruise missile (Source: Medium)
To put that in perspective, Russia’s defence budget has been well under $100 billion for years, with the 2017 budget slashing defence spending to around $50 billion. Trump’s proposed budget also includes 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles from Raytheon, helping to replenish the ones used to strike a sovereign country that is at the forefront of the real war on terrorism.
As I warned in an article published all the way back in August 2016, the idea peddled by Trump’s zealot supporters during the election campaign that Trump was somehow an anti-war, anti-interventionist candidate, was, and still is, total nonsense. Trump will continue the long tradition of US Presidents who pursued policies that enriched the military-industrial complex at the expense of an infinite number of human lives.
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning over half a century ago could not have been more prescient, as the military-industrial complex is one of most powerful special interests that rules the US today. Unfortunately, Americans did not heed Eisenhower’s warning, which he expressed in his 1961 farewell address:
“This conjunction, of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry, is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognise the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes
Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of The Analyst Report, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
On April 26/27 2017 the New York Times released a video titled How Syria and Russia Spun a Chemical Strike. This video provides extensive forensic evidence that the New York Times used to develop its conclusions about an alleged nerve agent attack in Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, 2017. In this report, I show that NONEof the forensic evidence in the New York Times video and a follow-on Times news article supports the conclusions reported by the New York Times.
The New York Times video of April 26 was immediately followed by a New York Times article titled The Times Uses Forensic Mapping to Verify a Syrian Chemical Attack. This second article describes the same erroneous conclusions of the forensic analysis reported in the earlier video, but unlike the video, it does not show the extensive forensic evidence that could be used to determine the veracity of its conclusions.
On May 5, Human Rights Watch released a report titled Death by Chemicals that also used extensive forensic evidence similar to that discussed by the New York Times. The Human Rights Watch report showed forensic evidence that was supposed to indicate the existence of an alleged the sarin release site. In my last report, I showed that this forensic video-evidence also directly contradicted the conclusions in that report.1
The forensic evidence and analytical claims in all of these reports can be traced back to a single source, an organization called Bellingcat. This organization represents itself as “specializing in analyzing information posted online.” As will be shown in what follows, not a single claim made by Bellingcat is supported by the forensic evidence it used to reach its conclusions.
The particular evidence of concern in this report are claims made by Bellingcat about three sites that were attacked by air on April 4, 2017 in Khan Sheikhoun with general-purpose bombs. The alleged locations of the locations of the sarin release site and the three sites that Bellingcat concludes were attacked with general purpose bombs are shown in Figure 1 below from the New York Times video.
Location of the sarin release site and three sites in Khan Sheikhoun that Bellingcat alleges were attacked with general-purpose bombs on April 4 2017. The alleged sarin release site that Bellingcat incorrectly asserts that there is forensic evidence of an airdropped sarin-releasing munition ( see reference 1 below for a complete discussion of that false claim)
1 The Human Rights Watch Report of May 1,2017 Cites Evidence that Disaffirms Its Own Conclusions About the Alleged Nerve Agent Attack at Khan Sheikhoun in Syria on April 4,2017, May 8, 2017
The method used by Bellingcat to find the areas of bomb damage depend on line-of-sight data established from a panoramic view of Khan Sheikhoun on the day of the attack – April 4, 2017 (see Figure 2). This composite panoramic view was derived from a video-scan of the horizon taken north of Khan Sheikhoun looking south. As can be seen from the composite panoramic shown below in Figure 2, there are three bomb-debris clouds rising from the three areas that Bellingcat asserts were bombed on April 4.
The detailed analysis that will be presented later in this paper will show that this panoramic scene could nothave been recorded on April 4, 2017as claimed by Bellingcat.
Location of bomb-debris clouds at three sites in Khan Sheikhoun that Bellingcat alleges were attacked with general-purpose bombs on April 4 2017. The detailed analysis of Bellingcat’s own forensic evidence shows that this panoramic scene could not have been recorded on April 4, 2017.
Later in this report I will show using basic information about the fundamental characteristicsof bombs that debris clouds 2 and 3 are the result of the detonations of single 500 to 1000 pound general-purpose bombs. Debris cloud 1, which has a considerably larger base diameter than clouds 1 and 2, indicates that it was created by an attack using 2 or 3 bombs in the 500 to 1000 pound weight-class or it was possibly created by secondary explosions in an ammunition dump that was hit with single or multiple bombs. That is, the damage area associated with bomb-cloud 1 is predictably considerably larger than the bomb- damage areas associated with debris clouds 2 and 3.
The Bellingcat analysts used this panoramic view from the wrong day to establish lines of sight to each of the bombed areas. They then used before and after satellite images to search along the lines of sight for areas of bomb damage. In spite of all the evidence that Bellingcat had that indicated the panoramic was from the wrong day, they still found three locations where they allege bomb damage occurred.
This report shows that NONEof the bomb-damage areas identified by Bellingcat and shown in the New York Times video show any indication of bomb damage from 500 to 1000 pound bombs. That is, the data from the panoramic view is clearly and unambiguously inconsistent with the claims of bomb damage from the satellite photographs. In fact NONEof the forensic data claimed by Bellingcat in the New York Times as evidence of general-purpose bomb damage on April 4 supports the conclusions that are said to have been derived from the forensic data. In all, when these false claims about information provided in the forensic data are brought together with the claims about a sarin release site, the conclusion is inescapable that all of the evidence referred to by Bellingcat in the New York Times shows no evidence to support their narrative.
This means that the narratives put forward by the New York Times, and the closely related Human Rights Watch report of May 1, are all based on forensic evidence and conclusions that are unambiguously false.
The specific problems with the forensic analysis produced by Bellingcat are as follows:
The panoramic view that is alleged to have been recorded on April 4, 2017 shows that the wind is blowing in the opposite direction from the reported weather in Khan Sheikhoun on that day. This is not a minor
If the wind was blowing in the opposite direction as shown in the panoramic view alleged to have been recorded on April 4, the sarin from the alleged sarin-release site would have drifted into open fields and would not have reached any populated areas for more than half a kilometer. Hence, there would be no casualties from a sarin release at this siteas alleged by the New York Times, Human Rights Watch, and Bellingcat.
Given the small size of alleged sarin releasing container (containing no more than 5 to 10 liters), and the large distance between the nearest populated area and the sarin-release site, even with near ideal weather conditions for a deadly sarin dispersal, there would have been essentially NOcasualties from the sarin-release in any densely populated areas downwind.
The three areas where Bellingcat claims bomb damage occurred show NOevidence of bomb damage consistent with the observed bomb-debris clouds that indicate the delivery of 500 to 1000 pound bombs.
One of the bomb damage sites (bomb damage area 2) is not along the line-of-sight determined by the panoramic view as claimed by Bellingcat. As such, the location of this bomb damage site contradicts the datafrom the panoramic view that was allegedly used to find
Video of an alleged bombing of a target in March 2015in Khan Sheikhoun shows a large area of heavy bomb damage that is completely inconsistent with the minuscule or nonexistent bomb damagein the three bombed sites allegedly found by Bellingcat from the alleged events on April 4, 2017.
The bomb-damage video from March 2015shows a bomb-debris cloud that is much like the large bomb-debris cloud 1 allegedly produced on April 4, 2017. While the area bombed in March 2015 shows extensive and unambiguous severe bomb damage, the area where Bellingcat alleges bomb damage at site 1 on April 4 shows only minuscule or no bomb damage. This raises very serious questions about the veracity of Bellingcat’s claims about the forensic evidence of bomb-site damage.
In summary, video sequences of the alleged bombing in March 2015 show that three bombs in the 500 to 1000 pound class were dropped on the target.
Before and after satellite images also shown in the New York Times video of the alleged site that was bombed in March 2015 show an area of roughly 400 feet diameter that was completely demolished by the alleged bombing attack.
Damage site 1 identified by Bellingcat as being associated with a similar very large bomb-debris cloud created on April 4, 2017 shows only minuscule or no damage relative to the vast area that was demolished in March 2015.
The before and after satellite images used by Bellingcat were taken 44 days apart between February 21, 2017 and April 6, 2017. This means that even if there were bomb damage seen in the April 6 images, it would not be possible to uniquely identify that damage with the April 4
However, since there is NObomb damage in any of the three bombed sites that Bellingcat identified, this is not an issue with regard to Bellingcat’s analysis. However, it does indicate that if Bellingcat had found bomb damage in the before and after satellite imagery, it could not be ascribed unambiguously as having occurred on April 4
Although the New York Times video shows a bomb debris cloud in March 2015 and a completely demolished site associated with that bombing, it appears that nobody performing the analysis of the forensic data asked an obvious question; why was a bomb debris cloud associated with a large area of heavy ground-damage in one case but either no damage or minuscule damage from the bombing could be found in the other three cases where bomb-damage debris clouds were observed?
How Bellingcat reached anyof its conclusions in the face of coherent and internally consistent forensic evidence to the contrary is inexplicable – the complete lack of any forensic evidence of bomb damage generated by the use of the panoramic view allegedly recorded on April 4, 2017; the inconsistencies in the the wind direction observed in the panoramic view with weather reports for April 4; and an analytic process that failed to observe bomb damage consistent with the observed bomb-debris clouds or wind directions that could credibly carry a deadly sarin release plume into range of any densely populated area.
These egregious errors and glaring internal inconsistencies in the forensic analysis suggest that the analysts may have had a predetermined narrative, but could not find any forensic data to support it. So they simply solved their problem by asserting that there was forensic evidence that does not
This evidence suggests that New York Times management did not check the accuracy of the facts supporting the narrative of events on April 4, 2017 that the Times has been publishing, and continues to
***
The remainder of this report will focus on the specificforensic evidence presented in the New York Times video. The discussion will show, with example by example of forensic evidence from the New York Times video, that the interpretation of every piece of forensic evidence in the video is spurious, leading to the absolute and unambiguous conclusion that noneof the findings asserted in the video are supported by the facts.
The structure of the remainder of this report is as follows:
The report will first describe the basic design features of general-purpose bombs. It will then explain how the bombs inflict damage, the spatial scale and destructive effects caused by the detonation of such bombs, and the characteristics of the easily observable bomb-debris clouds that are generated by the bomb detonations.
In next section will show how the panoramic was allegedly used to find the three bomb-damage sites. We will show that the alleged locations of the observed bomb damage sites in the panoramic view were at ranges of roughly 1 to 2.5 miles from the camera. We will also show that one of the alleged bombing-sites is not aligned with the line-of-sight in the panoramic view. This raises further questions about the veracity of the analysis produced by Bellingcat.
After this we will show the video evidence of before and after satellite imagery of the three bombed areas that were allegedly identified by Bellingcat with the line-of-sight data from the panoramic view.
It will be shown that there is absolutely no evidence of bomb damage consistent with the observed bomb- debris clouds shown in the panoramic view.
In the section that then follows, video frames of the alleged bombing in March 2015extracted from the New York Times video will show that the debris cloud generated from the March 2015 attack indicate 3 bombs were used in that attack.
The satellite imagery provided in the New York Times video of the severely damaged area from that attack will be shown. The point of showing these video frames from the New York Times video is to show that both the Bellingcat and New York Times analysts who put together the video had to know that there was extensive bomb-damage on the ground associated with the large debris cloud from the March 2015 attack. As such, they should have known and expected to find a large area of demolished buildings extending over at least a city block at site 1, where either multiple bombs were dropped or there were extensive secondary explosions on the ground.
***
References for Interested Readers:
The New York Times video can be found at:
TIMESVIDEO
How Syria and Russia Spun a Chemical Strike By Malachy Browne, Natalie Reneau and Mark Scheffler, April 26, 2017
The advantage of using YouTube is that readers with sufficient interest can download the video directly onto a computer and easily study it frame by frame.
The New York Times article that describes how the analysis and the video was done and its conclusions can be found at:
The Times Uses Forensic Mapping to Verify a Syrian Chemical Attack By Malachy Browne, May 1, 2017
The Human Rights Watch report that has been shown in reference 1 to have no forensic evidence to support its claim that an airdropped sarin dispersing munition was used on April 4, 2017 in Khan Sheikhoun can be found at:
Death by Chemicals Human Rights Watch, May 5, 2017
The panoramic that forms the foundation of the alleged Bellingcat methodology that was supposedly used to locate the bomb-damage sites that show no evidence of bomb damage is shown below:
Above Composite from Top of Page 24 of the Human Rights Watch Report Death by Chemicals, first published on May 5, 2017.
Khan Sheikhoun During the Bombing Attack on April 4, 2017
Some Basic Facts about General-Purpose Bombs
This section provides basic information about general-purpose bombs that is relevant to understanding the forensic data used in the New York Times video with regard to the alleged bombing attack in Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, 2017
The diagrams below provide basic information about the design of “general-purpose bombs” and the physical effects associated with their use.
A basic general-purpose bomb is roughly 50% by weight explosives and 50% by weight metal casing (see Figure 3). This design choice is used to increase the lethality and destructiveness of the bomb. When the explosives in the bomb detonate, the heavy metal casing is shattered into numerous fragments by the hot expanding high-pressure explosive gas products, accelerating them to quite high speeds, of order 2 km/s. These high-speed fragments can do tremendous damage to a target even before the shockwave generated by the expanding explosive gases arrives at elements of the target (the fragments travel faster than the shockwave except at very short distances from the bomb casing).
The above diagram shows a Russian general-purpose bomb, which in terms of concept is the same as those used in the West. Half of the weight of general-purpose bombs is explosives and the other half is metal casing. When the explosives detonate they shatter the metal casing into thousands of fragments that weigh several grams each and travel at nearly 2 km/s (about 4500 mph). These high speed fragments can create tremendous damage to the target before the shockwave arrives. They also create a spray of lethal fragments that greatly increase the killing range against exposed personnel.
Figure 4 below shows the vast number of fragments that are typically produced by general-purpose bombs with casings of various wall thicknesses.
Fragments generated by the explosion of the munition that is roughly 50% weight by explosives and 50% weight by metal casing. These fragments travel at a speed near 2 km/s (about 4500 mph).
Figure 5 on the next page shows the early phases of the detonation process. The detonation of the explosives in the bomb produce violently expanding high-temperature gases which act like a fast moving piston on the metal casing and the surrounding ambient air. In the process of expanding, the casing shatters, pieces are accelerated to high speeds, and a shell of compressed ambient air forms a shockwave of compressed air that propagates outward on its own at slightly above the speed of sound (0.34 km/sec or about 760 mph) causing damage to structural elements that it encounters. The hot expanding gases from explosive mixing with entrained ambient air create a “bubble” of hot gases that is left behind at the detonation point as the shock propagates into the surrounding environment.
This bubble of hot gases then buoyantly rises from the detonation point, carrying entrained dust, pieces of target debris, and bomb remnants along with it as it rises.
When a general-purpose bomb explodes it creates a volume of hot air from the mixing of the extremely hot gases produced in the explosion with nearby surrounding air that is incorporated into the turbulent expanding explosive gases. Fragments from the casing can cause serious damage to surrounding structural elements before the blast wave arrives and can kill people at many hundreds of meters range. For bombs in the weight-range of 500 to 1000 pounds, the resulting “bubble” of hot buoyantly rising air initially left behind at the point of detonation carries target debris and other materials with it to an eventual full altitude of between 1000 and 1500 feet. The cloud has an overall shape like a mushroom where the crown is the remnant of the initial bubble of hot air from the initial explosion.
As shown on the next page in Figure 6, the initial explosion creates a dust cloud that is made up of the original hot expanding gases along with a “pedestal” of dust that is kicked up by the shockwave as it expands beyond the area of initially hot expanding gases. As the dust cloud evolves in time, it develops into a mushroom shaped debris-cloud where the original hot bomb gases form the crown of the cloud and the suction created by the rising crown of hot gases creates a “stem” which contains dust from the pulverized target.
Two examples of bomb-debris clouds from general-purpose bombs in the weight-range of 500 to 1000 pounds. The early debris cloud on the left is from two or three bombs hitting around the same location. The later-time debris cloud on the right is probably generated by a single general-purpose bomb in the 1000 pound weight-class.
There are various methods that have been developed to estimate the size of the crown of the debris cloud and its height. These estimation techniques are fundamentally approximate, as the cloud can be shaped by the temperature profile of the air, wind shear, and ambient winds. However, when a large bomb hits a target the result is a debris cloud that is unambiguously connected to the size of the munition that has been used. This fundamental fact of physics reveals that the New York Times video about the attack on Khan Sheikhoun makes claims that are completely incompatible with the forensic evidence they show.
Looking at the disparity between the absence of bomb damage that the New York Times analysts show in their video and what the target area would have to look like begs the question, “how could the analysts have possibly made the egregious mistake of thinking that the photos provided by Bellingcat indicated actual bomb-damage commensurate with the observed bomb-clouds in the panoramic view?”
This illustration shows an example of a numerical estimation procedure for making rough estimates of the weight of general- purpose bombs from bomb debris cloud dimensions observed in combat. The equations are derived from fitting data to numerous observations of bomb explosions. Figures 3 through 6 are from materials left to me by my dear friend and colleague, Richard Lloyd, who died from cancer on October 31, 2014. One of his last requests to me was that the accumulated treasures of his research be made available for public policy analysis.
Figure 8 below shows rough estimates of the blast overpressure versus range for general-purpose bombs of different weights. These curves include the fact that roughly half of the weight of the general-purpose bombs is explosives and the remaining weight is casing.
Damage from General-Purpose Bombs
A widely-known and documentable fact is that a blast overpressure of 30 psi from such a bomb will result in the complete demolition of an urban structural target. As shown in the Figure 8 graph, a 1000 pound general-purpose bomb will cause this result at a range of about 50 feet. As a result, the detonation of a 1000 pound general-purpose bomb will completely demolish urban structures that have not been built to military specifications over a circular area of roughly more than 100 feet in diameter.
An important additional consideration is that the level of damage done to a target from bomb blasts is highly dependent on the nature of the structure. In the case of the bombing attacks on buildings of the type that populate Khan Sheikhoun, variations in the strengths of building walls can make a very large difference in the size of an area that is essentially “flattened” by a bomb-hit. Although a blast overpressure of 30 psi will almost certainly knock the walls out and cause the complete collapse of a building, a blast overpressure of 20 psi could well produce the same result. This means that the diameter of an area completely demolished by a 1000 pound bomb could be between 100 and 150 feet. In the diagrams we subsequently show we will designate the areas that could be completely demolished in terms of concentric circles with diameters of 100 and 150 feet consecutively.
The above graph shows the blast overpressure versus range for general-purpose bombs of various weights. As can be seen by inspecting the graph, a blast overpressure of about 30 psi will occur at 50 feet from the detonation point of 1000 pound bomb.
The Panoramic View: Looking South from North of Khan Sheikhoun
Figure 9 on the next page shows the panoramic constructed by Bellingcat which forms the foundation and basic source of analysis used by the New York Times and Human Rights Watch in their published forensics-based analyses of the Syrian air attack on Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, 2017.
The analyses assert that this panoramic shows that three separate targets were hit with general-purpose explosive bombs on April 4, 2017 in addition to a fourth sarin-dispersing airdropped munition with an explosive charge that was too small to create the large and visible bomb-damage debris clouds that could be observed at long-range shown in this panoramic.
The New York Times video claims that this panoramic allowed them to locate where the 500 to 1000 pound explosive bombs were dropped. The described analysis process on the surface appears straightforward, but a more expert review of the forensic evidence shows that the analysis and its results are profoundly in error.
The analysts first determined the line-of-sight to each of the debris clouds relative to the known locations of thee minarets and the flat mound that is in the middle and foreground of the panoramic view. As a result of its very distinct appearance, the flat mound and its well defined edges, is a feature that can be be used to get a relatively precise estimate of the bore-site of the camera that produced the panoramic.
Such a mound is known among archaeologists as a, tell, which is formed from the accumulated remains of a series of walled towns built successively on top of each other. In the case of Khan Sheikhoun, this mound dates back about 4000 years to the bronze and iron ages. This particular mound is about 200 to 250 m long and 18 to 25 m high.
A very important immediate issue is raised when the motion of the bomb-debris clouds in the panoramic view is examined. The general direction of the debris-clouds is to the east. As shown in Figures 10 and 11, this instantly raises the question about how the alleged sarin release site could have created so many casualties so quickly. In Figure 10, the wind conditions obtained from weather reports suggests that a sarin release at that site would have carried sarin directly into a nearby heavily populated area immediately to the east northeast of the alleged release site. If enough sarin had been released, and if it also was released in a way that effectively caused it to quickly evaporate, then the wind as reported by weather stations in the area would have carried a relatively dense cloud of sarin vapor and droplets into the adjacent population area causing heavy casualties near the sarin-release site.
However, if as shown in Figure 11, the wind was gently blowing to the east, the sarin would have instead created a plume that would have had to travel in excess of 600 to 700 m before encountering a densely populated area. Even relatively large amounts of sarin released on the ground near the alleged sarin release site would be unlikely to create a killing area at this range unless an airdropped munition of perhaps 1000 or 2000 pounds very efficiently dispensed the sarin at altitude above the ground. It is therefore clear that the assumption that the panoramic view was taken on April 4, 2017 directly contradicts the claim that a large group of people were poisoned by a sarin release from this particular site as alleged by the New York Times and Bellingcat analysts.
The above panoramic derived from a video taken north of Khan Sheikhoun looking South shows the three bomb debris-clouds. The debris cloud labeled 1 is almost certainly from either multiple 500 to 1000 pound bombs, or possibly from single or multiple bombs that hit an ammunition dump causing secondary explosions. Clouds 2 and 3 appear to be from single bombs hitting targets. As will be shown in a later section of this paper, ifthe target locations claimed by the New York Times and Bellingcat analysts were correct, clouds 1 and 2 would be about 1 mile from the camera and cloud 3 would be about 2.5 miles from the camera.
This satellite image shows the alleged location of the sarin release site and the predicted direction of the sarin plume as indicated by weather reports on April 4, 2017.
This satellite image shows the direction the sarin plume would be carried from the alleged sarin release site if the panoramic view used in the New York Times analysis was in fact taken on April 4, 2017. Gigantic amounts of sarin would be needed to kill and injure people at the roughly 600 m range where there is a center of population.
In summary, the inconsistencies in the forensic evidence from the panoramic view should have raised fundamental questions about the assumption that the panoramic view was recorded on April 4, 2017. It then should have raised questions about the use of this panoramic view has a foundation for the New York Times, Human Rights Watch, and Bellingcat analyses. If the sarin release site was at the location alleged by all three organizations, the only way significant casualties could be generated would be if the wind was blowing to the west northwest as predicted by the weather reports on April 4, 2017.
If the wind is instead blowing to the east, as shown in the panoramic, the sarin release cloud would move across empty open fields for a distance of 600 to 700 m before encountering a dense center of population. In order to achieve lethality at such a long range, the nerve-agent plume from a release at ground-level would need to have efficiently dispersed many tens of liters of sarin in extremely stable weather conditions that would keep the sarin plume low to the ground as it moved towards the population center. As shown in reference one critiquing the Human Rights Report of May 1, 2017, there is absolutely no evidence of any kind of a munition at the alleged sarin release site that could be nearly large enough to carry the amounts of sarin needed to cause casualties at these large ranges. It therefore seems that the panoramic view contradicts the conclusion that the sarin release site was the source of a nerve agent attack and that the panoramic was recorded on April 4, 2017.
The Consistency of the Panoramic Data with the Alleged Locations of Bomb-Damage
As already noted, the New York Times video claims that the panoramic view provided the analysts with line-of-sight data from the video camera to the three locations where 500 to 1000 pound explosive bombs were dropped.
We will now examine the before and after satellite images used by the New York Times analysts to conclude they had found the three bomb-damage sites associated with the three bomb-damage debris clouds seen in the panoramic video.
Figures 12 and 13 show a satellite photograph of Khan Sheikhoun as displayed in the New York Times video. Figure 12 shows satellite photograph exactly as it is presented in the New York Times video and Figure 13 shows the same image but with locations labeled so as to provide the reader with orientation.
This satellite image published in the New York Times video analysis shows the alleged locations of the sarin release site and the three bomb-damage sites identified with the panoramic view of Khan Sheikhoun.
This satellite image published in the New York Times video analysis shows the alleged locations of the sarin release site and the three bomb-damage sites identified with the panoramic view of Khan Sheikhoun.
The alleged location of the camera north of Khan Sheikhoun looking South has been provided by Bellingcat, so it is possible to use the bomb-damage locations found by Bellingcat and the location of the camera to verify Bellingcat’s findings.
Figure 14 below shows the manipulations of the panoramic view so it can be used together with the satellite images of Khan Sheikhoun to determine the line-of-sight to the damage areas. Figure 15 on the next page shows Bellingcat’s determination of the location of the bomb damage locations and the vector directions to the damage sites on the satellite image.
The above set of images show how the alleged locations of bomb-damage sites can be used to verify their consistency with the panoramic view. This is done by scaling the size of the panoramic view so that debris-cloud 1, debris cloud 3, and the archaeological flat mound are all in alignment as shown in Figure 15 on the next page. The scaled panoramic view is also rotated so that its length is perpendicular to the line-of-sight of the camera that recorded the panoramic view. This is then overlaid on a satellite image that includes the area where the camera was operating. The result of this process is shown in Figure 15.
What is immediately evident from an inspection of Figure 15 is that although the edges of the flat archaeological mound and the centers of the debris-clouds 1 and 3 align with the line-of-sight of the camera, debris-cloud 2 is not aligned. Since the precision of the imagery is quite high, there is no doubt that the location of the bomb-damage site 2 identified by the New York Times analysts is inconsistent with the panoramic view that was assumed by Bellingcat and the New York Times to be recorded on April 4, 2017.
The next step in the process of determining the veracity of the alleged the alleged forensic evidence associated with events on April 4, 2017 as claimed by Bellingcat and the New York Times is to look at the before and after photographs of the damage sites.
As can be seen from inspecting the alignments of the locations and the camera line-of-sight, the flat mound and debris-cloud locations 1 and 3 are aligned. However, debris-cloud 2 is badly out of alignment with the other objects. This lack of registration between the alleged bombing locations and the camera line-of-sight is another very strong indication that the analysis of the panoramic view is not consistent with the asserted claims about bombing locations and levels of damage on April 4, 2017.
The Evidence of Bomb Damage Allegedly Found from the Panoramic Data
The first issue that should have raised questions for the Bellingcat and New York Times analysts is the time between the before and after satellite photographs. The “before” satellite images were taken on February 21, 2017 and the “after” images were taken on April 6, 2017. This is a time interval of 44 days.
As a result, if Khan Sheikhoun was under air attack anytime within a 44 day time-period, damage from these earlier attacks could potentially be mistaken for damage inflicted on April 4, 2017. However, as a review of the data will show, this issue is not of concern – the reason being that there is no evidence ofbomb damage of any kind at any of the three sites identified by the New York Times.
Figure 16 shows debris-cloud 3 as seen from the camera that recorded the panoramic view. As already noted, the analytical method used by the New York Times to find the bombed site is critically dependent on the use of line-of-sight data from the panoramic view. The analysts claim to have located the bomb- damage by searching satellite imagery along the vector direction determined by each bomb-debris cloud.
Bomb cloud 3 indicates the detonation of a 500 to 1000 pound general-purpose bomb. If the site located by Bellingcat and the New York Times was correctly located, the debris cloud in this image would be at a range of about 2.5 miles. At the time the image was taken the cloud-top was at an altitude of about 500 to 600 feet. Given the size of the explosion, the expected levels of damage from a bomb of this size would be extensive if it had landed in an area populated by buildings.
Figure 17 below below shows the before and after satellite photographs that Bellingcat and the New York Times analysts allege show evidence of bomb damage associated with bomb-debris cloud 3.
The “before” satellite image from February 21, 2017 is shown on the left and the “after” satellite image from April 6, 2017 is shown on the right
It is instructive to look at the before and after satellite photographs in several stages, so as to get a sense of the level of damage that Bellingcat and the New York Times is alleging was the result of an explosion by a 500 to 1000 pound bomb. This can be done by looking at Figure 17 which is labeled “Find the Damage!”
The author has tested roughly a dozen people without special knowledge of bomb effects to determine how evident damage is from this composite dual image photo. None of these people were able to find the bomb damage from the unmarked before and after images in this graphic.
The above before and after photographs are supposed to show the bomb damage done in the area associated with debris-cloud 3 identified in the panoramic shown in figure 16. The author has shown this New York Times photograph to perhaps a dozen nonspecialists and asked them to find the bomb-damage area. None of them succeeded.
The bomb damage locations claimed by the New York Times are indicated in Figure 18 as being within the yellow circles. It is worth reflecting on the claim made by the New York Times that this is a location where a 500 to 1000 pound bomb exploded creating a debris cloud that was observed at a range of roughly 2.5 miles!
A very careful look into the before and after yellow circles overlaid onto the before and after images shows a small dark region in the “after” image on the roof of a building where the New York Times alleges that a 500 to 1000 pound general-purpose bomb exploded on April 4, 2017. Associating such a negligible level of possible damage with the identified delivery location of a 500 to 1000 pound bomb is ludicrous and completely at odds with essentially everything known about the effects of explosives and bombing.
The above before and after photographs are supposed to show the bomb damage done in the area associated with debris-cloud 3 identified in the panoramic shown in Figure 16. The author has shown this New York Times photograph to perhaps a dozen nonspecialists before the yellow circles identifying the alleged bomb-hits were added to the photo and asked them to find the bomb- damage area. None of them succeeded.
Figure 19 below shows the size of the area where severe bomb-damage from a 500 to 1000 pound general-purpose bomb are expectedand predictableat location 3, as identified by the New York Times.
The yellow circle filled with hatching shows the area where buildings would be demolished. The large red dot on the left shows the building that would have been demolished if the bomb had hit in the location where the New York Times analysts allege there was bomb damage. The large red dot to the right of that building shows a building across the street from the demolished building that would also have almost certainly been completely destroyed.
In the case of that building (see Figure 20), the blast overpressure on its front wall facing the street would essentially cause the complete failure of the outer walls facing the blast point. This would result in the collapse of loadbearing structures and the floors in the front half of the building facing the alleged bomb impact point. The rear of the building might have survived collapse, but the effects of the blast wave funneling through the structure could well cause the collapse of the back half of the building as well.
Hence, an informed guess about the level of damage on that building would be “probable partial or total collapse.” In any case, nobody who knew anything about the effects of explosives could have possibly misidentified a minuscule blemish on the roof of a large building as evidence of an attack with a 500 to 1000 pound bomb. The level of damage alleged by the New York Times at this location is simply ridiculous when compared with the evidence used to identify this location as the bomb detonation site seen from 2.5 miles in the panoramic view.
The above before and after photographs show what levels of damage would have occurred if the debris cloud 3 had been properly associated with the location of the identified target area. The inner circle has a diameter of roughly 100 feet, within which 30 psi or more blast would have caused the complete demolition of the building. The outer circle of diameter roughly 150 feet, shows the area within which a 15 psi or more blast could knock down masonry walls and buildings that are not constructed of steel reinforced concrete. In essence, a knowledgeable analyst who believed this site had been hit by a bomb large enough to create the debris cloud seen in the panoramic would have known to expect very heavy damage and demolished buildings at this location.
In summary, NOTHINGassociated with this alleged forensic evidence of bomb damage at location 3 shown in the New York Times video supports the Times’ narrative of this event in Khan Shekhoun on April 4, 2017.
Alleged Bomb Damage at the Site Associated with Debris Cloud 2
The bombed area associated with bomb-debris cloud 2 shows exactly the same astounding disparity between levels of predictable and expected damage from a 500 to 1000 pound bomb relative to what is identified as bomb damage by the New York Times and Bellingcat analysts.
Figure 21 shows the location of bomb cloud 2 as seen in the panoramic view of Khan Sheikhoun from the North looking South.
Bomb cloud 2 indicates the detonation of a 500 to 1000 pound general-purpose bomb. If the site located by the New York Times was correctly identified, the debris cloud in this image would be at a range of about 1.5 miles. At the time the image was taken the cloud-top was at an altitude of about 500 to 600 feet. Given the size of the explosion, the expected levels of damage from a bomb of this size would be extensive if it had landed in an area populated by buildings.
Figure 22 shows a video frame from the New York Times video that is constructed from a composite of a section of the Bellingcat panoramic view, and an elaborate three-dimensional representation of Khan Sheikhoun looking from north to south. The locations of the three bomb-debris clouds and the archaeological mound are all identified with markings to make it easier for the reader to compare these features in both figures 21 and 22.
The bottom half of the above composite image from the New York Times video published on April 26, 2017 shows the two debris clouds from explosions that allegedly occurred in an attack on Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, 2017. The composite image asserts that the two identified bombing sites were determined with line-of-sight analysis using the panoramic image from the video camera north of Kan Sheikhoun. The analysts claim to have used line-of-sight data in combination with digital satellite imagery to locate the areas where the bombs shown in the lower half of the composite fell. However, examination of the satellite images of the location 2 where the bomb allegedly exploded shows no evidence of bomb damage.
The disparity between the expected and observed levels of bomb-damage at the identified location of site 2 where allegedly a 500 to 1000 pound bomb fell are just as dramatic as in the case of site 3.
Figure 23 at the top of the next page again provides the reader an opportunity to see the uncluttered before and after satellite images of the bombed area. Even after knowing and studying the claims by the New York Times analysts about the damage at this site, it is still difficult even with foreknowledge to quickly find the area of claimed damaged. Individuals with no prior knowledge of the claims of damage in the before and after images shown in the New York Times video have an equally hard time finding the damage alleged by the New York Times in this case (site 2) as in the case of site 3.
Figure 24 in the middle of the next page identifies the alleged bomb-damage location with yellow circles in the before and after images of the alleged hit-location. The after image shows a small slightly oblong dark area on the roof of a building. According to the New York Times analysts, this is the identified area of bomb-damage from a 500 to 1000 pound bomb.
Figure 25 is an image from the New York Times video where it is alleged that photos of the bomb-damage have been taken on the ground at site 2. This particular photograph indicates an astonishing disparity between the bomb-damage that would occur if a 500 to 1000 pound bomb came through the roof at that location and the damage claimed by the New York Times analysts.
As shown in Figure 26, on the following page, a 500 to 1000 pound bomb would have completely demolished the building it hit and would also have demolished the building across the street, which can be seen in the photograph in Figure 25, allegedly taken at damage location 2.
The yellow hatched inner circle in Figure 26 shows the circular area of roughly 100 feet in diameter where the detonation of the bomb would produce a blast overpressure of 30 psi or more!
Such a high level of blast overpressure would completely demolish structures beyond and within the inner circular area shown in the figure. The outer circle shows the area in which a 15 psi overpressure or more would occur. A 15 psi overpressure would be enough to severely damage or knock down most stone masonry walls of the type that appear to be ubiquitous in the construction used in Khan Sheikhoun. Thus, almost all of the buildings along the entire length of the block in figure 26 would have been demolished or rendered unusable. Yet the New York Times claims an ambiguous possible small hole in the roof that is seen on a low resolution satellite image is evidence for bomb damage that should have shown demolished buildings across the area at issue.
Finally, it should be noted that the location of site 2 is NOTalong the line-of-sight to debris-cloud 2 in the panoramic view. Thus, the New York Times claims damage from a large bomb in an area that is not along the observed line-of-sight in the panoramic view that shows no evidence of bomb damage associated with a bomb-debris cloud allegedly used to find the bombed location.
This complete disconnect between the bomb-damage at both sites 2 and 3, and the serious line-of-sight discrepancies associated with the identified location of bomb-damage site 2, are serious internal inconsistencies with the narrative produced by the New York Times and its analysts. In the next section on bombing site 1, even more serious inconsistencies and discrepancies between claimed findings in the New York Times video and ground-truth will be identified and discussed.
The before and after satellite images of site 2 where the New York Times analysts assert bomb damage from a 500 to 1000 pound general-purpose bomb is shown above. It is a useful exercise for the reader to try to find the differences that indicate bomb-damage in the image from February 21, 2017 and from April 6, 2017.
The two yellow circles in the before and after images show the minuscule feature in the after image associated with the observed debris-cloud 2 that is claimed as evidence of damage from a 500 to 1000 pound bomb.
The image on the left side of the above video frame from the New York Times video shows a photograph of the alleged bomb damage at the site where debris cloud 2 was generated in the attack on April 4, 2017. It is not possible to determine if this damage area is in any way associated with a satellite image. However, it is easy to determine that the damage in the photograph could not possibly have been so small if a 500 to 1000 pound general-purpose bomb had gone through the roof at this location. A photograph from the same spot would simply show nothing but rubble, including the rubble of the building wall across the street behind the parked vehicle. An actual photograph of this location after a hit with a 500 to 1000 pound bomb would show that the surrounding buildings had been completely demolished.
The areas of expected bomb-damage at site 2 where a bomb-debris cloud was observed in the panoramic view, are shown in the markings projected over the after satellite image taken on April 6, 2017. The large red dot in the center of the hatched yellow circle shows the spot where New York Times analysts claim a 500 to 1000 pound bomb hit. The hatched yellow circle shows the outer limits of an area where the blast wave from the bomb would be roughly 30 psi or higher. This level of blast overpressure would demolish all the buildings within and beyond the inner circle. The outer yellow circle shows the area within which a 15 pounds per square inch or more would occur. This level of overpressure would be enough to cause the collapse of or extreme damage to stone masonry walls of the type that appear to be ubiquitous in building construction in Khan Sheikhoun. Thus, the level of damage associated with such a bomb-hit should essentially be the “flattening” of almost all the buildings along the full length of the block. It should be no surprise why this class of general-purpose bomb was called a “blockbuster” in World War II.
Yet Another Set of Contradictions:
The New York Times Claims of Damage at Bomb-Site 1
Figure 27 is derived from the same New York Times video frame as in Figure 22. The important difference between these two figures is the overlay of markings that provide information to the reader.
In particular, there are three ellipses shown in yellow that indicate roughly the size of areas of destruction expected from bombing attacks. The smallest and right-most ellipse shows the estimated size of the area of destruction at debris-cloud site 2, which has been discussed in detail in the prior section.
The left-most ellipse shows an area that was completely demolished when it was bombed in March 2015. The New York Times video shows video that it alleges was taken of the March 2015 attack (see Figure 29). The video shows that three bombs were dropped on the target. The video also shows the initial development of the bomb-debris cloud from that attack (Figure 28) and aerial photographs of the damaged area (Figure 31), which extends over a roughly circular diameter of about 400 feet. The size of this area is consistent with the dropping of three 500 to 1000 pound bombs onto the target.
As can be verified by examining the panoramic view of bomb-debris cloud 1, it is very clear that this cloud has a significantly larger base-diameter than debris-clouds 2 and 3. The base-diameter of the debris-cloud 1 is more than twice that of debris-clouds 2 and 3. The area covered by the base of this debris cloud is between four and six times larger than the area covered at the base of the other two debris-clouds.
This is exactly the expected result from a bombing that uses three bombs rather than one.
These observations strongly suggest that debris-cloud 1 is explained by a multiple bomb attack. Another possibility is that a single bomb was dropped on a large ammunition dump and secondary explosions led to the creation of a debris-cloud and area of ground-damage that had a very large base-diameter. In either case, the debris-cloud indicates a very much larger area of destruction than what should have been found at sites 2 and 3 – assuming that any bomb-damage was observed at these other two locations consistent with the debris-clouds seen in the panoramic.
The markings on the above image identify important indicators that raise questions about the veracity of the New York Times analysis. The three yellow ellipses show the rough size areas that should have been subjected to high levels of damage in the form of demolished buildings. As has already been shown, no such damage is present in either the bombed sites associated with debris cloud 2 and debris cloud 3. The left-most ellipse shows the area damaged in March 2015. The New York Times video contains video of the bombing that it claims was taken in March 2015. The New York Times video also shows before and after satellite images of the area demolished in March 2015. Direct comparison of the size of the debris clouds from the March 2015 attack and bomb-debris cloud 1 that the Times alleges was the result of a bombing attack on April 4, 2017 indicate that the size of the severely damaged area associated with debris-cloud 1 should be about the same as that associated with the site that was bombed in March 2015. In spite of the fact that the New York Times analysts provided evidence of extreme large-scale damage associated with the March 2015 attack, they allege infinitesimal bomb damage at site 1. Thus, the analysts were informed of the large spatial scale of the demolished area from the attack of March 2015 but still claim infinitesimal damage at site 1 is convincing evidence of an attack involving multiple bombs or large secondary explosions. This is yet another inexplicable inconsistency in the analysis put forward in the New York Times video and by Bellingcat.
The remaining images and their subtitles provide all of the information about the serious discrepancies between the bomb damage recognized by the New York Times analysts at the bombing site associated with the March 2015 attack and the minuscule bomb-damage asserted by the analysts to indicate a similar bombing at site 1 on April 4, 2017. The images and subtitles tell the story so there is no point in repeating it further in this main text.
The above photograph shows the late debris cloud from a bombing in March 2015in Khan Sheikhoun of a target area (referred to above as “silo”) discussed in the New York Times video published on April 27, 2017. The sequence of video frames from that video shown in Figure 29 below show that three bombs were dropped on the site. Note that the base of the debris cloud is very close to the same size as the base of the large debris cloud 1 in the panoramic image that is incorrectly identified as having been taken on April 4, 2017.
Plates A through F show the sequence of events that indicate three bombs were dropped on a target that was alleged to be the site of a warehouse and silos in Khan Sheikhoun in March 2015. Plate A shows the target immediately before the impact of the bombs. Plate B shows the three distinct early debris clouds from the bombs that were dropped, and plates C and D show the evolution of the debris cloud from the three nearly simultaneous bomb explosions. As will be shown in the Figure 30, the base dimensions of this debris cloud is very close to that of the base dimensions of the debris cloud 1 in the panoramic view.
The image of the late-debris cloud from the March 2015(derived by scaling Figure 28 above) attack is inset on images of debris- clouds 1 and 2 allegedly from a bombing attack on April 4, 2017, according to the New York Times video. The inset images from Figure 28 were scaled so that the buildings in the foreground of each of the two original images would be roughly on the same spatial scale to facilitate a visual comparison of the two bomb-debris clouds. As can be seen, even accounting for uncertainties in the scaling, the very large base diameter of debris-cloud 1 indicates that multiple bombs were used in that attack.
The images of the target hit in March 2015are shown in both the satellite image on the left and the image on the right taken by a small drone carrying a television camera. As can be seen, the area severely damaged is about 400 feet across.
The above satellite photograph shows the “silo” target prior to being bombed in March 2015. Also shown in the satellite image are the alleged bomb-damage locations from the April 4, 2017 attack as determined by the line-of-sight data of the bomb-debris clouds from the panoramic view. The size of the areas that should have been heavily damaged at sites 1 and 2 are also shown. Since the debris-cloud associated with damage at 1 is comparable in size to the area demolished in March 2015, it is reasonable to expect that an area of similar size should have also been demolished. Since the image above was produced by the analysts associated with
the New York Times video, the question arises why did they associate minuscule to nonexistent damage at site 1 with a major bombing when they were fully aware of the large scale area of destruction associated with the bombing in March 2015.
The satellite photograph used as the base-image in Figure 32 above is also well-suited to show the off-alignment of bombing site 2 relative to the line-of-sight determined by the panoramic view. This shows that an area of potentially several square blocks could have been totally demolished if the two bombing sites were actually along the line-of-sight established by the panoramic view. Since there is no significant damage exhibited in the satellite photographs of both alleged bombing sites, this underscores the absurdity of the claims made in the New York Times video when compared to the actual forensic evidence.
Summary and Conclusions
This seemingly narrow technical discussion of the disparity between forensic evidence that allegedly indicates a nerve agent and bombing attack in Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, 2017 is of profound importance to US national security and to our democracy.
The White House produced a false intelligence report on April 11, 2017 in order to justify an attack on the Syrian airbase at Sheyrat, Syria on April 7, 2017. That attack risked an unintended collision with Russia and a possible breakdown in cooperation between Russia and United States in the war to defeat the Islamic State. The collision also had some potential to escalate into a military conflict with Russia of greater extent and consequence.
The New York Times and other mainstream media immediately and without proper review of the evidence adopted the false narrative produced by the White House even though that narrative was totally unjustified based on the forensic evidence. The New York Times used an organization, Bellingcat, for its source of analysis even though Bellingcat has a long history of making false claims based on distorted assertions about forensic evidence that either does not exist, or is absolutely without any evidence of valid sources.
On September 17, 2013 the New York Times published on its front page a totally bogus false claim based on an alleged analysis produced by Bellingcat that concluded using untrue assumptions about the excessively long range of a sarin-carrying munition that the nerve agent attack on August 21, 2013 had originated from a site deep inside Syrian government controlled territory. My colleague, Richard Lloyd, and I produced analysis and reported to Times management that that the munition could travel could only travel two kilometers or less nearly, not the 10 km range that formed the foundation of the conclusions published by the Times. Yet in spite of the uncontested accuracy of this science-based fact, the New York Times stuck to its rhetoric and did not make any effort to re-examine the foundations of the narrative it knew had to be false in the face of these facts.
This history of New York Times publishing of inaccurate information and then sticking by it when solid science-based forensic evidence disproves the original narrative cannot be explained in terms of simple error. The facts overwhelmingly point to a New York Times management that is unconcerned about the accuracy of its reporting.
The problems exposed in this particular review of a New York Times analysis of critically important events related to the US national security is not unique to this particular story. This author could easily point to other serious errors in New York Times reporting on important technical issues associated with our national security. In these cases, like in this case, the New York Times management has not only allowed the reporting of false information without reviewing the facts for accuracy, but it has repeatedly continued to report the same wrong information in follow-on articles. It may be inappropriate to call this “fake news,” but this loaded term comes perilously close to actually describing what is happening.
The specific problems with the forensic analysis produced by Bellingcat and reported by the New York Times are as follows:
The three areas where Bellingcat claims bomb damage occurred show NOevidence of bomb damage consistent with the observed bomb-debris clouds that indicate the delivery of 500 to 1000 pound bombs.
If the wind was blowing in the opposite direction as shown in the panoramic view on April 4, the sarin from the alleged sarin-release site would have drifted into open fields and would not have reached any populated areas for more than half a kilometer. As such, there would be no casualties from a sarin release at this locationas alleged by the New York Times, Human Rights Watch, and Bellingcat.
Given the small size of the container (containing no more than 5 to 10 liters) that was alleged by Bellingcat as carrying sarin, and the large distance between the nearest populated area and the sarin- release site, even with near ideal weather conditions for a deadly sarin dispersal, there would have been essentially NOcasualties from the sarin-release in any densely populated areas downwind.
One of the bomb damage sites (bomb damage area 2) is not along the line-of-sight determined by the panoramic view as claimed by Bellingcat. As such, the location of this bomb damage site contradicts the data from the panoramic view that was allegedly used to find
Video of an alleged bombing of a target in March 2015in Khan Sheikhoun shows a large area of heavy bomb damage that is completely inconsistent with the minuscule or nonexistent bomb damage in the three bombed sites on April 4, 2017 allegedly found by Bellingcat. The bomb-damage video from March 2015 shows a bomb-debris cloud that is much like the large bomb-debris cloud 1 allegedly produced on April 4, 2017. While the area bombed in March 2015 shows extensive and unambiguous severe bomb damage, the area where Bellingcat alleges bomb damage at site 1 on April 4 shows only minuscule or no bomb damage. This raises serious questions about the veracity of Bellingcat’s claims about the forensic evidence of bomb-site
In summary, video sequences of the alleged bombing in March 2015 show that three bombs in the 500 to 1000 pound class were dropped on the target.
Before and after satellite images also shown in the New York Times video of the alleged site that was bombed in March 2015 show an area of roughly 400 feet diameter that was completely demolished by the alleged bombing attack.
Damage site 1 identified by Bellingcat as being associated with a similar very large bomb-debris cloud created on April 4, 2017 shows only minuscule damage relative to the vast area that was demolished in March 2015.
The before and after satellite images used by Bellingcat were taken 44 days apart between February 21, 2017 and April 6, 2017. This means that even if there were bomb damage seen in the April 6 images, it would not be possible to uniquely identify that damage with the April 4
However, since there is NObomb damage in any of the three bombed sites that Bellingcat identified, this is not an issue with regard to the Bellingcat However, it does indicate that if Bellingcat had found bomb damage in the before and after satellite imagery, it could not be ascribed unambiguously as having occurred on April 4
Although the New York Times video shows the debris cloud and the completely demolished site associated with that bombing, it appears that nobody performing the analysis of the forensic data asked the question why in one case a large debris cloud was associated with a large area of heavy ground- damage and in all the other cases there was either no damage or only minuscule evidence of some kind of small
The complete lack of any forensic evidence of bomb damage generated by the use of the panoramic view; the inconsistencies in the the wind direction observed in the panoramic view with the weather reports for that day; and an analytic process that observed bomb damage consistent with the observed bomb-debris cloud in the March 2015 bombing but no significant bomb-damage in the three bombings on April 4, 2017 leads to findings that are inexplicable with regard to the
These egregious errors internal inconsistencies in the forensic analysis suggest that the analysts may have had a predetermined narrative, but could not find the forensic evidence to support it. So they simply solved their problem by asserting that there was forensic evidence that does not
This evidence suggests that New York Times management did not check the accuracy of the facts supporting the narrative of events on April 4, 2017 that the Times has been publishing, and continues to.
By Theodore A. Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT. Postol’s main expertise is in ballistic missiles. He has a substantial background in air dispersal, including how toxic plumes move in the air. Postol has taught courses on weapons of mass destruction – including chemical and biological threats – at MIT. Before joining MIT, Postol worked as an analyst at the Office of Technology Assessment, as a science and policy adviser to the chief of naval operations, and as a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory. He also helped build a program at Stanford University to train mid-career scientists to study weapons technology in relation to defense and arms control policy. Postol is a highly-decorated scientist, receiving the Leo Szilard Prize from the American Physical Society, the Hilliard Roderick Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Richard L. Garwin Award from the Federation of American Scientists.
Comments Off on The New York Times Video Analysis of the Events in Khan Sheikhoun April 4 2017 Attack: NONE of the Cited Forensic Evidence Supports the Claims
Wednesday morning’s powerful blast, believed to have been from explosives in a water-transporting vehicle, killed scores, injuring hundreds more in Kabul, Afghanistan’s heavily protected diplomatic district.
The blast destroyed dozens of vehicles, damaged numerous buildings across a wide area, leaving a huge crater in the ground.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid condemned the attack, saying its fighters had nothing to do with it. Kabul’s 1TV channel reported ISIS claiming responsibility for what happened.
The Taliban’s official spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid (Source: Daily Pakistan)
It’s unclear how a security breach this great could have happened. Though hard to impossible to check all vehicular and other movements into and around high-security areas, perhaps there’s more to Wednesday’s incident than reported.
America, NATO and their regional rogue state allies support ISIS. Why would it carry out an attack close to where Western and other diplomatic embassies are located, causing enormous carnage, one of the deadliest incidents in the country since US-launched aggression in October 2001?
US Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) head General John Nicholson Jr., CENTCOM chief General Joseph Votel, and other Pentagon commanders want more US troops sent to the country.
Trump’s military and national security advisors recommend deploying an additional 50,000 US forces – to prop up Kabul’s pro-Western puppet regime, along with continuing endless war, unwilling to acknowledge a long ago lost cause.
Was Wednesday’s blast a terrorist incident like many others in US war theaters? Or was it something else unknown at this time, perhaps to get Trump to authorize sending thousands more US combat troops to Afghanistan?
Security forces stand next to a crater created by massive explosion in front of the German Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, May 31, 2017. (Source: ABC News)
Obama continued Bush/Cheney’s war after pledging to end it. Now it’s Trump’s.
Will he continue the futility of the past 16 years, America’s longest war, sending more US forces to pursue a lost cause?
Or will he responsibly end America’s aggression, bringing to a close one of the most disturbing chapters in its history?
In the wake of Wednesday’s blast, along with phony reports about Russia supplying the Taliban with weapons, he’s most likely to escalate America’s longest war, not end it.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
“In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.” –(Howard Zinn, 1922-2010.)
When the US, UK and their fellow destroyers of nations embarked, in October last year, on erasing Iraq’s ancient Mosul in order to save it, did they reflect on the enormity of the cost to humanity and history of their actions now and that of their genocidal, illegal invasion and fourteen year occupation – and counting? (Not forgetting the bombing of the country 1991-2003.) There was a quasi pull out in 2009, but a reported 16,000 mercenaries remained in the US Embassy compound.
Mosul, situated on the Tigris River, was first mentioned in name by the Greek writer Xenophon in 401 BC, although the area was inhabited from probably the 25th century BC. As Fallujah, near destroyed by the US in 2004 was known as City of Mosques, Mosul has been known as City of Churches. The population however, has been richly diverse: Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians, Turkmens, Kurds, Yazidis, Shabakis, Mandeans, Kawliya, Circassians.
Sunni Islam has been the largest religion, but Salafism, Christianity, Shia Islam, Sufism, Yezidism, Shabakism, Yarsan and Mandeanism all coexisted in and around this ancient, hauntingly beautiful city. (1)
Mosul, as so much of Iraq, has suffered unimaginably under ISIS – but it is hard to spot the difference from how Iraq suffered under the US and UK (and are again.) The US bombed the city during the 2003 invasion, murdered Saddam Hussein’s two sons and fifteen year old grandson there in July 2003 – no Judge or jury, just US ISIS style summary executions – as across the nation.
Robert Fisk wrote of US atrocities in Iraq (2) as related to him by an American veteran. There is a US Army “Warrior creed” which:
“allows no end to any conflict (but) total destruction of the ‘enemy.’ It allows no defeat… and does not allow one ever to stop fighting (lending itself to the idea of the ‘long war.’) It says nothing about following orders, it says nothing about obeying laws or showing restraint. It says nothing about dishonourable actions…”
Fisk writes (September, 2006):
“From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Bagram, to the battlefields of Iraq and to the ‘black’ prisons of the CIA, humiliation and beatings, rape, anal rape and murder have now become so commonplace that each new outrage is creeping into the inside pages of our newspapers.” Note “inside pages”, as so “commonplace.”
“Looser Rules of Engagement.”
In April this year, it was revealed (3) that the US Air Force on a bomb-fest over Mosul – and indeed wider Iraq and Syria – were operating under “looser rules of engagement.” Moreover:
“Lt Gen McFarland, now orders air strikes that are expected to kill up to ten civilians without prior approval from U.S. Central Command …” And this is “liberation” from ISIS? (Emphasis added.)
Presumably the family of eight reported killed by a US bomb in late October, including three children, one just two years old, were one of the General’s “expected” kills.
Air strikes in Iraq and Syria have: “ … destroyed 6,000 buildings with over 40,000 bombs and missiles have inevitably killed much higher numbers of civilians.” Apocalyptic horror. Of course US and UK presence in air and on the ground in Syria are entirely illegal.
So the people of Mosul and Syria’s cities, towns and villages are hostage to ISIS/Daesh and other head chopping factions fighting with US weaponry. US forces on the ground are “advising” the Iraqi army – which has absorbed militias ever bit as terrorizing as ISIS. US forces themselves have, of course, a gruesome history of terror and gathering body parts as “souvenirs.” (4)
In Word War 11 it was skulls, ears, teeth; in Vietnam penises. In Afghanistan it was fingers “and other body parts” (5) and in Iraq it was reportedly fingers, with dead bodies being tied to US tanks in Fallujah and as Ross Caputi wrote (Guardian, 13th March 2012)
“Some of my closest friends mutilated dead bodies, looted from the pockets of dead resistance fighters, destroyed homes, and killed civilians.”
Destruction – a “Partial” List.
And ponder further on the US “liberation” of Mosul. As Nicholas J. Davis has written (6) earlier this year, Award-winning Iraqi environmental scientist, Mosul-born Prof. Souad Al-Azzawi (Ph.D., Colorado School of Mines) compiled a partial list of air strikes on the city:
*Many government buildings have been destroyed. U.S. officials told USA Today, attacks are often conducted at night to minimize civilian casualties, but security guards and civilians in neighboring buildings have of course been killed.
*Telephone exchanges have been systematically bombed and destroyed.
*Two large dairies were bombed, killing about one hundred civilians and wounding two more.
*Multiple daytime air strikes on Mosul University on March 19th and 20th killed ninety two civilians and wounded one hundred and thirty five, mostly faculty, staff, families and students. Targets included the main administration building, classroom buildings, a women’s dormitory and a faculty apartment building.
(Note: Mosul University was one of the largest educational and research centres in the Middle East. Near unbelievably, the murderous ISIS primitives are thought to have destroyed over 8,000 books and 100,000 manuscripts – but the US destroyed near the entire faculty.)
*50 civilians were killed and 100 wounded by air strikes on two apartment buildings, Al Hadbaa and Al Khadraa.
*A mother and four children were killed in an air strike on a house in the Hay al Dhubat district of East Mosul on April 20th, next door to a house used by Islamic State that was undamaged.
*Twenty two civilians were killed in air strikes on houses in front of Mosul Medical College.
*Twenty civilians were killed and seventy wounded by air strikes on the Sunni Waqif building and nearby houses and shops.
*U.S. air strikes on April 24th damaged the Rashidiya water treatment plant in West Mosul and the Yarmouk power station in East Mosul.
*Banks and a bottling plant were bombed, more dead and maimed.
*An air strike on a fuel depot in an industrial area ignited an inferno with 150 casualties on 18th April.
*Bombs have damaged a food warehouse, power stations and sub-stations in West Mosul, and flour mills, a pharmaceutical factory, auto repair shops and other workshops across Mosul.
More US destruction and arguably war crimes are listed at (7.)
The aftermath of the US bombing of Mosul University (Source: NewsVice)
General Mattis’s “Annihilation Tactics.”
To further assess what a US “freed” Mosul might look like, here is a brief summary of what Fallujah’s 2004 “freedom” cost (8):
“The 1st Marine Division fired a total of 5,685 high-explosive 155mm artillery rounds during the battle. The 3rd Marine Air Wing (aviation assets only) expended 318 ‘precision’ bombs, 391 rockets and missiles, and 93,000 machine gun and cannon rounds.
When the Iraqi army re-took the remains of the city from ISIS/ISIL, as ever advised by the US, The Telegraph headline said it all: “Fallujah in ruins after Iraqi forces retake ‘90%’ of the city from ISIL.”
On Sunday 28th May US Secretary of Defence James Mattis (image on the right) stated that
the U.S. military is to use “annihilation tactics” to defeat ISIS fighters in Mosul telling CBS’s “Face the Nation” that “civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation.”
Mattis knows a bit about “annihilation tactics”, he headed Camp Pendleton’s Ist Marine Division in Iraq which were integral to the massacres in Fallujah in April and November 2004.
Speaking to a group of soldiers about how to behave in Iraq during a 2003 speech he ordered:
“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”
Fallujah’s mass graves are silent witness to the diligent obedience to Mattis’s orders.
“Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight … It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right upfront with you …”, he told a conference in San Diego, in 2005. (9)
When the US is not shooting and bombing Mosul’s families in the cursed name of liberation, it is displacing them. Figures to 19th May show in excess of 526,000 men, women and children fleeing their homes and all they own. In the month to 2nd December 2016 over one thousand civilians were killed. On May 26th One hundred and five civilians were killed. On 30th May in the Az Zanjili district of the city, at least two hundred people were reportedly killed in a bombing lasting several hours and dozens of homes “completely flattened.” (Al Araby, 30th May.) The figures in human cost, hour by hour, day after day, would surely fill volumes.
On 27th May the US had dropped leaflets telling people to leave the Old City, Mosul’s ancient heart, a city referred to as Al Fayha (the Paradise) and the “Pearl of the North.” US forces however, care as little as ISIS for life, limb or the Middle East’s haunting Pearls and Paradises.
Mosul Will Be “Destroyed.”
Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s former Deputy Prime Minister, Finance Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, has stated that Mosul, formerly home to two million souls, will be completely “destroyed” and “uninhabitable” by the time the terrorists have been driven out. (Independent, 15th February 2017.) Another ancient jewel destroyed in the name of “freedom.”
Behind the figures are people living the unimaginable. As this was being finished, a message came from a Mosul-born friend, who writes:
“The American Coalition are lying … Civilians in Mosul are getting killed by the bombing and Iraqi and coalition ground missiles. They keep bombing each area for one or two weeks killing hundred of civilians and when the area is empty from any snipers …
“Two of my mother’s cousins houses in Thawrah area were bombed three days ago. Fourteen family members died. Four women, eight children the oldest is ten, and two men. People reclaimed seven bodies and other seven still under rubble. They couldn’t save any survivor under the rubble because the bombings are still going on intensively on the area.
“Those are my relatives and I know very well that they have nothing to do with IS.
“This is the New US/(Prime Minister) Abadi strategy … In Hay al Refaiae, last week my other cousins moved into five houses with their families with also an eighty seven year old old mother to avoid the American Coalition bombing. All five houses were destroyed – with the whole surrounding area. Three of them were injured.”
A man cries as he carries his daughter while walking from an ISIS-controlled part of Mosul towards Iraqi special forces soldiers during a battle in Mosul, Iraq on Mar. 4, 2017. (Source: Goran Tomasevic / Reuters)
“Why Do I Get So Angry?”
Another letter was sent to a friend by his father, also used with permission and gratitude:
“People ask me: Why do I get so angry?
“Below is a scene today from Mosul, my home town. It is a scene repeated a thousand times over, all around Mosul. Yesterday the U.S. Air Force undertook 158 bombing missions over the city of Mosul. Every bridge across the Tigris in Mosul is now destroyed, the Sugar Factory has been bombed, a 5-Story medical centre has been demolished, the entire airport has become rubble, much of the city’s infrastructure including water and electricity have ceased to function, the University of Mosul buildings have been leveled, thousands of homes have been rendered unlivable, and of course no one is counting the civilian dead and the refugees.
“And all for what? To destroy the Islamic State? Is this the same so-called Islamic State whose factions have been supported, financed, and trained by the CIA over the past five years in order to bring about regime change in Syria?
“Since 2003, the United States has bombed Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan … and presently it has its eye focused on Iran. And yet, we have the gall and temerity to talk about the savagery and barbarism of the Mongolian hordes of eight centuries ago.
“I really do wonder why people keep asking me: Why do I get so angry?”
Thinking the Unthinkable.
In the title I query the outcome of this criminal decimation and cite Hiroshima. Parts of Iraq already have higher cancer and birth defect statistics than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, linked to the depleted uranium weapons used by the US and UK from 1991 to now.
Donald Trump has demonstrated his casual fecklessness with weapons of mass destruction by dropping the largest “conventional” weapon ever used on Afghanistan and fifty nine radioactive and chemically toxic Tomahawk Cruise missiles on Syria, neither country had been proved of doing anything but simply existing.
On the Presidential campaign trail, Mark Halperin of Bloomberg asked Donald Trump, whether he would use nuclear weapons against ISIS.
“Well, I’m never going to rule anything out”, replied Trump.
When pushed by Chris Matthews of MSNBC on this issue, Trump said:
“Somebody hits us within ISIS – you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?” (10.)
Iraq is near destroyed on the Blair and Bush lies that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Trump does and it seems, is prepared to think the unthinkable. Will the UN, the relevant world bodies, the “international community” wake up, before it is too late, before a swathe of Iraq and Syria’s people are vapourised, with twenty seven centuries of history ?
Back in 2011, my BSNews co-editor, Mike Raddie, reported to the Metropolitan Police that suspected British citizens were providing funding and support for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Two weeks later, after no response from The Met, Mike contacted them again to be told that his report had been logged, but that the content was redacted. This was ‘unprecedented’ the officer told him.
2017: A significant observation was made by political blogger, John Hilley, this week regarding the facts which have come to light surrounding MI6/MI5 collusion with Manchester based Libyan and British-Libyan Jihadists in order to topple Gaddafi under Theresa May’s watch as Home Secretary. Hilley wrote: ‘Proper reporting of this story should be enough to bring down Theresa May’.
Think about that for a moment. We are now days away from one of the most important elections for decades, with Jeremy Corbyn rapidly closing the poll gap between himself and May, and the BBC, ITV News, Sky News and Channel 4 News are choosing not to tell the British voting public that the Tory leader oversaw, and (necessarily) approved, the withdrawing of terrorist control orders for known Jihadists in Manchester that they might travel freely between that city and Libya and so aid the UK government’s effort to overthrow Gaddafi. They are choosing not to inform voters, at this most crucial time, that Theresa May knew, ‘a thriving community of listed terrorists exists…in the midst of the British public, without any intervention by the UK government, security or intelligence agencies’ (Tony Cartalucci, Land Destroyer Report, May 24th.)
Source: BSNews
‘No intervention’ by our intelligence agencies, we now know, was not strictly true, of course, because thanks to an explosive Middle East Eye article published last Thursday we see it was exactly the kind of ‘intervention’ voters should have knowledge of before attempting to judge how fit Theresa May is to run their country, especially in the context of the cynical and corrosive Tory characterisation of Corbyn as a ‘terrorist sympathiser’. MEE revealed the full extent of MI6/MI5 collusion with members of the proscribed terrorist group, LIFG (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group), carrying interviews with sources who stated that in 2011 their control orders were lifted and ‘within days’ their passports returned. This, conveniently, just as the scheme to remove Gaddafi was heating up – one source reveals he was even asked by an MI5 officer, ‘are you willing to go into battle?’
Interestingly, another source explains that he was, ’employed to edit videos showing Libyan rebels being trained by former SAS and Irish special forces mercenaries in Benghazi’, the city in which a ‘massacre’ provided the rationale for Western intervention. Media Lens, in their alert ‘The Great Libya War Fraud” observe:
‘the smearing of Jeremy Corbyn fits well with the similarly uniform propaganda campaign taking the ‘threat’ of Iraq ‘WMD’ seriously…then, also, the corporate media system assailed the public with a long litany of fraudulent claims. And then there was Libya’.
The piece continues under the sub-heading, ‘The Benghazi Massacre: No Real Evidence’:
‘coming so soon after the incomplete but still damning exposure of the Iraq deception – with the bloodbath still warm – the media’s deep conformity and willful gullibility on the 2011 Libyan war left even jaundiced observers aghast. It was clear that we were faced with a pathological system of propaganda on Perpetual War autopilot.’
Media Lens also tweeted:
‘The Benghazi massacre threat was a fraud. But shouldn’t heads now roll at the BBC, Guardian, Independent, Times…?’
‘The U.S. special mission in Benghazi and the nearby CIA annex were utilized in part to coordinate arms shipments to the jihadist rebels fighting the Syrian regime, with Ambassador Christopher Stevens playing a central role…’
And Tony Cartalucci writes in his piece on the Manchester bombing that,
‘LIFG members would not only assist the US and British governments in the 2011 overthrow of the Libyan government, they would also move on – with Western arms and cash – to NATO member Turkey where they staged an invasion of northern Syria’.
He then draws our attention to a 2011 report in The Telegraph:
‘Abdulhakim Belhadj, head of the Tripoli Military Council and the former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group ‘met with Free Syrian Army leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey’ said a military official working with Mr Belhadj.’
Cartalucci asserts that
‘Libyan terrorists would expand to hundreds, possibly thousands of fighters and later merge with other Syrian militant groups including Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise Jabhat al Nusra. In Libya, LIFG fighters have divided themselves among various warring factions, including Al Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates…’ He concludes that, ‘revealed once again is a convenient intersection of terrorist and US/British interests – this time in pursuit of regime change in Syria in the wake of successful US/UK backed regime change in Libya.’
That the corporate media propaganda ‘autopilot’ used for Libya is in full operation regarding Syria hardly needs emphasising, and those good old ‘radicals’ at Channel 4 News are right at the forefront as documented by independent British journalist in Syria, Vanessa Beeley, in her must-read piece ‘Fake News Week: Why Channel 4 “News” Owes an Apology to Syria’ . Because to understand why Theresa May allowed a network of known Jihadist terrorists to thrive in the middle of Manchester, and to comprehend why the corporate media is willfully keeping this from the British people, we need to understand the overarching modus operandi of the British corporate state – of which the corporate media is a vital component. Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan…it is always the same MO, the same bullshit justifications for war accompanied by the same amplification – rather than the challenging – of them by the ‘mainstream’ media.
We have heard comments aplenty about Jeremy Paxman’s ‘ferocious’ grilling of Theresa May in recent days, but did he question her on any of these sickening ‘Libyan’ revelations in what was, after all, supposed to be a democratic exercise in determining her suitability as Prime Minister? He did not. And the same goes for that other corporate media ‘rottweiler’ Andrew Neil. Both of these six-figure earning, puffed-up egomaniacs conducted a charade of savage inquisition whilst leaving the most critical questions in their back pockets with their hefty paychecks. What a disgusting sham. The rottweilers are nothing more than myrmidons. It is thanks to charlatans like this that the British public is left to fatally compartmenalise on geopolitcal issues rather than seeing the pattern of psychopathic Perpetual War praxis operating without interruption through the bloody decades:
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s founding members had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, returning to Libya determined to establish an Islamic state and coalescing as the LIFG in the mid-1990’s. In 1996 they carried out a failed assassination attempt against Gaddafi which was, according to MI5 whistleblower, David Shayler, funded by MI6, this being one of the reasons he left MI5. Shayler explained he was ‘physically sickened by the fact that MI6 wanted to sponsor Islamic extremists and carry out terrorism’. A sentiment he expanded upon in a book by fellow MI5 whistleblower and his partner at the time, Annie Machon, excerpts of which are available on Machon’s website:
‘I joined the service to stop terrorism and prevent the deaths of innocent people, not to get involved in these despicable and cowardly acts. I still cannot believe that the Prime Minister has refused to take my evidence or investigate this matter as this decision has sent out a clear message to the intelligence services that they can fund terrorism, conspire to murder people with impunity, and take enormous risks with our security. After all, would you give an individual you hardly know, who has admitted to connections with Al Qaeda, an enormous sum to carry out a terrorist attack, when you know the group he is leading is opposed to the values of Western society? It is difficult to imagine a greater disregard and contempt for the lives and security of the British people’.
David Shayler and Annie Machon outside the Old Bailey 2002 (Source: BSNews)
How tragically these words echo now. How terribly prescient they are in light of the Manchester bombing. And how illuminating regarding the unceasing, shameful programme of deep-state depravity which has continued unseen for years, serenaded by the rhetoric of ‘peace and freedom’ spewed out by the Thatchers, Blairs and Mays, leaders happy to send off successive generations of young soldiers to fight and die in their corporate wars accompanied by the drumbeat of their media’s approval while the innocent civilian dead piled up in pitiable monument.
Ten million that number stands and rising, according to historian Mark Curtis who has documented, based on declassified government files, the consequences of Britain’s inglorious foreign policy since World War II. Mark is well placed to remark that ‘the culture of lying to and misleading the electorate is deeply embedded in British policy-making’ enabled by the elite’s ‘endemic contempt for the general population.’ A contempt which meant that, ‘Labour and Conservative governments have connived with militant groups linked to Al Qaeda to control oil resources, overthrow governments and promote Britain’s financial interests. (‘Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion With Radical Islam‘)
‘Labour and Conservative’. But that contemptible consistency may now be under threat with the arrival of Jeremy Corbyn. No wonder they’re terrified of him. A life-long peace campaigner apparently uninterested in personal power who appears to genuinely care about people? This is not business as usual. He is different in kind, not degree, and he is to be stopped. Only Tony Benn has come anywhere as close as Corbyn to being in a position to halt the neoliberal project in the UK with his challenge to Dennis Healey for the 1980 deputy Labour leadership. Declared The Nation in 2014:
‘they hated him for it…but they also feared him, because Benn represented not just Labour’s conscience but its soul – a living link to the radical England of the Levellers, the Chartists, the Suffragists and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.’
Exactly the same can be said of Corbyn. A man like this should never, according to the script, end up in the seat of power. But should he win, and despite all efforts of the corporate media this outcome becomes daily less remote, we can only wait and see what pressures a corrupted political system will bring to bear. How does a dissident run a country? How will he avoid a slide towards expediency when he’s swimming in sewage? And how will he interact with an intelligence community indistinguishable from the terrorists we claim to abhor?
All of these things are a matter of conjecture, but what is not is the fact that the corporate media is keeping information from the British people which would, if properly reported, be the end of Theresa May’s campaign – in fact, her political career. It would also be the autopsy of the diseased system which spawned her – and who knows where that might lead? And that’s the point. The corporate media, being a fundamental organ of that diseased system, would be dealing itself a fatal blow in revealing state corruption this deep. It will never do it. This information is an existential threat.
Immediately then, we have to ask ourselves: do we want the corporate news media to decide the outcome of this election? Because that is what’s happening. And if it does, then democracy is dead – as much as its gasping body had any breath left. If the answer is no then we must challenge the so-called journalists who are participating in this travesty and expose the system which trains. promotes and rewards them for their obedience. In the longer term, we must build change into our society from the bottom up, through our communities and with our solidarity underpinning a fight for social justice.
The worst has already happened. Families in Manchester, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and everywhere else our governments have spread their poison, will never again hear their children’s voices or see their smiles. And so, those who sleep soundly at night knowing they have caused this carnage must never be allowed to sleep so peacefully again.
The former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Luis Moreno Ocampo has said that the investigation being carried out by the ICC concerning the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, will most likely result in condemnation of Israeli officials since the establishment of settlements is considered a continuing war crime.
He added that the settlements constitute a clear legal violation of the Rome Statute and the rules of international law, which prohibit an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to an occupied territory.
During a special panel discussion organized by Al-Quds University yesterday evening, Ocampo said that the prosecutor’s office has gone a long way in examining the issue of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
He denied the statements attributed to him by an Israeli newspaper a year and a half ago that settlements are not illegal, pointing out that it was not the first time that the Israeli press has presented its own interpretation of statements.
In particular, he stated that what was reported in the newspaper at that time is contrary to his firm legal convictions that the transfer of the civilian population of an occupying force onto occupied land constitutes a war crime.
Ocampo explained that the case brought by the State of Palestine before the ICC has caused huge discomfort among the Israeli side and is moving the Israeli government from an attack posture to one of defence, citing a quote by an Israeli official that Israel is recruiting more lawyers than soldiers as a result of the Palestinian complaint.
The Central Intelligence Agency, established through the National Security Act of 1947, was primarily intended to be a centralized clearinghouse for information to prevent another Pearl Harbor-style attack on the United States. Be that as it may, the initiation of what would eventually be termed the Cold War soon after led to the rapid expansion of the Agency’s role, to include running actual spies and engaging in classic covert actions. The CIA took the lead in the U.S. pushback against Moscow and developed tactically into the principal offensive weapon in America’s conduct of the Cold War. Russia and its allies responded in kind. Indeed, the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its allies might well be termed the war of the spies.
Espionage employing human agents, as opposed to technical intrusions, is a high-risk and morally questionable business. It was justified after World War II because the United States was confronted by a cluster of enemies who were militarily powerful and fully capable of hitting the American homeland with nuclear weapon-tipped ballistic missiles. Given that level of confrontation, the most important secrets were those relating to the intentions of the leadership of countries like Russia and China—and it is only possible to obtain that kind of information from an actual spy who penetrates the inner councils of the hostile regimes. That is precisely why so much time and effort has been put into recruiting, training, and supporting spies overseas.
On May 20, the New York Times reported that “Killing CIA Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations”. The article described how an entire network of American spies in China had been identified by the counterintelligence services of that country and rolled up between 2010 and 2012, “crippl[ing] U.S. spying operations…for years afterwards.” Some of the “eighteen to twenty” sources, including high level government officials, were executed while others were imprisoned. It is to be presumed that all who were not shot outright were tortured. The Times report stated that a thorough damage assessment has been conducted but it had proven impossible to identify the actual cause of the disaster, so it remains unknown whether there was a mole or some tradecraft or communications failure that had brought about the death and imprisonment of so many American agents.
In reality, the rolling up of entire American espionage networks is not exactly that unusual because of the way intelligence agencies operate even when their actions have not been betrayed from within. Sweeping arrests of American spies have occurred not only in Russia and China, but also in Cuba, Iran, India and France. In theory, every single high-level spy in what is referred to as a “denied area” with a hostile and capable counterintelligence service is compartmented off from any other spies operating in that country, but the reality is that agents are often recruited and handled in such a way that the exposure of one individual puts all the others at risk.
To be sure, the mole explanation is attractive because it is more convenient to blame an individual than it is to critique an entire system. But as the presumed mole has not been discovered, it also leads to the presumption that he or she might still be active. CIA and FBI moles have been devastating. Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, and Edward Howard provided the Soviet Union with information that led to the betrayal of numerous agents and the virtual destruction of espionage networks that took years to develop. In this case, investigators identified several possible moles, one of whom had quit the Agency and moved to an unnamed Asian country, but a solid case to proceed with an arrest could not be developed.
And then there is the tradecraft angle. Tradecraft is the term used to describe how an American case officer identifies, develops, recruits and then runs a spy. The Times account reveals that highly-sensitive Chinese agents were routinely met by their handlers in Beijing. There were encounters in restaurants where the local counterintelligence service employed the waiters and had microphones implanted on all of the tables. I must admit that I find it unimaginable that even a Chinese-American case officer would risk meeting a Chinese official in the high-security environment that Beijing represents, but that is apparently what the FBI investigation determined. It would be a piece of cake for local surveillance to pick up the agent, interrogate him, and develop a clear picture of the CIA modus operandi in the city. Once you have one spy you have the key to identifying all of them.
The other two notable vulnerabilities are how and where foreign spies are recruited and what they use to communicate. How would you recruit a Chinese official or scientist who would have information that Washington wanted? You would approach him when he is outside China on business, vacation, or studying. But the problem is that those places where American intelligence can operate freely are relatively easily identifiable and are also well known to the counterintelligence service in Beijing. So a Chinese physicist recruited by U.S. intelligence while doing postgraduate studies at an American university would intensify interest in others who also attended that university, some of whom might also be spies.
Back in my time in the Agency, a number of hostile intelligence services identified vacation and business destinations in the Middle East where their officials were being spotted by CIA, approached, and sometimes recruited. Knowing this, they could focus on recent travelers to those areas and were able to turn several of the agents while also identifying a number of others. The Chinese counterintelligence service could certainly have done the same in assessing its travelers that it considered sensitive from either a political or occupational point of view.
Knowing how the opponent is approaching and recruiting spies from among your countrymen also provides an opportunity to run a dangle operation, which can be used to enter, identify, and disrupt an intelligence network. A dangle is essentially a double agent who will pretend to work for the Americans while really working for his own country. U.S. intelligence polygraphs new agents but “swirl” examiners confess that lie detectors work best on Americans, who find it hard to lie when confronted by a machine that they believe can tell what is the truth. Asians and Arabs are regarded as particularly difficult to examine effectively because their cultures make it possible to mentally compartmentalize their responses. Guilt-ridden Catholics are easy.
And then there are the communications, seen by many as the most vulnerable element in agent handling. No one writes letters anymore, so secret or invisible writing is passé, but electronic communication using satellites is very much in. Messages from spies are encrypted, but anything encrypted can be unencrypted if enough time and effort are committed to the project. One should assume that the counterintelligence services in Moscow and Beijing are very good at what they do and quite willing to work hard. American intelligence services probably used the same technical system to stay in touch with all their spies in China, so when you catch one of them and analyze his procedures and equipment you are probably well on your way to catching all of them. And when you uncover a “nest of spies” you inflict serious collateral damage on whoever recruited them. In this case, prospective Chinese agents willing to trade secrets for money will come to the logical conclusion that the United States government is unable to protect them.
The best way to avoid the pain and embarrassment of having one’s human sources exposed is to cut back on spying in most places most of the time because running agents will inevitably mean occasionally getting caught. It is perhaps more important to consider why one spies in the first place. Unique information that protects a vital national interest is certainly desirable, but unleashing thousands of numbers-driven case officers worldwide to collect information that is either of passing interest or no interest at all is both a waste of resources and an invitation for international humiliation when something goes wrong. With that in mind, one has to wonder how many of the Chinese who paid the ultimate price were actually providing information that was essential to policymakers in Washington. Perhaps none of them were.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
Featured image: Andrey Burmakin / Shutterstock.com via The American Conservative
Yesterday, French media applauded newly elected President Emmanuel Macron’s summit Monday in Versailles with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This enthusiasm was all the more significant as the newspapers made little effort to hide the fact that Macron was shifting towards Moscow despite Washington’s open hostility to Russia.
“In the finery of the castle of Versailles,” Le Monde wrote in its editorial yesterday, “France wanted on Monday, May 29, to start a new, better course in its relations with Russia. And that was a good thing.” It rejoiced that “At NATO, with Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, like with Vladimir Putin in Versailles, Mr. Macron set the tone.”
The editorial pointed to the close links between Macron’s overtures to Russia and the growing tensions between the United States and the European Union (EU), and above all Germany. These took the most overt form in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s statement this weekend that, after Britain’s exit from the EU and the election of Donald Trump as US president, continental Europe would have to fight for its future alone, without relying on Washington and London.
Le Monde hailed Macron’s
“will to seize a ‘European moment.’ ” It added, “Between Brexit and the mercantilist isolationism of Donald Trump, highlighted this week by Angela Merkel, the EU must close ranks and reinforce its own identity on the great issues of the day: Ukraine, Syria, global warming.”
This analysis was shared, with minor variations, by newspapers of all political colours. The right-wing Le Figaro explained that the two presidents aimed to “revive diplomatic relations between their two countries” and applauded Macron’s timing:
“Macron also capitalised on an international situation favourable to France. Faced with Putin, he was free to act: the UK is out of the picture since Brexit, the United States is unpredictable since Donald Trump’s election, and Germany is busy preparing its upcoming elections.”
Putin and Macron reach a wary détente (Source: France 24)
Libération, however, recalled the close relations between Germany and Macron, who was Berlin’s favoured presidential candidate, and applauded Macron’s rapprochement with Putin.
“The diplomatic collaboration [Macron] has developed with Angela Merkel shows undeniable skill,” it wrote. “By inviting the Russian president to follow the footsteps of the brutal and visionary Czar Peter the Great, of whom Putin styles himself the descendant, Macron is offering Putin assurances.”
The emergence of such a consensus in the French media reflects a profound shift taking place in the politics of the capitalist class in France and across Europe. The NATO military alliance between the United States, Canada, and the western European powers is in an advanced state of collapse.
At Versailles, Macron broached policies that would repudiate most of the initiatives that French and US imperialism developed together over the last decade. When right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy was elected in 2007, he took France back into the NATO military command in order to repair the damage done to relations with Washington by German and French opposition to the illegal 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
Since then, France and other European imperialist powers worked with Washington to launch a war rampage across the Middle East and eastern Europe, often targeting pro-Russian regimes. Now, however, Macron is signaling that he is considering a vast reorientation of French foreign policy away from the United States and towards Russia.
In Syria—where France backed the NATO war to topple the Russian-backed regime since the war began in 2011, even recognising US-backed opposition militias as Syria’s government—Macron floated the possibility of reopening France’s embassy in Damascus. He also proposed developing closer counter-terrorism cooperation with Russia.
Macron stood by silently while Putin denounced economic sanctions Washington forced the EU to impose on Russia. To address the conflict that erupted inside Ukraine after Washington and Berlin backed a fascist-led putsch against a pro-Russian government in Kiev in 2014, Macron also endorsed the “Normandy format” of four-way talks between Germany, Russia, France, and Ukraine. This negotiating format pointedly leaves out the United States.
Significantly, sections of the international media are beginning to discuss the vast implications of this policy shift, coming as Germany, Macron’s main ally, remilitarises its foreign policy.
In the United States, Forbes pointed to the link between the Macron-Putin conference and the bitter geo-strategic rivalries growing inside NATO. It mocked coverage in the US media which, it said, all
“reads the same: Macron took it to Putin over fake news, Syria and gay rights. There is nothing else to see. Progressive nice guy Macron spanked evil backer of dictators, Putin.”
Coming after Trump’s foreign tour to the Middle East and Europe, during which Trump laid out an aggressive pro-Saudi and anti-Iranian line, the magazine pointed to bitter strategic and energy rivalries between Washington and its nominal European allies.
“Macron,” Forbes warned, “needs Putin more than he needs Donald Trump. These two are more likely to get along, at least behind closed doors, and here is why. First, many in France are souring on sanctions [against Russia]. … Second, and more importantly, is this little deal here: Total SA’s agreement to develop giant South Paris gas field in Iran. French oil giant Total SA is one of the biggest European players in Iranian hydrocarbons. Russia is Iran’s best friend. … France and Total cannot trust the Americans on Iran, but they can trust the Russians.”
While Forbes unmistakably saw a potential Franco-Russian alliance as threatening US interests, Germany’s Die Zeit was, by contrast, agreeably surprised.
“From a German standpoint, one always asks oneself, when the big neighbours France and Russia are meeting, whether they are hiding some sort of plan against Germany,” it wrote. “And Paris and Moscow are often happy to play on these concerns. So it is astonishing that French observers are almost unanimously interpreting Macron’s first international appearances in the context of a renewed German-French alliance.”
It is ever clearer that the sudden, rapid and unpredictable shifts in the foreign policy of the various imperialist powers are not passing events or coincidences, but symptoms of a far broader crisis of the capitalist system struck by more than a decade of deep economic crisis.
In 1991, the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union deprived the NATO alliance of a common enemy. Over a quarter century later, the process of NATO’s internal collapse is in a very advanced state. The wars in Iraq and Yugoslavia launched by the United States and its European allies in the 1990s have escalated into wars across much of the Middle East and Africa, and vast US-led confrontations with Russia and China, with a major NATO military build-up in eastern Europe and the US-led “pivot to Asia” aimed at China.
Every indication is that the shift Macron is undertaking has been under preparation for some time, amid mounting opposition in European capitals to the impact of US wars on their strategic interests. Macron himself traveled to Russia last year as economy minister and met with his Russian counterpart, Alexei Ulyukayev, to announce that despite EU sanctions on Russia, Macron hoped French economic ties to Moscow would deepen. Under the impact of the sanctions, France’s trade volume with Russia has been halved, to only US$11.6 billion per year.
Russian Economics Minister Alexei Ulyukayev, left, and French Economics Minister Emmanuel Macron talk during the Russian-French Council of Economic, Financial, Industrial and Trade Issues session on January 25, 2016 in Moscow, Russia. (Source: MyRitter.com)
Macron’s prime minister, Edouard Philippe, was the mayor of France’s busiest container shipping port, Le Havre, which repeatedly hosted the influential China-Europa business summit.
The deepening strategic and economic rivalries between the NATO powers constitute a warning to the working class. After a quarter-century of escalating war, the remilitarisation of German foreign policy and Macron’s call for a return to the draft in France, the European ruling elites are preparing an explosion of imperialist militarism fought in the interests of the banks, shareholders, and major corporations.
Workers cannot support any of these contending imperialist powers, on either side of the Atlantic; all are led by ruling classes bitterly hostile to working people and that are preparing horrific wars. What is emerging is not the bankruptcy of one or another imperialist power, but of world imperialism, and a plunge by international capitalism back to the type of conflicts that twice in the last century led to world war.
The reactionary character of Franco-German imperialist interests is perhaps most strikingly indicated by the nature of Macron’s government. Having extended France’s nearly two-year-long state of emergency, which suspends basic democratic rights, it is preparing to impose deep cuts to jobs and social benefits in authoritarian fashion, by decree. As it prepares to wage war overseas, it is pouring resources to boost police force levels and increase the number of prison cells, in anticipation of a confrontation with the working class.
The US-led coalition and US-backed forces are on full alert over the collapse of ISIS in the Syrian province of Aleppo and the success of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) against the terrorist group at the Iraqi border with Syria.
The Kurdish Security Police of the Asayish held a meeting on Monday in Qamishli city to discuss the formation of a defence system ‘to confront the Iranian project’ that is allegedly supported by by the Syrian government. In other words, the Asayish is concerned that a part of the Syrian-Iraqi border was liberated from ISIS by the PMU.
The Asayish is a 15,000-strong force controlled by the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD). At the same time, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) that are the core of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are military wings of the PYD. Thus, the Asayish statement could be considered as an official position of the PYD and the SDF.
Furthermore, the Asayish was involved in heavy clashes against the National Defense Forces and the Syrian Army in the city of Hasakah in August 2016. The Asayish was supported by the YPG and the US-led coalition.
The US-backed force has also increased its activity on the southern bank of Euphrates capturing the villages al-Mushayrifah, Bir Akhu Hadlah, Bir al-David and Bir Hajj al-Mufazi near Tabqah as well as the Baath Dam and the villages of Hawra, al-Barouda and al-Matiyura south of it. According to some experts, the SDF is aiming to reach the Resafa Crossroads in order to cut off the Salamiyah-Raqqah highway that links up the SAA-held city of Salamiyah with Raqqah, and to expand its presence near the N4 Highway in order to prevent the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) Tiger Forces from reaching the province of Raqqah.
The SDF advance followed a collapse of the ISIS defenses in the countryside of Maskanah and a failure of US-backed militant groups to counter government forces in southeastern Syria along the borders with Jordan and Iraq.
Thus, the US-led coalition may even decide to develop the SDF advance in the direction of Deir Ezzor in order to capture Deir Ezzor oil and gas fields on pretext of the battle against ISIS. However, this will be possible only if ISIS units deployed in Raqqah continue keep a defense attitude and avoid counter-attacking advancing SDF units.
Environmental campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason has just written to the UK’s Policy Advisor Nigel Chadwick at the Chemicals Regulation Directorate of Health and Safety Executive (HSE).
She also sent Chadwick a 19-page document (Monsanto_has_committed_slow_poisoning_of_the_people_of_Wales) in which she asserts that Monsanto has engaged in the slow poisoning of the people of Wales with PCBs and Roundup. This, she says, is with the help of the British government, the Expert Committee on Pesticides, the Health and Safety Executive, Defra, the Royal Society, European Food Safety Authority, European Chemicals Agency, the German Rapporteur Member State, the BBC, the BMA and Rupert Murdoch.
Mason also discusses how Monsanto has committed ecocide with Roundup in Wales thanks to Swansea City Council’s authorised the spraying of it on city roadsides. A total of 518 kg was used in 2016.
She mentions her long and unsatisfactory many years’ history of correspondence with the HSE about pesticides, which has failed to stimulate appropriate regulatory action despite the firm evidence she has provided about the damaging effects of biocides throughout the UK and across the globe.
As with many of her previous documents, Mason outlines how Monsanto has conspired to keep its money-spinning, disease-causing product (glyphosate-based) Roundup on the market via a combination of deception, the manipulation of science and regulatory processes and the co-option of key figures – the same company that was also involved in the cover up of Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
Monsanto in Wales: PCBs and toxic dumping
Mason states:
“Wales is the site of the worst environmental disaster that the public has never heard of because there was a massive cover up for more than 40 years.”
Source: Hwaairfan’s Blog
She describes the role of the British government in colluding with Monsanto by outlining how Monsanto poisoned the environment in Wales with the dumping of toxins from its factory there, where it manufactured PCBs and other dangerous chemicals. The company knew about the health risks of PCBs long before they were banned. Company papers subsequently released show that for more than 30 years Monsanto had sat on lab tests results that indicated PCBs were fatal to rats and other animals.
It stopped making PCBs in Anniston (US) in 1971 because of scandals about PCBs on the health of the population and wildlife. However, the British government agreed to ramp up production at the Monsanto plant in Newport, Wales.
Toxic waste from the increased production was dumped at various quarries in Wales and one in the north of England. The British government, which knew of the dangers of PCBs in the environment in the 1960s, allowed their production in Wales until 1977.
Mason notes the extraordinary lengths to which the British government went to protect Monsanto and cover up the truth. One quarry has been found to contain at least 67 toxic chemicals. Seven PCBs have been identified, along with vinyl chlorides and naphthalene. A few years ago, the unlined quarry was found to be still leaking (the pollution of water has been occurring since the 1970s). The waste and groundwater contain significant quantities of poisonous, noxious and polluting material.
PCBs are chemicals persist in the environment and will never disappear from Wales.
Mason argues:
“The continual leak of Monsanto’s toxic chemicals will carry on for many years from Brofiscin, Maendy or one of the other five quarries around Wales in which toxic chemical waste was carried in the past by lorries bearing IWD/Purle and Monsanto logos.”
Mason describes how important research has been ignored by regulators and governments over the years that showed how various agrochemicals and other man-made chemicals in the environment are changing humans: polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), DDT, chlordane, lindane, aldrin, dieldrin, endrin, toxaphene, heptachlor, dioxin, atrazine and dacthal – all identified as endocrine disruptor chemicals.
As a resident of Wales, Mason notes that in 1973, she swapped being poisoned by PCBs leaking into the Cardiff water supply for Monsanto’s test bed for its flagship glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup in Swansea. In her various papers, Mason has provided disturbing descriptions of how glyphosate has been used liberally in South Wales and data relating to the deteriorating health of residents as well as degradation of the environment and biodiversity across the UK.
Yet, due to government collusion with the agrochemical sector, European directives have been sidelined, regulatory processes subverted and ‘business as usual’ remains the order of the day.
Business as usual
The British Government enjoys very close financial relationships with Monsanto, Syngenta, AstraZeneca, Bayer CropScience and Dow Chemicals. Mason states:
“The UK government supported the Glyphosate Task Force (GTF), a consortium of companies joining resources and efforts in order to renew the European glyphosate registration with a joint submission (most companies produce their own formulated glyphosate products).”
She then highlights how private corporations are shaping the government’s research agenda in Britain in a way that serves their own interests:
“In 2010 Michael Pragnell, founder of Syngenta and former Chairman of CropLife International, was appointed as Chairman of Cancer Research UK (CRUK) and by 2011 CRUK was donating money (£450 million/year) to the Government’s Strategy for UK Life Sciences and AstraZeneca (Syngenta’s parent company) was providing 22 compounds to academic research to develop medicines in the UK. One Corporation promotes cancer; the other Corporation tries to cure it.”
Whether it is CRUK, the Francis Crick Institute or the Oxford Martin Commission (see Mason’s letter to the OMC here) for Future Generations, Mason draws attention to the fact that these bodies, which say they are concerned about health and disease, appear to do their best to avoid addressing the issue of transnational agrochemical companies and their products.
She asks:
“When did Oxford University lose its way? Was it when the Global Corporations came in with money to offer for services? Sir Richard Doll the epidemiologist who, together with Austin Bradford Hill, worked out that smoking caused cancer became Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University in 1969 and a Companion of Honour in 1996 for ‘services of national importance’. Only after his death it was discovered between 1976 and 2002 that he had been paid by Monsanto to defend Agent Orange and PCBs in Court.”
Source: sustainablepulse.com
And it gets worse. The EU Commission (EC) has announced that it is planning to extend authorisation for glyphosate for a further ten years. The decision is based on the latest evaluation published by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) declaring glyphosate to be safe. The EC has actually approved 14 new import authorisations for genetically engineered plants resistant to herbicides. All these plants will contain residues from spraying. Several of the genetically engineered plants recently approved for import are not only resistant to glyphosate but also to combined applications of other dangerous herbicides, such as 2,4-D, dicamba, glufosinate and isoxaflutole.
Mason has already written to the ECHA concerning its flawed evaluation of glyphosate.
Key figures are dismissive of Mason’s work
If you read Rosemary Mason’s series of documents, you will be impressed with the amount of information she has placed in the public domain. What might be more impressive is that her evidence is always supported with reference to many official reports and (peer-reviewed) scientific studies. Her work is not just about the science behind chemicals and their impacts on people and nature. She brings to the table analyses that also delve deep into the politics of policy- and decision-making.
For all the effort put in, the recipients of her open letters seem to dismiss or ignore what she has to say. These are high-level figures often working in publicly funded institutions and whose agencies – at least in theory – are seeking to balance the interests of the public with commercial interests to the benefit of everyone involved.
However, the response to her letters seems to be ‘thanks but no thanks, we have all this covered’, even though Mason has produced page after page of evidence to show they have not got it covered and are colluding with the agrochemical sector to privilege its interests ahead of all else.
While Mason writes about the poisoning of people, water, soil and food, what her writing is ultimately about is corruption in high places and a neoliberal capitalism that regards regulation as a barrier to lining the pockets of highly paid CEOs and shareholders.
What it amounts to is a crime against humanity because the whole of humanity is paying the price. From Wales and the US to Argentina and India, the impacts of transnational agribusiness and the rolling out of its toxins are clear to see.
The media largely remains silent on the issue of agrochemicals and disease, preferring to parrot a narrative about individual choice and lifestyle being responsible for various illnesses (see this). This conveniently diverts attention from the role of the agrochemical sector and how public institutions and governments are colluding with the industry to frame legislation and polices to ensure business as usual.
Green Revolution: money-spinning chemical revolution
The Green Revolution was a chemical revolution based on proprietary seeds and chemical inputs, monocropping and ultimately debt. It was exported across the world and pressed into the service of US geostrategic interests and corporate profit. The model is not only unsustainable but has and has been underpinned by a resource-grabbing, food-deficit producing US foreign policy agenda for many decades, assisted by the WTO, World Bank and IMF (for instance, see ‘this and ‘this).
Source: scidev.net
Mason has discussed in her many documents the loss of biodiversity and the devastating impact on health as a result of this model of farming. In her new document, she refers to Iowa in the US with is chemical-drenched fields and monocultured of GM Roundup Ready corn: no birds, no bees, no insects in a world where corn is king. Anything that might eat corn, hurt corn, bother corn is destroyed.
Some 100 years ago, the same fields were home to 300 species of plants, 60 mammals, 300 birds, hundreds and hundreds of insects. That all gave way to industrialised ‘efficiency’ courtesy of a Monsanto model of agriculture propped up by billions of dollars of taxpayer handouts. A water-intensive model of agriculture that turns soil into degraded chemical cocktails and humans into carriers of disease.
Monsanto’s whole business model is based on conquest. It captures markets and key institutions, destroys competition and relies on the US government to maintain its profits and access to regions of the world. It relies on the US state to keep the fundamentally crisis-ridden neoliberal agenda on track by facilitating corporate imperialism.
There are genuine alternatives (see this as well) to the prevailing chemical-intensive model of agriculture and the massive social, environmental and health costs it entails. To be genuinely effective, however, these alternatives must go hand-in-hand with rejecting the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics of neoliberalism, while at the same time continuing to hold to account the corrupt corporations that drive and profit from it as well as key figures in public institutions who facilitate the needs of these companies.
Several brave souls have actually declared their intention to run against Rwandan President, aka Dictator, Paul Kagame in this year’s election, even though two of the country’s three viable candidates landed in prison last time and a third fled the country after his party’s vice president was found by a riverbank with his head cut off.
This week the Rwandan government announced that all presidential candidates’ social media messages—text, photos, and video—must be approved by the national electoral commission. Since the Rwandan government has long since assassinated or frightened any real journalists out of the country, this will severely hinder candidates’ efforts to get their message out, even to the tiny percentage of the population who have both cell phones and electricity in their homes and the larger percentage who have cell phones but have to leave their homes—often walking miles—to charge them. Or to those of us outside Rwanda who might be trying to follow this year’s election.
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A great deal, no doubt, but one word Kagame most certainly does not want broadcast or even tweeted to the world outside is “famine.” That word might embarrass both him and his powerful friends Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Howard Buffett, and Reverend Rick Warren, all longtime champions of his so-called economic miracle.
Bill Clinton and Paul Kagame in Rwanda
Bill Clinton and Howard Buffett aren’t likely to be pleased by reports that their agricultural aid to Rwanda is helping starve rather than uplift Rwandans, so would they want Rwandan presidential candidates to have the freedom to tweet “Rwandan famine” or related images?
Clinton has said that he is willing to tolerate some of the Rwandan government’s failings in the area of human rights because, “They have achieved so much,” and “Nothing’s perfect.”
Indeed. A recent investigation published by London-based Global Campaign for Rwandans’ Human Rights reports that
“since November 2015 more than three million Rwandans [a quarter of the population] are at the verge of starvation and more than 150,000 Rwandans have emigrated out of the country, mostly to Uganda, due to a ravaging famine, particularly in the Eastern Province Districts of Rwamagana, Nyagatare, Bugesera, Kayonza and Kirehe as well as Nyanza and Gisagara Districts in Southern Province.”
Source: The Organization for World Peace
And something else is wrong with this picture. Two of the famine stricken districts of Eastern Province—Kayonza and Kirehe—are among the three districts that the Clinton Development Initiative (CDI) boasts of helping in its publication “Anchor Farm Project: Rwanda.”
“CDI focuses its smallholder outreach operations in Rwanda’s Eastern Province—in the Kirehe, Gatsibo, and Kayonza districts—where they have an established network of field officers, government agricultural workers, and more than 35,000 farmers benefiting from agricultural extension services during the 2016-2017 seasons. CDI’s work will focus on the effectiveness of its farmer extension programs. The core focus of these programs will be on integrated soil fertility management, predominantly for a soy-maize rotation; access to quality and reliable seeds, inputs and input finance; climate resilience and erosion control; and working directly with large buyers to secure the best price. The Clinton Hunter Development Initiative (CHDI), which is a partnership between the Clinton Foundation and The Hunter Foundation of Scotland, established and operates the agroprocessing business Mount Meru Soyco LTD. Soyco, which produces cooking oil for the local Rwandan market, provides a market opportunity for CDI smallholder farmers.”
And damn if there isn’t another problem here. This Hunter-Clinton Foundation agro-processing partnership—Mount Meru Soyco LTD—in the now famine stricken district of Kayonza—appears to have been a source of “reputational” anxiety for Clinton Foundation staff and for John Podesta. Podesta is of course former Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton; former CEO, now Chair and Counsel for the Center for American Progress; former Counselor to Barack Obama; former Chair of the Obama-Biden Transition Team; co-owner of the Podesta Group, a major lobbying firm; and perhaps most infamously, campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential run.
These 2012 e-mails released by Wikileaks in the Podesta e-mails expressed concern that former President Clinton might be held responsible for whatever Mount Meru Soyco LTD gets up to:
Tom Hunter sent an email to WJC [William Jefferson Clinton] recently saying he hoped to be in a position to re-engage thru CHDI [Clinton Hunter Development Initiative] in Rwanda in the not too distant future. Announcing that our job in Rwanda is done and we are withdrawing would end that possibility. Ewan Hunter sits on the Board of both Soyco and Rwanda Coffee. To the extent that he is identified with CHDI and not the Hunter Foundation, the reputational issues, at least as far as the public is concerned, would still exist even after our “announcement.” The government would understand the distinction, however.
________________________________
From: Amitabh Desai To: Bruce Lindsey
Cc: Zayneb Shaikley; Walker Morris; Laura Graham; Doug Band – PC; Justin Cooper – PC; John Podesta
Sent: Tue Feb 21 17:03:02 2012 Subject: Rwanda concern
Dear Bruce, Laura, and Doug, the note below requests your guidance regarding CHDI in Rwanda. We’d welcome your feedback and would be happy to discuss this further at your convenience. Sincerely, Ami and Walker
THE CHALLENGE: The Rwandan public and government associate Soyco and Rwandan Farmers with WJC, but we have little or no operational input or control of those programs. This presents reputational risks – for example next year if Soyco is accused of unjust labor practices, or an accident/fatality occurs at the factory, or if the farmers complain the factory isn’t paying them fair prices, etc, there is a risk that WJC is held responsible, albeit unfairly.”
What follows—all of which can be read in Podesta e-mail 15436—is a review of five options for managing “reputational risks.” One is recommended because it “would enable WJC to say rightfully that we have ongoing agriculture programs in Rwanda” and “provide an opportunity to engage donors who approach us with an interest in Rwanda.”
Fast forward to 2017, and Rwanda’s Eastern Province’s Kayonza District—home of agro-processing facility Mount Meru Soyco LTD— faces famine and mass migration north to Uganda, which already hosts millions of refugees moving south to escape war and famine in South Sudan.
At the same time Rwandan President Paul Kagame continues to take one star turn after another on the world stage. He is Israel’s African darling and he has just accepted the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson Award for Outstanding Friendship with the Jewish People at the Champions of Jewish Values Gala in NYC. He is fêted by elite American universities and business schools including Yale, Harvard, Stanford and the Wharton School, who present him as a transformative leader and echo Bill Clinton’s rhapsodic claim that “the economic and social gains in Rwanda have been nothing short of astonishing under Kagame.” The Rwandan president even co-chairs the UN Millenium Development Goals Advocacy Group with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg.
Yet despite all this international star power, Kagame so fears even the tweets of domestic rivals that he commands his electoral commission to censor them. “Rwanda Genocide” is one term that will not make it past his censors; “Genocide against the Tutsi” is the legally codified and enforced description of Rwanda’s 1994 tragedy inside Rwanda.
Another word that his rivals won’t be allowed to tweet is “famine,” even as a quarter of his people face desperate hunger.
Explosive allegations have emerged that the UK’s MI5 intelligence agency had prior warning of Manchester suicide bomber Salman Abedi planning a terrorist atrocity.
On May 22, Abedi detonated a shrapnel-laden improvised explosive device outside a performance in Manchester by American singer Ariana Grande, killing 22 people, many of whom were children, and wounding 116.
According to the Mail on Sunday,
“the FBI told MI5 that Abedi was part of a North African Islamic State cell plotting to strike a political target in the UK.”
The FBI passed these warnings to MI5 in January, after placing Abedi on their terrorist watch list in 2016. An unnamed “security source” told the Daily Mail that the FBI informed MI5 that Abedi
“belonged to a North African terror gang based in Manchester, which was looking for a political target in this country.”
He continued:
“Following this US tip-off, Abedi and other members of the gang were scrutinised by MI5. It was thought at the time that Abedi was planning to assassinate a political figure. But nothing came of this investigation and, tragically, he slipped down the pecking order of targets.”
The claims by Prime Minister Theresa May that Abedi acted as a “lone wolf” and was known by Britain’s security services only “to a degree” lie in shreds. It is simply not credible that an individual planning to assassinate a British “political figure”—that could conceivably include the prime minister, foreign secretary or the queen—would be allowed to “slip” under the radar.
Abedi was effectively given a free hand by MI5 to launch a terrorist attack. The Daily Mail’ s revelations add to mounting evidence of the role of British intelligence services and successive governments in cultivating Islamist terror networks and protecting these “assets” as part of their regime-change operations in Libya and Syria.
On Thursday, a report by Middle East Eye (MEE) exposed what it described as an “open door” policy by the previous Conservative government of David Cameron allowing members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) to travel to Libya in 2011 as part of military operations to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. May was home secretary in that government. Abedi’s parents were both members of the LIFG. These individuals were able to travel freely between the UK, Libya, Syria and other locations.
Former rebel fighters interviewed by the MEE explained how British security services assisted their movements, providing them with passports and clearing them for departure. Belal Younis, who traveled to Libya in 2011, said he was asked by an MI5 officer, who had detained him for questioning after a trip to Libya in early 2011,
“Are you willing to go into battle?”
“While I took time to find an answer,” Younis told MEE, “he turned and told me the British government have no problem with people fighting against Gaddafi.”
During a subsequent trip to Libya in May 2011, he was questioned by counter-terrorism police in a British airport lounge, but an MI5 officer interceded and he was “waved through.” The MI5 officer later called Younis to say that he had “sorted it out.”
Many of those who traveled to Libya had previously been under counter-terrorism control orders, with tight restrictions on their movement and Internet activity. However, the control orders were lifted in 2011 as Britain joined US and French efforts to topple Gaddafi.
The killing of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 (Source: CBS News)
Unknown to the British people, including the families who lost loved ones last Monday night, Manchester was at the centre of operations that funnelled rebel fighters into Libya. Younis told the MEE’s reporters,
“The majority who went from here were from Manchester.” Another interviewee said of the young recruits he encountered during a visit to a rebel camp in Misrata that same year, “They had proper Manchester accents.”
Another British-born fighter told the MEE they were also allowed to travel to Syria, where Islamist groups, offshoots of Al Qaeda and backed by the US and Britain, have been fighting to overthrow the government of Bashar Al-Assad. Abedi himself was allowed to travel to Syria. “No questions were asked,” Younis said. Another British-Libyan said he had worked for the British SAS in Benghazi to edit slick video recruitment and marketing packages showing fighters being trained by both the SAS and Irish Special Forces.
In Saturday’s Daily Mail, Peter Oborne alleged direct collusion by MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, with terrorist organisations in Libya and Syria. Oborne, associate editor of the Spectator and former chief political commentator at the DailyTelegraph, wrote,
“MI6 officers were complicit in creating a generation of British-born jihadis who are prepared to do anything, and kill anyone—even young children—in their efforts to destroy this country.
“There is every reason to speculate that Salman Abedi’s evil handiwork at the Manchester Arena on Monday night was in part a direct consequence of MI6’s meddling in Middle Eastern and North African affairs.”
Oborne singled out MI6’s role under the Labour government of Tony Blair, when its former chiefs, Sir Richard Dearlove and Sir John Scarlett, “allowed [MI6] to become a propaganda tool for the Labour PM’s clique of war-mongers.”
Scarlett drafted the infamous dossier on Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, used by Blair to stampede Britain into war.
“MI6 has failed to learn the lessons from this debacle,” Oborne wrote, pointing to the “hundreds” of British citizens who “were allowed to travel abroad to join jihadist organisations.”
Britain’s sordid dealings with the LIFG and other Al Qaeda-linked groups stretch back to the 1980s. The LIFG was spawned from the mujahideen and built up by the US in Afghanistan as part of its destabilisation of the Soviet Union. Since then, the fate of the LIFG has directly tracked shifts in British and American foreign policy.
Abdel-Hakim Belhaj (Source: The Guardian)
In 1996, British intelligence agencies paid LIFG leaders huge sums to attempt to assassinate Gaddafi, according to leaks from senior French intelligence officials and former MI5 officer David Shayler. In 2004, after the Blair government’s rapprochement with the Libyan regime, MI6 helped seize LIFG leader Abdel-Hakim Belhaj and his deputy Sami al-Saadi. According to British historian and author Mark Curtis, Belhaj was handed over to the CIA, tortured, and then sent back to Tripoli to spend six years in solitary confinement, where MI6 agents reportedly questioned him.
In 2011, in response to the Arab Spring, the US and Britain set in motion long-standing plans for regime-change operations in the Middle East. Anti-terrorism control orders against LIFG leaders were lifted because, according to Curtis, the British government “once again found that its interests—mainly concerning oil—coincided with those of Islamist forces in Libya.”
The 22 dead and scores injured in Manchester, no less than the people of Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and countless other countries invaded and occupied, are the victims of British imperialist intrigue and are regarded as “collateral damage.”
These explosive revelations raise a number of questions that must be answered:
Why did MI5 drop its investigation into Salman Abedi, and who authorised this?
Why was he able to travel freely throughout the European Union and Middle East, including to known terror hubs?
Did MI5 inform Theresa May’s government of the threats to strike a political target in Britain?
How was he able to receive thousands of pounds in student loans to finance his activities, including travel and the renting of multiple residencies in the lead-up to last Monday’s attack, despite not attending university?
Last week, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn earned the enmity of the media for pointing to the obvious connection between Britain’s involvement in colonial-style wars and the heightened danger of terrorism. The Guardian led the attack, with Jonathan Freedland insisting,
“It’s a delusion to think that the terror attacks are just about foreign policy,” and Paul Mason declaring, “The ‘blowback theory’, which blames Islamist terrorism directly on western expeditionary warfare, is both facile and irrelevant in this case.”
However, Corbyn was silent on the political responsibility of successive Labour and Tory governments for launching wars of aggression and even promised to give the army and the security services additional resources. He has so far said nothing about revelations that MI5 had forewarning of Abedi’s attack.
A large number of climate experts believe the Paris Climate Accord does not go nearly far enough in addressing the crisis of abrupt anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD).
Nevertheless, in what is clearly both a symbolic move and a nod to his fossil fuel backers, Donald Trump will be pulling the US out of the agreement, according to several reports today.
The US, along with nearly 200 other countries, agreed to voluntarily reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in 2015. Interestingly, given the ongoing Russia scandal that is plaguing the White House on a daily basis now, withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement will make the US and Russia the only industrialized countries that reject taking action to mitigate ACD.
Trump has claimed that ACD is a “hoax,” despite the fact that 97 percent of the global scientific community agrees that humans are the cause of our warming planet. The majority of the remaining 3 percent of the scientific community has been shown to be taking funding from the fossil fuel industry.
Trump’s move displays a callous disregard for the future of life on Earth. A recently published study showed that the depletion of dissolved oxygen in Earth’s oceans is occurring much faster than previously believed. Hence, ACD is now recreating the conditions that caused the worst mass extinction event on Earth, the Permian mass extinction that took place approximately 250 million years ago and annihilated 90 percent of life. Dramatic oceanic warming and acidification were key components of this extinction event, and these conditions align with what we are seeing today.
Source: The Guardian / PolitiFact
In the US, a recent report states that it is “inevitable” that the contiguous US will lose all of its glaciers by 2050, a mere 33 years from now. Data from a January US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report show that the federal government has increased its worst-case scenario for sea-level rise to up to an average of more than eight feet by 2100. That amount of sea level rise will render large parts of many global coastal cities, including several in the US, uninhabitable.
As Trump geared up to pull out from the Paris agreement, scientists have stated the obvious: The Earth is likely to reach dangerous levels of warming even sooner if Trump withdraws the US from its promise to cut CO2 emissions.
Scientists have said that the US withdrawal could add up to 3 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere on an annual basis. Over time, that will be enough to melt ice sheets faster, trigger more extreme weather events and raise sea levels even more quickly.
One group ran a worst-case computer simulation showing what will happen if the US does not curb its emissions, and found that it would add up to half a degree of warming on its own by 2100.
World Leaders Condemn the Withdrawal but Vow to Move Forward
Global leaders have condemned Trump’s decision.
German Chancellor Angela Merkelsaid talks with Trump at the recent G7 conference in Europe regarding the Paris agreement were “very difficult, if not to say, very unsatisfactory.” After meeting with Trump, Merkel said that Europe needed to unify and work together to take care of itself, given that the US is no longer working with its allies.
Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni also said that Europe needed to forge its own path.
“This takes nothing away from the importance of our trans-Atlantic ties and our alliance with the United States, but the importance we put on these ties cannot mean that we abandon fundamental principles such as our commitment to fight climate change and in favor of open societies and free trade,” he told the media.
In the US, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) tweeted:
“Pulling out of #ParisAgreement is a massive moral, economic & leadership failure for Trump admin. Loss of business, jobs, & intl standing.”
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterressaid Tuesday that ACD is undeniable and it is “absolutely essential” that the world fight the problem together, and stated that the US should stay on board with the agreement.
“If any government doubts the global will and need for this accord, that is reason for all others to unite even stronger and stay the course,” Guterres told the media during an event at New York University. “The message is simple: the sustainability train has left the station. Get on board or get left behind.”
Environmental Groups Condemn Trump’s Move
Earthworks’ Executive Director Jennifer Krill said Trump’s decision to exit the Paris agreement shows that this administration values fossil fuel industry profits over our health and well-being.
“President Trump’s decision to exit the Paris Climate Agreement sends a dangerous signal to the rest of the world that the United States values fossil fuel industry profits over clean energy innovation and the health and well-being of our citizens,” she said in the group’s recent press release. “As the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, turning our back on international climate action damages not only our global reputation on this issue, but the people here at home who suffer from the air pollution that comes along with these emissions. The over 12 million people living within a half mile of an oil and gas facilities deserve action to reduce air pollution, not head-in-the-sand climate denial.”
Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food and Water Watch, went so far as to say that Trump’s move makes the US a “rogue nation.”
In a press release, Hauter acknowledged that the Paris accord falls short of the kind of action that is really necessary, but that it was “better than nothing.”
“By choosing to walk away from the table, the United States effectively becomes a rogue nation when it comes to matters of climate change, human rights and global leadership in general,” Hauter said. “Mr. Trump’s foolish, belligerent decision to abdicate responsibility at the federal level now makes real action on climate at the state and local levels even more critical.”
Hauter added that, for the sake of our planet and future generations,
“It is imperative that elected leaders at every rung of government — from the smallest town halls to the halls of Congress — do everything in their power to resist fossil fuels and help enable a clean energy revolution.”
May Boeve, executive director of the climate organization 350.org, said in a press release that today is a “shameful day,” and called Trump’s move a “travesty” and a “crime against the future of people and the planet.” She assessed the situation as a prioritization of profit over the will of the people.
“The choice they had was clear, and they decided to side with fossil fuel billionaires over the overwhelming majority of Americans who support the agreement,” Boeve said. “By exiting, the administration has isolated the United States from the rest of the world and defamed the US position as global leader on climate action and much more.”
The recent NATO summit took a decision to formally become a member of the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS), in addition to its training mission in Iraq.
Last year, NATO started a training and capacity-building mission for Iraqi armed forces. In January, it opened a regional center in Kuwait. NATO AWACS aircraft operate in Syria. But the participation in combat actions against the IS has so far been limited to a few aircraft taking part in the operations of the US-led coalition of the willing. Formally, each alliance member contributes to the coalition, but NATO as its own entity does not. Despite the coalition’s efforts, the IS had grown and expanded in Syria till Russia launched its military operation there in 2015.
France and Germany have always had reservations about the prospect of joining the anti-IS coalition as an alliance, concerned that it would lead to NATO taking over the fight or overshadowing regional partners, such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Italy has been skeptical of the plan.
Despite all the speeches ringing alarm bells about the deadly threat coming from the IS – the mortal enemy of the West that vowed to fight it till it exists – the bloc’s combat ready forces are deploying…against Russia in the Eastern Europe! As a result, the alliance has seen no need to counter the IS plans to create a caliphate. It stubbornly turns a blind eye on the peril coming from the South.
Migrant flows are flooding the territories of European alliance members, terrorist acts are committed to kill citizens of the NATO member states, US and Turkish military are fighting the extremists on the ground but the bloc largely limits itself to words of condemnation while demonizing Russia – the country which says it does not want to provoke confrontation and calls for a dialogue!
The summit’s decision to join the fight comes at a time the US, UK and France-backed rebel forces based in Jordan are reported to be preparing for operations on Syrian soil. On May 18, US aircraft struck a convoy of forces affiliated with the Syrian government. The attack occurred in far southern Syria near al-Tanf, along the Syria-Iraq border – an area where US Special Operations Forces (SOF) are training local fighters. The leading NATO member plunged directly into the Syrian conflict taking sides. Evidently, the move signaled broadening of American involvement in the six-year Syrian civil war. The US has led the anti-IS in Syria since 2014, but so far has avoided engaging with Syrian government or Iran-backed forces.
The US, the UK and France are the leading members of the alliance and there is little doubt they are preparing to cross the border and establish control over the region where the borders of Jordan, Syria, and Iraq meet. They will need support of other nations, especially the allied ones and it coincides with NATO’s decision to become part of the anti-IS operation. The control over the area by NATO-supported forces will include a key highway from Baghdad to Damascus that Iran has used to supply weapons to Syrian forces. Al-Tanf is a strategic crossing located at the intersection of the Jordanian, Iraq, and Syrian borders and commands the No.1 Route linking Baghdad with Damascus and the Jordanian capital of Amman.
Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi (Source: iraqiembassy.us)
It all happens at a time NATO members involved in the combat actions and Israel are deeply concerned over the recent visit of a high-ranking Iraqi military to Damascus to discuss the situation on the Syrian-Iraqi border. The allegation that Iraq’s Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi has pivoted his support away from the US-led campaign to the Russia-Turkey-Iran coalition adds even more fuel to the fire.
Definitely, the contribution will increase. Right after the summit on May 25, the Netherlands announced the decision to send two more warplanes to fight the IS. From mid-June a Dutch KDC-10 tanker aircraft will be stationed in Kuwait. And in the last quarter of the year, a C-130 transport plane will be contributed to the fight for two months. About 90 military personnel will go with the planes. The new deployment will temporarily increase the number of Dutch soldiers in Iraq to about 175, twenty more than previously agreed. The Dutch commandos currently supporting Iraqi troops on the front will be equipped with armored vehicles and other weapons systems from next month. The Netherlands also expressed readiness to contribute several F-16 fighters from early next year. Other NATO members will increase the contribution to support the NATO effort. It will increase but it is worth to remember that the bloc’s operations in Libya and Afghanistan ended up in failure.
Expanding NATO role in Syria may lead to either confrontation or coordination, or at least de-confliction, with the Russia-Syria-Iran forces. Turkey, a NATO country, is a member of Russia-Turkey-Iran trio pushing forward the Astana peace process. And the common enemy is the IS. Coordination of efforts appears to be a logical step. The issue should top the NATO-Russia Council agenda along with the plans to establish de-escalation zones. It could be discussed with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the G20 summit.
Some arrangement with Russia is unavoidable. But is it an achievable goal with NATO building up its forces in the Baltics, Poland, Romania and the whole Black Sea region? Can Russia and NATO fruitfully coordinate efforts, or even cooperate, in Syria with tensions running high in Europe? Evidently, the standoff between Russia and NATO benefits no one but IS. Finding mutual understanding is indispensable to defeat the common enemy. Actually, playing off the West against Russia is the IS only hope for survival. That’s the expectation the group must be deprived of. It remains to be seen if these arguments are taken into consideration as NATO joins the fray.
After more than a half century, the historical truth of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been finally established beyond rational dispute. The Kennedy assassination is a false mystery. It was conceived by the conspirators to be a false mystery which was designed to cause interminable debate. The purpose of the protracted debate was to obscure what was quite clearly and plainly a coup d’état. Simply stated, President Kennedy was assassinated by our U.S. national security state in order to abort his efforts to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion.
MAY 29, 2017 – rat haus reality press, ratical.org (PDF format) — Released today: a greatly expanded digital edition of the book John Kelin first created in 1999.
This archival treasury contains the essays by Philadelphia lawyer Vincent J. Salandria from 1964 into 2016 presenting his evolving understanding of the assassination of President Kennedy.
Beginning with authoring the first critical analysis of the contradictions between the Warren Report and the 26 volumes of Hearings and Exhibits, showing in extensive detail how the conclusions did not match the evidence the government published, Salandria went on to study the crux of the matter: the why of the assassination.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born 100 years ago today. This book celebrates and is dedicated to the courageous stand he took on behalf of all people everywhere to choose peace over war. As author Jim Douglass distills this:
Because John Kennedy chose peace on earth at the height of the Cold War, he was executed. But because he turned toward peace, in spite of the consequences to himself, humanity is still alive and struggling. That is hopeful. Especially if we understand what he went through and what he has given to us as his vision.
At a certain point in his presidency, John Kennedy turned a corner and he didn’t look back. I believe that decisive turn toward his final purpose in life, resulting in his death, happened in the darkness of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although Kennedy was already in conflict with his national security managers, the missile crisis was the breaking point.
At that most critical moment for us all, he turned from any remaining control that his security managers had over him toward a deeper ethic, a deeper vision in which the fate of the earth became his priority. Without losing sight of our own best hopes in this country, he began to home in, with his new partner, Nikita Khrushchev, on the hope of peace for everyone on this earth—Russians, Americans, Cubans, Vietnamese, Indonesians, everyone on this earth—no exceptions. He made that commitment to life at the cost of his own. What a transforming story that is.
And what a propaganda campaign has been waged to keep us Americans from understanding that story, from telling it, and from re-telling it to our children and grandchildren. Because that’s a story whose telling can transform a nation.
From the standpoint of a belief that war is the ultimate power, that’s too dangerous a story. It’s a subversive story. It shows a different kind of security than always being ready to go to war.
It’s unbelievable—or we’re supposed to think it is—that a president was murdered by our own government agencies because he was seeking a more stable peace than relying on nuclear weapons.
It’s unspeakable. For the sake of a nation that must always be preparing for war, that story must not be told. If it were, we might learn that peace is possible without making war. We might even learn there is a force more powerful than war. How unthinkable! But how necessary if life on earth is to continue.
That is why it is so hopeful for us to confront the unspeakable and to tell the transforming story of a man of courage, President John F. Kennedy. It is a story ultimately not of death but of life—all our lives. In the end, it is not so much a story of one man as it is a story of peacemaking when the chips are down. That story is our story, a story of hope.
“What Jim did was to resurrect the JFK in each of us, and thus to set before us the task of carrying on the work he was doing. Jim was able to do this because he saw and was able to render JFK’s story as a gospel tale.”
Vincent Salandria’s dedication of bearing witness to and following the polestar of historical truth emits a light we can all likewise be guided by. In doing so, we can join in the sacred work of supporting the exquisite eons of Life exploring itself on Earth for the seventh generation yet unborn and beyond.
Historical truth is the polestar which guides humankind when we grope for direction to help guide us through the thick morass of current crises. Without historical truth we are denied the guidance and wisdom required to solve the afflictions which now threaten the very existence of the family of man.
The surname of Natalya is already very familiar to those using antiviruses. I will only add that she is now the General Director of the company “Info Watch”.
I met her in Moscow during the VI Conference on International Security, organised by the Russian Ministry of Defence. We were both part of a panel in a meeting on “Security of Information and Freedom of Access: the Contradictory Interrelations”. Natalya Kasperskaya, in her speech, showed that she does not believe in the narrative about ‘the almighty Russian hackers’ who were even able to influence the American presidential elections.
I asked her to explain what she was basing her incredulity on. She smiled:
“We know – and also the American experts know – that 95% of all crimes – illegal accesses, intrusions and disruptions of every kind even in the most protected corners of the Web – are never discovered. That is, the perpetrators remain unknown even by using the most sophisticated web searching systems”.
Of course, I thought. Would these Russian hackers – so powerful and marvelously organised – be nevertheless so naive to leave digital fingerprints that would make them easily identified? In this case they would be part of the 5% bunglers who are unable to hide.
“The issue is – said Natalya in her speech – that there are millions of viruses which can delete the identity of the perpetrator of a crime or cover it in such a way as to make it unrecognizable”. “So, is there any evidence about what the experts from NSA, CIA and FBI say? Is there any evidence about the fact that Russia has influenced the US election campaign, the most crucial democratic event of the most powerful country in the world?” “No evidence”.
Furthermore, on the basis of the considerations we have just made, one would say that there are infinite methods to stick fake labels on anyone using the Internet, making researches, doing business and bank transfers, sending and receiving contents of any kind. In conclusion, the Internet is the most ill-famed place in the world, exactly because it is the most frequented. And technologies – which are increasingly sophisticated and are developing at a faster and faster rate – are going to make the Internet the most deceitful place, where any information can be modified at will, turning the “truth” to “false” in a billion of variations. We already know – we all know since we have watched Avatar – that every picture can be “manipulated” to represent what is useful to those who want to deceive us. Anyone able to use a smartphone can do that. Let’s just imagine what a person whose job is organising terrorist attacks can do. We are finding this out, attack after attack.
Those who have watched “The Manchurian Candidate”, by Jonathan Demme (2004), know that at that time one was already able to literally delete a person from a movie shot and substitute it with another. A governmental agency secretly did that in order to prevent the public opinion from becoming aware of something: a conspiracy built up by another agency, in that case a non-governmental agency but equally powerful, a “corporation”. Today we know for sure that also sounds can be “manipulated”. There is a program (actually there are many), called Lyrebird, which allows to create a copy of a voice, using only a one-minute recording of the same voice. You have seen that in the movie Mission impossible III by J. J. Abrams, starring Tom Cruise. The movie came out in 2006, but it was directed some years earlier.
Do you remember now those 30 “strange” (strange because impossible) phone calls coming from aeroplanes which were flying at 4,000 meters of altitude on 9/11 2001? They were most likely synthetic voices. What is left to understand is who actually fabricated those calls, when and where they were coming from. Perhaps – but we doubt it – Mrs Boldrini will tell us, with the help of her debunkers.
Hollywood, which has deeply manipulated all of us, has also delivered us some messages, warning us in advance about what was happening: the greatness and the mocking brutality of the American cinema. But we did not realise that. It is easier to watch a sci-fi film than asking ourselves whether it is containing a message. The Truman Show, The Matrix, Three Days of the Condor: they all contain messages which we did not understand completely or did not notice at all.
And now there are those who are raising the “fake news” issue. They want us to believe that everything they told us and showed us until yesterday is the truth. They seem to ignore that when we will speak with someone at the telephone, we will have to take into account that it could be someone else than “him” or “her”.
But also the profession of voice-over actor will end, for example: the foreign actor will be able to “speak” in any language, using the correct pronunciation and through his “synthetic-but-real” voice; our favourite actor will tell us “goodnight”; and no contract will be authenticated by a telephone call anymore. What a shame: we will have to use pen and paper again. Getting back to the Moscow Conference from where we started: which “security of information” can we get in the future, as we live in a global village where we will not be able to distinguish a dog from a cat anymore?
Sports people are the show ponies of life, modern gladiators whose opinions should only be relevant to their field of endeavour. The end of the amateur, and the rise of the professional put pay to the rounded dabbler and dilettante, ably educated yet still committed to a sporting pursuit. The professional sports individual is tasked with endurance and performance as a sole domain, and opinions, notably of a political or sexual kind, would tend to be private matters. Often, they would best remain that way.
Not so Margaret Court, one of the most successful tennis players of all time, who forgot herself when she decided that her opinions seemed to be the stuff of gold, valued because she had done something with ball and racket.
Her mouth was loosened by the stance taken by the Australian airliner Qantas that it would support same sex marriage.
“I am disappointed,” she fumed, “that Qantas has become an active promoter for same-sex marriage.”[1]
Marriage, she believed could only ever be a “union between a man and a woman as stated in the Bible.”
Those familiar with Court’s post-tennis life would be unsurprised by the fervour of her views. Her period of retirement did not begin well: she endured “feelings of uselessness, inferiority, unworthiness.” Jesus became her saviour. She became a Pentecostal pastor, going so far as to found her own church in Perth.[2] She then proceeded to make her personal crisis a public, moral one.
Her mashed views form the typical potpourri of hysteria, outpourings of fear on the fringes. Dressed up as opinion, she has taken to public forums to explain that homosexuality is the stuff of illness, and that compassion needed to be shown for sufferers. On 20Twenty Vision Christian Radio, the collective “we” was used to describe what was less an attitude than a priestly instruction fanned by fire.
“We’re there to help them (gay people) overcome. We’re not against the people.”[3]
Court’s statistics and readings have been reactionary in their inventiveness, showing that mastering a tennis court might be a touch easier than mastering literature or any specialist field. Religiosity is bound to burn the evidence before the sermon.
“They’re human beings and 92 percent, they say in America, have either been abused in some form sexually or emotionally at an early age for them to even be this way.”[4]
The “they”, of course, remains unspecified, a glutinous, unspecified wonder of darkness that risks enveloping the world. And for good reason, she suggests: tennis, after all, is teaming with corrupting lesbians.
It is a claim she had made in 1990, suggesting that the structure of women’s tennis was a conspiratorial affair of Lesbos. Players such as the formidable Martina Navratilova were singled out as poor role models. Playing at the back of Court’s mind may well have been the ending of her grand slam singles career by the Czech in the quarters of the US Open.
Far more recently, Court has attacked the union of Australian tennis player Casey Dellacqua and former touch football champion Amanda Judd for depriving their children of a father.
“I simply want to champion the rights of the family over the rights of the individual to engineer social norms and produce children into their relationships.”
Court certainly has firm views of those she sees as indoctrinators: homosexual activists, keen to spread the same-sex gospel like storm troopers.
“That’s all the devil… but that’s what Hitler did and that’s what communism did – got the mind of the children. And there’s a whole plot in our nation, and in the nations of the world to get the minds of children.”
Distressing conspiracies abound in that Pentecostal mind.
That neither Hitler nor many a Communist politbureaucrat had little time for policies protecting sexual choice was obviously sidestepped by the Court process of conversion. As did the cruel omission that hetero manic totalitarianism did its best to rid humanity of homosexuals. Court has no desire to let the young minds she speaks of with such conviction learn that part of the curriculum.
These outbursts also tend to have a haunting effect: what is good for the indignant goose is certainly appropriate for the agitated gander. Tennis players have decided to wade in, showing that they have their own opinions we must all be subjected to. The currently ranked world number one Andy Murray, for one, decided that sexual orientation was no one’s business.
“Everyone should have, in my opinion, the same rights. And, yeah, that’s my view on it.”[5]
There are even suggestions by such players as Samantha Stosur that the Margaret Court Arena be boycotted during the Australian Open. Murray, no doubt concerned that his wallet might be damaged, prefers to avoid the sledgehammer approach of a boycott.
“If something is to be done, I think it would be more beneficial to do it before the tournament starts.”[6]
Now that is far more representative: a true tennis player keen on keeping to schedule and listening to the sound of money coming in.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected].
A sea of people participated in the pro-direct elections act at Copacabana, in Rio de Janeiro – Credit of the Photographs : Direct Now Movement
150,000 people participated this Sunday in a historical act for direct elections, at the Copacabana beach. The protest was convoked by artists and organized by the Popular Brazil and People Without Fears fronts, initiatives that gather hundreds of popular movements, syndicate centrals and leftist parties. The manifestation began at 11am and the beach remained full until 7pm. The culminating point was at 5pm when Caetano Veloso and Milton Nascimento went up to the stage. The objective of the manifestation was to push the National Congress to approve an amendment to the Constitution that allowed presidential direct elections as soon as possible.
The actor Wagner Moura acted as a master of ceremony at the cultural and political event, which gathered great names of the Brazilian music, such as Criolo, Mano Brown, Maria Gadú, Martínez, Teresa Cristina, and parliamentarians, popular movements’ leaders, former ministers, etc.
“It is not acceptable that Michel Temer is still President. It can not be an option that this corrupt Congress, abettor of the coup and with over 200 deputies investigated, chooses our next president. It might be legal, but it is not legitimate. We have the right to vote and we want direct elections right now. This is not a leftist nor rightist party, this is a celebration in the name of democracy”, argued Moura.
Various artists made internet videos convoking the population to the manifestation and they also assisted to the protest. Among them we could see Antonio Pitanga, Camila Pitanga, Osmar Prado, Bete Mendes, Daniel de Oliveira, Gregório Duvivier, Sophie Charlotte, Zezé Motta, Maria Casadevall and many others. The actor Humberto Carrão, that has already participated in other acts in the defense of democracy, also went to leave his opinion:
“People no longer bear this illegitimate government, and deputies can not decide who will rule the country next, because that Congress ignores what the society thinks and vindicates, that is why we shout today: Temer Out, Direct Elections Now!”.
For the actor Daniel de Oliveira protesting in a moment like this is not just a right, is an obligation for those who want a better Brazil.
“There was no way I would miss this event. It is our duty and right to directly demand direct elections. I believe that the people should chose who is going to be our president”, he highlighted.
Among the people an indignation environment reigned due to the last revelations done in the prized denouncement made by the businessman Joesley Batista, of JBF. Dona Graciela de Oliveir, 70 years old, comments why did she went to Copacabana to express herself:
“I am here because the corrupt Congress expelled a democratically elected president to deliver our country and our economy to foreign interests. To cover the mistakes of the PSDB and of all of them who are against the people. That is why I came to protests”, she expressed.
The images show a real ocean of people at the shore of Copacabana. This act may enter in the political history of the country as one of the main mobilizations that supported the “Direct Elections Now!” demand. In 1984, thousands of people also went to the streets to demand direct elections to move the military dictatorship that ruled the country.
South Korean President Moon Jae In demanded a probe yesterday into why he wasn’t told about the arrival of additional launchers for the country’s US-supplied terminal high-altitude area defence (Thaad) missile defence system.
President Moon vowed before taking office on May 10 to review deployment of a system that has infuriated both North Korea and China, which consider its powerful radar a security threat.
Many of his supporters don’t want the system, which US President Donald Trump said Seoul should pay for.
Senior presidential adviser Yoon Young Chan said Mr Moon had discovered that four more launchers for the Thaad system had arrived in the country since the original two launchers were installed in April.
Defence Ministry officials didn’t report their arrival when they gave the president’s policy advisory committee a briefing last Thursday.
“President Moon said that it’s ‘very shocking’ after receiving a report” on the incident from his national security director, Mr Yoon said.
The new president, who favours dialogue with North Korea, is working with cabinet members appointed by his pro-Washington conservative predecessor Park Geun Hye, who was ousted from office in March over a corruption scandal. Mr Moon has nominated some of his own cabinet members but they haven’t formally taken office.
He was sworn in as president straight after winning a May 9 by-election and hasn’t had the usual two-month transition period.
Washington stations about 28,500 troops in South Korea, supposedly as deterrence against potential aggression from North Korea.
After facing conservative attacks on his security views during the election campaign, Mr Moon toned down his Thaad criticism, saying that deployment would be inevitable if North Korea continued provocative test-firing of ballistic missiles.
THAAD in South Korea
The new president has said that he will employ both persuasion and pressure to resolve the North Korean nuclear stand-off.
Yemen is descending into total collapse, its people facing war, famine and a deadly outbreak of cholera, as the world watches, the UN aid chief said on Tuesday.
Speaking to the UN Security Council, Stephen O’Brien said
“the time is now” to end the world’s largest food emergency and put Yemen back on the path to survival.
“Crisis is not coming, it is not looming, it is here today – on our watch and ordinary people are paying the price,” said O’Brien, the UN undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs.
“The people of Yemen are being subjected to deprivation, disease and death as the world watches.”
The crisis is spiraling towards “total social, economic and institutional collapse” in the poor Arab country, O’Brien added.
His remarks reflected frustration with the Security Council’s failure to pressure the warring sides in Yemen to pull back from the brink and engage in serious negotiations on ending the two-year war.
A man carries an injured child from fighting in Taiz (Source: AFP)
More than 8,000 people have been killed since a Saudi-led coalition launched a military campaign in March 2015 against Iran-allied Huthi rebels who control the capital Sanaa.
The conflict has left 17 million people facing dire food shortages including nearly seven million who are one step away from famine in the country, which is heavily dependent on food imports.
Cholera is spreading
Since late April, a cholera outbreak has killed 500 people while 55,206 Yemenis – one third of them children – are ill, according to UN figures.
Another 150,000 cases of cholera are expected in the next six months.
After the Saudi-backed government moved the central bank from Sanaa to Aden, more than one million civil servants stopped receiving their salaries, pushing more families toward starvation, said O’Brien.
He singled out the Saudi-led coalition for criticism, saying its threat of attacks on the rebel-held port of Hodeida – a “lifeline” for Yemen’s imports – coupled with clearance delays for ships had sapped traders’ confidence.
“Giving rising costs, major shipping companies are now simply avoiding the Red Sea ports, thereby depriving the Yemeni people of desperately needed food and fuel,” said the UN aid chief.
Returning from talks in the region, UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed reported no progress in his efforts to broker a return to negotiations and to clinch a deal on allowing vital deliveries to Hodeida.
“I will not hide from this council that we are not close to a comprehensive agreement,” he told the council.
Last week, 22 international and Yemeni humanitarian and human rights groups including Save the Children, the International Rescue Committee and Oxfam raised alarm over Yemen.
Source: The Conflict Comment
They called on the council, in particular Britain which has the lead for addressing the conflict at the top UN body, to “end its year-long inaction on Yemen, and move decisively to end what is now the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.”
Meanwhile, it emerged late on Tuesday that Oman is mediating between Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi‘s government and its Houthi opponents over a U.N. plan to resume peace talks in the war-torn country, according to a Yemeni government official.
The official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said Yemeni Foreign Minister Abdel-Malek al-Mekhlafi was in Muscat at Oman’s invitation to discuss ways to bridge differences with the Houthis, who control the capital Sanaa with their allies, over plans presented by the U.N. special envoy to Yemen last week.
The plans, presented by U.N. Special Envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed during a regional tour last week, included confidence building measures such as turning over the Red Sea port of Hodeidah to a neutral party, opening Sanaa airport for civilian traffic and paying civil servants’ salaries.
The Omani side has conveyed to Mekhlafi the Houthis’ willingness to accept this plan, but also its insistence that civil servants’ salaries be paid first.
“The differences regarding Hodeidah now centre on the identity of the neutral party which will manage the port,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.
Oman maintains good ties with the Houthis, who seized Sanaa in 2014 in a campaign that eventually forced Hadi to flee to Saudi Arabia in 2015 with his government. The Gulf Arab state had long mediated in international affairs, including facilitating talks between Iran and the United States.
Hadi’s government, which had recently made some small gains at the battlefront after months after a long stalemate, has threatened to attack Hodeidah, where most of Yemen’s food and humanitarian supplies enter, unless the Houthis agreed to turn the facility over to neutral observers.
The Houthis have in turn demanded that the Saudi-led coalition that controls Yemen’s airspace allow Sanaa airport to reopen and that the Yemen central bank, which Hadi had moved last year from Sanaa to Aden, pay salaries that had been withheld from civil servants for several months.
The Yemeni official said the Omani side have informed Mekhlafi in talks on Monday that the Houthis were ready to agree to Ould Cheikh Ahmed’s plan in full.
“The differences are not confined to the neutral party that will administer Hodeidah port,” the official said.
In the quest for truth and the zest of bringing it out, Global Research introduces to you a number of incisive articles on the Manchester terror attack.
Unspoken questions should now be answered. According to John Pilger, information is being “suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy”.
In the words of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky:
” The established consensus is that the role of a government is to protect its people. That myth has to be sustained. The media’s role is to ensure that the truth does not trickle down to the broader public”.
Most people in Western countries are unaware that their own governments are supporting and funding the terrorists.
When France provides (covert) military aid to both the Libya Islamic fighting Group (LIFG) and ISIS-Daesh in Syria, does this not suggest that the French government might at some future date be “held accountable” for the terror attacks in Paris and Nice (allegedly carried out by the ISIS), which have resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians?
The unsayable in Britain’s general election campaign is this. The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy.
There appears now to be a reason why officials in the USA were able to name the Manchester Arena suicide bomber within four hours of the event. The FBI knew exactly who the perpetrator was and were able to leak huge amounts of data to the American press, much to the vocal frustration of British intelligence.
Given Abedi’s connections and his travel movements leading up to the attack, the only explanation for him being able to remain at large for so long is that he was a protected asset—part of a broad network of operatives utilised by Britain and the US to conduct their nefarious operations in the Middle East.
Today the links emerge between the Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi (22), and these extremist forces within Libya. It appears the bombing attack against the Manchester concert venue was directed and coordinated by the family of Abedi and their close contacts within Libya including his father Ramadan Abedi who was arrested earlier today.
Is the Manchester attack simply blowback from security operations gone awry – or is it more likely that this latest terror event provides further evidence of complicity on behalf of West in the ‘War On Terror’ era?
* * *
Truth in media is a powerful instrument.
Global Research is a small team that believes in the power of information and analysis to bring about far-reaching societal change including a world without war.
After more than three years of US sanctions (and almost a year of constant attacks from the western media) Russian credit risk has collapsed to its lowest level since September 2013.
As Bloomberg notes, high demand for Russia’s dollar-denominated assets is driving the cost of the country’s credit-default swaps back near record lows…
Investors with a bullish view on the nation’s debt sell the default protection and collect regular payments for the instruments rather than buying the country’s dollar bonds and receiving interest.
After sanctions caused a dearth of new dollar securities, CDS have become an increasingly popular way for investors to gain exposure to Russia, according Societe Generale SA’s Rosbank PJSC unit.
While Russian 10Y bond yields have tumbled back to 4.00% – the lowest since the election, Chinese bond yields have exploded higher (up almost 100bps to 3.7% – the highest since Dec 2014).
Perhaps Rex Tillerson was right after all – despite the liberal media’s desperation to paint him as yet another ‘friend of Putin’ – when he questioned the efficacy of US sanctions on Russia this week during his confirmation hearings…
The long-serving executive said the Trump administration needs to review the efficacy of the sanctions and judge whether there might be better ways to try to constrain, or potentially woo, the Kremlin.
“Sanctions, in order to be implemented, do impact American business interests,” Mr. Tillerson said in response to questioning. “When sanctions are imposed, they are, by design, going to harm American business.”
“In protecting American interests.…sanctions are a powerful tool. Let’s design them well… Let’s ensure those sanctions are applied equally.”
For over two weeks this May, a delegation of 30 Americans visited seven regions and ten cities across Russia. Organized by Sharon Tennison of Center for Citizen Initiatives, the entire group began in Moscow with several days of meetings and visits, then broke into smaller groups going to cities including Volgograd, Kazan (Tatarstan), Krasnodar (near Black Sea), Novosibirsk (Siberia), Yekaterinburg and the Crimean cities Simferopol, Yalta and Sevastopol. After these regional visits, delegates regrouped in St Petersburg to share their experiences. Following is an informal review with conclusions based on my observations in Kazan and what I heard from others.
Observation and Facts
Western sanctions have hurt sectors of Russia’s economy but encouraged agricultural production.
Exports and imports have been impacted by Western sanctions imposed in 2014. The tourist sector has been hard hit and education exchanges between Russia and the USA have been interrupted or ended. However, the sanctions have spurred investments and expansion in agricultural production. We were told that farmers are saying
‘Don’t lift the sanctions!”
Some Russian oligarchs are making major infrastructure investments.
For example, billionaire Sergei Galitsky has developed Russia’s largest retail outlet, the Magnit supermarket chain. Galitsky has invested heavily in state-of-the art drip irrigation green houses producing massive quantities of high quality cucumbers, tomatoes and other vegetables which are distributed via the supermarkets throughout Russia.
Magnit Supermarket (Source: Budapest Business Journal)
There has been a resurgence of religion in Russia.
Russian Orthodox Churches have been revitalized and gold leaf glistens on the church domes. Muslim mosques have also been refurbished and rebuilt. A brilliant new mosque is a prominent part of the Kremlin in Kazan, Tatarstan. There are many Muslim in Russia. This research puts the number at ten million though we heard estimates much higher. We saw numerous examples of interfaith unity and cooperation, with Muslim Imams working side by side with young Russian Orthodox priests. We also heard stories of how churches had been used as prisons or food warehouses during the Stalin era.
Russia increasingly looks east.
The Russian emblem of a double-headed eagle looks both east and west; it is a Eur-Asian country. While Europe is still important politically and economically, Russia is increasingly looking to the east. Russia’s “strategic partner” is China – economically, politically and militarily. There are increasing numbers of Chinese tourists and education exchanges with Russia. In the United Nations Security Council the two countries tend to vote together. Huge investments are planned for the transportation network dubbed the “Belt and Road Initiative” connecting Asia with Europe.
Russia is a capitalist country with a strong state sector.
Government is influential or controls sectors of the economy such as public transportation, military/defense industry, resource extraction, education and health care. State owned enterprises account for nearly 40% of overall employment. They have universal health care in parallel with private education and health care facilities. Banking is a problem area with high interest rates and the failure/bankruptcy of numerous banks in the past decade. We heard complaints that foreign multinational companies can enter and control sectors of the economy, drive out Russian competitors and take the profits home.
There is some nostalgia for the former Soviet Union with its communist ideals.
We met numerous people who speak fondly of the days when nobody was super-rich or horribly poor and when they believed there was a higher goal for society. We heard this from people ranging from a successful entrepreneur to an aging Soviet era rock musician. That does not mean that these people want to return to Soviet days, but that they recognize the changes in Russia have both pluses and negatives. There is widespread disapproval of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the economic chaos of the 1990’s.
There is a range of media supporting both government and opposition parties.
There are three major TV stations controlled by and supporting the government. Along with these, there are numerous private stations criticizing the government and supporting various opposition parties. In print media, the majority of newspapers and magazines are critical of the government.
Public transportation is impressive.
The streets of Moscow are jam packed with new cars. Meanwhile, underground there is a fast, economical and efficient subway system which is the most heavily used in Europe. The Moscow metro carries 40% more passengers than the New York subway system. On major routes the trains arrive every 60 seconds. Some of the stations are over 240 feet underground with the longest escalator in Europe. Inter-city trains such as the Sapsan (Falcon) take passengers between St. Petersburg and Moscow at 200 kms per hour. Despite the speed, the train is smooth and quiet. It’s an interesting way to view rural Russia as one passes ramshackle dachas, cute villages and abandoned Soviet era factories.
Depending on who you ask, Putin’s popularity seems to range between 60 and 80%. There are two reasons: First, since he became leader the economy has stabilized, corrupt oligarchs were brought into check, and the standard of living dramatically improved. Second, Putin is credited with restoring international respect for Russia and national pride for Russian citizens. Some say
“During the 1990’s we were a beggar nation.”
President Vladimir Putin (Source: Russian government)
Russians have a strong sense of national pride and Putin’s administration has restored that. Some people think Putin deserves a break from the intense pressure and workload. That does not mean everyone likes him or is afraid to say that. Our official Moscow guide took delight in showing us the exact spot on the bridge outside the Kremlin where she believes Putin had one of his enemies assassinated. Other Russians we spoke with mock these accusations which are widely believed in the West. As to the accusations that Putin is a “dictator”, about 75 students in Crimea openly laughed when they were asked about this Western belief.
Current Political Tension
Russians are highly skeptical of accusations about Russian “meddling” in the U.S. election.
One foreign policy expert, Vladimir Kozin, said
“It’s a fairy tale that Russia influenced the U.S. election.”
They contrast the unverified accusations with clear evidence of U.S. interference in past Russian elections, especially in the 1990’s when the economy was privatized and crime, unemployment and chaos overwhelmed the country. The role of the U.S. in “managing” the election of Boris Yeltsin in 1995 is widely known in Russia, as is the U.S. funding of hundreds of Non Governmental Organizations in Ukraine prior to the 2013-2014 violence and coup.
There is a strong desire to improve relations with the U.S.
We met numerous Russians who had participated in citizen exchanges with the U.S. in the 1990’s. Almost universally these Russians had fond memories of their visits and hosts in the U.S.. In other places we met people who had never met an American or English speaking person before. Typically they were cautious but very pleased to hear from American citizens who also wish to improve relations and reduce tensions.
Western media reports about Crimea are hugely distorted.
CCI delegates who visited Crimea met with a broad range of citizens and elected leaders. The geography is “stunningly beautiful” with mountains dropping to beaches on the Black Sea. Not reported in the West, Crimea was part of Russia since 1783. When Crimea was administratively transferred to Ukraine in 1954, it was all part of the Soviet Union. Crimeans told the CCI delegates they were repelled by the violence and fascist elements involved in the Kiev coup. Bus convoys from Crimea were were attacked with injuries and deaths following the Kiev coup. The new coup government said Russian was no longer an official language. Crimeans quickly organized and held a referendum to secede from Ukraine and “re-unify” with Russia. With 80% of registered voters participating, 96% voted to join Russia. One Crimean stated to the CCI delegates, “We would have gone to war to separate from Ukraine.” Others noted the hypocrisy of the West which allows secession votes in Scotland and Catalonia, and which encouraged the secession of Croatia, but then rejects the overwhelming vote and choice of the Crimean people. Sanctions against tourism are hurting the economy of Crimea yet the public is confident in its decision. The Americans who visited Crimea were overwhelmed with the warm welcome and friendliness they received. Because of the sanctions, few Americans visit Crimea and they also received substantial media coverage. In reaction, political officials in Ukraine accused the delegates of being “enemies of the Ukrainian state” and put their names on a blacklist.
Russians know and fear war.
Twenty-seven million Russians died in WW2 and that experience is seared into the Russian memory. The Nazi siege of Leningrad (now called St Petersburg) reduced the population from 3 million to 500 thousand. Walking through the cemetery of mass graves brings home the depth of suffering and resilience of Russians who somehow survived a 872 day siege on the city. Memory of the war is kept alive through commemorations with huge public participation. Citizens carry poster size photographs of their relatives who fought or died in World War 2, known as the “Immortal Regiment”. In Kazan, the march involved 120 thousand persons – 10% of the entire city population – beginning at 10 am and concluding at 9 pm. Across Russia, millions of citizens actively participate. The marches and parades marking “Victory Day” are more solemn than celebratory.
Russians see themselves being threatened.
While Western media portrays Russia as “aggressive”, most Russians perceive the reverse. They see the U.S. and NATO increasing military budgets, steadily expanding, moving up to the Russian border, withdrawing from or violating past treaties and conducting provocative military exercises. This map shows the situation.
Russians want to de-escalate international tensions.
Former President Gorbachev said to our group
“Does America want Russia to just submit? This is a country that can never submit.”
These words carry extra significance because it was Gorbachev who initiated the foreign policy of Perestroika which led to his own side-lining and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev has written about Perestroika as follows: “Its main outcome was the end of the Cold War. A long and potentially deadly period in world history, when the whole humankind lived under the constant threat of a nuclear disaster, came to an end.” Yet we are clearly in a new Cold War and the threat has re-emerged.
Conclusion
Despite three years of economic sanctions, low oil prices and an intense information war in the West, Russian society appears to be doing reasonably well. Russians across the spectrum express a strong desire to build friendship and partnership with the U.S. At the same time, it seems Russians will not be intimidated. They don’t want war and won’t initiate it, but if attacked they will defend themselves as they have in the past.
Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be contacted at [email protected].
The unsayable in Britain’s general election campaign is this. The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy.
Critical questions – such as why the security service MI5 maintained terrorist “assets” in Manchester and why the government did not warn the public of the threat in their midst – remain unanswered, deflected by the promise of an internal “review”.
The alleged suicide bomber, Salman Abedi (image on the right), was part of an extremist group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, that thrived in Manchester and was cultivated and used by MI5 for more than 20 years.
The LIFG is proscribed by Britain as a terrorist organisation which seeks a “hardline Islamic state” in Libya and “is part of the wider global Islamist extremist movement, as inspired by al-Qaida”.
The “smoking gun” is that when Theresa May was Home Secretary, LIFG jihadists were allowed to travel unhindered across Europe and encouraged to engage in “battle”: first to remove Mu’ammar Gadaffi in Libya, then to join al-Qaida affiliated groups in Syria.
Last year, the FBI reportedly placed Abedi on a “terrorist watch list” and warned MI5 that his group was looking for a “political target” in Britain. Why wasn’t he apprehended and the network around him prevented from planning and executing the atrocity on 22 May?
These questions arise because of an FBI leak that demolished the “lone wolf” spin in the wake of the 22 May attack – thus, the panicky, uncharacteristic outrage directed at Washington from London and Donald Trump’s apology.
The Manchester atrocity lifts the rock of British foreign policy to reveal its Faustian alliance with extreme Islam, especially the sect known as Wahhabism or Salafism, whose principal custodian and banker is the oil kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Britain’s biggest weapons customer.
This imperial marriage reaches back to the Second World War and the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The aim of British policy was to stop pan-Arabism: Arab states developing a modern secularism, asserting their independence from the imperial west and controlling their resources. The creation of a rapacious Israel was meant to expedite this. Pan-Arabism has since been crushed; the goal now is division and conquest.
LIFG (Source: Liwa Al-Umma Facebook Page )
In 2011, according to Middle East Eye, the LIFG in Manchester were known as the “Manchester boys”. Implacably opposed to Mu’ammar Gadaffi, they were considered high risk and a number were under Home Office control orders – house arrest – when anti-Gadaffi demonstrations broke out in Libya, a country forged from myriad tribal enmities.
Suddenly the control orders were lifted.
“I was allowed to go, no questions asked,” said one LIFG member.
MI5 returned their passports and counter-terrorism police at Heathrow airport were told to let them board their flights.
The overthrow of Gaddafi, who controlled Africa’s largest oil reserves, had been long been planned in Washington and London. According to French intelligence, the LIFG made several assassination attempts on Gadaffi in the 1990s – bank-rolled by British intelligence. In March 2011, France, Britain and the US seized the opportunity of a “humanitarian intervention” and attacked Libya. They were joined by Nato under cover of a UN resolution to “protect civilians”.
Last September, a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee inquiry concluded that then Prime Minister David Cameron had taken the country to war against Gaddafi on a series of “erroneous assumptions” and that the attack “had led to the rise of Islamic State in North Africa”. The Commons committee quoted what it called Barack Obama’s “pithy” description of Cameron’s role in Libya as a “shit show”.
In fact, Obama was a leading actor in the “shit show”, urged on by his warmongering Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and a media accusing Gaddafi of planning “genocide” against his own people.
“We knew… that if we waited one more day,” said Obama, “Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
The massacre story was fabricated by Salafist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be
“a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda”. The Commons committee reported, “The proposition that Mu’ammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence”.
Britain, France and the United States effectively destroyed Libya as a modern state. According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties”, of which more than a third hit civilian targets. They included fragmentation bombs and missiles with uranium warheads. The cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. Unicef, the UN children’s organisation, reported a high proportion of the children killed “were under the age of ten”.
More than “giving rise” to Islamic State — ISIS had already taken root in the ruins of Iraq following the Blair and Bush invasion in 2003 — these ultimate medievalists now had all of north Africa as a base. The attack also triggered a stampede of refugees fleeing to Europe.
Cameron was celebrated in Tripoli as a “liberator”, or imagined he was. The crowds cheering him included those secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS and inspired by Islamic State, such as the “Manchester boys”.
To the Americans and British, Gadaffi’s true crime was his iconoclastic independence and his plan to abandon the petrodollar, a pillar of American imperial power. He had audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would have happened, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African governments with military “partnerships”.
The fallen dictator fled for his life. A Royal Air Force plane spotted his convoy, and in the rubble of Sirte, he was sodomised with a knife by a fanatic described in the news as “a rebel”.
Having plundered Libya’s $30 billion arsenal, the “rebels” advanced south, terrorising towns and villages. Crossing into sub-Saharan Mali, they destroyed that country’s fragile stability. The ever-eager French sent planes and troops to their former colony “to fight al-Qaida”, or the menace they had helped create.
On 14 October, 2011, President Obama announced he was sending special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops were sent to South Sudan, Congo and the Central African Republic. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent was under way, largely unreported.
In London, one of the world’s biggest arms fairs was staged by the British government. The buzz in the stands was the “demonstration effect in Libya”. The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry held a preview entitled “Middle East: A vast market for UK defence and security companies”. The host was the Royal Bank of Scotland, a major investor in cluster bombs, which were used extensively against civilian targets in Libya. The blurb for the bank’s arms party lauded the “unprecedented opportunities for UK defence and security companies.”
Saudi King Salman and British PM Theresa May (Source: Stringer / AFP / Getty Images)
Last month, Prime Minister Theresa May was in Saudi Arabia, selling more of the £3 billion worth of British arms which the Saudis have used against Yemen. Based in control rooms in Riyadh, British military advisers assist the Saudi bombing raids, which have killed more than 10,000 civilians. There are now clear signs of famine. A Yemeni child dies every 10 minutes from preventable disease, says Unicef.
The Manchester atrocity on 22 May was the product of such unrelenting state violence in faraway places, much of it British sponsored. The lives and names of the victims are almost never known to us.
This truth struggles to be heard, just as it struggled to be heard when the London Underground was bombed on July 7, 2005. Occasionally, a member of the public would break the silence, such as the east Londoner who walked in front of a CNN camera crew and reporter in mid-platitude.
“Iraq!” he said. “We invaded Iraq. What did we expect? Go on, say it.”
At a large media gathering I attended, many of the important guests uttered “Iraq” and “Blair” as a kind of catharsis for that which they dared not say professionally and publicly.
Yet, before he invaded Iraq, Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that
“the threat from al-Qaida will increase at the onset of any military action against Iraq … The worldwide threat from other Islamist terrorist groups and individuals will increase significantly”.
Just as Blair brought home to Britain the violence of his and George W Bush‘s blood-soaked “shit show”, so David Cameron, supported by Theresa May, compounded his crime in Libya and its horrific aftermath, including those killed and maimed in Manchester Arena on 22 May.
The spin is back, not surprisingly. Salman Abedi acted alone. He was a petty criminal, no more. The extensive network revealed last week by the American leak has vanished. But the questions have not.
Why was Abedi able to travel freely through Europe to Libya and back to Manchester only days before he committed his terrible crime? Was Theresa May told by MI5 that the FBI had tracked him as part of an Islamic cell planning to attack a “political target” in Britain?
In the current election campaign, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has made a guarded reference to a “war on terror that has failed”. As he knows, it was never a war on terror but a war of conquest and subjugation. Palestine. Afghanistan. Iraq. Libya. Syria. Iran is said to be next. Before there is another Manchester, who will have the courage to say that?
The 2017 Memorial Day weekend will inevitably go down in history as the three-day span when remembrances of our military veterans took a media backseat to President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and everything Russian.
One of the key areas under multiple probes is a meeting Kushner held in December with Sergey Gorkov, the Chairman of Vnesheconombank (VEB), a Russian state-owned bank which has been under U.S. sanctions since July 2014 for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in Ukraine. What this meeting was about has yet to be officially determined.
Reuters reported on Saturday that
“FBI investigators are examining whether Russians suggested to Kushner or other Trump aides that relaxing economic sanctions would allow Russian banks to offer financing to people with ties to Trump, said the current U.S. law enforcement official.”
Financial dealings with a Russian bank that remains under U.S. sanctions can result in serious penalties – or not. Wall Street On Parade conducted research into filings made at the Securities and Exchange Commission for fixed income securities issued by Vnesheconombank and found that some of the biggest names in Wall Street banking and mutual funds in the U.S. hold, cumulatively, hundreds of millions of dollars in notes and bonds issued by the Russian bank.
Donald Trump‘s first foreign visit has begun to define America’s foreign-policy posture. After almost two years of words and rhetoric, Trump has began to reverse his electoral promises with diametrically opposed actions. The most recent meetings with the King of Jordan and President Erdogan, in addition to the trips to Saudi Arabia and Israel, represent the foundations of a great alliance that seems to be directed towards halting the advance of the Shiite arc in the Middle East that is led by Iran and Syria (as well as Hezbollah) with the assistance of Russian military power and Chinese economic power.
Over the past 30 days, Donald Trump has been able to meet with the most important allies of the United States in Middle East. First of all, King Abdullahof Jordan, and then Erdogan of Turkey, were received at the White House. Then Trump went on a trip numbering several days to Saudi Arabia and Israel. In each of these meetings, major points of friction between parties were discussed in an effort to find a shared outcome in the interest of everyone.
With Jordanian King Abdullah, the issue of the southern border between Syria and Jordan has been dealt with, and attempts are being made to influence the conflict, although there are few men and resources available. It would appear that Trump has agreed to supply the Jordanians with armored vehicles and trained proxies (FSA, but in reality anti-Assad militias recycled with other terrorist groups) with the intention of preventing the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) from taking control of the borders between Jordan, Iraq and Syria. In this sense, the town of al-Tanf is a good example of what the US and its allies want to avoid. Conquering the town would let Damascus link Baghdad to Iran, reactivating one of the major road-supply lines between Syria and Iran. This is precisely why the US and its proxy fighters decided to attack the SAA and bomb its convoy when it was approaching the town to reconquer it.
President Donald Trump greets Jordan’s King Abdullah II during a joint news conference at the White House in Washington on April 5, 2017. (Source: Yuri Gripas / Reuters)
With Erdogan, the main thrust concerns the joint effort between Washington and the Kurds to conquer Raqqa, though the bigger issue for Washington is the hidden offensive to seal the eastern border with Iraq, thanks to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The problem remains that Trump and Erdogan seem to have different ideas about the role of the Kurds in the offensive in Syria. At the same time, Washington’s notorious duplicity in its intention to fight terrorism shows that the offensive on Raqqa has intentionally left open two roads south of the city linking the capital of Daesh with Deir ez-Zor, a strategic city still partially controlled by Assad’s troops. The intent, as in Mosul, is clearly to relocate terrorists to another city under Assad’s control so as to continue the work of destroying Syria.
The tour in Saudi Arabia and Israel, in addition to the usual assurances concerning the sale of weapons — Trump has secured nearly 400 billion dollars of sales to the Saudi kingdom — coincided with the new American project in Syria to directly or indirectly control all the country’s borders. The goal is to seal the border to the south and southeast with Jordanian-led Free Syrian Army (FSA) troops, as well as seal the border in the north and northeast border with Iraq and Turkey through the SDF, or even alternatively, a mix of Turkish troops linked with the Nusra Front, as seems to have been the case with Euphrates Shield. What remains is the western border, which is the most complicated to decipher. The southwest, bordering Jordan, is firmly in the hands of the SAA. The other is the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights a safe place for daesh and al-Qaeda terrorists. In the west, the Mediterranean laps on SAA-controlled land, as with the border with Lebanon. Finally, to the northwest, the border with Turkey is in the hands of terrorists funded by Ankara, currently halted by the agreements from Astana, or in the hands of the Syrian Kurds allied with Damascus.
As one can easily see, the American objective in talks with regional allies is to find a common strategy that can guarantee a semblance of victory in Syria. With Assad’s army pushing more and more against the terrorists, thanks to the forces freed by the Astana accords, it is easy to foresee that the Jordanian and Iraqi borders will be attractive targets for Damascus. The northern border, controlled in part by Turkey, is currently frozen in terms of movements and will be discussed in future negotiations; it is difficult to see any military effort to change the situation.
Trump’s journey to the Middle East has thus had the goal of boosting the sale of weapons, the confidence in the US as an ally, and the organization of a strategy in Syria.
President Donald Trump and King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia sign a Joint Strategic Vision Statement for the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, during ceremonies, Saturday, May 20, 2017, at the Royal Court Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (Official White House Photo Shealah Craighead)
The intention is to create an Arab NATO that can coordinate key events in the region more easily than can the current international coalition. The plan envisaged is essentially that of employing all resources available to prevent Assad from controlling the borders between Syria and Iraq and Syria and Jordan, effectively freezing the situation in Syria. Washington’s desperate wish is to prevent a union between Syria, Iraq, Iran and Hezbollah, for such would spell the creation of a Shiite arch that is clearly opposed to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Qatar and Turkey.
It is likely that Trump, the Saudi’s and Israel are looking to a strategy that could justify in the eyes of the Arab world an open cooperation between the Riyadh and Tel Aviv, something that could also earn points for Trump before the international community. The first thing on the list is a negotiation between Israel and Palestine in order to resolve this historical conflict. The point is that if this operation were to succeed, the divisions between Israel and a part of the Sunni world could be overcome in order for them to face their common enemy, which is of course Shiite Islam that is most prominently represented by Iran, Hezbollah and Syria.
If the strategy is to avoid the emergence of a Shiite arc dominated by Iran, the US has made clear that countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel and Jordan set aside their strategic differences regarding the future of the region in order to unite under an American leadership in the region. Trump’s biggest incentive to negotiate a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians is to be seen by the world as “the best negotiator ever”, building his legacy. From the Saudi perspective, the resumption of a leading role by the United States is a welcome relief after the Obama presidency. Moreover, Riyadh’s closeness to Beijing has generated some anxieties amongst US policy-makers, who see the role of the Saudi-controlled petrodollar and OPEC as the only way to continue to fuel their wars thanks to the economic hegemony of the dollar.
For Israel, this is a long-awaited shift of policy from Washington. Secret talks and meetings with Riyadh, with the common goal of limiting Iranian influence in the region, have been going on for years, and from their point of view, Washington is finally completely on board. Another aspect to consider is the role of Qatar, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood (very close to the Erdogan Turkish faction, as well as enjoying a presence in the former Obama administration through Huma Abedin) and the financial hand behind many Palestinian factions such as Hamas. Although the wounds between Riyadh and Doha were patched up after the Egyptian affair (Morsi was supported by Qatar, and el-Sisi received more or less indirect support from Riyadh) some outstanding issues remain, above all the competing ideological roles in the Middle East played by Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The intention of Washington and Riyadh, with the blessing of Tel Aviv, is to bring together all the opponents of Tehran and Damascus under a single banner renamed Arab NATO. In this way, co-ordination between the parties to take control of the Syrian borders, the last option left to influence events in Syria, could be given a realistic shot.
The final strategy for Washington is as simple as it is difficult to implement, namely, to isolate Iran while preventing the emergence of a link between Iran and the Mediterranean, something that is connected to the export of gas and oil from Tehran to Europe, in sharp contrast to the Qataris’ plan to export gas through Iraq and Syria in Europe. In addition to the energy corridors and the domination of the region, there is a much wider picture to consider.
Beijing intends to rebuild Syria at the end of the conflict, and the same intentions will likely extend to all those countries needing money and funding following years of war. The Chinese idea is to intervene economically to revitalize the region once the wars are over, something that will happen sooner or later. Moscow’s leadership role from a military point of view continues to expand in co-operation with Iran and Egypt. In Syria we know of the massive Russian presence, but in Iraq there is coordination with Moscow in terms of information sharing, and the same with Egypt in Libya. Russian armaments and specialists are at the disposal of these countries for the purposes of defeating terrorism, but also as a means of expanding the Russian presence in the Middle East and North Africa.
Summing up these situations, it is easy to imagine how Iran intends to drive the Shiite arc in the Middle East, with guaranteed economic support from Beijing and a military umbrella courtesy of Moscow, consolidating a region that has been living in chaos for decades.
Beijing, Moscow and Tehran are faced with the ultimate challenge of resisting the foreign intervention of powers aligned with the United States by ending the Syrian quagmire through diplomatic and military efforts. If this operation can be accomplished in a relatively short period of time, it may be that neocon-Israeli-Wahhabi efforts will vanish into nothing.
Syria, as well as the whole of the Shiite arc, is destined to dominate the region thanks to industrial development and security, something that currently seems unachievable but ultimately will be the norm. Beijing and Moscow are aware that in order to achieve a full integration of the Eurasian continent with its Middle-Eastern, Persian and North African neighbors, something is needed beyond territorial problems like in Syria or Libya. The region needs a wide-ranging project that can revive countries where poverty abounds, where the average age is very low, and where there is a lack of education. These factors are primary ingredients for the recruitment of extremist terrorism.
Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow are struggling to extirpate the seeds of hatred from the region in order to give a radiant future not only to their peoples, but to all nations that want to be part of a new world order based on mutual respect and dialogue, not imposition and strength.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (L), Chinese President Xi Jinping (C) and Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani attend the Expo Center before the opening ceremony at the Expo Center at the fourth Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) summit in Shanghai on May 21, 2014 (Source: AFP 2017/ ALY SONG / POOL)
The dollar is the symbol of the financial domain that feeds the Western war machine. The Arab NATO is the latest attempt by a number of countries to stop the inevitable in Syria and the Middle East. It is no coincidence that Riyadh focuses on two very different scenarios. The approximation between Beijing and Riyadh is a factor underestimated in the West, just as is Moscow’s fruitful dialogue between Turkey and Israel. While Ankara, Tel Aviv and Riyadh are central to Washington’s strategy, these contacts with Beijing and Moscow indicate that even amongst the sworn opponents of Tehran and Damascus, there is lack of confidence that the plan elaborated by the Israelis, Neocons and Wahhabis may succeed.
Once US efforts in the Middle East and North Africa eventually fail, it is likely that the dollar’s role will also begin to be affected by a diversification towards non-dollar-based sales of oil. The reality that Washington faces is much more complex and negative than it does not seem. If the Shiite arc really succeeds in dominating the region, with Beijing’s economic protection (linked to One Belt One Road and the Maritime Silk Road, as well as institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank), Washington will be unable to hold back even her closest allies, who are already eager to talk with their Russians and Chinese counterparts.
The deep state in Washington, and Trump to a lesser extent (he is interested in creating a legacy based on the solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict), realized that a last attempt was to be made in Syria with the takeover of Raqqa and the conquest of the borders between Syria and Iraq and Syria and Jordan. All future projects of the Wahhabi-neocon-Israeli alliance depend on the military success of these operations.
If Assad will be able to secure his country by defending its borders, the Shiite arc will finally come to life and at that point it will only be a matter of time before Beijing can inject money into the country’s economy to stabilize it while Moscow continues its security work in the region targeting extremists in Libya, Egypt and Iraq.
There is a ruthless struggle in various areas of the Middle East and North Africa on which the future of millions of people will depend. A victory for Assad and Syria today is a defeat for the American-Israeli-Saudi war machine and a triumph for the future the evolving multipolar world.
Federico Pieraccini is an independent freelance writer specialized in international affairs, conflicts, politics and strategies.
Earlier this month, Israel and its friends around the world celebrated the 69th anniversary of Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence. Among them was our Prime Minister who issued the following statement: “while we celebrate Israel’s independence, we also reaffirm our commitment to fight anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.” The fact that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism were mentioned separately is significant because they are very different phenomena, which many mistakenly conflate. Such a conflation would be historically incorrect and politically dangerous.
Anti-Semitism, like all racial hatred, is prohibited in Canada. Originally, anti-Semitism was as a reaction to social, cultural and economic integration of Jews in the wake of the Emancipation. It then spread around the world, including Canada. Jews used to be routinely discriminated against in many spheres of public life. In Germany, anti-Semitism produced an ideology that ended in the systematic murder of millions of Jewish civilians during the Second World War.
Another consequence of anti-Semitism was the emergence, in the late 19th century, of Jewish nationalism, a political movement known as Zionism. It aimed at forging out of the Jews a nation in the European sense of the word, getting these “nationalized Jews” to settle in Palestine and ensuring the Zionists’ political and military control over the country, which was inhabited by diverse ethnic and confessional groups.
Zionism was a revolution in Jewish life, and its founders were proud of it. To quote Shlomo Avineri, a prominent political scientist and historian who also served as Director General of Israel’s Foreign Office,
“Zionism was the most fundamental revolution in Jewish life. It substituted a secular self-identity of the Jews as a nation for the traditional and Orthodox self-identity in religious terms.”
In his words, Zionism was
“a clear break with the quietism of the religious belief in messianic redemption that should occur only through divine intercession in the mundane cycles of world history.”
Avineri also believes that it would be “banal, conformist and apologetic” to link Zionism to the traditional Jewish longing for the Land of Israel.
No wonder Zionism provoked massive opposition among the world’s Jewish population. However surprising this may seem today, many Jews accused Zionists of anti-Semitism. Edwin Montague, a prominent British statesman and a Jew, vigorously protested the Balfour declaration that promised in 1917 to support the Zionist project in Palestine. He titled his public rebuke “Memorandum on the anti-Semitism of the Present government.” In fact, Balfour himself severely limited the immigration of Jews fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire in 1905 while favouring their settlement in Palestine.
Indeed, Zionists argued – and continue to argue – that Jews constitute an alien body within non-Jewish nations, and that they really belong to Israel. This is precisely what anti-Semites believed, and what many continue to believe. This confluence of ideas and interests did not escape the intrepid founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl (image on the right). In his diary, Herzl acknowledged that the anti-Semites would be instrumental in helping carry out the Zionist program.
History proved Herzl right. The Zionist movement found grace in the eyes of anti-Semites during over one century of its history. Not only did they believe that Jews constitute a foreign element in their countries, they also wanted them out. This is how Zionist training camps were allowed to operate between the world wars in several countries of Europe, including Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, which also facilitated the transfer of thousands of German Jews and their capital to Palestine.
It is now clear that conflating anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is historically incorrect. It is also politically dangerous to confuse the two, since legitimate opposition to Jewish nationalism may be branded anti-Semitic. This would go against Canada’s commitment to free expression by lumping criticism, boycott, sanctions and other forms of peaceful protest with anti-Jewish bigotry. As any Canadian, Prime Minister Trudeau is free to support or oppose Zionism. And as the highest elected official in the country, he deserves credit for distinguishing between political opinion and racial hatred.
The author is professor of history at the Université de Montréal. His recent book is What is Modern Israel? (University of Chicago Press, 2016). His previous book A Threat from within: a Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism has been translated into over a dozen of languages and shortlisted for the Governor General Award.
A decision by Donald Trump this Thursday could prove fateful for the immediate future of Jerusalem, the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the region.
He must decide whether to renew a presidential waiver, signed by his predecessor, Barack Obama, that expires on June 1. The six-month waiver delays implementing a law passed by Congress in 1995 that requires the US to recognise occupied Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and relocate its embassy there from Tel Aviv.
It is a law every president for the past 22 years has baulked at. It would pre-empt the Oslo accords and negate Washington’s assumed role as “honest broker”. Carrying out Congress’s wish would deny the Palestinians East Jerusalem, the only credible capital of a future Palestinian state.
But equally significantly, the law would recognise Israel’s efforts to claim sovereignty over the Old City’s holy places, especially the incendiary site of Al Aqsa mosque. That could provoke a conflagration both locally, among Palestinians, and more generally in the Middle East.
Al-Aqsa mosque (Source: Wikipedia)
Trump’s key advisers are reported to be bitterly divided. Some, such as secretary of state Rex Tillerson, warn that, if the president fails to approve the deferral, his claims to be crafting the “ultimate deal” to bring peace to the region will be doomed from the outset.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies, including in the US Congress, are doing their best to pressure Trump in the opposite direction.
On Sunday, Netanyahu staged a provocative stunt, holding his weekly cabinet meeting in a tunnel under Al Aqsa mosque compound to announce measures to bring millions more Jewish visitors to the occupied Old City, including a new cable car to the edge of the mosque.
It was Netanyahu’s decision to open the Western Wall Tunnel in 1996, when he first became prime minister, that brought the Oslo process into almost terminal crisis at an early stage. Three days of clashes killed more than 100 Palestinians and 17 Israeli soldiers.
Next Tuesday, meanwhile, the US Congress and Israel’s parliament in Jerusalem are due to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Israel’s illegal occupation of the city in a ceremony conducted via video link.
The Jerusalem Post reported on Monday that either Trump or vice-president Mike Pence are due to participate, in what could be interpreted as the first tacit recognition by the White House of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
That would be a continuation of Trump’s break with official US policy towards Jerusalem during his visit to the region last week. He became the first sitting president to visit the Jewish prayer plaza at the Western Wall, below Al Aqsa. It was unclear whether his advisers had explained that where he stood had been a Palestinian neighbourhood 50 years ago, before it was ethnically cleansed.
Trump stuffed a note into the wall, in what observers hoped was a plea for divine help in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But the Western Wall visit was more probably an effort to placate his core supporters. Christian evangelicals paid for dozens of billboards across Jerusalem reminding Trump that he won the election only because of their votes – and that they expect the US embassy to be moved to Jerusalem.
Western Wall in Jerusalem (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The day after Trump’s departure, Netanyahu exploited the president’s attendance at the wall to further damage prospects for peacemaking. He made a provocative speech to mark “Jerusalem Day”, Israel’s annual show of strength in East Jerusalem.
He claimed that Trump had disproved the “lies” promoted by the United Nations cultural body, Unesco, when it voted this month to re-state that Jerusalem is occupied.
In truth, it was Netanyahu who indulged in gross mendacity, claiming that East Jerusalem had been “desolate” and “neglected” before its occupation. Israel had “redeemed” the city, he said, while Al Aqsa mosque would “always remain under Israeli sovereignty”.
His supporters tried to give that claim concrete expression by staging the largest-ever march through the Old City on Jerusalem Day. Palestinians were forced into hiding or fled early as police allowed 60,000 Jewish ultra-nationalists to besiege the heart of East Jerusalem.
In a sign of the power balance in Israel, a small group of 50 left-wing Jews – many from the US – linked arms to try to block the march at the Old City’s entrance. Footage showed police brutally arresting them, grabbing them in chokeholds and breaking one woman’s arm.
Jerusalem is the most intractable of the final-status issues set out in the Oslo process. Those expecting miracles of Trump are going to be disappointed. His commitment to pressuring Netanyahu is weak, while the Israeli prime minister’s commitment to making concessions is non-existent.
Whether Trump signs the waiver or not on Thursday, all indications are that the US president – faced with domestic pressures and an intransigent Israeli government – is going nowhere with his “ultimate deal”.
The only real question to be decided on Thursday is whether Trump prefers to take the fast or protracted route to failure.
A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
People in Iraq, Libya and Yemen are desperate for strong and stable government. Theresa May is partly why they don’t have it, says Steve Beauchampé.
The General Election campaign has returned after last week’s brief hiatus and with it a volley of unedifying Conservative attacks on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s historic support for a united Ireland and the Palestinian people, highlighting the most tenuous of links and associations.
Yet serious examination of Jeremy Corbyn’s (image on the right) activism shows him to have been on the right side of history and ahead of mainstream public opinion time and again, standing up for anti-racist and anti-apartheid causes, refugees and asylum seekers, gender equality, the LGBT community, environmental issues, animal rights and the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and self-expression long before such things gained widespread acceptance. Perhaps not surprising then that when you campaign in support of so many marginalised groups and outsider causes that you will from time to time encounter those whose frustrations and sense of powerlessness has led them to step outside of the law.
As regards Irish republicanism Corbyn’s attempts to achieve conflict resolution through dialogue may at times have been naive, but were his actions so dissimilar to the approach adopted around the same time by MI5 and later by John Major, both of whom ultimately realised that a decades-old conflict, whose death toll was inexorably rising, could not be won solely by military means?
But whilst Jeremy Corbyn’s peripheral rôle in the republican cause has been (and continues to be) pored over and examined by his opponents half a lifetime later, the record and judgement of Theresa May with regard to much more recent UK military interventions requires equally forensic scrutiny given her claims to be a fit and proper person to lead Britain.
And frankly, history’s judgement on this aspect of Theresa May is unlikely to be generous. After first being elected an MP in 1997, she voted in favour of the 2003 invasion of Iraq (having already supported the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in the frenzied post-9/11 atmosphere). Like so many of her colleagues on the opposition Conservative benches at the time, May failed to hold the Blair government to account despite the widely expressed caution of many experts over both the reasons for going to war and the lack of a post-conflict plan to stabilise Iraq. Instead, May limply and dutifully gave her support.
What followed for Iraqis has been almost fifteen years of societal breakdown throughout large parts of this once architectural, cultural and scholastic gem of a nation, with swathes of land occupied until recently by Islamic State and a fracturing of the country along religious, sectarian and tribal lines in a way that will be hard, if not impossible, to heal.
Tony Blair defends his relationship with Muammar Gaddafi (Source: The Telegraph)
By 2011, and as the then Home Secretary in the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government, Theresa May backed the Anglo/Franco-led military action in Libya, which despite its billing as merely creating a no-fly zone to protect civilians and rebel fighters, mainly located in the east of the country, quickly escalated into regime change, culminating in the overthrow and lynching of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Again, as a senior government minister Theresa May ignored warnings that historic tribal divisions, the absence of a strong and stable government or a long-term strategic plan would quickly fracture the country.
Six years on and Libya exists in little more than name only. There is no central government, armed militias and feudal warlords hold considerable power, whilst every international Islamist terror group of substance now boasts a flourishing branch office in the country from where they increasingly export their murderous ideologies. And every month, if not every week, scores of desperate migrants, people who long ago lost all control of their lives, drown off the Libyan coast whilst seeking something better than the hell that their lives have spiralled into.
Learning nothing from history and the consequences of her own actions, in August 2013 Theresa May supported Prime Minster David Cameron’s unsuccessful attempt to persuade MPs to back UK air strikes against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The absence yet again of a coherent post-conflict strategy was sufficient for Labour leader Ed Miliband to refuse his party’s support to Cameron, who narrowly lost a House of Commons vote on the issue. The main beneficiaries of such an intervention, with its intention to downgrade Assad’s military capabilities (if not to remove him from power), would likely have been the plethora of extremist groups engaged in the Syrian civil war, principal amongst them the then nascent Islamic State.
Since becoming Prime Minister Theresa May (image on the right) has continued the supply of British made weapons and military expertise to Saudi Arabia for use in its war crime-strewn bombing campaign in Yemen, a campaign which has killed countless numbers of civilians and is fast creating yet another failed state in the region.
Iraq, Libya and increasingly Yemen: countries where British military interventions have created power vacuums swiftly filled by a combination of anarchy, lawlessness, violence and economic depravation, with catastrophic consequences and relentless, unending misery for millions of civilians.
Theresa May supported each and every one of these military interventions. Jeremy Corbyn opposed all of them. So whose judgment would you trust?
The official U.S. government line is that Iran is the main country responsible for the 9/11 attacks in America. On 9 March 2016, a U.S. civil court ruled that Iran must pay to some victims of the 9/11 attacks $10.5 billion in fines, and the Obama Administration had no comment, so the U.S. press ignored the verdict almost totally. But this verdict was the only official U.S. court ruling thus-far about state-sponsorship of the 9/11 attacks, 16 years after the event. It was therefore huge news on 9 March 2016 — it created a precedent, for the U.S. government to allege that Iran had caused the 9/11 attacks and is consequently ‘the number one terrorist state’ (as Israelis have long claimed). But it received very little coverage at the time.
The event’s significance was the precedent that this verdict set, but most of the ‘news’media simply didn’t report this important precedent: it was the first official U.S. governmental conclusion alleging that Iran had, in effect, ‘invaded’ America, on 11 September 2001; and, yet, even now, no one is saying that Iran invaded the U.S. on 9/11, because the U.S. government isn’t yet trying to prepare the public to support an invasion of Iran by American forces. Still, this precedent could become the start for such preparation, if neither of America’s Iran-hating ‘allies’, Israel and/or Saudi Arabia, can be induced to invade.
President Trump, on May 20th, advanced toward the possibility of invading Iran, a long way, when he announced a record-shattering $350 billion sale of U.S.-made weapons to Saudi Arabia, and the White House said
“This package of defense equipment and services support the long-term security of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region in the face of Iranian threats.”
The symbolism here was that Saudi Arabia is America’s ally, and that Iran is America’s enemy. The stage is set, in case a U.S. President will want to take that stage.
President Trump, on 5 February 2017, was asked in a Super Bowl television interview, what his policies would be regarding Iran, and he answered (video here, transcript here):
“They have total disregard for our country. They are the number one terrorist state.”
(When he was running for the U.S. Presidency, in 2016, he had spoken only about “Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia’s role on the World Trade Center and the attack. That’s very serious stuff. It’s sort of nice to know who your friends are and perhaps who your enemies are.” But now that he was the U.S. President, and his biggest initial American jobs achievement — already in the works during his Presidency’s start — would be an all-time record high $350 billion sale of U.S.-made weapons to the Sauds, Trump as President has been mentioning the Sauds only as ‘allies’, no longer as supporters of terrorism.)
All of the information that’s known about Iran’s actual role in 9/11 is contained in the judge’s 22 December 2011“Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law” in the civil court case, which the judge stated solely upon the basis of the research that the law firm for the suing American victims had set forth. Basically, what their case came down to is that some of the 9/11 hijackers had traveled through Iran prior to 9/11. Among those “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law” were no allegations of evidence to prove that Iran had participated in the planning of the 9/11 attacks, nor of any Iranians paying any of the hijackers. However, one anti-government Iranian, named Mesbahi, referred to a flight simulator that maybe had been purchased from Iran, and he was alleged to have said that he “believes that the simulator was probably used to train the 9/11 hijacker pilots.” That’s all. For these things, the judge fined the Iranian government $10.5B, and told the suing victims to get the money any way they could (which might be not at all, since Iran mocked and rejected the verdict — but the precedent for ‘Iran caused 9/11’ was set).
What, then, was the reality of Iran and the 9/11 attacks? Even the civil suit’s claimants didn’t allege anything substantial for the period prior to 9/11, but what about the period since 9/11?
The events of 9/11 … provided an unprecedented opportunity for a strategic rapprochement between the United States and Iran. After 9/11, Iran not only denounced the attacks and cooperated with the United States in Afghanistan, but also offered to negotiate a comprehensive resolution of differences with no preconditions.
The failure to recognize the impact of the 1953 coup on Iran’s collective identity, and subsequent policy decisions in support of the shah, only reinforced the view that the United States was the primary source of Persian humiliation. … The Bush neoconservatives, dominating the NSC policy formulation process, viewed Iran through the same lens they viewed al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein. Americans have a short attention span: the administration responded to Iran through the context of 1979, yet few considered that most Iranians still viewed America through the events of 1953. Regime change was the wrong policy for Iran. The militarized foreign policy approach that the administration thought worked so well in Afghanistan and Iraq was not relevant to Iran. As the Bush administration was about to discover, one cannot apply a singular policy to the complexity of the Middle East. The Bush Doctrine did just that.
Trump is continuing George W. Bush’s policy.
Mehochko wrote, on page 52:
Iran’s response to 9/11 surprised many observers: spontaneous candlelight vigils in Tehran mourned the American dead, the mayors of Tehran and Isfahan sent condolence messages to the people of New York City, and Iranians observed a moment of silence before a national soccer match. The Iranian government issued a strong statement condemning the terrorist attacks, and President Khatami publicly expressed his “deep regret and sympathy with the victims.” During his November visit to the UN General Assembly, Khatami went so far as to request permission to visit ground zero in order to offer prayers and light a candle for the victims.88
Tehran, Iran – 2001 – Candlelit vigil for 911 victims 10 – time.com – Photo by H. Sarbakhshin (AP)
On page 55:
At the January 2002 Afghanistan Donors Conference in Tokyo, Iran pledged $540 million in assistance for the new Afghan government, compared to the $290 million committed by the United States. While in Tokyo, an Iranian representative approached Dobbins and expressed his desire to not only continue cooperation in Afghanistan, but work on other issues with the appropriate American officials. At this same conference, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill received a similar message from the Iranian government. Both Dobbins and O’Neill reported Iran’s offers to Rice and Powell, but no reply was given to Iran. Later, during a March 2002 meeting in Geneva, the Iranian delegation met again with Dobbins, and offered military assistance to house and train up to 20,000 Afghan troops under the American led effort. Dobbins relayed this offer to the administration, but Powell deferred the issue to Rice, who deferred the issue to Rumsfeld. Days later, the issue was on the agenda for discussion at a NSC Principals Committee meeting. During the meeting, Dobbins relayed Iran’s offer, but Rumsfeld ignored the issue, and no one else seemed interested.
Page 59:
In October 2001, Flynt Leverett, Middle East expert for the Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff, was responsible for developing a strategy to address the offers of support from Syria, Libya, Iran, and other troublesome countries. Leverett’s proposal to Powell was basically a quid pro quo engagement: if these countries agree to expel terrorist groups and cease efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, the United States, in return, will normalize relations. In December, when this policy proposal came up for discussion at a NSC Deputies Committee meeting (chaired by Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley), Hadley, as well as the representatives from the vice president’s office and the OSD, rejected the idea.
Then, Mehochko stated:
“The Pentagon was already exploring options for regime change in Tehran.” Furthermore: “Israel and Pakistan were also alarmed about the increased cooperation between Iran and the United States.”
On page 65, Mehochko quoted from President Bush’s State of the Union Address on 29 January 2002:
Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September 11th, but we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade…States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.
Clearly, the U.S. is set upon conquest. First, Afghanistan was invaded; then, Iraq; then, Libya; then, Syria — all of them destroyed (and radicalized — which the U.S. started in Afghanistan back in 1979). Perhaps Iran will be next. What is the point of anyone’s trusting a government like that?
If Trump were sincere, then, he would instead publicly expose the fraud that U.S. foreign policy has been based upon, and he would expose the historical record, which proves that the U.S. should be protecting Iran and its allies from the Saudi-led fundamentalist-Sunni war against Iran and against all of the world except Sunni-allied Israel and except Sunni-ruled countries. Russia and China and India would then become also U.S. allies, and the possibility of a globe-annihilating nuclear world war, WW III, would immediately plunge. Hundreds of trillions of dollars that will otherwise be spent on preparations for WW III would then go instead toward constructive expenditures. But something prevents American Presidents from doing any such thing as that. Apparently, America’s long war to conquer Iran, Russia, and China, must go on, no matter what. The 9/11 attacks kicked it into high gear.
First, the U.S. punished Afghanistan for 9/11. Then, the U.S. punished Iraq for 9/11. Then, the U.S. court said that Iran somehow was the nation guilty for 9/11. Then, the U.S. President said that Iran is ‘the number one terrorist state’.
The stage is set. But after an intermission, what will the remaining acts be? Has the script been written for what is to come? Does anyone know how the play that started on 9/11 will end?
All that can be concluded from the evidence thus far is that the Sauds did 9/11 with inside-job cooperation from George W. Bush, and that afterward, a country uninvolved in it — Iraq — was invaded and destroyed, and another country uninvolved in it — Iran — has recently become fined for having caused it.
So much for Trump’s lawyers gaining control over the president’s tweeting habits.
Just three after the Italian G-7 meeting ended in an unprecedented lack of consensus over the Paris climate deal, prompting Angela Merkel to announce one day later that Germany can no longer “completely rely” on the US, Trump escalated the dispute with Germany over trade and defense while the German Chancellor met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a demonstration of her ability to pivot from the U.S. to strengthen alternative global alliances.
“We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military,” Trump said in his first tweet on Tuesday. “Very bad for U.S. This will change”
We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change
Trump’s tweet came minutes after Merkel and Modi held a joint press conference in Berlin, at which the German leader sent a very clear message to the US, calling India a “reliable partner with respect to big projects.” That contrasted with her Sunday comments at a Munich rally that reliable trans-Atlantic ties that formed the basis of German foreign policy since World War II “are to some extent over.”
Merkel and Modi stressed their mutual values on the economy and climate change, with the Indian leader suggesting he will adhere to the Paris Agreement to combat global warming even if the U.S. quits. He praised Merkel’s experience and Germany’s economic example to India.
“We are meant for each other,” Modi said.
In the same vein, on Monday Germany’s foreign minister Sigma Gabriel, called Trump’s policies “short-sighted,” saying they stand against the European Union’s interests.
“Anyone who accelerates climate change by weakening environmental protection, who sells more weapons in conflict zones and who does not want to politically resolve religious conflicts is putting peace in Europe at risk,” Sigmar Gabriel said on Monday. “The West has become smaller, at least it has become weaker.”
In a follow up tweet, Trump said Russian officials are likely “laughing” at the U.S. amid continuing reports related to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race.
“Russian officials must be laughing at the U.S. & how a lame excuse for why the Dems lost the election has taken over the Fake News,” Trump tweeted shortly after his German-bashing tweet.
Russian officials must be laughing at the U.S. & how a lame excuse for why the Dems lost the election has taken over the Fake News.
Trump’s latest comments come after reports last week that son in law and senior aide Jared Kushner in December sought to establish a backchannel line of communication between the Trump transition team and Moscow. The move came during a meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The FBI is looking at meetings that Kushner held with Kislyak and Russian banking executive Sergey Gorkov in December as part of the law enforcement investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
The tweet also came out at the same time as news broke that Trump’s communications director, Mike Dubke, has resigned from the White House.
The Bazreh area in eastern Damascus has been fully liberated from militants.
On Monday, the last batch of militants and their supporters left the area and Barzeh was taken under full control by government forces.
With the liberation of Bazreh, government forces made a large step in a wider effort aimed at securing the Damascus countryside from various terrorist threats.
According to some pro-government sources, the area of Jobar controlled mostly by Hayat Tahir al-Sham (HTS) terrorists, excluded from the ceasefire agreement, could become the next target for the Syrian army.
Meanwhile, the Syrian military has deployed the 4th Armoured Division and its special forces known as al-Ghaith Forces in Daraa aiming to repel the ongoing advance of HTS and its allies and to reverse their gains in the city.
In early May, HTS seized about 40 buildings northeast of the Al-Manshiyya district that had been also captured by militants.
In the province of Aleppo, the Syrian Army Tiger Forces have regained the villages of Hamedaia, Mestariha, Maza, Wasteh, and the nearby areas and advanced on the ISIS-held town of Maskanah from northern and western directions.
Government forces also continued advancing in the Maskanah countryside aiming to link up with army units deployed near Khanasser.
On Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron stated that France would launch an immediate strike in response to any use of chemical weapons in Syria. The French president made this statement following a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Macron also slammed the Russian state-run media outlets RT and Sputnik, labeling them as a “deceitful propaganda”. Earlier on Monday, Macron and his Russian counterpart met in the Palace of Versailles to discuss bilateral relations.
The Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) have reached the border with Syria in the western part of the province of Nineveh.
A prominent Iranian general,commander of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Qassem Soleimani, was spotted among PMU units in the border area. This means that the PMU push to the border had likely been coordinated with Iran and Iranian-backed forces in Syria.
Much will depend upon on how the PMU reacts to the continued tensions between US-led forces and the Syrian military in the border area.
A spokesman of the PMU also announced that the group is ready to fight ISIS in Syria in coordination with the Damascus government.
«Un ordine internazionale basato sulle regole, che promuova la pace tra le nazioni, salvaguardi la sovranità, l’integrità territoriale e l’indipendenza politica di tutti gli stati e assicuri la protezione dei diritti umani»: questo dicono di volere i leader del G7 svoltosi a Taormina, accanto alla base di Sigonella, centro strategico nel Mediterraneo per le guerre e operazioni coperte Usa/Nato che hanno demolito lo stato libico e cercato di fare lo stesso in Siria, accrescendo il tragico esodo di migranti dei cui diritti umani il G7 si dice preoccupato.
Le dichiarazioni ricalcano quelle del Summit Nato di Bruxelles: il G7 è formato dai sei maggiori paesi Nato più il Giappone, principale alleato Usa/Nato in Asia. Non mancano le divergenze economiche e politiche, camuffate da posizioni divergenti su clima e migranti. Al Summit Nato Trump ha irritato la Merkel e altri, ricordando che «gli Usa spendono per la difesa più di tutti gli altri paesi Nato messi assieme». Ha chiesto con tono perentorio che tutti gli alleati mantengano l’impegno, assunto nel 2014 col presidente Obama, di destinare al militare almeno il 2% del pil. Finora, oltre agli Usa, solo Grecia, Estonia, Gran Bretagna e Polonia hanno superato tale soglia. L’Italia, calcola il Sipri, spende per il militare l’1,55% del pil, ossia circa 70 milioni di euro al giorno. Salendo al livello della Grecia (2,36%, nonostante la crisi economica), spenderebbe oltre 100 milioni al giorno; salendo a quello degli Usa (3,61%), spenderebbe oltre 160 milioni di euro al giorno. Il 2%, insiste Trump, è ormai insufficente per i crescenti impegni della Alleanza. Il Summit di Bruxelles ha annunciato che la Nato entra nella «Coalizione globale per sconfiggere l’Isis» (sotto comando Usa come la Nato), di cui sono già membri i 28 paesi dell’Alleanza.
La Nato fornirà aerei radar Awacs e forze speciali per operazioni che, con la motivazione di combattere l’Isis (in realtà funzionale alla strategia Usa/Nato di demolizione degli stati), mirano a penetrare in Siria per smembrarne il territorio e accerchiare l’Iran.
Il Summit ha anche annunciato un aumento delle truppe Nato in Afghanistan, oggi ammontanti a 13 mila uomini.
In Europa la Nato continua la sua espansione ad Est: entra come 29° membro, già invitato al Summit, il Montenegro che, nonostante le piccole dimensioni, è importante per la sua posizione geostrategica e per i suoi bunker, in cui la Nato dislocherà enormi quantità di armi, probabilmente anche nucleari, e cacciabombardieri.
La Nato – ha dichiarato al Summit il segretario generale Stoltenberg – «deve reagire», poiché ha di fronte una «Russia che usa la forza militare per cambiare i confini in Europa con le sue azioni aggressive contro l’Ucraina, annettendo illegalmente la Crimea e continuando a destabilizzare l’Ucraina orientale».
Scavalcando lo stesso Trump, che ha parlato in generale di «minacce provenienti dalla Russia ai confini orientali della Nato», il Summit ha rilanciato l’accusa alla Russia di voler cambiare i confini dell’Europa con un uso aggressivo della forza militare. Accusa che rinnova quella della vecchia guerra fredda, prospettando lo scenario dei carri armati russi che invadono l’Europa. La promessa elettorale di Trump di voler aprire un negoziato con Mosca si infrange sul muro, invisibile ma possente, di quei circoli dominanti statunitensi ed europei che, puntando su una nuova guerra fredda, bloccano ogni trattativa con Mosca minacciando lo stesso Trump di impeachment con l’accusa di connivenza col nemico.
L’ombra della sconfitta Clinton perseguita Trump, sedendo come convitato di pietra al Summit Nato e al G7.
The news that the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had warned Britain’s security service (MI5) about Salman Abedi, the man accused of the recent suicide bombing atrocity in the English city of Manchester, once again raises the issue of the role of Western intelligence services in the conduct of the so-called war on terror.
The commission of terrorist acts such as occurred in Manchester have invariably formed the basis for the justification of initiating fresh military intervention or bolstering existing military deployments. They also serve as the setting for the implementation of laws which since the September 11th attacks in the United States have incrementally eroded the sum rights and freedoms enjoyed by citizens in the Western world.
The risk of war and further loss of their freedoms make it incumbent on the citizens of these countries to be better informed about the workings of those agencies tasked with protecting their nations from internal threats such as acts of terrorism. The average Western citizen should be concerned about a disturbingly consistent pattern of acts of terror perpetrated by suspects who were either being monitored by national security establishments or who had served as double-agents and informers. Thus, it is important that they are able to be adequately informed so that they are able to assess and make judgements as to whether the strategies being employed to manage the the threat of terror are fundamentally flawed or point to something more sinister.
Recent revelations by the British Mail on Sunday newspaper that the FBI had sent a message to MI5 in January of 2017 stating that Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber responsible for the carnage at a concert in Manchester on May 22nd, was part of a North African-based cell of the so-called Islamic State “plotting to strike a political target in the UK” raise deeply disturbing questions. For one, they stand in stark contrast to the announcement by Prime Minister Theresa May that Abedi, who she claimed was known by the security services only “to a degree” had acted as a “lone wolf”.
The official narrative of the British state is that Abedi (image on the right) was investigated but that no evidence of suspicious activities was found and that he simply dropped off the radar. However, the details presently known about Abedi and his family as well as the relationship between the security services and known Islamists in Manchester point to the implausibility of a genuine investigation yielding little on Abedi.
Abedi, whose parents belonged to the al-Qaeda affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), was an absentee University student who utilized a student loan to finance travel expenses and to pay rents at various addresses. He travelled freely to a number of European Union countries as well as to countries in the Middle East and North Africa region including Syria and Libya.
Libya, the homeland of his parents, is of course the country where the British government was instrumental in the Nato action which led to the overthrow of Colonel Muamar Gaddafi. While it is well-known that members of the British special forces regiment, the SAS, was involved in training and directing the attacks of the LIFG in the anti-Gaddafi insurrection of 2011, a less known aspect is the role played by MI5 in the recruitment of Islamists from the Manchester area to fight for this guerrilla movement.
Young men who were under state surveillance and control orders were approached and the idea of fighting against the Gaddafi government broached. Those who agreed had restrictions lifted and were allowed to travel to Libya. It is a state of affairs which apparently continued. They were allowed to continue traveling to Libya, which today is a lawless state dominated by Islamist militias, as well as to other destinations including Syria, a country against which Britain, in alliance with Nato and the Sunni Gulf monarchies, has sought to effect regime change.
It is clear that MI5 has utilised the services of radicalised Muslims like Abedi in this endeavour. The modus operandi followed by Britain and the Western alliance in their efforts to overthrow the Ba’athist government of Syria, like Gaddafi’s a secular one, is to fund and train insurgent Islamists. This policy was exposed with devastating clarity in 2015 with the collapse of the trial on charges of terrorist offences of Bherlin Gildo, a Swedish national. The Old Bailey was informed that the charges which centred on Gildo’s activities in Syria would have caused deep embarrassment to Britain’s intelligence services because of their covert support for anti-Assad militias, the overwhelming majority of which are Islamist in agenda.
So far as Abedi is concerned, the evidence points to the intelligence services following a tried pattern of establishing individual contacts and relationships with terror networks as part of the goal of overthrowing governments earmarked as anti-Western.
These individuals and groups effectively become what are known in the parlance of the intelligence world as ‘assets’. They receive protection from the state in a variety of ways including the issuance of passports and untrammelled passage through airports.
A former Libyan rebel named Belal Younis told the Middle East Eye news site that he was the beneficiary of such protection at the time MI5 was recruiting anti-Gaddafi rebels in 2011. He recalled one episode where his interrogation by counter-terrorism police officers in an airport lounge was aborted after the intervention of an MI5 officer who waved him through and who later informed him that he had “sorted it out”.
Specific evidence of similar personal contacts between Salman Abedi and officials of the security service have not materialised. But the circumstances which enabled him to travel freely and to evade official surveillance is remarkably clear.
It is useful to provide some documented examples of situations where acts of terror were committed by individuals who were either being monitored by national security establishments or who had been previously functioning as double-agents and informers.
Mohamed Merah, the man claimed to have carried out terror shootings in Toulouse and Montauban, was for long rumoured to have been a double agent and informer for the DCRI, a counter-terrorism and counter-espionage state intelligence body which effectively serves as France’s equivalent to the FBI.
Merah’s father claimed that this was the case. His son sent him two separate clips of 20 minutes length in which he detailed his connections to French intelligence while he was surrounded by special forces in a Toulouse apartment. The respective items of footage were sold by Merah senior to the French authorities for 30,000 Euros; money which he then used to buy land in his native Algeria to which he was expelled.
During the siege, CNN reported that Merah had boasted to French police that he had been trained by al-Qaeda in Waziristan, a tribal area where many European jihadists have gone. Merah had travelled to various Middle Eastern countries as well as to Central Asia. The French authorities even claimed that he briefly visited Israel. The idea was that French agents agreed to allow Merah to travel freely in return for information on Islamist terror cells.
Yves Bonnet, a former head of the now dissolved domestic counter-espionage service DST, confirmed to the Toulouse newspaper La Depeche du Midi that Merah had worked as an informer saying:
He was known to the DCRI, not especially because he was an Islamist, but because he had a correspondent in domestic intelligence. When you have a correspondent, it’s not completely innocent. This is not trivial.
Across the Atlantic there is no shortage of cases with similar narratives. For instance, the Russian intelligence agency FSB informed the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev (image on the left, source: Daily Mail) was a violent radical Islamist more than eighteen months before the bomb outrage at the Boston Marathon in April of 2013. Yet, according to a congressional report, the authorities missed numerous opportunities to detain Tsarnaev when he was travelling to and from Dagestan for training.
The lawyers defending Tsarnaev’s younger brother who survived a police chase and shoot-out after the bombing constantly asked questions about the FBI’s clandestine involvement with Tsarnaev. The opinion of many counter-terrorism experts and law enforcement officials is that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was for a period of time a federal informant. Tsarnaev, it appears, was a protected asset who somehow managed to avoid imprisonment despite his involvement in a triple murder case in 2011. The following year, he was allowed to travel to Russia using only residency documents and a passport issued in Kyrgyzstan even though he was on two terrorist watch lists. On his return, he was not subjected to additional security screening for persons with his immigration status who are away for a period exceeding six month.
In a book entitled Maximum Harm: The Tsarnaev Brother, the FBI and the Road to the Marathon Bombing, Michele McPhee, an award-winning investigative journalist theorizes that the federal government may have played a “direct role in creating the monster that Tamerlan Tsamaev became”. Her thesis is that Tsarnaev was an informant who turned on the United States after his request for citizenship was turned down. The FBI continues to deny that he worked as an informant but still refuses to reveal all the information it has under its control.
The FBI’s use of a former Egyptian army officer named Emad Salem twenty years earlier as an informant tasked with infiltrating a group of Islamists who were later charged and convicted of the bomb attack on the World Trade Center also provides for an uncomfortable episode of state surveillance gone wrong. Salem, who was paid over a million dollars for his efforts, claimed that the bomb was built with the knowledge of FBI agents who assured him that the operation was a sting and agreed to foil the plot by supplying him with fake explosive materials. The FBI continue to deny foreknowledge of the attack.
It is a pattern continued in the case of Omar Mateen who massacred revellers at an Orlando nightclub in June of 2016. Mateen, whose father had long-time links with the CIA because of his role in Afghan politics, had been officially subjected to two investigations by the FBI.
The comment by Yves Bonnet, the former DST head, that the relationship between an informer and a state is “not trivial” is one that citizens would be advised to ponder. The control of presumed intelligence assets carry severe risks since as some suspect in the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, they may go “rogue” and commit acts of terrorism.
Once such relationships are established, it means that intelligence agencies have the capability of pursuing agendas which exceed the bounds of morality and legality. By this it is meant that state intelligence bodies may utilise terror groups as a means of fomenting terror with the objective of influencing public opinion.
The idea that the state can enable acts of terror against its own citizens either by allowing a planned act of terror by a group to go ahead or by instigating the terroristic enterprise itself is one which many refuse to accept.
Yet, evidence of state created and manipulated acts of terror is well-documented. The investigation conducted by Judge Felice Casson and the revelations of Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a convicted terrorist, about the role of Italian military intelligence in steering far Right groups to committing acts of terror shed light on the stage-managing of what in Italy was termed la strategia della tensione: a ‘strategy of tension’.
While in the specific context of the anni di piombo (‘years of lead’) this entailed directing neo-fascist groups such as Ordine Nuovo and Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari to commit outrages which were blamed on Left wing groups such as the Brigate Rossi, the overarching aim was to condition the response of a the public, who would be suitably disgusted, enraged and fearful to turn to the state. In Vinciguerra’s words:
You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, unknown people far from any political game. The reason was quite simple – to force the people to turn to the state for greater security.
The objective of state-manipulated terror thus is to use the resultant public emotion as the basis for enacting laws related to bolstering state powers. It enables the state to made decisions and follow policies which would be unlikely to be accepted by its citizens in the absence of such catastrophic events. These responses will be centred on curtailing the freedoms of citizens or justifying military action or both.
The purpose of the Northwoods Project which was approved by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff in the early 1960s was that the public outcry expected to be caused by a series of contrived bombings and hijackings which were to be blamed on the government of Fidel Castro would provide the pretext for launching a military invasion of the island of Cuba.
On the specific matter of the use of surveilled suspects, informants and cultivated terror networks, the potential for state-engineered incidents is an entirely plausible one. And while not admitting that this was the case, a report prepared under the auspices of Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute released in July of 2014 found that all but four of the most high-profile cases of domestic terrorism which had occurred in the United States in the decade after the 9/11 attack of 2001 featured the “direct involvement” of government agents or informants. To quote the report:
All of the high-profile domestic terrorism plots of the last decade, with four exceptions, were actually FBI sting operations -plots conducted with the direct involvement of law enforcement informants or agents, including plots that were proposed or led by informants. According to multiple studies, nearly 50 per cent of the more than 500 federal counter-terrorism convictions resulted from informant-based cases; almost 30 per cent of those cases were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot.
Among the four exceptions is claimed to be the Boston Marathon bombing which as explained earlier is still plagued by highly contentious allegations that the perpetrator was an FBI informant. Nonetheless, the report called into question the post-9/11 shift taken by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies toward stopping terrorist plots before they occur. It went as far as to suggest that some operations had morphed into manufacturing threats.
The FBI itself has a history replete with intrigues which captured its operatives in situations where the agency actively engaged in fomenting violence. The COINTELPRO policy which aimed to disrupt and discredit dissident social and political organisations involved using agents tasked with widening the rift between Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, and his former apostle Malcolm X. The tactics employed contributed to the eventual assassination of Malcolm X. Three decades later, the Bureau would employ the services of an agent provocateur to entice one of Malcolm X’s daughters into a conspiracy to kill Louis Farrakhan, a later leader of the organisation who for many years remained steadfastly unrepentant about his role in inciting Malcolm X’s murder.
The involvement of actors controlled by the British state in acts of terror were a strong feature of the counter-insurgency policy employed in the ‘low-intensity war’ with republican militias during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This strategy involved the use of loyalist terror organisations as proxies.
During that conflict, a stage was reached where state and military intelligence organisations were controlling key actors among both republican and loyalist terror groups. It is alleged by Kevin Fulton, a British-controlled IRA-infiltrator, that the security forces had agents embedded within the ‘Real IRA’ at the time of the Omagh bombing atrocity of 1998. Fulton, whose name is the pseudonym of Peter Keely, an intelligence corp soldier and member of the army’s Force Research Unit, was prevented from giving evidence at the trial of a man charged with the bombing. To date, no one has been convicted of the bombing and the authorities continue to refuse to hold a public inquiry.
The evidence so far assembled of the security services giving support to people who are connected to radical Islamist organisations is something about which Britons and other Western Europeans must be concerned. While each atrocity is met with the inevitable response that society will remain unbowed and unchanged, the stark reality is that there has been a steady diminution of their hard won rights and freedoms since the inauguration of the so-called war on terror.
They are being asked to get used to the idea of having the army deployed on the streets of mainland Britain and of the introduction of internment. Another outrage may mean that Britain may opt to follow France which is effectively under a permanent state of emergency.
And with revelations that the perpetrators of many key terror events in the United Kingdom and in places such as France may have been intelligence assets or had records of being surveilled by state intelligence agencies, it is time for the general public to be cautious about accepting the typical official response which affixes blame on the limitations of available resources or on undocumented investigations purporting to have found no evidence against future terrorists.
It is time for the public to put pressure on the government to re-think its strategy on combating terrorism, a move which must involve acknowledging that overthrowing Arab secular governments such as in Libya and the continuing attempt to do so in Syria have created the circumstances enabling the spread of radical Islamism and a corresponding increase in the threat of terrorism.
Failure to do so and a continued adherence to a mindset conditioned to think that their government and state security apparatuses are benign and benevolent institutions incapable of acting against the public interest will ensure that they will continue to be enslaved by the emotional manipulation intended by terrorist outrages which give politicians the licence to take away their hard won rights and freedoms as well as to enter into endless foreign conflicts.
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer and law lecturer based in London, England. He has an interest in intelligence and security matters.
The Cold War could have ended in 1958 when Van Cliburn won the Piano Competition in Moscow. Van Cliburn was overwhelmed with Russian applause and his stage with the profusion of flowers.
The judges asked Khrushchev if they were permitted to award the prize to the American. Khrushchev asked, “was he the best?” “Yes,” replied the judges. “Then give him the prize,” said the Soviet leader.
Khrushchev achieved the de-Stalinization of Russia and worked with US President John F. Kennedy to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis. Their cooperation opened an end to the Cold War. However, hardliners in both countries removed both leaders from office, thus condemning the world to the ever present risk of nuclear armageddon. Thanks to the insane US governments in the post-Reagan era, this risk is higher than ever.
Take time to enjoy Van Cliburn’s performance in Moscow of Tchaikovsky’s piano Concerto No. 1. Here is Van Cliburn’s 1958 performance.
Here is a later performance in Moscow. Watch the hand work. It is extraordinary that such a difficult piece of music is performed on both occasions without a single missed key.
Here is Dan Rather on the importance of the 1958 performance:
When President Reagan was trying to end the Cold War, he invited Soviet leader Gorbachev to the White House and prevailed on Van Cliburn to come out of retirement to perform in the spirit of the 1958 tension-breaking performance. Gorbachev was enthralled.
Reagan was the last American president. His successors, with the possible exception of George H. W. Bush, have been mere puppets of the military/security complex. Yet, the left-wing hates Reagan. The Amerian left-wing has dissolved into the stupidity of Identity Politics and has even become an accomplice of the neoconservative war/police state.
The Zionist neoconservatives and the military/security complex have succeeded in destroying the accomplishment of Reagan and Gorbachev, and have resurrected the prospect of nuclear armageddon.
The U.S. is casting its net over the desert between Iraq and Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to install military bases and power-structures that will guarantee major influence in the area for the foreseeable future. A part of that plan is to develop Sunni proxy forces that will keep the government forces of Damascus and Baghdad out of the area. Another part is to privatize important infrastructure to keep it under direct U.S. control.
To privatize the Iraqi Highway 1 between Baghdad and the Jordanian capital Amman, is a major point in these plans. According to the NYT:
As part of an American effort to promote economic development in Iraq and secure influence in the country after the fight against the Islamic State subsides, the American government has helped broker a deal between Iraq and Olive Group, a private security company, to establish and secure the country’s first toll highway.
Map by New York Times
The map shows Highway 1 from Baghdad to Amman. Notice the road junction east of the Jordan-Iraq border. There the road splits with one branch going north-west towards Damascus. The point where that road crosses from Iraq to Syria is the al-Tanf border station currently occupied by U.S. forces and their British and Norwegian auxiliaries as well some Syrian “rebels” under U.S. control. The U.S. recently bombed a convoy of Syrian and allied Iraqi forces which was moving towards that area. The U.S. military dropped leaflets to Syrian troops to order them to stay away from their own border. Who the f*** do those U.S. troops think they are? What is there justification to be there in the first place? Large Iraq and Syrian government forces are now moving towards al-Tanf from the two sides of the border to evict the occupiers. Iraq, Syria, Iran and Russia have agreed that no U.S. position will be tolerated there. U.S. and other foreign troops will either move out voluntary from al-Tanf or they will be removed by force.
Highway 1 and its branch to Damascus is the most important economic lifeline between Syria and Jordan in the west and Iraq and beyond in the east. Whoever controls it, controls major parts of commerce between those countries. Iraq is a country with rich resources. While it is under economic strains after decades of U.S. sanctions and war against it by the U.S. and Takfiri proxy forces it has no long-term need to rent out such major real estate.
Nevertheless the current Iraqi government under Prime Minister al-Abadi signed a preliminary agreement for a 25 year contract with the U.S. company:
Mr. Abadi has awarded the development project to Olive Group, although the final details are still being worked out. The project would include repairing bridges in western Anbar Province; refurbishing the road, known as Highway 1; and building service stations, rest areas and roadside cafes. It would also include mobile security by private contractors for convoys traveling the highway.
Al Abeidi (image on the right) is now under pressure from the Shia majority who elected him into office to renounce the deal. It is obviously that the deal is not in their interest nor that of the country. According to U.S. diplomats one purpose of the deal is:
pushing back on the influence of Shiite Iran, whose growing power in Iraq has alarmed important Sunni allies of the United States like Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Iran has little to do with the road. It is the Shia majority of Iraq that would benefit most from free flowing traffic and commerce on it.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia have enabled the Sunni insurgency in Iraq of which ISIS is just the latest incarnation. To allow the U.S. to control the road and thereby Anbar province in the name of Turkey and Saudi Arabia would guarantee that future Sunni insurgencies could threaten Baghdad whenever “needed”. Just remember how Obama said he used ISIS to throw then Prime Minster Maliki out of office:
The reason, the president added, “that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of [Prime Minister Nuri Kamal] al-Maliki.
A U.S. controlled west-Iraq and south-eastern Syria would be a highway for Saudi Arabian miscreants from their country up towards Baghdad and Damascus. It would be an incarnation of the “Salafist principality” the U.S. and other early ISIS supporters have wished for since at least 2012.
The U.S. is willing to obfuscate and to lie to further its imperial plans. The NYT is, as usual, complicit in that:
Playing on painful memories and fears of Iraqis, news outlets have also run false reports that Blackwater — the private security firm that acted with impunity in the early days of the American occupation and gunned down innocent Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007 — had taken on the project.“The politics of this country are challenging,” said Christian Ronnow, executive vice president of Constellis, the parent company of Olive Group, a private security firm that has worked for years in Iraq.
The [Constellis] Group combines the specialized skills and operational excellence of ACADEMI, Edinburgh International, Strategic Social and Triple Canopy,
is an American private military company founded in 1997 by former Navy SEAL officer Erik Prince as Blackwater, renamed as XE Services in 2009 and now known as Academi since 2011 after the company was acquired by a group of private investors.
Olive Group is Constellis Group is Academi is Blackwater – the “false reports” in Iraqi media are way more truthful on that than the NYT is.
The U.S. project in Anbar province and its potential control of Highway 1 through private U.S. forces threatens to put an economic stranglehold on Iraq, Syria and Jordan. I trust that nationalist forces in those countries as well as their allies will do their best to prevent it.
True Publica Editor’s note: There appears now to be a reason why officials in the USA were able to name the Manchester Arena suicide bomber within four hours of the event. The FBI knew exactly who the perpetrator was and were able to leak huge amounts of data to the American press, much to the vocal frustration of British intelligence. Here’s why:
Explosive allegations have emerged that the UK’s MI5 intelligence agency had prior warning of Manchester suicide bomber Salman Abedi planning a terrorist atrocity.
On May 22, Abedi detonated a shrapnel-laden improvised explosive device outside a performance in Manchester by American singer Ariana Grande, killing 22 people, many of whom were children, and wounding 116.
According to the Mail on Sunday,
“the FBI told MI5 that Abedi was part of a North African Islamic State cell plotting to strike a political target in the UK.”
The FBI passed these warnings to MI5 in January, after placing Abedi on their terrorist watch list in 2016. An unnamed “security source” told the Daily Mail that the FBI informed MI5 that Abedi “belonged to a North African terror gang based in Manchester, which was looking for a political target in this country.”
He continued:
“Following this US tip-off, Abedi and other members of the gang were scrutinised by MI5. It was thought at the time that Abedi was planning to assassinate a political figure. But nothing came of this investigation and, tragically, he slipped down the pecking order of targets.”
The claims by Prime Minister Theresa May that Abedi acted as a “lone wolf” and was known by Britain’s security services only “to a degree” lie in shreds. It is simply not credible that an individual planning to assassinate a British “political figure”—that could conceivably include the prime minister, foreign secretary or the queen—would be allowed to “slip” under the radar.
Abedi was effectively given a free hand by MI5 to launch a terrorist attack. The Daily Mail’ s revelations add to mounting evidence of the role of British intelligence services and successive governments in cultivating Islamist terror networks, and protecting these “assets” as part of their regime change operations in Libya and Syria.
On Thursday, a report by Middle East Eye (MEE) exposed what it described as an “open door” policy by the previous Conservative government of David Cameron, allowing members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) to travel to Libya in 2011 as part of military operations to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. May was home secretary in that government. Abedi’s parents were both members of the LIFG. These individuals were able to travel freely between the UK, Libya, Syria and other locations.
Former rebel fighters interviewed by the MEE explained how British security services assisted their movements, providing them with passports and clearing them for departure. Belal Younis, who traveled to Libya in 2011, said he was asked by an MI5 officer, who had detained him for questioning after a trip to Libya in early 2011, “Are you willing to go into battle?”
“While I took time to find an answer,” Younis told MEE, “he turned and told me the British government have no problem with people fighting against Gaddafi.”
During a subsequent trip to Libya in May 2011, he was questioned by counter-terrorism police in a British airport lounge, but an MI5 officer interceded and he was “waved through.” The MI5 officer later called Younis to say that he had “sorted it out.”
Libya, once the wealthiest nation in Africa with free healthcare, the highest literacy and lowest poverty now lies in ruins and over-run with terrorists and warring gangs. (Source: True Publica)
Many of those who traveled to Libya had previously been under counter-terrorism control orders, with tight restrictions on their movement and internet activity. However, the control orders were lifted in 2011 as Britain joined US and French efforts to topple Gaddafi.
Unknown to the British people, including the families who lost loved ones last Monday night, Manchester was at the centre of operations that funnelled rebel fighters into Libya. Younis told the MEE’s reporters,
“The majority who went from here were from Manchester.”
Another interviewee said of the young recruits he encountered during a visit to a rebel camp in Misrata that same year,
“They had proper Manchester accents.”
Another British-born fighter told the MEE they were also allowed to travel to Syria, where Islamist groups, offshoots of Al-Qaeda and backed by the US and Britain, have been fighting to overthrow the government of Bashar Al-Assad. Abedi himself was allowed to travel to Syria. “No questions were asked,” Younis said. Another British-Libyan said he had worked for the British SAS in Benghazi to edit slick video recruitment and marketing packages, showing fighters being trained by both the SAS and Irish Special Forces.
In Saturday’s Daily Mail, Peter Oborne alleged direct collusion by MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, with terrorist organisations in Libya and Syria. Oborne, associate editor of the Spectator and former chief political commentator at the DailyTelegraph, wrote, “MI6 officers were complicit in creating a generation of British-born jihadis who are prepared to do anything, and kill anyone—even young children—in their efforts to destroy this country.
“There is every reason to speculate that Salman Abedi’s evil handiwork at the Manchester Arena on Monday night was in part a direct consequence of MI6’s meddling in Middle Eastern and North African affairs.”
Oborne singled out MI6’s role under the Labour government of Tony Blair, when its former chiefs, Sir Richard Dearlove and Sir John Scarlett, “allowed [MI6] to become a propaganda tool for the Labour PM’s clique of war-mongers.”
Scarlett drafted the infamous dossier on Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, used by Blair to stampede Britain into war.
“MI6 has failed to learn the lessons from this debacle,” Oborne wrote, pointing to the “hundreds” of British citizens who “were allowed to travel abroad to join jihadist organisations.”
Britain’s sordid dealings with the LIFG and other Al-Qaeda-linked groups stretch back to the 1990s. The LIFG was spawned from the mujahedeen and built up by the US in Afghanistan, as part of its destabilisation of the Soviet Union. Since then, the fate of the LIFG has directly tracked shifts in British and American foreign policy.
In 1996, British intelligence agencies paid LIFG leaders huge sums to attempt to assassinate Gaddafi, according to leaks from senior French intelligence officials and former MI5 officer David Shayler. In 2004, after the Blair government’s rapprochement with the Libyan regime, MI6 helped seize LIFG leader Abdel-Hakim Belhaj and his deputy Sami al-Saadi. According to British historian and author Mark Curtis, Belhaj was handed over to the CIA, tortured, and then sent back to Tripoli to spend six years in solitary confinement where MI6 agents reportedly questioned him.
In 2011, in response to the Arab Spring, the US and Britain set in motion long-standing plans for regime change operations in the Middle East. Anti-terrorism control orders against LIFG leaders were lifted because, according to Curtis, the British government “once again found that its interests—mainly concerning oil—coincided with those of Islamist forces in Libya.”
The 22 dead and scores injured in Manchester, no less than the people of Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and countless other countries invaded and occupied, are the victims of British imperialist intrigue and are regarded as “collateral damage.”
These explosive revelations raise a number of questions that must be answered:
Why did MI5 drop its investigation into Salman Abedi, and who authorised this?
Why was he able to travel freely throughout the European Union and Middle East, including to known terror hubs?
Did MI5 inform Theresa May’s government of the threats to strike a political target in Britain?
How was he able to receive thousands of pounds in student loans to finance his activities, including travel and the renting of multiple residencies in the lead-up to last Monday’s attack, despite not attending university?
Last week Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn earned the enmity of the media for pointing to the obvious connection between Britain’s involvement in colonial-style wars and the heightened danger of terrorism. The Guardian led the attack, with Jonathan Freedland insisting,
“It’s a delusion to think that the terror attacks are just about foreign policy,” and Paul Mason declaring, “The ‘blowback theory’, which blames Islamist terrorism directly on western expeditionary warfare, is both facile and irrelevant in this case.”
However, Corbyn was silent on the political responsibility of successive Labour and Tory governments for launching wars of aggression and even promised to give the army and the security services additional resources. He has so far said nothing about revelations that MI5 had forewarning of Abedi’s attack.
In a blatant but not altogether surprising display of arrogance and aggression, the United States recently dropped leaflets on the al-Tanf road, warning the Syrian military to halt its advance toward Tanf and demanding a retreat.
According to reports both by Leith Abou Fadel of Al-Masdar and from SouthFront, the leaflets were dropped after the Syrian military had advanced to the Shehmi area, which is located about 55km from the city of Tanf. The leaflets not only warned the SAA to stop advancing but demanded that it withdraw to the Zaza triangle.
According to local sources cited by SouthFront, the leaflets contained sectarian expressions.
Syrian TV reported that the SAA has managed to advance in and around the Scientific Research area of the eastern desert of the Suweida countryside. The Syrian military was also able to repel an attack launched by the Western-backed terrorist group known as the Free Syrian Army in the same area.
In addition, SouthFront has reported that the “US-led forces” used Switchblade suicide drones in order to target the SAA positions with Grad missiles south of Zaza.
The move toward Tanf is significant because it puts Syrian military forces moving toward U.S. and U.K. Special Operations Forces stationed at the same location.
The base, located at al-Tanf, has been operational for around a year.
The area is of substantial strategic importance to the regime, as controlling it would help re-establish a road link with Iraq to the south.
In June 2016, Russian jets, providing top cover for the Syrian military, bombed the base. No casualties were reported.
In April, the base reportedly came under attack from Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).
The UK government refused to comment in line with its long standing policy relating to Special Forces operations.
The US has reportedly warned against further encroachment on the base and it remains unclear how foreign troops would respond to contact with Syrian forces.
The precise disposition and number of UK forces in unknown though they are likely to be either British Army personnel from 22 SAS or Royal Marines from the SBS – Britain’s so-called ‘Tier 1’ operators. Other units that operate under the same ‘no comment’ umbrella include the Special Forces Support Group (SFSG), formerly the 1st Battalion of The Parachute Regiment, which supplies additional troops to SF operations and the shadowy Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), which provides expert close surveillance capabilities.
The possibility of a direct Syrian clash with US/UK forces and thus a Russian clash with US/UK forces is now becoming very real as the Syrian government does not seem ready to allow the US and UK to simply invade and occupy any more territory than they already have.
By now, it should be clear that the presence of the FSA in the Tanf area is nothing more than ruse designed to provide a tar baby for the Syrian military to fire upon – going under the guise of “moderate rebels” – which will then allow the West to scream that Syria is attacking moderates, violating agreements, and threatening American soldiers, and thus justify some type of U.S./U.K. reprisal.
Still, it appears that Syria and its Russian allies may be reaching the end of their patience with America’s arrogant invasions and chest thumping in Syria. The obvious strategy for the Syrian military is to lift the siege of Deir ez-Zour and retake Raqqa before America, Kurds, or America’s Kurdish terrorist forces are able to do so and thus begin choking the ability of terrorists to move back and forth, supply, and direct military efforts against the Syrian government. After the immediate goal is reached, the SAA will be tasked with surgically removing the cancer inflicted upon the country by the United States.
This Memorial Day, Monday, May 29, 2017, is the 100th birthday of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States.
JFK was assassinated on November 22, 1963, as he approached the end of his third year in office. Researchers who spent years studying the evidence have concluded that President Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy between the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secret Service. (See, for example, JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass)
Kennedy entered office as a cold warrior, but he learned from his interaction with the CIA and Joint Chiefs that the military/security complex had an agenda that was self-interested and a danger to humanity. He began working to defuse tensions with the Soviet Union.
His rejections of plans to invade Cuba, of the Northwoods project, of a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and his intention to withdraw from Vietnam after his reelection, together with some of his speeches signaling a new approach to foreign policy in the nuclear age convinced the military/security complex that he was a threat to their interests.
Cold War conservatives regarded him as naive about the Soviet Threat and a liability to US national security. These were the reasons for his assassination. These views were set in stone when Kennedy announced on June 10, 1963, negotiations with the Soviets toward a nuclear test ban treaty and a halt to US atmospheric nuclear tests.
The Oswald cover-up story never made any sense and was contradicted by all evidence including tourist films of the assassination. President Johnson had to cover up the assassination, not because he was part of it or because he willfully wanted to deceive the American people, but because to give Americans the true story would have shaken their confidence in their government at a critical time in US-Soviet relations. To make the cover-up succeed, Johnson needed the credibility of the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Earl Warren, to chair the commission that covered up the assassination. Warren understood the devastating impact the true story would have on the public and their confidence in the military and national security leadership and on America’s allies.
As I previously reported, Lance deHaven-Smith in his book, Conspiracy Theory in America, shows that the CIA introduced “conspiracy theory” into the political lexicon as a technique to discredit skepticism of the Warren Commission’s cover-up report. He provides the CIA document that describes how the agency used its media friends to control the explanation.
The term “conspiracy theory” has been used ever since to validate false explanations by discrediting true explanations.
President Kennedy was also determined to require the Israel Lobby to register as a foreign agent and to block Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. His assassination removed the constraints on Israel’s illegal activities.
Memorial Day is when Americans honor those in the armed services who died serving the country. JFK fell while serving the causes of peace and nuclear disarmament. In a 1961 address to the United Nations, President Kennedy said:
“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race – to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved.”
Kennedy’s address was well received at home and abroad and received a favorable and supportive response from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, but it caused consternation among the warhawks in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The US led in terms of the number of nuclear warheads and delivery systems, and this lead was the basis for US military plans for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.
Also, Many believed that nuclear disarmament would remove the obstacle to the Soviet Army overrunning Western Europe. Warhawks considered this a greater threat than nuclear armageddon. Many in high military circles regarded President Kennedy as weakening the US viv-a-vis the Soviet Union.
The assassination of President Kennedy was an enormous cost to the world. Kennedy and Khrushchev would have followed up their collaboration in defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis by ending the Cold War long before the military/security complex achieved its iron grip on the US government. Israel would have been denied nuclear weapons, and the designation of the Israel Lobby as a foreign agent would have prevented Israel’s strong grip on the US government. In his second term, JFK would have broken the CIA into a thousand pieces, an intention he expressed to his brother, Robert, and the Deep State would have been terminated before it became more powerful than the President.
But the military/security complex struck first, and pulled off a coup that voided all these promises and terminated American democracy.
The Syria Solidarity Movement® (SSM) condemns the US-led Coalition attack last week on Syrian military forces inside of Syria near the town of al-Tanf. The Syrian forces were on a mission to dislodge terrorist mercenaries from a nearby position and to help secure Syria’s borders with Iraq and Jordan. This direct attack on Syrian forces marks a further escalation of hostilities by the USA and its Coalition partners against the legitimate government of Syria. The attack was clearly illegal under international law because neither the USA nor its Coalition partners have the permission of the Syrian government either to enter or to overfly the sovereign state of Syria.
The Coalition attack puts into stark relief the fraudulent nature of the US claim that it is involved in Syria (and Iraq) in order to fight terrorism. Nothing could be further from the truth: various arms of the US and Coalition governments have openly admitted funding, recruiting for, arming, and inserting terrorist proxy armies inside of Syria since 2011. The practical effect of the attack last week near al-Tanf was to protect some of these terrorist proxies from being wiped out by Syrian military forces.
The USA has been trying to destabilize and overthrow the Syrian Arab Republic for various political and economic reasons since the establishment of that state in 1963. Since the “Arab Spring” of 2011, the USA, its NATO partners, various Arab monarchs, and neighbouring countries (such as Turkey and Jordan) have been conducting an attempted regime change operation in Syria. Fortunately for the Syrian people, Syria was able to call upon its allies such as Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, for assistance to liberate whole sections of its territory from occupation by the western proxy armies, composed mostly of foreign terrorist mercenaries. In late 2016, Syrian and allied forces liberated Aleppo, the largest and principal commercial city of Syria and thus foiled western plans for regime change in that country.
Since the liberation of Aleppo, US policy planners have resorted to John Kerry’s (Obama’s former Secretary of State) infamous “Plan B” for the partition of Syria. The USA built at least two illegal air bases in eastern Syria and recruited Kurdish and other mercenaries to try to drive ISIS out of the area. In doing so, the USA and its Coalition partners have expressed absolutely no intention of returning the territories taken from ISIS to the government of Syria.
Armed men in uniform, identified by the Syrian Democratic Forces as the US Special Operations Forces, ride in the back of a pickup truck in the village of Fatisah in the northern Syrian province of Raqqa on May 25, 2016 (Photo: Getty Images / AFP / Delil Souleiman)
Instead, the USA, with the special help of the State of Israel, has been nurturing the creation of a Kurdish separatist state, “Rojava”, in northeastern Syria in just the same way that it created a separatist Kurdish state in Northern Iraq. Neither the USA nor Israel gives a whit for the national rights of the Kurdish people and even less for the Arabs and ethnic minorities who are ethnically-cleansed by Kurdish paramilitaries as they advance under US protection in eastern Syria.
The reason, then, for the US attack on Syrian forces last week near al-Tanf was to deny access by the legitimate government of Syria to the eastern part of its sovereign territory and to prevent it from securing its borders with Iraq and Jordan.
Furthermore, the recent attendance by US President Trump at a meeting of US client states hosted in Riyadh by the king of Saudi Arabia indicates that the USA is intending further to ratchet up tensions in the Middle East. First, Trump authorized enormous new arms sales to Saudi Arabia and then further widened the Sunni-Shia divide in the Middle East by aiming the hostility of the Riyadh “summit” at countries where Shia Islam is a political force, such as Iran, Lebanon and Yemen.
The Syria Solidarity Movement considers these US and Coalition foreign policies to be reckless and belligerent. They could easily lead to a wider regional war or even a third world war.
The SSM calls on the people of all countries of the world to make their voices for peace heard by their government officials and in social media, calling for a political, rather than a military, solution to the crisis in Syria under the existing and on-going auspices of the United Nations. We urge the people of the countries belonging to the US-led Coalition to demand their governments bring home all their troops and military equipment from Syria and to stop aiding and abetting the terrorist proxy armies of Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Furthermore, these government should be encouraged to end their illegal economic sanctions against Syria (which punish ordinary civilians), re-establish normal diplomatic relations with Damascus, contribute to the reconstruction of the devastated civilian infrastructure of Syria, and help repatriate Syrian refugees and internally-displaced persons to their proper homes.
Top Russian officials are concerned that a bill passed by the US Congress will do more than increase sanctions on North Korea. Moscow claims H.R. 1644 violates its sovereignty and constitutes an “act of war.”
On May 4, 2017, House Resolution 1644, the innocently named “Korean Interdiction and Modernization of Sanctions Act,” was quickly passed by the US House of Representatives by a vote of 419-1 – and it was just as quickly labeled an “act of war” by a top Russian official.
Why was Konstantin Kosachev, chair of the Russian Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee, so alarmed about a US law ostensibly aimed at North Korea? After all, there had been no blistering partisan debate preceding the vote. Instead, the bill was handled under a “suspension of the rules” procedure usually applied to noncontroversial legislation. And it passed with only one dissenting vote (cast by Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky).
Konstantin Kosachev (Source: globalzero.org)
So what did H.R. 1644 call for? If enacted, the bill would amend the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016 to increase the president’s powers to impose sanctions on anyone in violation of certain United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding North Korea. Specifically, it would allow for expanding sanctions to punish North Korea for its nuclear weapons programs by: targeting overseas individuals who employ North Korean “slave labor”; requiring the administration to determine whether North Korea was a state sponsor of terrorism and, most critically; authorizing a crackdown on North Korea’s use of international transit ports.
H.R. 1644 Targets Foreign Ports and Air Terminals
What caught the eye of Russian critics was Section 104, the part of the bill that presumed to grant the US “inspection authorities” over shipping ports (and major airports) far beyond the Korean Peninsula – specifically, ports in China, Russia, Syria, and Iran. The bill identifies more than 20 foreign targets, including: two ports in China (Dandong and Dalian and “any other port in the People’s Republic of China that the President deems appropriate”); ten ports in Iran (Abadan, Bandar-e-Abbas, Chabahar, Bandar-e-Khomeini, Bushehr Port, Asaluyeh Port, Kish, Kharg Island, Bandar-e-Lenge, Khorramshahr, and the Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport); four facilities in Syria (the ports at Latakia, Banias, Tartous and the Damascus International Airport) and; three ports in Russia (Nakhodka, Vanino, and Vladivostok). Under the proposed law, the US Secretary of Homeland Security could use the National Targeting Center’s Automated Targeting System to search any ship, plane, or conveyance that has “entered the territory, waters, or airspace of North Korea, or landed in any of the sea ports or airports of North Korea.” Any vessel, aircraft, or vehicle found in violation of this US law would be subject to “seizure and forfeiture.”
House Bill Raises a Red Flag for Russia
“I hope [this bill] will never be implemented,” Kosachev told Sputnik News, “because its implementation envisions a scenario of power with forced inspections of all vessels by US warships. Such a power scenario is beyond comprehension, because it means a declaration of war.”
Russian officials were understandably outraged by Congress’ imperious move to extend the US military’s authority to include surveillance of sovereign ports in the Russian Far East. Russia’s Upper House heatedly noted that such actions constitute a violation of international law that was tantamount to a declaration of war.
“No country in the world, and no international organization, has authorized the US to monitor implementation of any resolutions of the UN Security Council,” Kosachev observed.
He accused Washington of attempting to “affirm the supremacy of its own legislation over international law,” an example of US “exceptionalism” that he claimed constitutes “the main problem of present-day international relations.”
Kosachev’s Upper House colleague,Alexey Pushkov, underscored this concern.
“It is absolutely unclear how the bill will be implemented,” Pushkov stated. “To control Russian ports, the US will have to introduce a blockade and inspect all ships, which amounts to an act of war.” Pushkov argued that the lopsided 419-1 vote “indicates the nature of the legal and political culture of the US Congress.”
Russia Challenges US Exceptionalism
Russia now fears that the US Senate maybe similarly inclined. According to Sputnik News, the surveillance-and-interdiction amendment is “due to be approved by the Senate and then signed by US president Donald Trump.”
Andrei Krasov, the First Deputy Head of the Defense Committee in Russia’s Lower House, greeted news of the US move with a mixture of disbelief and indignation:
“Why on Earth did America assume the responsibilities? Who gave it such powers to control the seaports of our country? Neither Russia nor international organizations asked Washington to do so. One can only answer that any unfriendly step by the US administration against Russia and our allies will receive a symmetrical adequate response. In any case, no American ship will enter our waters. Our armed forces and our fleet have every means to severely punish those who will dare to enter our territorial waters.”
Krasov suggested that Washington’s “saber-rattling” was another sign that the US has no interest in accommodating other members of the world community – especially rivals like China and Russia.
“These are heavyweights which, in principle, do not fit into the US’s overall concept on governing and ruling the whole world.”
Vladivostok, Russia. (Source: Britannica.com)
Vladimir Baranov, a Russian ferry line operator whose vessels ply the waters between Vladivostok and the North Korean port city of Rajin, told Sputnik News that
“the US physically cannot control Russian ports – you have to visit the Port Authority, demand documents, that sort of thing . . . . This is essentially a bluff by the US, an attempt to show that it controls the world.”
Alexander Latkin, a professor from the Vladivostok State University of Economics and Service, was similarly skeptical:
“How could the US control our ports operations? It might have been possible if the US possessed a percentage of the port’s equity but, as far as I know, all of the shareholders are Russian. It is essentially a political move by the US. The Americans don’t have any legal or economic basis for controlling our ports.”
Maxim Grigoryev, who heads Russia’s Foundation for the Study of Democracy, told Sputnik Radio that he found the proposed legislation “rather funny,” given that it fails to provide any details on what a US inspection intervention might entail nor does it provide any guidelines for conducting Pentagon inspections of internationally flagged foreign vessels and foreign port facilities.
“What happened is that the US judicial authority has empowered its executive counterpart to present a report on this matter, which includes telling whether the sanctions against North Korea are being violated via Russian, Korean, and Syrian ports,” Grigoryev stated. “The US doesn’t mind that it basically dictates that other countries must adhere to US legislation. Clearly, this is a preparation for some sort of statement to be made against Russia, Syria or China. The measure is unlikely to be related to real politics – because the US doesn’t have any jurisdiction over other countries – but this is an obvious foundation for some propaganda campaign.”
Adding to the growing uncertainty over rising US/Russia tensions, top Russian military officials have expressed alarm over signs that the Pentagon is making preparations for a preemptive nuclear strike on Russia.
Rising Concerns of a Nuclear Attack
Lt. Gen. Victor Poznihir (Source: gazeta.ru)
On March 28, 2017, Lt. Gen. Victor Poznihir, Deputy Chief of the Main Operations Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces, warned that the placement of US anti-ballistic missiles near Russia’s borders “creates a powerful clandestine potential for delivering a surprise nuclear missile strike against Russia.” He repeated this concern again on April 26, when he alerted the Moscow International Security Conference that the Russian General Staff’s Operations Command is convinced Washington is preparing to exercise the “nuclear option.”
This terrifying news went virtually unnoted by the US media. On May 11, columnist Paul Craig Roberts (a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan and former associate editor of The Wall Street Journal) cited Poznihir’s comments in a clearly agitated blog post.
According to Roberts, a Google search revealed that this “most alarming of all announcements” had only been reported in a single US publication – the Times-Gazette of Ashland, Ohio. There were, Roberts reported,
“no reports on US TV, and none on Canadian, Australian, European, or any other media except RT [a Russian news agency] and Internet sites.”
Roberts also was alarmed to discover that no “US senator or representative or any European, Canadian, or Australian politician has raised a voice of concern that the West was now preparing for a first strike on Russia” nor, it appeared, had anyone reached out to “ask Putin how this serious situation could be defused.”
(Roberts has previously written that Beijing’s leaders also fear the US has detailed plans for a nuclear for strike on China. In response, China has pointedly reminded the US that its submarine fleet stands ready to destroy America’s West Coast while it’s ICBMs go to work obliterating the rest of the country.)
“Never in my life have I experienced the situation where two nuclear powers were convinced that the third was going to surprise them with a nuclear attack,” Roberts wrote.
Despite this existential threat, Roberts notes, there has been “zero awareness and no discussion” of the growing risks.
“Putin has been issuing warnings for years,” Roberts writes. “Putin has said over and over, ‘I issue warnings and no one hears. How do I get through to you?’”
The US Senate now has a critical role to play. The bill is currently before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The committee has an opportunity to acknowledge the grave existential risks created by H.R. 1644 and make sure that no companion bill ever makes it to the Senate floor. If this precipitously ill-conceived legislation is allowed to survive, our own survival – and the survival of hundreds of millions of others around the world – cannot be guaranteed.
Gar Smith is a veteran of the Free Speech Movement, an anti-war organizer, a Project Censored Award-winning reporter, Editor Emeritus of Earth Island Journal, co-founder of Environmentalists Against War, a member of the board of World Beyond War, author of Nuclear Roulette and editor of the forthcoming book, The War and Environment Reader.
The US-led coalition is desperately trying to prevent the Syrian government from restoring control over its borders with Syria and Iraq. Since Friday, US-backed militant groups, also known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), have repeatedly attacked the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies near the Zaza area, the Zuluf Reserve and the Scientific Research Battalion area. However, government forces repelled attack, killing unknown number of militants and destroying at least 4 vehicles belonged to the US-backed groups.
According to pro-government sources and available photos, the so-called opposition actively uses Switchblade suicide drones against government troops in the area. This means that the US Special Forces are involved in a standoff with the SAA.
Following a failed attempt to drive government forces out from the Damascus-Baghdad highway, US-led coalition aircraft dropped leaflets warning the SAA from moving towards the border town of al-Tanf and arguing that government forces have to withdraw from the Zaza area. Thus, the US-led force deployed in the area once again confirmed that its real goals have little with combating ISIS terrorists.
On Saturday, SAA deployed the 800th Battalion of the Republican Guards in the eastern Zuluf reserve area. The battalion 800 is among the best-equipped units of the SAA. Its deployment in the area shows that the Syrian military is not going to abandon its attempts to restore control over the border area. Meanwhile, government forces also took full control over the village of Alyania and the nearby area.
While the US-led coalition was opposing the Damascus government, the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) liberated the town of Al-Qahtaniya. The goal of the PMU advance is the ISIS stronghold of Al-Ba’aj, 36km from the border with Syria. Some experts believe that the expansion of the PMU influence over the Syrian-Iraqi border will contribute to the Damascus government seeking to drive out US-backed militants from the area.
In the province of Aleppo, the SAA Tiger Forces have liberated Ras al-Ain al-Ahmar, the sugar factory, the train station and other points near the town of Maskana, the last ISIS defense site in the province. Warplanes of the Russian and Syrian air forces targeted ISIS units and their vehicles inside the town of Maskana, and in the villages of Al-Taybeh and Al-Hamidiya. Local sources indicate that ISIS may withdraw from Maskana under a threat of a full encirclement by the SAA. However, if ISIS terrorists decide to defend the town, the SAA may just outflank it and continue advancing towards the province of Raqqah via the N4 highway.
Warplanes of the Russian and Syrian air forces targeted ISIS units and their vehicles inside the town of Maskana, and in the villages of Al-Taybeh and Al-Hamidiya. ISIS destroyed a SAA battle tank with an ATGM.
The SAA has repelled several ISIS attempts to infiltrate in the Tal Brok area and destroyed a vehicle and killed a number of ISIS militants during the clashes in the Al-Makabir area in Deir Ezzor. The situation in the besieged city remains tense. If the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) allow ISIS to freely withdraw from Raqqa, the SAA in Deir Ezzor may face a critical threat to their safety because the ISIS storming group will receive large reinforcements.
Last weekend, reports appeared in the Russian media that the SDF may allow ISIS to withdraw from Raqqah under another deal with the terrorists group. The SDF denied the allegations. However, the group’s deals with ISIS in Manbij and Tabqa don’t allow to believe that the US-backed force is not considering this option.
Nearly five years ago, Ecuador granted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange political asylum at its London embassy. The original purpose of the asylum was to avoid extradition to the United States. Two years earlier, Swedish authorities had launched an investigation of Assange for sexual assault. Sweden has now dropped that investigation.
Assange called the Swedish decision to end the investigation an “important victory for me and for the U.N. human rights system.” But, he said, the “proper war was just commencing,” because the London Metropolitan Police warned if Assange leaves the Ecuadorian Embassy, they would arrest him on a 2012 warrant issued after he failed to appear at a magistrate’s court following his entry into the embassy.
The original reason for granting asylum to Assange remains intact. The U.S. government has been gunning for Assange since 2010, when WikiLeaks published documents leaked by whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Those documents, which included the Afghan and Iraq war logs and U.S. State Department cables, were ultimately published in the New York Times, the U.K. Guardian, and the German magazine Der Spiegel.
The leaked reports exposed 20,000 deaths, including thousands of children, according to Assange. Many of them contain evidence of war crimes. [Among the leaked material was the “Collateral Murder” video, a gruesome view from the gun-barrel of a U.S. helicopter gunship as it mowed down a group of Iraqi men, including two Reuters journalists, as they walked on a Baghdad street – and then killing a man who stopped to help the wounded and also wounding two children in his van.]
It was never clear what role Sweden played in the Assange saga. Criminal charges were never filed there and Swedish authorities never took Assange up on his offer to make himself available for interviews with Swedish authorities in London. The Swedish prosecutor insisted that he travel to Sweden to be interviewed. Assange declined, fearing that if he went to Sweden, that country would extradite him to the United States.
The Swedish investigation of Assange may have been instigated at the behest of the United States. Journalist John Pilgerdocumented political pressure by the U.S. government on Swedish authorities:
“Both the Swedish prime minister and foreign minister attacked Assange, who had been charged with no crime. Assange was warned that the Swedish intelligence service, SAPO, had been told by its U.S. counterparts that U.S.-Sweden intelligence-sharing arrangements would be ‘cut off’ if Sweden sheltered him.”
Although the Swedish investigation has now been dropped, the threat of arrest persists. The London police have indicated they will arrest Assange for failure to appear in a London Magistrates Court if he leaves the embassy. Britain would then likely extradite Assange to the United States for possible prosecution.
Arresting Assange a U.S. ‘Priority’
Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared in April that arresting Assange is a “priority” for the Department of Justice, even though the New York Times indicated that federal prosecutors are “skeptical that they could pursue the most serious charges, of espionage.” The Justice Department is reportedly considering charging Assange with theft of government documents.
A decision to prosecute Assange would mark a 180-degree change of direction for President Trump. During the 2016 presidential campaign Trump declared, “I love WikiLeaks” after it published confidential emails from the Democratic National Committee that some U.S. intelligence agencies claim were obtained by Russian hackers (although Assange denies getting the material from Russia).
Attorney General Jeff Sessions. (Flickr U.S. Customs and Border Protection)
In March, WikiLeaks published CIA documents containing software and methods to hack into electronics. This was the beginning of WikiLeaks’ “Vault 7” series, which, Assange wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post, contained “evidence of remarkable CIA incompetence and other shortcomings.”
The publication included “the agency’s creation, at a cost of billions of taxpayer dollars, of an entire arsenal of cyber viruses and hacking programs – over which it promptly lost control and then tried to cover up the loss,” Assange added. “These publications also revealed the CIA’s efforts to infect the public’s ubiquitous consumer products and automobiles with computer viruses.”
CIA Director Michael Pompeo called WikiLeaks
“a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”
Pompeo said,
“We have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.” Pompeo declared, “Julian Assange has no First Amendment privileges. He is not a U.S. citizen.”
But, the Supreme Court has long held that the Constitution applies to non-Americans, not just U.S. citizens. And, when the Obama Justice Department considered prosecuting WikiLeaks, U.S. officials were unable to distinguish what Wikileaks did from what the Times and Guardian did since they also published documents that Manning leaked. WikiLeaks is not suspected of hacking or stealing them.
A week before Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, Comey told the House Intelligence Committee, “WikiLeaks is an important focus of our attention.” He said the Justice Department’s position “has been [that] newsgathering and legitimate news reporting is not covered, is not going to be investigated or prosecuted as a criminal act,” adding, “Our focus is and should be on the leakers, not those [who] are obtaining it as part of legitimate newsgathering.”
But Comey said,
“a huge portion of WikiLeaks’ activities has nothing to do with legitimate news gathering, informing the public, commenting on important controversies, but is simply about releasing classified information to damage the United States of America.”
As Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, wrote at Just Security, Comey was drawing the line
“not between leaking classified information and publishing it, but between publishing it for ‘good’ reasons and publishing it for ‘bad’ ones.”
And, “[a]llowing the FBI to determine who is allowed to publish leaked information based on the bureau’s assessment of their patriotism would cross a constitutional Rubicon,” Goitein wrote.
Other advocates for civil liberties also defended WikiLeaks as a news organization protected by the First Amendment.
“The U.S. government has never shown that Assange did anything but publish leaked information,” Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, told the Times.
Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, stated in an interview with the Times,
“Never in the history of this country has a publisher been prosecuted for presenting truthful information to the public.”
Assange’s Detention Called Unlawful
In 2016, following a 16-month investigation, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Assange’s detention by Britain and Sweden was unlawful. It stated,
“[A] deprivation of liberty exists where someone is forced to choose between either confinement, or forfeiting a fundamental right – such as asylum – and thereby facing a well-founded risk of persecution.”
The U.N. group found,
“Mr. Assange’s exit from the Ecuadorian Embassy would require him to renounce his right to asylum and expose himself to the very persecution and risk of physical and mental mistreatment that his grant of asylum was intended to address. His continued presence in the Embassy cannot, therefore, be characterized as ‘volitional’.”
Thus, the U.N. group concluded that Assange’s continued stay in the embassy “has become a state of an arbitrary deprivation of liberty,” in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
Alfred de Zayas (Source: Alfred de Zayas’ Human Rights Corner)
Alfred de Zayas, U.N. Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order, told Consortiumnews,
“What is at stake here is freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds.”
He cited Article 19 of the ICCPR, which guarantees the right to freedom of expression.
“Whistleblowers are key human rights defenders in the Twenty-first Century, in which a culture of secrecy, behind-closed-door deals, disinformation, lack of access to information, 1984-like surveillance of individuals, intimidation and self-censorship lead to gross violations of human rights,” said de Zayas, who is also a retired senior lawyer with the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and former Secretary for the UN Human Rights Committee.
Moreover, the Johannesburg Principles of National Security, Freedom of Expression and Access to Information, issued in 1996, provide,
“No person may be punished on national security grounds for disclosure of information if the public interest in knowing the information outweighs the harm from the disclosure.”
Even some mainstream news organizations that have been critical of WikiLeaks for releasing classified U.S. information have objected to the idea of criminal prosecution. A Washington Post editorial in 2010 entitled “Don’t Charge Wikileaks” said:
“Such prosecutions are a bad idea. The government has no business indicting someone who is not a spy and who is not legally bound to keep its secrets. Doing so would criminalize the exchange of information and put at risk responsible media organizations that vet and verify material and take seriously the protection of sources and methods when lives or national security are endangered.”
In the U.S. government’s continued legal pursuit of WikiLeaks, there is much more at stake than what happens to Julian Assange. There are principles of press freedoms and the public’s right to know. By publishing documents revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes, emails relevant to the U.S. presidential election and proof of CIA malfeasance, Assange did what journalists are supposed to do – inform the people about newsworthy topics and reveal abuses that powerful forces want concealed.
Assange also has the right to freedom of expression under both U.S. and international law, which would further argue for Great Britain dropping the failure-to-appear warrant and allowing Assange to freely leave the embassy and to finally resume his life.
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. Visit her website at http://marjoriecohn.com/ and follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/marjoriecohn.
President Donald Trump has concluded his eight-day trip to four countries that started in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Italy and ended in Belgium attending the NATO and G7 Summits. In this first set of trips as President of the United States, aside from fueling roadmaps towards global militarization and hegemonization, what else did he get from his ‘diplomatic’ getaway?
It was time to do the Zionist boogie within a mere period of 27 hours, and anyone wishing to see two muggers of history enjoying each other’s company found themselves peering at Donald Trump of the United States, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, nearly arm in arm on the recent tilt in US policy. “We understand each other,” effused the Israeli leader, “and so much of the things that we wish to accomplish for both our countries.” (Dr. Binoy Kampmark)
From his big white bird did the President descend upon his dreading European hosts, looking much like natives waiting to be slaughtered or ravished. As Donald Trump pushed his way through NATO members (the Montenegrin prime minister, for one, felt his forceful shove), representatives shot glances of discomfort and bemusement. In a refreshing blast of brutishness, the Ugly American, made flesh in the incarnation of Trump, was explaining, even hectoring Washington’s allies.
From Trump’s words and gestures in Israel it is obvious that he is working towards a solution that will see Palestinians subsisting in Bantustans with the whole of Jerusalem firmly in Israel’s control, reinforced by settler communities in the West Bank exercising jurisdiction over its water resources. Palestinian agents of Israel and the US will be enticed into accepting this arrangement which in turn will be endorsed by a number of other Arab and Muslim governments keen on pleasing Washington for their own interests.
Beleaguered by ongoing accusations of being a Kremlin agent, protests, and calls for his impeachment, President Trump has finally seen fit to embark on a multi-state visit abroad.
Sadly, President Trump’s visit to the Middle East only confirmed my skepticism about what might come out of it. Trump went to the region with nothing to offer to mitigate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and received no commitment from either Israeli or Palestinian leaders to resume the peace negotiations in earnest, but he received lots of platitudes and empty good-will gestures.
Any Trump promise comes with hazards, the most notable of which is flipping rapid change. It soon became clear, even within the short time the president was going to spend in Israel, that dangerous, even scandalous excitement was looming.
Saudi Arabia, Israel and America’s regional presence constitute the epicenter of regional and global state terrorism – supporting its scourge, not combating it.
Most remarkably, the U.S. Government has for decades winked at the billions of support given by Saudi members of the royal family to Wahhabism, that is, to promote fundamentalist Islam, throughout the Muslim world. The first words uttered by Trump on his arrival in Riyadh were that it is ‘an honor’ to be visiting.
The summit between the United States and the Gulf countries was nothing but a meeting of courtesy, a presentation, a ceremony. The (alleged) US-Arab-Islamic summit, bringing together 55 or 56 countries, was but a standing ovation to President Trump, and it was not a summit or conference. There were no preparatory committees, no material distributed to participants, no preliminary meeting of foreign ministries or ministries of defense…, neither draft declaration, nor debate, nor negotiations, nor exchanges, nor nothing all.
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Truth in media is a powerful instrument.
Global Research is a small team that believes in the power of information and analysis to bring about far-reaching societal change including a world without war.
Watch blockbuster movies from the “south” and chances are you will start to believe that the world is not really such a desperate place. Perhaps you might even get convinced that under the present imperialist and turbo-capitalist global arrangement things can always get better. If you live in a gutter somewhere in Sub-Continent or Africa, you could simply try hard, you could”believe in yourself and love yourself”, you could “listen to your instincts”, and everything may eventually fall into the right places. You could get acknowledged, rewarded and even catapulted from your misery into some plush pastures that are covering the tall green hills of success. Think twice! Or… don’t think at all -just bury your head in the sand.
There were always books written and films produced just in order to please the Western funding agencies and propaganda machine. I described the process, colorfully, in my recent political/revolutionary novel “Aurora”.
Just think about Kite Runner written by an Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini, or about all those bestsellers by Salman Rushdie or Elif Shafak, books about India or Turkey, but intended almost exclusively for a Western audience, and often despised in their native countries.
The works of Rushdie and Shafak can at least qualify as “literature”. But now both the Western markets and mainstream media are demanding more and more of ‘feel good’ rubbish books and movies from poor countries, more and more of those simple, picturesque and ‘positive’ stories that are actually confusing and give false hopes to the local population of many poor countries.
Do you still remember Slumdog Millionaire? How realistic a scenario was that? First of all, it was not even an Indian film; it was a 2008 British movie, directed by Danny Boyle, who also had directed Trainspotting. It took place in the Juhu slum of Mumbai.
In 2011, I filmed in the same Mumbai slum where the movie was produced. I asked many, how likely was such a ‘success scenario’ in that filthy and hopeless neighborhood? The dwellers of the Juhu slum just dismissed the entire charade with derogatory gestures; why even waste precious words?
Now more films are coming – more and more… and more! Feel good; feel very good about the world! Drop a few tears as you are departing from the cinema. Utter under your breath: “Everything is possible.” Collaborate with the establishment. Forget about the revolution, think ‘positively’ (the way the system wants you to think) and above all, think about yourself!
A film about a real Ugandan chess player Phiona Mutesi, created by the Indian director Mira Nair (Fire, Water among her other work), Queen of Katwe, is a tour-de-force of true individualism. And again, if you think you are actually watching a Ugandan or even Indian film, you are squarely wrong: it is supposed to feel like an African one, but it is a US movie, produced by Walt Disney Pictures. And it is actually intended and even proudly promoted as a “feel good movie“.
The plot is simple and predictable: a little girl grows up in total misery, in one of the toughest slums of Africa –Katwe, at the outskirts of Kampala. Her father has already died of AIDS, her mother is unable to pay the rent, and her older sister is barely surviving as a prostitute. Phiona, just 10-years old, is forced to drop from school.
Her life is approaching total collapse. But then, suddenly, a miracle! Hallelujah!
Phiona enrolls in a state-sponsored chess program. She is talented. She climbs and climbs, soon travelling to Sudan by a plane, and few months later, even to Russia.
It is supposed to be a ‘true story’. And yes, there was a poor girl, growing up in a Ugandan slum. She was talented although she never reached the zenith, and never won any gold medal. In the film, she wins tournaments, makes loads of cash, and buys a villa(looking like a palace), for her family.
Is this what young poorgirls watching the film in the Katwe slum should be aiming at? Would such a dream be realistic, or is this an absolute mirage?
I also filmed in Katwe, for my damning documentary Rwanda Gambit. And when I was a young kid, I could pass for a talented chess player, taking part in several tournaments and competitions. Somehow, the film – Queen of Katwe – did not make any sense. To become chess champion takes much more than some luck and zeal. Like a concert pianist, a chess player has to spend years and years of hard training, literally killing himself or herself, to play at a certain level.
When I was a kid, my father, a scientist, was obsessed with turning me into a champ. Frankly, I was not too interested, although I worked hard, for years. I won a few medals, but never went further. Could Phiona, hungry, almost without a roof over her head, become a grand master, just after few months of unhurried coaching?
I wish she could. But I doubt it, knowing Uganda, knowing its slums, fully realizing how merciless their reality really is, and of course, knowing chess.
Who benefits from such films? Definitely not the poorest of the poor, and definitely not Indians or Africans!
It appears that the only beneficiaries are those people who are trying to uphold the status quo, in the West and in the colonies. They don’t want people to realize: that there is almost no hope left, and only some radical change, a revolution, can reverse and improve things in their plundered countries.
A revolution is a ‘communal’ event. It is never about one person suddenly advancing, or getting ‘rescued’ or ‘saved’. It is not about one person or one family ‘making it’. It is about an entire nation fighting for its rights, for progress, and it is about social justice for all.
Little ‘success stories’ actually divide communities, offering false hopes.
Phiona’s story coming from pro-Western, turbo-capitalist Uganda, has nothing in common with the great communal projects in Venezuelan slums: like the classical Youth Orchestras, or cable cars, childcare centers, public libraries, community learning centers, and free medical posts.
No matter how ‘lovely’ is Mira Nair’s cinematography, winning the lottery, or getting lucky here and there, is not going to change the entire country. That is exactly why those small individualist acts and triumphs are being celebrated and glorified in the centers of Western imperialism. There, no real change is ever welcomed, whether it takes place at home or in the colonies. On the other hand, all selfish little victories are treated as sacred. One should live for himself or herself, disregarding the context.
How many other deeply‘positive-thinking’/ unrealistic/ ‘feel-good’/ ‘false-hope’ films have I seen, lately? Many. For instance Lion, a 2016 Australian/UK co-production, about a poor Indian boy who jumps on a train, loses his hometown, and eventually gets adopted by a loving and dedicated Australian family.
It looks like a downpour, an avalanche of similar films and books and news stories. It looks like some kind of new wave of ‘positive thinking’, or ‘there is nothing really too wrong with our world that couldn’t be fixed by some personal luck and individualism’ dogma. Most of the stuff is somehow connected to the epicenter of Western ideological indoctrination – the United Kingdom (a country, which is successfully nullifying all revolutionary zeal of its own citizens, of the immigrants arriving from desperate and colonized countries, and even those people who live in despair in various far away places).
The West is busy manufacturing ‘pseudo reality’. And in this grotesque pseudo-reality, several deprived individuals like starving chess players, street vendors and slum dwellers are suddenly becoming rich, successful and fulfilled. Millions of others, all around them, continue to suffer. But somehow, they don’t seem to matter much.
There is a new celebrity group in making – let’s call them the ‘glamorous poor’.Those ‘exceptional individuals’, the glamorous poor, are easy to digest, and even to celebrate in the West. They are swiftly and cheerfully integrating into the ‘mainstream’club of the global ‘go getters’ and narcissist rich.
[First published by NEO]
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.
While this book is not authored by a U.S. educated citizen, its arguments tend to have some of the same problems as the natural born authors have in arguing the case for a continued U.S. presence in world affairs. Rachman presents a reasonable effort in presenting his case for Easternization and this would be a good beginning work for those entering into discussions of global affairs.
Rachman’s perspective is broad, his writing engaging with many personal anecdotes. Considered with the many other writers on U.S. foreign affairs, he is not quite capable of connecting all the dots, even though his ‘dots’ cover a strong range of issues.
The largest factor – not surprising for an author writing for major financial publishers – is the economic factor, and it also an unfortunate over riding miss. The miss is narrow, but still not on target, the target being the military-industrial -financial complex. The components are discussed separately, with frequent connections, but the underlying base to U.S. supremacy in the world is not revealed accurately.
Rachman (image on the right, source: CSIS) begins the work honestly, saying he has “a largely positive view of the role of American power in the world” with the West providing “a pole of stability and power imposing order on a chaotic world.” He sees a multi polar world that needs “a dominant power in the background” to “enforce…the rule of law.” Fair enough – so far. But very quickly Rachman undermines what could have been a much stronger thesis when words about imposing power, a chaotic world, and dominant power imply something more severe than economic control.
It starts with a comment that
“At the beginning of the 1400s, China and the Islamic world were at levels of economic and political power and sophistication that were at least equivalent to those attained in Europe.”
I find that a highly arguable proposition as Europe had just suffered through the Black Death, the culmination of centuries of medieval feudal warfare and ignorance. It was during the Renaissance of the 1400s when Europe strengthened on the knowledge base offered by China and the Arabic nations of the day.
The next steps historically are the voyages of “discovery” and “exploration” by the European empires striving for resources, markets, and wealth. Except that the rest of the world more or less knew where it was, and the doctrine of “discovery” as elucidated by the Christian church was one of civilizing the savage beasts, or eliminating them if they got in the way. A reading of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs,and Steel indicates that European dominance started and continued with its superiority in the application of military violence in order to harvest the wealth of the world. It also was and is supported by the same doctrine of discovery with its attitudes towards people of ‘colour’. In other words, military first, economic power later.
In Easternization, Rachman posits the opposite sequence, he says after his brief overview of history,
“These centuries of European and American dominance were based on economic might….It is economic might that allows nations to generate the military, diplomatic, and technological resources that translate into international political power.”
Yes, he accepts U.S.military might, but only as it follows from economic power. Through his own arguments the military is always there, Thomas Friedman’s “hidden fist” that allows for the economic and political dominance to continue.
His argument is also contradictory as many of his points discuss the military imposition of power – on China after the Opium Wars (opium is definitely an economic factor) and the “opening” up of Japan after Perry’s gunboat diplomacy. Currently, America relies “on military force as the basis of its foreign policy in the Pacific.” While discussing Singapore, Rachman notes that the original Muslim kingdom “was overthrown by a Portuguese invasion.”
The line about economic power is reiterated in slightly different forms throughout the book. But it is always backed up by military power as per Friedman. That is the real miss that colours the interpretation of Easternization.
The second miss is being able to connect all the dots. Rachman starts off commenting about a “chaotic” world, and continues on through to the current “dark, violent, and anarchic” situation in the Middle East. He provides an interesting discussion of the “institutions” that control the world economic order, the Bretton Woods arrangements of the IMF, World Bank, et al. That latter of course is a focal point of the “rule of law”, but that in sequence does not discuss the current “rule of law” being highly arbitrary as applied by the U.S. using its military to back it up in its own interpretation or denial of international law, or being highly restrictive in favour of corporations when it comes to corporate trade laws under the rubric of supposed “free” trade.
US president Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Another dot missed is Israel. It is discussed but not to the degree that shows its use of military force combined with the U.S. military to maintain its position in the Middle East, either domestically against the Palestinians or with the its neighbouring countries. Russia is also discussed disparagingly (and erroneously with respect to the language and ‘facts’ used to support the discussion), but not once are CIA/NATO/NSA/NGO intrigues mentioned in this or any other situation around the world.
A truly clear examination of historical and current events underscores the violent nature of European and U.S. imperial adventures around the world. The military continually imposes its might throughout the period of western economic domination, either directly with aggressive wars (including the U.S. civil war and Indian wars, the Boer War, WW I being essentially a war between European empires, and WWII being the final European imperial battle due to a failed peace process at Versailles), or indirectly through subversion, threats, coercion, and yes, the power of the US petrodollar as reserve currency.
Combine all those dots and near misses and a reader with a broader background would be able to see the real reason for the “chaotic” world and the “dark, violent, and anarchic” situation in the Middle East. Within the current global structures, if the U.S. loses its reserve currency status, or simply becomes one among equals, the US petrodollar would be in danger of collapse.
The current support for Saudi Arabia is not about oil per se, but about oil being marketed using US$ as that is the only thing supporting the US$ at the moment. The enormous debts internally and externally cannot be paid off without some form of massive inflation – or collapse. It is not about terrorists (well, maybe now it is, but they were created/supported in order to help the U.S. contain or defeat its economic threats), nor is it about oil, it is all about attempting to maintain an economic position that after WW II was readily maintained through military force backing up centralized economic control.
It is not about human rights, democracy, or freedom – never has been. China, backed by Russia, is the greatest threat to the continuing role of the US$ as the dominant standard. Easternization presents some interesting details and anecdotes around this central idea, but it fails to connect the dots between military might first, this supporting economic dominance, then the duo used to try and impose U.S.hegemony around the world.
EFSA fails to provide evidence to support its decision to dismiss a key study showing glyphosate is carcinogenic.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has been accused of excluding from its glyphosate assessment a key study only because of a negative comment by a former US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) official.
The former US EPA official, Jess Rowland, is under investigation in a US court case brought by cancer sufferers, who believe that exposure to Roundup triggered their disease. Based on internal Monsanto documents disclosed in the lawsuit, Rowland is accused of colluding with Monsanto to defend glyphosate’s health record.
The accusation against EFSA was made by the toxicologist Dr Peter Clausing, representing Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Germany, at a scientific conference on glyphosate’s health risks, held in the EU Parliament on 10 May. The conference was hosted by the Czech Socialist MEP Pavel Poc.
Dr Clausing said that he had met the head of EFSA’s pesticides unit, Jose Tarazona, the previous week. They had discussed a key study (Kumar 2001) showing that glyphosate caused malignant lymphoma in mice. Dr Clausing said that Dr Tarazona was not able able to give any concrete reasons why the study was excluded from EFSA’s assessment, other than that a US EPA observer had said the US EPA had not accepted it due to viral infections in the animals.
According to a report in EU Food Policy,[1] EFSA and PAN agree that the US EPA observer was Jess Rowland, who made the remark about infections during a teleconference about glyphosate organised by EFSA in 2015.
However, EFSA told EU Food Policy that
“it and member states had already picked up on weaknesses with the study and that the majority of member states had agreed there was a high background of malignant lymphomas in the mice used for the study.”
The EU Food Policy article goes on to quote Dr Tarazona as saying that Rowland informed EFSA “about potential flaws in the Kumar study (2001) related to viral infections that could influence survival as well as tumour incidence”.
Dr Tarazona told EU Food Policy that EFSA didn’t just take Rowland’s word for it:
“After the teleconference, EFSA experts checked the Kumar (2001) study themselves and found additional indications that confirmed deficiencies in the health status of animals, which supported the plausibility of a viral infection.”
Dr Tarazona told EU Food Policy that Dr Clausing’s remarks “give rise to concerns about the integrity of EFSA’s glyphosate assessment”, but that this is “not borne out by the facts”.
Image on the right is Dr. Peter Clausing at Monsanto Tribunal (Source: GMWatch)
No evidence for alleged “viral infections”
So what were these “additional indications that confirmed deficiencies in the health status of animals, which supported the plausibility of a viral infection”?
EFSA has had plenty of chances to describe them.
First, in its “Conclusion on the peer review of the pesticide risk assessment of the active substance glyphosate”, published in 2015, EFSA declared the Kumar study as
“not acceptable due to viral infections that could influence survival as well as tumour incidence – especially lymphomas”.
And second, in a peer-reviewed paper of the same year explaining why EFSA had come to a different conclusion on glyphosate’s carcinogenicity from the World Health Organisation’s cancer agency IARC (which classed it as a probable carcinogen), Dr Tarazona and his co-authors from EFSA and Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) say that the Kumar study “was excluded due to a likely viral infection in the experimental population”.
But in neither document does EFSA give any supporting evidence for viral infections.
And in neither document does EFSA describe any “additional indications that confirmed deficiencies in the health status of animals, which supported the plausibility of a viral infection”, such as Tarazona claimed were present in the Kumar study.
In fact there is an irrefutable (by the EU authorities, at least) source that states that there is no evidence whatsoever that the animals in this experiment suffered from a viral infection or that their health was deficient as a result of such an infection. That source is none other than the CLH (harmonised classification and labelling) report on glyphosate, based on industry data and submitted by the German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA) to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA).
The CLH report states:
“During a teleconference (TC 117) on carcinogenicity of glyphosate hold [sic.] by EFSA… it was mentioned by an US EPA observer that the Kumar (2001, ASB2012-11491) study had been excluded from US EPA evaluation due to the occurrence of viral infection that could influence survival as well as tumour incidences, especially those of lymphomas. However, in the study report itself, there was no evidence of health deterioration due to suspected viral infection and, thus, the actual basis of EPA’s decision is not known” (p. 72).
Nevertheless, ECHA continued to use the narrative of a virus infection in spite of its admission that there was no evidence for such an infection. In its Opinion, ECHA cautions against “a possible role of oncogenic viruses” – which it apparently deemed as sufficient reason to exclude this important study from the overall assessment.
Unsurprisingly, having disposed of Kumar using an apparently evidence-free argument, ECHA followed EFSA in concluding that glyphosate is not carcinogenic.
Dr Tarazona’s identification of the “US EPA observer” as Jess Rowland raises questions about the influence on the EFSA glyphosate assessment exercised by this man – who allegedly boasted to a Monsanto executive that he deserved a medal if he could kill another agency’s investigation into the chemical’s health risks.
“Viral infection” claim first shows up in Monsanto-supported paper
It seems that Rowland himself did not come up with the narrative of the “viral infection”. It first appeared in a Monsanto- and Glyphosate Task Force-supported review, which concluded that glyphosate was non-carcinogenic. The review was co-authored by Monsanto employee David Saltmiras and published in the journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology, which has industry ties. However, even this review introduces the idea of a viral infection in tentative language, referring to a “possible viral infection” that “may have confounded interpretation of results”.
EFSA goes much further than this Monsanto-linked paper in its unqualified claim that the Kumar study was “not acceptable due to viral infections”.
Malignant lymphoma-prone mice?
But what about the other supposed weakness in the Kumar study, the “high background of malignant lymphomas in the mice used for the study” that EFSA mentioned to EU Food Policy?
That argument doesn’t stand up either, according to Dr Clausing. He told GMWatch that while a good number of control mice did get malignant lymphomas, the glyphosate-treated mice had a statistically significant increase in malignant lymphomas, in a clearly dose-dependent fashion. Moreover, this statistically significant increase in malignant lymphoma was well above the range of historical control data (the “background” incidence referred to by EFSA) – supporting the observation of a glyphosate-induced carcinogenicity.
Dr Clausing said that these were valid historical control data as measured by OECD standards. This was important because there are a number of examples where EFSA used invalid historical control data to dismiss significant findings of carcinogenicity.
GMWatch believes that for EFSA to claim that these increases were due to chance and not to glyphosate is to turn its back on the scientific method.
The study that had to be killed
Dr Clausing believes that the Kumar study, together with two other studies showing the same effect, presents difficult-to-refute evidence of glyphosate’s carcinogenicity. Its particular significance within EFSA’s assessment is that the reasons used by EFSA to dismiss other studies showing glyphosate is carcinogenic do not apply to the Kumar study and a second study by Wood et al. (2009). In both studies the increase in malignant lymphoma in glyphosate-treated animals was both dose-dependent and significant, at doses that could not be dismissed as only a “high-dose phenomenon”.
In reality the Kumar study is far from being an outlier. Before EFSA produced its assessment, the German authority BfR, under pressure from the IARC verdict, had demonstrated statistically significant increases in cancer in seven rodent carcinogenicity studies with glyphosate. But EFSA denied these results, using what Dr Clausing considers spurious arguments, and insisted that there was only one mouse study – Kumar – with statistical significance.
According to the European legislation, evidence for carcinogenicity in at least two separate studies is “sufficient evidence” to label a compound as carcinogenic (category 1B). That would mean an automatic ban. Thus in Dr Clausing’s view, the Kumar study “presented an obstacle” to EFSA’s apparent intention to declare glyphosate as non-carcinogenic: “That’s why the exclusion of this particular study from further consideration was so important.”
Dr Clausing is not the only authority to believe that the Kumar study was particularly problematic for those who wish to argue that glyphosate is non-carcinogenic. The BfR remarked in its assessment of glyphosate that this unpublished industry study “was apparently not available to IARC” – “otherwise, it would have been certainly used as the first place argument for carcinogenicity of glyphosate” (p. 9).
Flawed study included by EFSA
Dr Clausing argued in his presentation to the EU Parliament that the Kumar 2001 study should have been included by EFSA in its assessment and that a study by Atkinson (1993), which found no carcinogenic effect of glyphosate, should have been excluded. The latter study was invalid, he explained, because only animals with signs of malignant lymphoma that were visible to the naked eye were examined more closely – a recipe for missing numerous cases. This flawed study was used as additional “proof” that glyphosate did not cause malignant lymphoma.
If EFSA had included Kumar and excluded Atkinson, it would not have concluded that glyphosate was not carcinogenic, Dr Clausing told the meeting.
Did Rowlands mislead EFSA on glyphosate?
Court documents released on March 13th show that Monsanto colluded with the EPA to bury scientific evidence linking its glyphosate product (RoundUp) to cancer in humans (specifically, Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma). (Source: Natural News)
In light of Jess Rowland’s role in the assessment of carcinogenicity of glyphosate in the US as reflected by the internal Monsanto documents, there are serious concerns that he might have influenced the decision by providing wrong information. Yet EFSA is not an innocent victim in this case. It apparently failed to properly scrutinize Rowland’s claim.
To summarize, the only publicly available explanation for EFSA’s dismissal of the Kumar study due to a viral infection is Rowland’s claim – yet there is no factual evidence whatsoever to back up the claim. Dr Clausing said he has examined the publicly available documents as well as the raw data of the Kumar study, which was made available to him by EFSA. He said,
“Scrutinizing all these documents did not provide any other evidence than the Rowland intervention. As a result, I have doubts about the integrity of EFSA’s assessment of glyphosate. Those doubts have been sown by EFSA itself.”
Note
1. EU Food Policy. EFSA refutes claims it was improperly influenced on glyphosate. 15 May 2017. Subscription only (eufoodpolicy.com); no direct link.
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