Global Research

Syrian Foreign and Expatriates Ministry dismissed the latest Trmup administration accusations about a crematory at Sednaya prison, which is allegedly being used to cover-up mass executions, saying the US administration is trying to amuse the public with yet another Hollywood-like story.

The ministry then compared the latest US provocation to their previous barrel bombs and chemical weapons publicity stunts.

The accusations come in time of the Syrian Army’s huge victories against terrorist groups, many of which are backed by Washington.

The Trump administration never managed to provide any credible proof that authorities in Syria are running a crematory at Sednaya prison.

Syrian government also responded to the recent killings of Syrian civilians by the US-led anti-ISIS coalition’s airstrikes in the countrysides of Raqqah and Deir Ez Zour provinces.

Earlier on Tuesday, Syrian Foreign and Expatriates Ministry addressed the Secretary  General of the United Nations and the President of the UN Security Council, on yesterday’s slaughters of nearly 100 Syrian civilians, resulting from coalition air strikes.

In a statement, included within letters, sent to the aforementioned UN bodies, the ministry said that Syria condemns, in strongest terms, latest aggression made by the US-led anti ISIS coalition, which resulted in deaths of nearly 100 Syrian civilians.

The ministry also pointed out that the international coalition made illegal incursions into Syrian airspace and violated territorial integrity of a sovereign country, adding that Syria once again demands the UNSC to pressure the coalition forces to immediately cease all acts of aggression and violations of international law, UN Charter including, and not ignore its demands as it did before.

Yesterday, US-led anti-ISIS international coalition carried out two air raids in the sovereign Syrian territory: one in the village of Aakerchi and another one in the town of Abu Kamal, located in the countryside of the eastern province of Deir Ez Zour.

Both raids resulted in deaths of approx.100 civilians, majority of them being women and children.

“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” ― James Madison

Who designed the malware worm that is now wreaking havoc on tens of thousands of computers internationally by hackers demanding a king’s ransom? The U.S. government.

Who is the biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The U.S. government.

What country has one of the deadliest arsenals of weapons of mass destruction? The U.S. government.

Who is the largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such that they are literally arming the world? The U.S. government.

Which is the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon in wartime? The United States.

How did Saddam Hussein build Iraq’s massive arsenal of tanks, planes, missiles, and chemical weapons during the 1980s? With help from the U.S. government.

Who gave Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida “access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry”? The U.S. government.

What country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The U.S. government.

Where did ISIS get many of their deadliest weapons, including assault rifles and tanks to anti-missile defenses? From the U.S. government.

Which country has a history of secretly testing out dangerous weapons and technologies on its own citizens? The U.S. government.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.

The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

Just think about it for a minute: almost every tyranny being perpetrated against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism.

Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race.

Surveillance. The drug wars.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Case in point: For years now, the U.S. government has been creating what one intelligence insider referred to as a cyber-army capable of offensive attacks.

As part of this cyberweapons programs, government agencies such as the NSA have been stockpiling all kinds of nasty malware, viruses and hacking tools that can “steal financial account passwords, turn an iPhone into a listening device, or, in the case of Stuxnet, sabotage a nuclear facility.”

And now we learn that the NSA is responsible for the latest threat posed by the “WannaCry” or “Wanna Decryptor” malware worm which—as a result of hackers accessing the government’s arsenal—has hijacked more than 57,000 computers and crippled health care, communications infrastructure, logistics, and government entities in more than 70 countries already.

All the while the government was repeatedly warned about the dangers of using criminal tactics to wage its own cyberwars.

It was warned about the consequences of blowback should its cyberweapons get into the wrong hands.

The government chose to ignore the warnings.

This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party controls the White House: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.

Yet the powers-that-be don’t really want us to feel safe.

They want us cowering and afraid and willing to relinquish every last one of our freedoms in exchange for their phantom promises of security.

As a result, it’s the American people who pay the price for the government’s insatiable greed and quest for power.

We’re the ones to suffer the blowback.

As historian Chalmers Johnson explains,

“blowback is another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows.”

Unfortunately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, “we the people” are the ones who keep reaping what the government sows.

We’re the ones who suffer every time, directly and indirectly, from the blowback.

We’re made to pay trillions of dollars in blood money to a military industrial complex that kills without conscience. We’ve been saddled with a crumbling infrastructure, impoverished cities and a faltering economy while our tax dollars are squandered on lavish military installations and used to prop up foreign economies. We’ve been stripped of our freedoms. We’re treated like suspects and enemy combatants.

We’re spied on by government agents: our communications read, our movements tracked, our faces mapped, our biometrics entered into a government database. We’re terrorized by militarized police who roam our communities and SWAT teams that break into our homes. We’re subjected to invasive patdowns in airports, roadside strip searches and cavity probes, forced blood draws.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

America will never be safe or secure as long as our government continues to pillage and plunder and bomb and bulldoze and kill and create instability and fund insurgencies and stockpile weapons of mass destruction and police the globe.

So what can we do to stop the blowback, liberate the country from the iron-clad grip of the military industrial complex, and get back to a point where freedom actually means something?

• For starters, get your priorities in order.
• Stop playing politics with your principles.
• Value all human life as worthy of protection.
• Recognize that in the eyes of the government, we’re all expendable.
• Demand that the government stop creating, stockpiling and deploying weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical, biological, cyber, etc.
• Finally, stop supporting the war machine.

Until these missteps are corrected, we should probably do as Chalmers Johnson suggests and stop talking about “democracy” and “human rights.”

As the propaganda coming from Washington regresses to an even more infantile level each year, so does the danger of that propaganda being used to justify a greater American military involvement in the Syrian crisis which Washington itself created. Always ready to invoke the memories of Adolf Hitler, Nazis, and the Holocaust at every opportunity, the U.S. State Department is now claiming that not only is Bashar al-Assad controlling massive prisons where mostly innocent civilians are starved and tortured, but that he is operating crematoriums where the bodies of victims are destroyed, thus cheating the moral West out of having any actual evidence of Assad’s “crimes against humanity.”

This new round of propaganda is based upon the debunked Amnesty International report released in February, 2017, entitled “Human Slaughterhouse: Mass Hangings And Extermination At Sednaya Prison, Syria.” The report contained great writing but it was totally devoid of actual evidence. In fact, the only evidence contained in those pages was satellite photos that showed a building that AM claimed was a prison. The photos thus showed the same thing that any American could have provided had they taken a picture of an American public school.

Still, the propaganda report was full of accounts gathered from “survivors” who themselves had been terrorist fighters or affiliated with terrorist groups and from other anti-Syrian pro-terrorist NGOs. This and the satellite photos were all they were able to produce. Now, however, the U.S. has more to add to the story – crematoriums. With Americans so seemingly impervious to subtlety, the Washington Post saw fit to point out the obvious – that the State Department briefing was “accusations of mass murder and incinerated bodies, evoking the Holocaust.”

Interestingly enough, the first time this report was published, it was on the eve of the Geneva talks, an obvious attempt to muddy the waters and provide the United States with more leverage in the negotiations. This time, we are yet again heading into a round of Geneva talks and the United States yet again has lost leverage in negotiations.

This little tidbit has not been lost on some Russians. Konstantin Kosachev, Chairman of the Russian Federation Council’s Committee For Foreign Affairs (in the Upper House of Parliament), stated “New ‘sensational’ and ‘declassified’ US revelations on the alleged ‘mass executions’ in Syria and a crematorium at the Sednaya Prison near Damascus are not very trustworthy.”

“Now, when an absolutely new phase in the Geneva talks (held without the US) is around the corner, the Americans apparently try to once again shift attention to the ‘Assad regime,’ undermining the peace process, wishing this or not,” he added.

The Washington Post, one of many corporate media outlets to have latched on to the story, stated that

“The Syrian government has constructed and is using a crematorium at its notorious Sednaya military prison near Damascus to clandestinely dispose of the bodies of prisoners it continues to execute inside the facility, the State Department said Monday.”

Assistant Secretary of State, Stuart Jones, stated

“What we’re assessing is that if you have that level of production of mass murder, then ­using the crematorium would . . . allow the regime to manage that number of corpses . . . without evidence.”

“We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Sednaya prison,” he added.

As for the State Department’s evidence, we are, once again, treated to wholly unconvincing “satellite photos” of alleged construction that the State Department takes a wild leap to claim is a crematorium. One need only read the Washington Post’s description of the evidence in order to see just how flimsy it is. Karen DeYoung writes,

The newly released information included a satellite photo of the snow-covered Sednaya complex with an L-shaped building labeled “probable crematorium.” Assessment of the facility, Jones said, included the presence of “the discharge stack, the probable firewall, the probable air intake — this is in the construction phase — this would be consistent if they were building a crematorium.” In a photo taken Jan. 15, he said, “we’re look[ing] at snowmelt on the roof that would be consistent with a crematorium.”

Probable crematorium. Probable firewall. Probable air intake. With all the use of the word “probable” in the description, I would probably say the evidence is probably no evidence at all. Indeed, would any serious intelligence agency base its strategy on such a glaringly obvious lack of evidence?

Tony Cartalucci of Land Destroyer Report agrees when he writes that,

No responsible intelligence agency would submit final reports containing the word “probable,” and more importantly, no responsible state department would cite reports containing the word “probable” to accuse a foreign government of crimes against humanity.

But an intelligence agency tasked with fabricating a narrative and a state department tasked with selling it to the international community would – and as the US State Department has done numerous times in the past and at great cost in human lives and global stability – Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya for example – that is precisely what has happened yet again.

. . . . . .

While the US State Department and the Washington Post attempt to paint an elaborate picture of abuse to shock the international community into condemnation of Syria, what it has really essentially done is resort to the schoolyard tactic of calling the Syrian government, “Hitler.”

The Amnesty International report was published in February 2017. Admittedly presenting no actual evidence, and considering the industrial scale of alleged mass murder and now alleged “incineration” taking place at the facility, one would assume the largest, most powerful intelligence network on Earth in human history could present something months later more substantial than a photograph taken from outer space labeled, “probable crematorium.”

That the largest, most powerful intelligence network on Earth, in human history failed to find anything more substantial indicates there is nothing to find and that instead, the US has deferred once again to fabricating pretexts for its continued meddling beyond its borders, amid catastrophic conflicts it itself engineered and is perpetuating, toward an outcome that suits Washington first and foremost – and especially at the cost of all others involved.

While spokespeople behind the US State Department’s podiums insist that the Syrian “slaughterhouse” is being organized and directed from Damascus, it is clear that just like the dismemberment and destruction of Iraq and Libya – the Syrian “slaughterhouse” is a project organized and directed from Washington.

Indeed, that is exactly what this report and the new accusations are.

Please see my article, “Amnesty International ‘Human Slaughterhouse’ Report Lacks Evidence, Credibility, Reeks Of State Department Propaganda” for a more detailed critique of the original HRW report.

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is the author of seven books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 andvolume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President, and Resisting The Empire: The Plan To Destroy Syria And How The Future Of The World Depends On The Outcome. Turbeville has published over 1000 articles on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s radio show Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST atUCYTV. His website is BrandonTurbeville.com He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

Slowly but surely, the truth about the planned attack on Syria by Western powers under the leadership of the US Empire and its allies comes to the fore. For too long, the mainstream media held the monopoly on reporting about this havoc inflicted by the West together with its terrorist partners such as ISIS, al-Nusra front, and so-called moderate rebels in Syria. Especially the Obama administration pampered the last one. As the public knows by now, there hasn’t been such a thing as “moderate rebels.”

That the public in the West could have been so misinformed, was the fault of CNN, BBC, NYT and other media outlets. They prostituted themselves to the power elite in Washington D. C. Independent reporting was not their task. They were part of the international war party, which wanted to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, to establish another Islamic dictatorship according to the Saudi Arabian model. Already in August 2011, President Obama said, “Assad must go.” Assad is still alive and kicking, and Obama is old news.

The Western propaganda machine didn’t even flinch from creating a false humanitarian organization, named “The White Helmets.” A British intelligence officer established it, and Western powers poured in 100 million US dollars. These folks were, in fact, al-Qaida affiliates disguised as paramedics. They operated in East Aleppo, long held by different terrorist organizations. The biggest fake-producing company, Hollywood, even awarded an “Oscar” to “The White Helmets.” The British journalist Vanessa Beeley was the first who disclosed this charade. “The White Helmets” cared only about wounded terrorists.

Besides these reports, Mark Taliano‘s Book “Voices from Syria” brings another aspect to a wider audience. Taliano, who is a Canadian investigative reporter and Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), shows an entirely different reality about Syria. He gives ordinary Syrians a voice. He reveals that the Western powers undermined the Syrian government and exposed it to attack. Apparently, the West has been fighting against the “criminal Assad regime” while, simultaneously, combating Islamic terrorists.

In his foreword, the director of CRG, Professor Michel Chossudovsky, emphasizes the concern of the author, namely, “what unites humanity with the Syrian people in their struggle against foreign aggression.” Taliano was interested in the “mystery” of the courage and resilience of the Syrian people to endure six years of NATO-sponsored terrorist and “peacemaking” airstrikes that devastated the civil infrastructure. Strikingly, is the author’s documentation of the fight of the Syrian people against “NATO-terrorism.”

Taliano’s book dispels several Western myths: The so-called “war on terrorism” is a fraud. The US and its coalition partners have created ISIS as stooges in the first place to bring about a regime change in Syria. The West mocked its aggression as “humanitarianism” to create heaviest crimes. That this aggression violates international law goes without saying. Without the massive propaganda support of the mainstream media, the “news” could not have spread that Assad oppresses and murders his people. If that had been the case, Assad would be gone long ago. The book shows that Assad has the support of the majority of the Syrians.

Mark Taliano (image left)

The author has good advice to the media:

“The mainstream media must reinvent itself. They must stop spreading war propaganda, and they must begin to report truths based on evidence.”

His book provides a convincing testimony to the bravery and resilience of the Syrian people, who have been fighting against an alliance of Western aggressors and Islamic terrorists for over six years. The fact that one of the oldest cultural nations of the world is bombed back to the Middle Ages by the West and its Arab allies is not only a colossal war crime but also a crime against humanity. The book corrects a large part of Western propaganda claims on Syria. Very readable and revealing.

Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as a journalist and editor in Bonn, Germany. He runs the bilingual blog Between the lines.

*     *     *

Excerpt from Preface:

Between 15 and 23 September 2016, I travelled to war-torn Syria because I sensed years ago that the official narratives being fed to North Americans across TV screens, in newsprint and on the internet were false. The invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya were all based on lies; likewise for Ukraine.

All of the post-9/11 wars were sold to Western audiences through a sophisticated network of interlocking governing agencies that disseminate propaganda to both domestic and foreign audiences. But the dirty war on Syria is different. The degree of war propaganda levelled at Syria and contaminating humanity at this moment is likely unprecedented. I had studied and written about Syria for years, so I was not entirely surprised by what I saw.

What I felt was a different story. Syria is an ancient land with a proud and forward-looking people. To this ancient and holy land we sent mercenaries, hatred, bloodshed and destruction. We sent strange notions of national exceptionalism and wave upon wave of lies. As a visitor I felt shame, but Syrians welcomed me as one of them. These are their stories; these are their voices.

**New Book: Voices from Syria**

Author: Mark Taliano

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-9-1

Year: 2017

Product Type: PDF File

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(Daily Caller) In a briefing held on Monday, the Department of State admitted that the alleged crematorium in the Syrian prison used to incinerate prisoners could actually just be a warmer part of the building.

The State Department stated Monday based on international and local NGO reports that the alleged crematorium used to burn the bodies of hundreds of hanged prisoners at a prison run by the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad may not be a crematorium at all.

Earlier, Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary for Middle Eastern Affairs, said that the prison in Saydnaya was modified in 2013 to support what the agency believes to be a crematorium, which is used to “cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Saydnaya prison.”

Amnesty International alleged in its report from February 2017 that between 5,000-13,000 prisoners have been executed at the site from 2013 to the present.

Neither the State Department, nor the human rights organizations have provided any substantial evidence to these claims so far.

Amy Goodman, host of the Pacifica Network’s flagship news hour “Democracy Now” is on a speaking tour of the country to celebrate the show’s 20th anniversary. When she appeared in Berkeley, East Bay Veterans for Peace, Chapter 162 were outside the First Presbyterian Church beforehand to distribute copies of their “Open Letter to Amy Goodman and Democracy Now: We Need Better and More Diverse Coverage on Syria.” Dissident Voice had published the essay on April 15.

I spoke to Daniel Borgstrom, a former U.S. Marine, who wrote it for his vets group.

*     *     *

Ann Garrison: Daniel, first, when and where did you serve in the U.S. Marine Corps?

Daniel Borgström: I spent four years in the USMC, 1959 to 1963. That was during the Kennedy years, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. I was stationed at Camp Lejeune, NC in 1961, when some 1,400 counter-revolutionaries landed on a beach in Cuba. We thought we’d be sent to back them up, so it looked like we’d be seeing action in Cuba. The atmosphere of the whole base was electric; guys had their field gear out, were wearing their hunting knives and stuff, looking very much like a regiment of Boy Scouts eagerly gearing up for a camping trip.

But we didn’t go. JFK refused to send us. And I remember being terribly disappointed at the time. Now I look back and realize what a courageous president Kennedy was. He stood up to the warmongers and said NO. I believe he paid for that with his life about 3 months after I got my discharge. According to the official story, JFK was killed by an average marksman using a totally unsuitable weapon, who nevertheless performed the most phenomenal feat of marksmanship ever known.

AG: And when did you begin to protest US wars?

DB: That was around 1970, nearly a decade after my discharge. I didn’t start out my life being a left-wing person. At first I was gung-ho, pro-war. When President Johnson bombed North Vietnam over the Gulf of Tonkin incident, I cheered. It took awhile – a long while – for me to figure things out. After my discharge, I took off and traveled around the world for a few years — Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Japan. Even Afghanistan.

Some people tell me I “missed the sixties,” but I did see the sixties, though from a different perspective.

While abroad I met and talked with many people, locals as well as travelers like myself, travelers from a dozen countries. Many were students, others were farmers, workers or shopkeepers. I talked with veterans who’d fought on different sides in different wars – World War II, the Algerian conflict, the Six-Day War. A Frenchman who’d fought in Algeria told me about his experiences and about popular resistance to that war. Some French soldiers had refused orders to fire at non-combatants.

Somewhere in the course of these experiences I came to realize that a lot of what I’d been told and assumed to be true just wasn’t so. There wasn’t any single moment of enlightenment; there were many. Like when I visited my Aunt Julia in Sweden; she was a Socialist and she must’ve been really disappointed to find that her American nephew was so poorly informed as to what went on in the world. She tried to wake me up.

But back to your question. I came back to America around 1970, and it was a whole different America from the one I’d left. Everything seemed different. There were huge antiwar demonstrations. No one had protested war or anything else in the America I remembered.

I listened to all the arguments against the Vietnam War and pretty soon I joined an antiwar veterans group. We believed that, as former military personnel, we could be especially effective in speaking out. It was our response to the warmongers and pundits who were saying, “Support our boys in Vietnam! The antiwar protesters are just college kids who don’t know what life is all about.

“Just ask a GI! Ask any veteran! They’ll tell you why we’re in Vietnam!” they claimed.

“Okay, fine, good!” we answered. “So ask us. We’re ex-GIs and we’ll be glad to tell you.”

On rare occasions journalists did actually ask us and give us good coverage, but that was very rare because what we had to say wasn’t part of the official story that the mainstream media (MSM) was there to tell.

On one occasion about 15 of us were arrested for occupying an Air Force recruiting office, and the MSM reported a whole lot of data about us, our names, our ages, etc., but NOT the fact that we were ex-GIs. I still have the newspaper clippings of that.

Another time, on December 29, 1971, we occupied the offices of the South Vietnamese consulate in Downtown San Francisco’s Flood Building. We did get good media coverage that day, but not during the trial that followed.

Thirteen of us ex-GIs went on trial together for trespassing, failure to disperse, and failure to obey a police officer; we could have all been sentenced to six months in jail. The trial lasted four weeks and there was a lot of really dramatic antiwar testimony in that courtroom – four weeks of it that the MSM refused to cover. We asked reporters why they wouldn’t come in and see the trial, and they told us they’d been ordered NOT to cover it.

Actually the trial was covered by the “underground” newspapers, as they were called back then. The Berkeley Barb, Good Times, The Tribe, and a bunch of others. I used to write for some of them; that’s how I got my start as a writer. Nowadays I write for websites.

At the end of the four weeks, the jury found us not guilty, despite abundant evidence that we’d done exactly what we were charged with. One of the jurors was a former U.S. Navy officer who took our side, and the whole jury was affected by the pervasive antiwar passion of the time.

After the verdict, the MSM did finally publish a rather bland article, not really saying much.

I often hear those times called “The Golden Age of Media.” Nonsense! The MSM was as biased then as now. Anyone doubting that should read Carl Bernstein’s 1977 article “The CIA and the Media.”

I have many nostalgic memories of our veterans group. We had good times. On Saturday nights we’d get together and watch horror movies. That was before the age of VCRs; we watched them on TV. And we’d go on excursions up in Marin County, up to Point Reyes and other interesting places together. Of course we’d march in antiwar demonstrations and join in singing songs like “We ain’t gonna study war no more.” Then the next weekend we might take our guns and go out to some shooting range for target practice.

AG: And why had you enlisted back in 1959?

DB: The short answer is: there was no KPFA or Pacifica affiliate station where I grew up in the Puget Sound area of Washington. “We have to defend the country against Communism!” That’s what I grew up hearing, constantly. Nobody questioned that. They described Communism as really awful – SURVEILLANCE STATES. What they described was pretty much like the surveillance state we live in today here in the US, and that was what I joined the USMC to defend our country against.

AG: So you owe a lot of your current opposition to US wars to coverage you’ve heard on Pacifica’s KPFA-Berkeley, including Democracy Now?

DB: I listen to KPFA almost daily and it’s been really important in helping me to keep up on events in a rapidly changing world. I hear reports on KPFA that the MSM simply doesn’t cover. Nevertheless, it was my travels and experiences in Europe, Asia and the Middle East that initially opened my eyes to seeing things in a new way.

AG: And why are you and East Bay Vets for Peace, Chapter 162, asking Democracy Now (DN) for better and more diverse coverage of the Syrian conflict?

DB: Partly it goes back to my memories from 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Strangely, I had no concept at the time of just how incredibly close we came to being wiped off the face of the earth. But when I think about it now, it makes me shudder. And now it looks like we could be headed for another nuclear face-off.

The warmongers in Washington – and that includes a lot of Democrats as well as Republicans – seem determined to pick a fight with nuclear-armed Russia. Many progressives seem totally blind to the danger, and Amy Goodman of DN is among them. Syria looks like a serious danger spot where US military forces could literally clash with Russian forces.

The warmongers in Washington seem determined to use the story of Assad bombing his own people with chemical weapons – specifically, sarin gas. The MSM plays that story big time, and Amy Goodman echoes it on DN. She features guests who promote the story, allowing them to give one-sided coverage, without convincing evidence to back their claims. She ignores investigators with evidence to the contrary about the sarin gas. People like Theodore Postol of MIT and Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity have looked at this and reported finding no convincing evidence, but they do not get featured on her show.

We’ve been down this road before. “Gulf of Tonkin” and “WMDs in Iraq” are two big lies that come to mind, but there’ve been many more, including “Remember the Maine” in 1898. In each case there was no convincing evidence, and the lack of it didn’t seem to matter.

For many years now, Amy Goodman’s DN has been my favorite radio show, and also that of a lot of progressives. Progressives like me listen to her, and she has a responsibility to properly inform us of what’s going on. Right now she should be investigating and exposing those lies that could lead to war. Instead, she’s promoting those lies, the “Assad-did-it-again” story, “gassing his own people.” So it’s time for her listeners to speak out.

I mentioned that at a meeting of our Veterans for Peace chapter, and got volunteered to write a letter to Amy. We mailed it via USPS to her a month ago, but still have no response. It was an open letter, and it was also posted on Dissident Voice and other websites. It was even posted to Telesur in Spanish. So even if Amy doesn’t read her mail, it’s a pretty fair assumption that she’s aware of our letter, but as I said, she hasn’t responded so far.

Meanwhile, Amy has continued – with only rare exceptions – to promote the “Assad-did-it-again” stories, featuring guests such as Anand Gopal on her show.

Then we heard Amy was coming to Berkeley on her speaking tour. She was coming on Sunday, May 14th, so we decided to pass out our open letter outside the event. The evening before the event, I spoke to you on KPFA’s Evening News about our plan. As I said then, no hard evidence has been presented on Democracy Now, but they seem to accept the story.

As a former soldier, I see no military rationale or advantage for using chemical weapons in the situations where Assad is accused of using them. I saw no political advantage either. On the contrary; the sarin gas story put so much pressure on Trump that he finally ordered the launch of 59 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles at a Syrian Army air field.

So, on Sunday, May 14th, we showed up at the door of the event with 300 copies of our open letter to pass out. I must admit I had been a bit worried over how people might take it. After all, these were Amy’s dedicated fans. I was also a fan of Amy, or had been at least.

I arrived shortly before the doors opened, and there were a dozen or so people waiting to get in. I passed out the letter and people read it while they stood in line waiting. Then a man turned to me and said, “Thank you for writing this. I totally agree.” Others said similar things. One said he’d heard about it on KPFA the previous evening, and I told him that was me on the air. “Good for you,” he said, or words to that effect.

Finally the doors opened, more people arrived and I was hurrying to pass out copies of the letter as they were hurrying to get in and get seats, so it wasn’t possible to get in a lot of conversations as at first. We’d hoped to go in and ask Amy to respond to our letter during the Q and A, but the tickets were already sold out.

We’re now thinking of writing an online petition to Amy. That’ll be our next step. It’s important that people hear about this and speak out. Just because somebody happens to be a major star in the progressive world doesn’t mean that they should be beyond criticism.

Daniel Borgström is a former US Marine, a CounterPunch and Dissident Voice writer, and a member of Veterans for Peace-East Bay, Chapter 162. He can be reached at [email protected].

Yesterday afternoon, 15 May 2017, Palestinian fisherman Mohammed Majed Fadel Baker succumbed to his wounds after the Israeli naval soldiers opened fire from a distance of 3 meters at the boat manned by him, his brothers and cousin in the northern Gaza Sea. This indicates a new crime committed by the Israeli forces though none of the fishermen posed any threat to the live of Israeli soldiers. This also emphasizes continuation of Israel’s policy to target the fishermen and their safety and deny them from freely sailing and fishing within the allowed fishing area.

According to PCHR’s investigation, at approximately 08:30 on Monday, 15 May 2017, an Israeli gunboat accompanied with a rubber boat opened fire at a Palestinian fishing boat sailing within 3 nautical miles off al-Wahah shore, northwest of Gaza City. The boat was manned by 4 fishermen namely ‘Omran Majed Baker (33), his two brothers; Fadi (32) and Mohammed (25), and their cousin Mohammed Zeyad Hasan Baker (32), and all of them are from Gaza. The fishermen fled by their boat to the south, but the Israeli gunboat manned by 8 soldiers armed with automatic rifles chased the boat and were able to target directly its engine. As a result, the boat stopped off shore in front of the Intelligence Service office, west of Gaza, and ‘Omran was hit with 2 metal bullets to the leg and abdomen. After that, a soldier opened fire from a 3-meter distance at the fishermen, wounding Mohammed Baker with a live bullet to the upper side of abdomen. Mohammed then fell down as part of his bowels got out. However, the soldiers forced the fishermen to move Mohammed to their boat and then sailed towards Ashqelon. At approximately 16:30 on the same day, Mohammed was announced dead succumbing to his wounds in Barzilai Hospital. His body was then transferred to al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza after coordinating with the Palestinian Liaison office.

Mohammed Zeyad Hasan Baker (32), said to PCHR’s fieldworker that:

“At approximately 08:00, I sailed with my cousins ‘Omran, Fadi and Mohammed Majed Baker from Gaza Seaport along with another fishing boat manned by 4 fishermen. After 15 minutes, We arrived at al-Sudaniya area sailing within 3 nautical miles off al-Waha shore about 1.5 miles off the allowed fishing area. When we started fishing, I saw an Israeli gunboat accompanied with a rubber boat coming from the north and speeding towards us. ‘Omran turned on the engine, headed to the south and stationed off the Intelligence Service office. I then saw the rubber boat speeding towards us and arrived in less than 2 minutes. There were 8 navy soldiers, 4 of whom were masked. The distance between us was about two meters when 2 soldiers randomly opened fire at us while we were trying to avoid being shot. Ten minutes later, the soldiers directly opened fire at us from a 3-meter distance. As a result, Fadi Majed Baker (32) sustained 2 rubber-coated metal bullets to the leg and abdomen. The Israeli gunboat continued chasing us, but suddenly appeared in front of our boat and the soldiers directly opened fire at the boat engine.  As a result, the boat stopped, and Mohammed was wounded and fell down. We shouted to inform the soldiers that Mohammed is wounded.  One of the soldiers then ordered us to come to the boat front while the other soldiers kept shooting above our heads. I carried Mohammed, who was wounded and part of his bowels were out.  He was foaming and then went into coma. The soldier, who was driving the gunboat, ordered me to carry Mohammed while 2 other soldiers took him to the gunboat, sailing towards Ashkelon. Furthermore, the other Israeli boat dragged our boat, which was hit with 6 live bullets, to the Gaza Seaport after an hour, but we lost the fishing net.”

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) strongly condemns this new crime, which led to the death of fisherman Mohammed Baker. PCHR confirms that this crime falls under the continued Israeli attacks against Palestinian fishermen in the Gaza Strip to terrify and deprive them of their right to sail and fish freely.  PCHR hereby:

1. Calls upon the International community, including the High Contracting Parties to the 1949 Geneva Convention, to intervene to stop all Israeli violations against fishermen and their property and allow them to fish freely in Gaza Sea;
2. Demands Opening an investigation into the crime that led to the death of Mohammed Baker though he did not pose any threat to the safety and security of the Israeli soldier;
3. Calls for immediately ending the chasing policy of fishermen and allow them to sail and fish freely;
4. Releasing those fishermen arrested by Israeli forces; and
5. Compensating the victims of the Israeli violations for the physical and material damage.

I arrived in Jerusalem last night and as always during the weeks between mid-May and mid-June the media is full of romanticized memories. Within these weeks are the two most significant dates in modern Palestinian history: May 1948 when Palestine was conquered and renamed Israel, and June, 1967 when the Israeli army completed the conquest of Palestine by taking East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For Palestinians these dates bring back bitter memories, but for Israelis the memories are sweet – those were the days when we were young and brave and innocent. Vintage photos of soldiers at the newly conquered Western Wall, generals announcing “the Temple Mount is in our hands,” and teary-eyed old Jews praying with devotion are everywhere. The horrors that make up the Palestinian memories, the piles of dead bodies, civilians panicking as they are forcibly exiled, children lost in the mayhem and ancient villages and communities bulldozed only to be rebuilt for Jews are rarely shown or discussed.

Israeli Generals Dayan, Narkis and Bar-Lev at the Western Wall

Palestinian refugees fleeing to Jordan across the wrecked Alenbi Bridge

Destruction of the 700 year old Mughrabi neighborhood was done immediately following the Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem to create the Western Wall plaza.

To add to all that, Donald Trump is expected to arrive in Jerusalem and this gives the press and the official state PR machine an even greater opportunity to deal with the two things they love best: smoke screens and trivia. Gaza? never even heard of it! Fifteen hundred innocent political prisoners on a hunger strike for over a month? Nobody cares! But check this out: apparently Trump will fly directly from Saudi Arabia to Tel-Aviv and this is the first direct flight between the two countries; the King David Hotel in Jerusalem is preparing for Trump’s visit and a drone was spotted in the hotel parking lot! And the ongoing burning question, will the great deal maker be able to close the Israeli-Palestinian peace Deal? All smoke screens and trivia which are the staples of tabloids – a category into which most Israeli media outlets fit perfectly – though in their defense one must admit that there is no point in dealing with substance because Trump’s visit will offer none.

Here are a few items that are sure not to be on Trump’s agenda: Two million people in Gaza have no access to clean water, proper nutrition or medicine.  They have been victims of devastating attacks for seven decades and before they can recover from one assault there is another one pending.  The Israeli water authority allocates only 3% of the water to Palestinians even though they make up more than 50% of the overall population. More than 55% of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship live below the poverty line, and even though they rate one of the highest in the world in literacy, there is massive unemployment among Palestinians. Palestinians in the West Bank live under a brutal military regime governed by Israeli commanders who impose inhumane laws and prevent people from enjoying the basic most human rights. Seven thousand political prisoners sit in Israeli jails in violation of international law, over fifteen hundred of them on a hunger strike for over a month.

Trump may also visit Ramallah, and there too these topics are not likely to come up. Though there are attempts to prop the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority, it is on life support and barely surviving. Municipal elections to West Bank cities were a failure – marked by boycotts of major political parties and a lack of voter interest. Mahmoud Abbas, the so-called president of the Palestinian Authority is old and tired and can no longer mask his disinterest in the fate of his people.  Hamas has made some changes to its charter and the newly elected head of Hamas’ political bureau is the Gaza resident, Gaza born Ismail Haniya, who is also the democratically elected Prime Minister of the now defunct Palestinian Authority.  The Authority has no real authority and neither party is relevant anymore.

The question of moving the US embassy to Jerusalem is also dead at this point although for political reasons Netanyahu will pretend it is a priority. Both Trump and Netanyahu know that Jerusalem is a red line that even two reckless politicians such as them will not dare cross. Trump will not risk a multi billion dollar weapons deal with Saudi Arabia, and Netanyahu won’t risk an uprising for a symbolic gesture for which no country in the world can give its support. The international community has never recognized Jerusalem as part of Israel, and international recognition of Israel’s jurisdiction is out of the question. So while Israeli politicians may try to create headlines over this topic, it is nothing but a smoke screen.

The terror under which Palestinians live – be it in their own country or in refugee camps  around it, is part of the daily bread of Palestinian existence. The causes for this existence, the wars of 1948 and 1967 are commemorated each year during the weeks between mid-May and mid-June.  The horror of the Palestinian reality is magnified when compared to the dishonest, romanticized narrative presented by Jews during that time: An Israel that is eternally young and brave and facing constant danger, yet winning and succeeding. Judging by Trump’s entourage, which includes David Friedman the new US ambassador to Israel and Jared Kushner, the famous Jewish son in law, Israel’s narrative of lies will dominate the agenda, while trivia and smoke screens will dominate the news.

Much outrage has been expressed in recent weeks over President Donald Trump’s invitation for a White House visit to Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, whose “war on drugs” has led to thousands of extrajudicial killings. Criticism of Trump was especially intense given his similarly warm public support for other authoritarian rulers like Egypt’s Abdel Fatah al-Sisi (who visited the Oval Office to much praise only weeks earlier), Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who got a congratulatory phone call from President Trump on his recent referendum victory, granting him increasingly unchecked powers), and Thailand’s Prayuth Chan-ocha (who also received a White House invitation).

But here’s the strange thing: the critics generally ignored the far more substantial and long-standing bipartisan support U.S. presidents have offered these and dozens of other repressive regimes over the decades. After all, such autocratic countries share one striking thing in common. They are among at least 45 less-than-democratic nations and territories that today host scores of U.S. military bases, from ones the size of not-so-small American towns to tiny outposts. Together, these bases are homes to tens of thousands of U.S. troops.

To ensure basing access from Central America to Africa, Asia to the Middle East, U.S. officials have repeatedly collaborated with fiercely anti-democratic regimes and militaries implicated in torture, murder, the suppression of democratic rights, the systematic oppression of women and minorities, and numerous other human rights abuses. Forget the recent White House invitations and Trump’s public compliments. For nearly three quarters of a century, the United States has invested tens of billions of dollars in maintaining bases and troops in such repressive states. From Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have, since World War II, regularly shown a preference for maintaining bases in undemocratic and often despotic states, including Spain under Generalissimo Francisco Franco, South Korea under Park Chung-hee, Bahrain under King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, and Djibouti under four-term President Ismail Omar Guelleh, to name just four.

Many of the 45 present-day undemocratic U.S. base hosts qualify as fully “authoritarian regimes,” according to the Economist Democracy Index. In such cases, American installations and the troops stationed on them are effectively helping block the spread of democracy in countries like Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kuwait, Niger, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

This pattern of daily support for dictatorship and repression around the world should be a national scandal in a country supposedly committed to democracy. It should trouble Americans ranging from religious conservatives and libertarians to leftists — anyone, in fact, who believes in the democratic principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. After all, one of the long-articulated justifications for maintaining military bases abroad has been that the U.S. military’s presence protects and spreads democracy.

Far from bringing democracy to these lands, however, such bases tend to provide legitimacy for and prop up undemocratic regimes of all sorts, while often interfering with genuine efforts to encourage political and democratic reform. The silencing of the critics of human rights abuses in base hosts like Bahrain, which has violently cracked down on pro-democracy demonstrators since 2011, has left the United States complicit in these states’ crimes.

During the Cold War, bases in undemocratic countries were often justified as the unfortunate but necessary consequence of confronting the “communist menace” of the Soviet Union. But here’s the curious thing: in the quarter century since the Cold War ended with that empire’s implosion, few of those bases have closed. Today, while a White House visit from an autocrat may generate indignation, the presence of such installations in countries run by repressive or military rulers receives little notice at all.

Befriending Dictators

The 45 nations and territories with little or no democratic rule represent more than half of the roughly 80 countries now hosting U.S. bases (who often lack the power to ask their “guests” to leave).  They are part of a historically unprecedented global network of military installations the United States has built or occupied since World War II.

Today, while there are no foreign bases in the United States, there are around 800 U.S. bases in foreign countries. That number was recently even higher, but it still almost certainly represents a record for any nation or empire in history. More than 70 years after World War II and 64 years after the Korean War, there are, according to the Pentagon, 181 U.S. “base sites” in Germany, 122 in Japan, and 83 in South Korea. Hundreds more dot the planet from Aruba to Australia, Belgium to Bulgaria, Colombia to Qatar. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, civilians, and family members occupy these installations. By my conservative estimate, to maintain such a level of bases and troops abroad, U.S. taxpayers spend at least $150 billion annually — more than the budget of any government agency except the Pentagon itself.

For decades, leaders in Washington have insisted that bases abroad spread our values and democracy — and that may have been true to some extent in occupied Germany, Japan, and Italy after World War II. However, as base expert Catherine Lutz suggests, the subsequent historical record shows that

“gaining and maintaining access for U.S. bases has often involved close collaboration with despotic governments.”

The bases in the countries whose leaders President Trump has recently lauded illustrate the broader pattern. The United States has maintained military facilities in the Philippines almost continuously since seizing that archipelago from Spain in 1898. It only granted the colony independence in 1946, conditioned on the local government’s agreement that the U.S. would retain access to more than a dozen installations there.

After independence, a succession of U.S. administrations supported two decades of Ferdinand Marcos’s autocratic rule, ensuring the continued use of Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, two of the largest U.S. bases abroad. After the Filipino people finally ousted Marcos in 1986 and then made the U.S. military leave in 1991, the Pentagon quietly returned in 1996. With the help of a “visiting forces agreement” and a growing stream of military exercises and training programs, it began to set up surreptitious, small-scale bases once more. A desire to solidify this renewed base presence, while also checking Chinese influence, undoubtedly drove Trump’s recent White House invitation to Duterte. It came despite the Filipino president’s record of joking about rape, swearing he would be “happy to slaughter” millions of drug addicts just as “Hitler massacred [six] million Jews,” and bragging, “I don’t care about human rights.”

In Turkey, President Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic rule is only the latest episode in a pattern of military coups and undemocratic regimes interrupting periods of democracy. U.S. bases have, however, been a constant presence in the country since 1943. They repeatedly caused controversy and sparked protest — first throughout the 1960s and 1970s, before the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, and more recently after U.S. forces began using them to launch attacks in Syria.

Although Egypt has a relatively small U.S. base presence, its military has enjoyed deep and lucrative ties with the U.S. military since the signing of the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1979. After a 2013 military coup ousted a democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government, the Obama administration took months to withhold some forms of military and economic aid, despite more than 1,300 killings by security forces and the arrest of more than 3,500 members of the Brotherhood. According to Human Rights Watch,

“Little was said about ongoing abuses,” which have continued to this day.

In Thailand, the U.S. has maintained deep connections with the Thai military, which has carried out 12 coups since 1932. Both countries have been able to deny that they have a basing relationship of any sort, thanks to a rental agreement between a private contractor and U.S. forces at Thailand’s Utapao Naval Air Base.

“Because of [contractor] Delta Golf Global,” writes journalist Robert Kaplan, “the U.S. military was here, but it was not here. After all, the Thais did no business with the U.S. Air Force. They dealt only with a private contractor.”

Elsewhere, the record is similar. In monarchical Bahrain, which has had a U.S. military presence since 1949 and now hosts the Navy’s 5th Fleet, the Obama administration offered only the most tepid criticism of the government despite an ongoing, often violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. According to Human Rights Watch and others (including an independent commission of inquiry appointed by the Bahraini king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa), the government has been responsible for widespread abuses including the arbitrary arrest of protesters, ill treatment during detention, torture-related deaths, and growing restrictions on freedoms of speech, association, and assembly. The Trump administration has already signaled its desire to protect the military-to-military ties of the two countries by approving a sale of F-16 fighters to Bahrain without demanding improvements in its human rights record.

And that’s typical of what base expert Chalmers Johnson once called the American “baseworld.” Research by political scientist Kent Calder confirms what’s come to be known as the “dictatorship hypothesis”:

“The United States tends to support dictators [and other undemocratic regimes] in nations where it enjoys basing facilities.”

Another large-scale study similarly shows that autocratic states have been “consistently attractive” as base sites. “Due to the unpredictability of elections,” it added bluntly, democratic states prove “less attractive in terms [of] sustainability and duration.”

Even within what are technically U.S. borders, democratic rule has regularly proved “less attractive” than preserving colonialism into the twenty-first century. The presence of scores of bases in Puerto Rico and the Pacific island of Guam has been a major motivation for keeping these and other U.S. “territories” — American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands — in varying degrees of colonial subordination. Conveniently for military leaders, they have neither full independence nor the full democratic rights that would come with incorporation into the U.S. as states, including voting representation in Congress and the presidential vote.  Installations in at least five of Europe’s remaining colonies have proven equally attractive, as has the base that U.S. troops have forcibly occupied in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since shortly after the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Backing Dictators

Authoritarian rulers tend to be well aware of the desire of U.S. officials to maintain the status quo when it comes to bases. As a result, they often capitalize on a base presence to extract benefits or help ensure their own political survival.

The Philippines’ Marcos, former South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee, and more recently Djibouti’s Ismail Omar Guelleh have been typical in the way they used bases to extract economic assistance from Washington, which they then lavished on political allies to shore up their power. Others have relied on such bases to bolster their international prestige and legitimacy or to justify violence against domestic political opponents. After the 1980 Kwangju massacre in which the South Korean government killed hundreds, if not thousands, of pro-democracy demonstrators, strongman General Chun Doo-hwan explicitly cited the presence of U.S. bases and troops to suggest that his actions enjoyed Washington’s support. Whether or not that was true is still a matter of historical debate. What’s clear, however, is that American leaders have regularly muted their criticism of repressive regimes lest they imperil bases in these countries. In addition, such a presence tends to strengthen military, rather than civilian, institutions in countries because of the military-to-military ties, arms sales, and training missions that generally accompany basing agreements.

Meanwhile, opponents of repressive regimes often use the bases as a tool to rally nationalist sentiment, anger, and protest against both ruling elites and the United States. That, in turn, tends to fuel fears in Washington that a transition to democracy might lead to base eviction, often leading to a doubling down on support for undemocratic rulers. The result can be an escalating cycle of opposition and U.S.-backed repression.

Blowback

While some defend the presence of bases in undemocratic countries as necessary to deter “bad actors” and support “U.S. interests” (primarily corporate ones), backing dictators and autocrats frequently leads to harm not just for the citizens of host nations but for U.S. citizens as well. The base build-up in the Middle East has proven the most prominent example of this. Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution, which both unfolded in 1979, the Pentagon has built up scores of bases across the Middle East at a cost of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. According to former West Point professor Bradley Bowman, such bases and the troops that go with them have been a “major catalyst for anti-Americanism and radicalization.” Research has similarly revealed a correlation between the bases and al-Qaeda recruitment.

Most catastrophically, outposts in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan have helped generate and fuel the radical militancy that has spread throughout the Greater Middle East and led to terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States. The presence of such bases and troops in Muslim holy lands was, after all, a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Laden’s professed motivation for the 9/11 attacks.

With the Trump administration seeking to entrench its renewed base presence in the Philippines and the president commending Duterte and similarly authoritarian leaders in Bahrain and Egypt, Turkey and Thailand, human rights violations are likely to escalate, fueling unknown brutality and baseworld blowback for years to come.

David Vine, a TomDispatch regular, is associate professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. His latest book is Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (the American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other publications. For more information, visit www.basenation.us and www.davidvine.net.

President Barack Obama has received much credit for drawing down American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, but less attention has been paid to his administration’s embrace of armed drones. His expansion of covert drone strikes goes far beyond that of former President George W. Bush, and has blurred the line between warfare and assassination. The classified processes used by the White House for approving these remote killings in foreign countries – countries which the U.S. is not officially at war with – has people questioning not only the Obama administration’s tactics, but also the collateral damage of civilian casualties left in its wake.

Via: Ammo.com

Sources

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http://www.poynter.org/2014/fact-checking-the-war-comparisons-between-obama-and-bush/272471/

https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/07/the-year-in-drones/

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Venezuela has been rocked in recent weeks by almost daily protests and counter-protests, as right-wing opponents of socialist President Nicolas Maduro seek to bring down his government.

While the media portrays these events as a popular rebellion against an authoritarian government, supporters of the pro-poor Bolivarian revolution initiated by former president Hugo Chavez say the country is witnessing an escalation in what is an ongoing counter-revolutionary campaign seeking to restore Venezuela’s traditional elites in power and reverse the gains made by the poor majority under Chavez and Maduro.

Green Left Weekly’s Federico Fuentes interviewed Steve Ellner, a well-known analyst of Venezuelan and Latin American politics and a retired professor at Venezuela’s Universidad de Oriente, to get his views on recent events.

*     *     *

When it comes to the current turmoil in Venezuela, the media have been unanimous in their version of events: the Maduro regime is on its last legs due to the overwhelming opposition it faces from the people, including among the poorest sectors that previously supported the government, and therefore its only recourse for survival is violent repression. How accurate is this media narrative?

It’s hardly a far-gone conclusion.

There is no better indication of the deceptiveness of the mainstream media’s narrative than the spatial nature of the anti-government protests in early 2014 known as the “guarimba” and again this year.

The protests are centred in the middle and upper class areas whose mayors belong to the opposition. The strategy behind the protests is for the mass civil disobedience, confrontation with security forces and widespread destruction of public property to spread to the poorer areas.

Certainly, the popular sectors have a long tradition of street protests, particularly over deficient public services. But the popular sectors have remained largely passive, although with more exceptions now than in 2014. Obviously the opposition is banking on greater active popular support than in 2014.

Along similar lines, the Chavista United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) has been more damaged by electoral abstention among disenchanted Chavistas than those who end up voting for the opposition. Such electoral behaviour is what explains the Chavista defeat in the December 2014 elections for the National Assembly.

But the Chavista leaders still have an impressive degree of mobilisation capacity, as was demonstrated in two recent marches, one on Venezuelan Independence Day on April 19, and the other on May 1.

The nation’s precarious economic situation as well as the complete political turnaround in the hemisphere strengthens the opposition’s hand. Whereas in past political crises, such as the coup attempt in 2002 and the general strike of 2002-2003, the Chavez government was able to count on backing from other Latin American nations including in some cases non-leftist ones.

Now Venezuela’s neighbouring governments, in spite of their considerable unpopularity and internal discontent, have explicitly taken up the cause of the Venezuelan opposition.

But at this point I would describe the political situation in Venezuela as a standoff, a far cry from saying that the government is on its last legs. Of course, given the political volatility over the recent past, predictions have to be at best tentative.

In an ultimate sense, the popular sectors have the last word. If they were to join the protests, then the statement that the Maduro government is, as you say, on its last legs, would be accurate. The situation would then be similar to that of the Soviet Union in 1991 when the miners began to march against the government, thus signalling the collapse of the regime.

Even some former supporters of the government today speak of an authoritarian turn on the part of Maduro. Is there any truth to this accusation?

To answer your question it has to be pointed out that Venezuela is not in a normal situation, with what political scientists call a “loyal opposition” that recognises the government’s legitimacy and plays by the rules of the game. Thus to talk about government actions without placing them in context – as the corporate media is prone to do – is misleading.

The opposition leaders of today are, for the most part, the same ones involved in the coup and general strike of 2002-2003, the same ones who refused to recognise the legitimacy of the electoral processes in 2004 and 2005 and consistently questioned the legitimacy of the National Electoral Council except in those cases in which the government was defeated.

They are also the same ones who refused to recognise Maduro’s triumph in the presidential election of 2013, resulting in about a dozen deaths, and then promoted the four months of protests in 2014 involving civil disobedience on a massive scale along with considerable violence, resulting in 43 deaths including six members of the national guard.

The current period commences with the opposition’s triumph in the National Assembly elections of 2015 when the president of that body, Henry Ramos Allup, immediately announced that regime change would be achieved within six months; subsequently the National Assembly turned down the executive’s budgetary allocations. All along the opposition has rejected the government’s call for a national dialogue, demanding concessions as a precondition for negotiations.

The protests that have occurred in the last month are a repeat of the guarimba of 2014. Opposition leaders completely evade the issue of violence, other than declaring that they are opposed to it in an abstract sense.

Practically every day they call marches in the affluent eastern part of Caracas that attempt to reach the downtown area where the presidential palace is located. Government spokespeople have stated numerous times that downtown Caracas is off limits for the opposition marches; security forces commonly employ tear gas to prevent passage.

The reason for the government’s refusal is obvious. With a massive number of opposition people in the downtown area for an indefinite period of time, massive civil disobedience, the surrounding of the presidential palace and violence would all ensue, along with uncontrollable chaos.

The confrontations would be aggravated by the coverage of the international media, which has always spun their reports to favour the opposition. The fact that every day for the last several weeks the main leaders of the opposition have called for marches to reach downtown Caracas, even though they know full well that confrontations will occur, would suggest that their strategy for gaining power envisions street disruptions and combat.

The spatial nature of the protests is key. You may say that the government is justified in avoiding the protests from reaching the centre of Caracas. But the question may be asked, would the Chavistas tolerate peaceful marches originating from the affluent eastern half of the city marching though Chavista strongholds in the popular sectors?

The question is clouded by the fact that the opposition marches almost invariably involve civil disobedience and violence.

Would you say that both the Chavistas and the opposition are assuming intransigent positions?

Both sides are playing hard ball, but a description of the political setting is indispensable in order to appreciate what is at stake. The fact is that the democratic nature of some of the government’s decisions is questionable, two in particular.

A month ago, ex-presidential candidate (on two occasions), and governor of the state of Miranda, Henrique Capriles was stripped of his right to participate in elections due to charges of corruption.

In the second place, the gubernatorial and municipal elections which were slated for December 2016 have been delayed on grounds that other proposed electoral processes have pushed them into the future. Although Maduro has indicated that his party is ready to participate in those elections, a date has still not been set. If elections were held today, the Chavistas would very possibly suffer losses.

The hardliners in the Chavista movement headed by National Assembly deputy Diosdado Cabello are obviously calling the shots and they support an aggressive line toward the opposition. The most visible voice for the “soft-line” is former vice-president Jose Vicente Rangel, who favours gestures that would encourage negotiations and buttress those in the opposition who reject street confrontation.

Likewise, the radicals in the opposition are firmly in control. They have made clear that once in power, they would jail the Chavista leaders on grounds of corruption and violation of human rights. Their call for “No to Impunity” is a coded slogan. It means in effect a witch hunt against the Chavista movement and repression that would pave the way for the imposition of unpopular neoliberal policies.

Indeed, neoliberalism characterised Capriles’ platform in the two presidential elections of 2012 and 2013. There is a definite relationship between the radical tactics and intolerance displayed by the opposition, on the one hand, and the neoliberal program which would be imposed should the opposition return to power, on the other hand.

To sum up, the narrative that calls the Maduro government “authoritarian” is a blatant misrepresentation of what is happening. On the other hand, the Chavista leaders have on occasion distanced themselves from democratic principles. Their actions, however, need to be contextualised.

What has been the impact of interference by the US government and the Organization of American States, along with the changing attitude of certain governments in the region?

The foreign actors you refer to have failed to place themselves above Venezuela’s internal politics in order to promote a peaceful resolution to a conflict that could well degenerate into civil war. The statements issued by the White House as well as Luis Almagro, the OAS’ secretary general, coincide in their entirety with the opposition’s narrative and demands.

Rather than taking sides in Venezuela’s internal conflict, the OAS should have called for a national dialogue and named a nonpartisan committee to investigate disputed events. The decision of the Maduro government to withdraw from the OAS was a reaction to the organisation’s partisanship, which has served only to exacerbate the political polarization.

The OAS and other international actors reinforce the Venezuelan opposition’s narrative that conflates pressing economic problems and the alleged authoritarianism of the Maduro government. This line inadvertently strengthens the hand of the hardliners within the opposition.

The only way to justify regime change by non-electoral means and the intervention of foreign actors, such as the OAS, is to attempt to demonstrate that the nation is headed toward a dictatorship and systematically violates human rights.

But the moderates within the opposition – although at this point they have no visible national leader – favour emphasising economic issues in order to reach out to the popular sectors of the population, attract some of the disenchanted Chavistas, and at the same time accept dialogue with government representatives. The moderates therefore place an accent mark on economic issues more than political ones.

In this sense, the intromission of foreign actors who question the Venezuelan government’s democratic credentials only serves to bolster the position of the radicals in the opposition and to further polarise the nation.

In terms of the current economic problems: how serious are the shortages?

The problem of shortages of basic products is undeniable, even while media outlets like the Wall Street Journal claim that the nation is on the verge of mass starvation. Hunger is a scourge that afflicts the lower strata in other, if not all, Latin American nations. But the key index from social and political viewpoints is the contrast with standards in Venezuela in previous years. The deterioration has certainly been sharp with regard to the period prior to the sharp decline in oil prices in mid-2015.

What do you foresee happening in the immediate future? Is the Maduro government doomed? What do you think of the proposed Constituent Assembly?

Maduro’s proposal for a constituent assembly is a mixed bag with regard to the possibility of achieving greater stability.

On the one hand it is an initiative – something new – that is designed to break the deadlock the nation finds itself stuck in. A favourable scenario would be that the Chavistas are able to activate their base as well as that of social movements and achieve an important degree of electoral participation.

Furthermore, in the best-case scenario, constituent assembly delegates would formulate viable proposals to deal with pressing issues, such as corruption, and the Chavistas in power would demonstrate genuine receptivity to them.

In short, a constituent assembly based on bottom-up participation could be a game changer.

In the case of the alternative scenario, the constituent assembly proposal will be viewed as a ploy to buy time and sidetrack the electoral process.

Steve Ellner is currently coordinating an issue on the class policies of progressive Latin American governments for Latin American Perspectives, a journal for which he is a participating editor. His “Implications of Marxist State Theories and How They Play Out in Venezuela” is slated to appear in the next issue of Historical Materialism.

Last week, mainstream media outlets gave minimal attention to the news that the U.S. Naval station in Virginia Beach had spilled an estimated 94,000 gallons of jet fuel into a nearby waterway, less than a mile from the Atlantic Ocean. While the incident was by no means as catastrophic as some other pipeline spills, it underscores an important yet little-known fact – that the U.S. Department of Defense is both the nation’s and the world’s, largest polluter.

Producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined, the U.S. Department of Defense has left its toxic legacy throughout the world in the form of depleted uranium, oil, jet fuel, pesticides, defoliants like Agent Orange and lead, among others.

In 2014, the former head of the Pentagon’s environmental program told Newsweek that her office has to contend with 39,000 contaminated areas spread across 19 million acres just in the U.S. alone.

U.S. military bases, both domestic and foreign, consistently rank among some of the most polluted places in the world, as perchlorate and other components of jet and rocket fuel contaminate sources of drinking water, aquifers, and soil. Hundreds of military bases can be found on the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of Superfund sites, which qualify for clean-up grants from the government.

Almost 900 of the nearly 1,200 Superfund sites in the U.S. are abandoned military facilities or sites that otherwise support military needs, not counting the military bases themselves.

“Almost every military site in this country is seriously contaminated,” John D. Dingell, a retired Michigan congressman and war veteran, told Newsweek in 2014.

Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina is one such base. Lejeune’s contamination became widespread and even deadly after its groundwater was polluted with a sizable amount of carcinogens from 1953 to 1987.

However, it was not until this February that the government allowed those exposed to chemicals at Lejeune to make official compensation claims. Numerous bases abroad have also contaminated local drinking water supplies, most famously the Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa.

Between 1946 and 1958, the US tested 66 nuclear weapons near Bikini atoll. Populations living nearby in the Marshall Islands were exposed to measurable levels of radioactive fallout from these tests. (Map: National Cancer Institute)

In addition, the U.S., which has conducted more nuclear weapons tests than all other nations combined, is also responsible for the massive amount of radiation that continues to contaminate many islands in the Pacific Ocean. The Marshall Islands, where the U.S. dropped more than sixty nuclear weapons between 1946 and 1958, are a particularly notable example. Inhabitants of the Marshall Islands and nearby Guam continue to experience an exceedingly high rate of cancer.

The American Southwest was also the site of numerous nuclear weapons tests that contaminated large swaths of land. Navajo Indian reservations have been polluted by long-abandoned uranium mines where nuclear material was obtained by U.S. military contractors.

One of the most recent testaments to the U.S. military’s horrendous environmental record is Iraq. U.S. military action there has resulted in the desertification of 90 percent of Iraqi territory, crippling the country’s agricultural industry and forcing it to import more than 80 percent of its food. The U.S.’ use of depleted uranium in Iraq during the Gulf War also caused a massive environmental burden for Iraqis. In addition, the U.S. military’s policy of using open-air burn pits to dispose of waste from the 2003 invasion has caused a surge in cancer among U.S. servicemen and Iraqi civilians alike.

Effect of US’ use of depleted uranium in Iraq

While the U.S. military’s past environmental record suggests that its current policies are not sustainable, this has by no means dissuaded the U.S. military from openly planning future contamination of the environment through misguided waste disposal efforts. Last November, the U.S. Navy announced its plan to release 20,000 tons of environmental “stressors,” including heavy metals and explosives, into the coastal waters of the U.S. Pacific Northwest over the course of this year.

The plan, laid out in the Navy’s Northwest Training and Testing Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), fails to mention that these “stressors” are described by the EPA as known hazards, many of which are highly toxic at both acute and chronic levels.

The 20,000 tons of “stressors” mentioned in the EIS do not account for the additional 4.7 to 14 tons of “metals with potential toxicity” that the Navy plans to release annually, from now on, into inland waters along the Puget Sound in Washington state.

In response to concerns about these plans, a Navy spokeswoman said that heavy metals and even depleted uranium are no more dangerous than any other metal, a statement that represents a clear rejection of scientific fact. It seems that the very U.S. military operations meant to “keep Americans safe” come at a higher cost than most people realize – a cost that will be felt for generations to come both within the United States and abroad.

Palm oil monoculture is expanding in the “Montes de María” mountains in Colombia, generating protests among communities who are left without lands.

Today it is almost impossible to see a jaguar in Montes de María, an environment where the jungle has been felled and which is now dominated by monocultures, such as teak or oil palm. The feline king of the American jungles, which was deified by indigenous peoples and became a problem for European conquerors, is, however, still present in each of the cultural expressions in this region of the Colombian Caribbean. Painted in murals, sung in songs or told in ancestral legends, the tiger, as it is known locally, is the central figure of the peculiar Montemarian culture. Legend has it that a sorcerer turned a hungry shepherd into a jaguar so he could eat the cow grazing in front of him. The only thing that the shepherd had to do to return to his human form was refrain from eating the animal’s heart, but the “shepherd tiger” couldn’t control himself and so his body has been forever struck in its animal form, and roams the mountains, roaring.

“Each one of us interprets the legend in our own way,” explains Manuel de la Rosa, a young musician of San Juan de Nepomuceno, a town nestled among forested mountains in the Montes de María. “With the onset of the war, many saw the jaguar as the guerrilla, there in the mountains, and its roar as the explosions characteristic of battles”, added Manuel, who was displaced by the conflict three years ago and currently lives in Bogotá.

No one knows the origins of the legend, although it could have a pre-Columbian origin or have even been introduced in the region by the numerous African slaves that settled there after fleeing their Spanish masters in the coastal cities. Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and mestizo populations make up a melting pot of the mountainous and jungle region of northern Colombia.

According to data from the Colombian government, close to a third of the population fled the region between 1998 and 2008.

In the 1980s the war that was spreading throughout the country between the guerrilla groups and the state arrived here to stay. Montes de María was the scene of several of the worst massacres committed during a war that reached unimaginable levels of brutality. According to Colombian government data, close to a third of the population fled the region between 1998 and 2008, leaving their villages at the mercy of the ghost of war. After the demobilisation of the paramilitaries and the retreat of the guerrillas a decade ago, the fighting, attacks and kidnapping stopped, and the displaced population started to return to Montes de María. But the region has been forever changed. Communities found themselves broken. The land has new owners and traditional crops like ñame (yam), cassava and banana have been replaced by a new coloniser: the African oil palm.

Monoculture as a consequence of the war

By the side of the road going from María la Baja to El Playón, the oil palm is the queen of the landscape, interrupted only by an enormous treatment plant. The small fruit product of this palm, which originated in Africa, is transformed into oil for culinary, cosmetic and industrial purposes. During the war, many displaced local peasants decided to sell their lands at any cost while they survived begging on the streets of Cartagena or Barranquilla. Others, having no access to bank credits, agreed to become partners with large agro-industrial companies –  like the ones that are part of Fedepalma – committing themselves to cultivate oil palm for the next 20 years. From the time of its creation this company ended up convincing many doubters by filling the gaps of a non-existent State in the region with the construction of schools and basic infrastructure. One way or another, the monoculture made its way to become practically the only form of agriculture in the area.

In the Afro-Colombian community of San Cristóbal a massacre was not needed to oblige 70% of the population to move away before death came to their homes.

“What we can see is that, through the armed conflict that was present, all the displacement had something hidden behind it all, which was land purchase on a massive scale”, said Luis [fictitious name], now spokesman for the San Cristóbal Community Council, who was a child at the time. In an interview in the main square of the municipality of San Jacinto.

He added:

“While we were leaving, others arrived, bought lands and stayed. We are reacting now and seeing who were the ones who came to our lands and the ones who murdered and displaced our people. There is a relationship.”

In the case of Montes de María it has not been possible to prove in court the direct relationship between the palm oil agro-industry and the displacements that occurred at the hands of paramilitaries groups, as it is the case in the Chocó, but it is interesting that massive land purchases by palm growers (“palmeros”) followed the massacres, displacements and emptying of the territory, similar to what happened in other parts of the country like Chocó and Catatumbo.

Oil palm, arguments for and against

At the beginning of last year, dead fish began to float in the Arroyo Grande dam, a few kilometres from María la Baja. The Colombian Institute of Rural Development (Incoder) took samples, but never determined the reason why the dead fish were piled up on the banks of the reservoir. For many inhabitants of the nearby villages, chemicals used in the palm monocultures were responsible. They also believe the same chemicals are causing the gastrointestinal and skin illnesses experienced by the communities, and they had no alternative sources of water.

Abel Mercado, manager of the palm oil processing plant in Mampuján, denies a relationship between Fedepalma activities and problems with water in the region.

“We must understand that this is a long-term project and we cannot just come and make problems for the communities. We must live in a harmonious way,” he explains.

For the palm entrepreneur “under the model of alliance with small producers all the elements in the production chain benefit, and the crops generate work for people”, though he does recognise that oil palm cultivation does not sufficiently compensate for the lack of food crops in economic and food sovereignty terms. To remedy this, Mercado assures his partners that they can include other types of crops other than oil palm on their lands, but currently there are thousands of uninterrupted hectares of only palm monoculture in María la Baja.

Grass-roots alternatives and resistance

As the road moves away from María la Baja and begins to go around the mountains in the direction of San Juan de Nepomuceno, the vast stretches of palm crops slowly disappear. In this transition area between oil palm plantations of the north and teakwood plantations of the south, peasants have been able to organise themselves into cooperatives and resist the advance of monocultures. Sixty-nine families have come together under an association called Asoagro to work in partnership on their lands and to create an economic project that is both respectful of their traditional forms of cultivation and economically viable. There, every farmer still owns his land, while the community has to give its approval for the sale of a plot to a third party.

Local population blames chemicals used in monocultures as the cause of gastrointestinal and cutaneous diseases

“Grass-roots organisations like Asoagro have served as a protective shield to prevent land dispossession”, says Antonio [fictitious name], an Asoagro representative. “Logging companies have offered us a lot of money, but we don’t want it because the land gives us back much more than money when we work on it. I do not know what I could do with money, but I do know what I have to do with the land”.

The organisation, founded in 2004 by smallholder (campesino) victims of displacement, produces yams, cocoa, and honey, among other products; which now they are starting to export. It is one of the examples of grass-roots organisations emerging – and succeeding – in the area.

In the southern part of Montes de María lies La Esperanza, one of the few Zenu indigenous communities that still exists in the area. It has opted for community-managed tourism that respects the environment as an alternative to agribusiness.

“Teak and palm projects have been offered to us, but we have rejected them because we maintain our culture and our right to the environment, we live from nature,” explains the indigenous community leader (Captain) Isaías.

The Ecolosó ecotourism park, which includes a waterfall in the middle of a forested area, was approved this year despite the initial reluctance of some of the indigenous people to receive tourists in their region.

“It is a natural source, which can be damaged if used in excess, but we realise that if we properly manage it, we could improve the quality of life of the inhabitants and the visitors can take with them a very good image of the community once they are gone,” adds Julia, a representative of the indigenous Cabildo (council).

Cansona Hill (cerro de la Cansona), belonging to the municipality of Carmen de Bolívar, is one of the few points more than 1,000 metres above sea level in Montes de María. From its summit there is a panoramic view encompassing the Arroyo Grande dam, the beginning of the 11,000 hectares of the oil palm monocultures of María la Baja and, on a clear day, the Caribbean Sea and the city of Cartagena de Indias. On the top of the high mountain, young people like Steven, who is 24 years old, started to get organised in 2013 to try to prevent what was starting to look as a second wave of displacement after the one caused by the war.

“With the monoculture, we are going to be displaced again because we are running out of land, and a campesino without land is not a campesino. Our identity is to sow”, explains Steven, member of the group ‘Youngsters Who Make Peace Happen’.

The monoculture has not yet arrived in this upland area as it has done at the foot of the mountains. Steven attributes this to greater organisation and peasant consciousness, like in San Juan or with the indigenous people of Esperanza.

“The difference is that the María la Baja area is not organised, so we got together and submitted a proposal of different grass-roots organisations stating that we didn’t want palm. They saw that we were organised and stopped asking,” he said.

In the majority of cases, however, resistance from the bottom up collides with public policies functionally articulated with the interests of the private sector. People claim a place to live and eat, and the palm provides neither of them. Meanwhile, traditional forms of cultivation, respectful of the environment and guarantor of at least a minimum of food sovereignty, are receding together with ancestral cultures. The Montemarian jaguar seems condemned to disappear entirely in the face of expansive agricultural methods.

Surrounded by oil palm crops, the rural settlement (“vereda”) of Mampuján, in María la Baja, is an island of resistance against the advance of monoculture. Its roads are not paved and almost all the houses are half finished. Inside Carlos’s house, a “campesino” who was displaced during the conflict along with 1,400 more people, explains why they continue to resist, against wind and tide, like a jaguar that defends its territory. “When we work in the field, the sun is very strong, very hot. And we know that if we leave the machete and go in the shade, the others will go in the shade too. Therefore, we continue with the machete, working, even if the sun is overpowering. Somehow, we resist so others resist too.”

Paula Álvarez is an independent researcher in the conflict surrounding the cultivation of oil palm in María la Baja.

On Tuesday, the Syrian Army and the National Defense Forces (NDF) captured two small villages near the recently liberated Jirah Military Airbase in the province of Aleppo. The army and the NDF took control of Bayloneh and Jarrah Sagir located west of the airbase at the road heading to the town of Tabqah. Government forces liberated the Jirah Military Base from ISIS last weekend. Since then, they have been preparing for further advances against ISIS terrorists in the province.

Israeli Housing and Construction Minister Yoav Galant has called to assassinate Syrian President Bashar Assad. Galant made the statement speaking at a conference outside Jerusalem amid the recent US allegations that Syrian security forces were conducting mass executions and were burning the bodies of the “victims.” He called that Assad’s alleged actions are a “genocide” with “hundreds of thousands killed.”

Earlier this month, the US State Department accused the Syrian government of carrying out mass killings of thousands of prisoners and burning the bodies in a large crematorium outside Damascus. Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary for the State Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, gave reporters some “declassified” satellite pictures allegedly showing a building in the prison complex that has been allegedly modified to support the crematorium. However, even some mainstream media outlets doubted that the provided imagery can confirm the state department allegations.

In April, US President Donald Trump ordered a missile strike against an Syrian air force airfield that US intelligence believes was used to carry out an April 4 chemical attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in the province of Idlib. However, the Trump administration has failed to provide any solid evidence that the Syrian military was behind the attack.

The new accusations against the Damascus government appeared amid a start of the new round of the peace talks in Geneva. According to reports, the government and the so-called opposition was set to discuss political transition, new constitution, elections and combating terrorism. Unfortunately, it is not clear how it’s possible to discuss combating terrorism with representatives of the opposition that directly cooperates with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and other terrorist groups as well as has al-Qaeda-style political program. Last weekend, President Assad said that “nothing substantial” would come out of the summit, which was “merely a meeting for the media”.

All real progress in decreasing violence in the country was achieved in the Astana format, that includes Syria, Iran, Russia and Turkey with some representatives of militant groups influenced by Ankara. The recent safe zones deal that is now works across the country is an example of this progress.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), backed up by the US-led coalition’s airpower, artillery and military advisers, made more gains against ISIS in the Raqqah countryside. SDF units took control of the villages of al-Jaif, Dahr al-Abdul and Badr and advanced on Mazraat al-Andalus and Hamrat Buwaytiyah in an attempt to further isolate the ISIS self-proclaimed capital.

Meanwhile, the vicinity of Raqqah has been flooded with watter from the Tabqah dam recently captured by the SDF. The SDF argue that ISIS has used irrigation channels (linked with the dam) to do this and to blame the US-backed force for a humanitarian crisis in the city. ISIS reported that the SDF did this by itself in order to flood ISIS underground tunnels in the area. The terrorist group is going to use this network during the battle for Raqqah.

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Environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason has just written an open letter to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) Director of Risk Management Jack de Bruijn. In the letter, which cites numerous sources to support her arguments, Mason says evidence now suggests taxpayers’ money has been used to shield Monsanto and other pesticides companies from liability and obstruct consumers’ ability to prove damages.

Such an allegation might not come as much as a surprise for those who are already familiar with Mason’s work. In the various open letters she has written to officials over the years, she has supplied pages of evidence to show how key figures and regulators have colluded with the industry to frame policies that support the bottom line of agrochemical companies to the detriment of human health and the environment.

In discussing the well-documented (by Mason in particular) fraud surrounding the (lack of) regulation of glyphosate (key active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup), she says to de Bruijn:

“The European Commission is clearly part of this glyphosate conspiracy. In that case, I have to reluctantly accept that ECHA must be an accessory to it.”

Mason (picture on the right) notes that the ECHA Risk Assessment Committee (RAC) does not classify glyphosate as a carcinogen, contrary to what the World Health Organization has suggested is the case; however, in her letter she offers evidence to show that glyphosate is not only toxic to humans but to aquatic life with long-lasting effects. She therefore asks de Bruijn:

“How can the BfR [German Federal for Risk Assessment – Rapporteur Member State for glyphosate assessment] , EFSA and the EU Commission re-authorize a chemical with such widespread use that is toxic to aquatic life?”

Glyphosate, agrochemicals and the impact on biodiversity

Jack de Bruijn is presented with evidence highlighting invertebrate declines in Welsh rivers in 2016 of which agricultural run-off plays a major part. Aside from the effects of glyphosate, Mason also draws attention to other chemicals and substances, such as neonicotinoid pesticides, nanoparticles and pharmaceuticals, on water quality and ecology.

Neonicotinoids cause virtually irreversible blockage of postsynaptic nicotinergic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) in the central nervous systems of insects. They also poison aquatic invertebrates, fish and birds.

Thanks to pollution, salmon and sea trout are already at critically low levels in certain Welsh waterways (Mason resides in Wales). A spokesman for Natural Resources Wales says the situation is approaching crisis point.

Mason then asks: Where have all the insects gone?

She refers de Bruijn to a study that shows a massive decline in insect abundance at more than 100 nature reserves in western Europe since the 1980s. It seems that grassland treated with herbicides and pesticide-coated seeds are a serious factor in this.

Agencies colluding with industry’s ‘crimes against humanity’

Jack de Bruijn is then informed about the findings of the five judges of the Monsanto Tribunal who agreed that Monsanto has violated human rights to food, health, a healthy environment and the freedom indispensable for independent scientific research. The judges also opined that ecocide should be recognised as a crime in international law and that human rights and environmental laws are undermined by corporate-friendly trade and investment regulation.

In an opinion issued on the 15th of March 2017 and related to the classification of glyphosate, the ECHA estimated that this product could not be classified as a carcinogen, as a mutagen or as toxic for reproduction. However, the Tribunal stressed that this classification does not take into account the risks of exposure, with residues found in food, drinking water and even in human urine.

Mason asks de Bruijn:

“Why did ECHA RAC conclude that the available scientific evidence did not meet the criteria to classify glyphosate as toxic to reproduction?”

Mason goes on to highlight how credible research is sidelined to come up with decisions that would be to the liking of Monsanto.

She says:

“When carrying out the Renewal Assessment Report for glyphosate, BfR committed far more crimes against humanity than just scientific fraud: they intentionally allowed GTF [Glyphosate Task Force] to delete many papers worldwide that showed that glyphosate caused birth defects and cancers, and those that provided evidence of bioaccumulation.”

“BfR eliminated the work that Monsanto feared the most (apart from the rat feeding studies of Séralini and his colleagues that were reported by EFSA and Monsanto to be fraudulent) was that by Prof Andrés Carrasco and his team in Buenos Aires that showed that glyphosate caused malformations in amphibian and chicken embryos.”

De Bruijn is made aware that in 2015 the German government summoned Prof Dr Andreas Hensel (President of BfR) before the Committee on Agriculture and Food and accused BfR of scientific fraud by using GTF statistics. BfR stands “accused of endangering the population” and also of “intentional falsification of the content of scientific studies”.

Mason notes the statistical dodge employed by the German authorities to defend glyphosate was the subject of an explosive in-depth news report that aired on German TV last October (2015) in the midst of deliberations by EU authorities on whether to re-authorize the chemical.

Do we want to replicate the devastation in South America?

In addition to having described the devastating effects of agrochemicals in the UK and Europe in her various highly-detailed and fully-referenced documents, Mason informs de Bruijn about the trail of disasters to human health and the environment that has followed the planting of GM maize and Roundup Ready crops in both Latin America and the US since they were first grown in 1996.

Mason asks whether we want to ignore research (like Seralini’s, for instance) just because it offends the industry and thus end up with similar disasters in Europe?

Over the last 20 years, industrial agriculture in Argentina has expanded by almost 50%, taking over regions intended for other production, including forests. Mason notes that more and more children are being born with defects in these areas, especially if the first months of pregnancy coincide with the time of spraying. Down’s syndrome, spina bifida, myelo-meningocele (neural tube defect), congenital heart disease, etc. are diagnosed more frequently in those areas; in some towns and during some years, at triple the normal rates, and directly linked to increased pesticide applications around the towns.

Mason refers to a report that says the model of agricultural production foisted on Argentina by international biotechnology companies has led to an 858% increase in the amount of pesticides used per year. Glyphosate is the most commonly used toxic agrochemical in Argentina, comprising 64% of total sales, and 200 million litres of glyphosate were applied during the last crop season.

Data is presented showing the rise in birth defects correlates with the rise in cultivation of GM glyphosate-tolerant soybeans in Chaco, Argentina. Birth defects per 10 000 live births increased from approx. 15/10,000 live births in 1997 to approx. 82/10,000 live births in 2008.

The point is that the very agrochemicals sector that is causing so much devastation elsewhere is the same sector that agencies or committees in Europe appear so keen to jump into bed with. A sector containing companies like Monsanto, which has more than 50 lawsuits against it in US District Court in San Francisco, filed by people alleging that exposure to Roundup herbicide caused them or their loved ones to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that Monsanto covered up the risks.

Mason also draws de Bruin’s attention to various documents which incriminate Monsanto in ‘ghostwriting’ documents and hiring academics to sign them.

Industry is “paralysing global pesticide restrictions”

In the Report presented to UN Human Rights Council about the Right to Food, Global Agricultural Corporations are severely criticised by Hilal Elver, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food. Mason informs de Bruijn that this recent report is severely critical of the global corporations that manufacture pesticides, accusing them of the “systematic denial of harms,” “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and heavy lobbying of governments which has “obstructed reforms and paralysed global pesticide restrictions.”

The report authored by Elver and co-authored by Baskut Tuncak, the UN’s special rapporteur on toxins, says pesticides have “catastrophic impacts on the environment, human health and society as a whole,” including an estimated 200,000 deaths a year from acute poisoning. The authors say:

“It is time to create a global process to transition toward safer and healthier food and agricultural production.”

The report states:

“Chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility.”

Although the pesticide industry argues that its products are vital for protecting crops and ensuring sufficient food supplies, Elver says “It is a myth.”

Elver adds that using more pesticides is nothing to do with getting rid of hunger. She argues that, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), we are able to feed nine billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but she says that the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.

Is the ECHA fit for purpose?

According to its website, the ECHA’s mission statement is as follows:

“ECHA is the driving force among regulatory authorities in implementing the EU’s groundbreaking chemicals legislation for the benefit of human health and the environment as well as for innovation and competitiveness. ECHA helps companies to comply with the legislation, advances the safe use of chemicals, provides information on chemicals and addresses chemicals of concern.”

Is the ECHA really up to the job? Or is “groundbreaking legislation… for innovation and competitiveness” a euphemism for kowtowing to the commercial interests of the industry?

Behind the public relations spin of the transnational agrochemicals and agrotechnology sector is the roll-out of a wholly unsustainable model of agriculture based on highly profitable corporate seeds and health- and environment-damaging proprietary chemical inputs.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Numerous high-level reports have suggested that organic farming and agroecology could form the mainstay of agriculture if they were accorded sufficient attention and investment. Unfortunately, big agribusiness players, armed with their chemicals or GMOs seek to marginalise effective solutions which threaten their markets and interests.

It is one thing to challenge the actions of these players, but it is another thing entirely for agencies to gain acceptance from corporations and by implication become a de facto compliant partner.

The report by Elver and Tuncak states:

“While scientific research confirms the adverse effects of pesticides, proving a definitive link between exposure and human diseases or conditions or harm to the ecosystem presents a considerable challenge. This challenge has been exacerbated by a systematic denial, fuelled by the pesticide and agro-industry, of the magnitude of the damage inflicted by these chemicals, and aggressive, unethical marketing tactics.”

Elver says:

“The power of the corporations over governments and over the scientific community is extremely important. If you want to deal with pesticides, you have to deal with the companies.”

The report recommends a move towards a global treaty to govern the use of pesticides and a shift to sustainable practice based on natural methods of suppressing pests and crop rotation and organically produced food.

Agrochemicals are fueling disease and environmental destruction across the world and corporations need to be properly held account for their crimes and charges laid against them in an international court of law.

It must be hoped that officials pay attention to Hilal and Tuncak as well as numerous other high-level reports that have advocated a shift towards more ecologically sound models of agriculture.

And let us hope too that they also pay serious attention to the findings of the Monsanto Tribunal and the legal cases pending against Monsanto at this time. Whether politicians, bureaucrats, other senior figures or scientists-cum-lobbyists for the industry, those who collude with corporations to facilitate ecocide and human rights abuses could one day be made to answer for their actions in a court of law.

On the eve of another round of Geneva VI talks, large western news agencies BBC and the AP referring to the State Department published accusations of Damascus of tortures and murders of political prisoners.

The published pieces include the words of Stuart E. Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, and two satellite images, which were taken in.

January, 2015, of the Sednaya prison near Damascus.

According to Jones, the building has been allegedly used by the Syrian authorities to burn the bodies of prisoners died of tortures and inhumane treatment.

As a proof, the U.S. brought the ‘evidence’ of some international organizations and NGOs including Amnesty International which claims 50 prisoners get killed per day.

However, the report of the ‘human right’ organization was fabricated in London using a technology claimed to be ‘forensic architecture’. Such a method is about substituting facts, physical, photo and video proofs with animation and sound effects created by designers.

In other words all Amnesty’s findings were in fact fabricated. They have nothing in common with the information inside Syria what could confirm tortures and murders. It looks like designing the latest generation of horror computer games or films. People who don’t always have much to say, and can’t write.

The American ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, came up to comment on the situation immediately. As if on command, she accused the Syrian government of crimes against humanity while placing some responsibility on Syria’s allies. Such shows are quite efficiently used by western states to torpedo or complicate a process of peaceful settlement.

Yet another ‘sensational’ and ‘unclassified’ disclosure by the U.S. of alleged mass executions in Syria and bodies burned in a crematorium are dubious and aimed at undermining the settlement process. It isn’t an accident that such accusations are published on the eve of Geneva VI negotiations.

Now, when the talks in Geneva without the U.S. side are seen to become fruitful Washington is attempting to exploit the media to turn the world’s attention to ‘Assad’s regime’. Bashar Assad’s opponents need any reason and pretext discrediting the Syrian government to sabotage the peace process.

Such U.S. actions are quite an obstacle on the way to peace in Syria. The conflict parties have shown that they are ready to find a solution of the crisis and to put an end to the terrible war. The positive results of the Astana talks gave impetus to Geneva-6. However, instead of backing the process, the U.S. decided to once again groundlessly blame the Syrian government.

Sophie Mangal is a special investigative correspondent and co-editor at Inside Syria Media Center.

May 15^th-19^th has been designated “National Infrastructure Week” by the US Chambers of Commerce, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and over 150 affiliates. Their message: “It’s time to rebuild.” Ever since ASCE began issuing its “National Infrastructure Report Card” in 1998, the nation has gotten a dismal grade of D or D+. In the meantime, the estimated cost of fixing its infrastructure has gone up from $1.3 trillion to $4.6 trillion.

While American politicians debate endlessly over how to finance the needed fixes and which ones to implement, the Chinese have managed to fund massive infrastructure projects all across their country, including 12,000 miles of high-speed rail built just in the last decade. How have they done it, and why can’t we?

A key difference between China and the US is that the Chinese government owns the majority of its banks. About 40% of the funding for its giant railway project comes from bonds issued by the Ministry of Railway, 10-20% comes from provincial and local governments, and the remaining 40-50% is provided by loans from federally-owned banks and financial institutions. Like private banks, state-owned banks simply create money as credit on their books. (More on this below.) The difference is that they return their profits to the government, making the loans interest-free; and the loans can be rolled over indefinitely. In effect, the Chinese government decides what work it wants done, draws on its own national credit card, pays Chinese workers to do it, and repays the loans with the proceeds.

The US government could do that too, without raising taxes, slashing services, cutting pensions, or privatizing industries. How this could be done quickly and cheaply will be considered here, after a look at the funding proposals currently on the table and at why they are not satisfactory solutions to the nation’s growing infrastructure deficit.

The Endless Debate over Funding and the Relentless Push to Privatize

 In a May 15, 2017, report on In the Public Interest, the debate taking shape heading into National Infrastructure Week was summarized like this:

The Trump administration, road privatization industry, and a broad mix of congressional leaders are keen on ramping up a large private financing component (under the marketing rubric of ‘public-private partnerships’), but have not yet reached full agreement on what the proportion should be between tax breaks and new public money—and where that money would come from. Over 500 projects are being pitched to the White House. . . .

Democrats have had a full plan on the table since January, advocating for new federal funding and a program of infrastructure renewal spread through a broad range of sectors and regions. And last week, a coalition of right wing, Koch-backed groups led by Freedom Partners . . .  released a letter encouraging Congress “to prioritize fiscal responsibility” and focus instead on slashing public transportation, splitting up transportation policy into the individual states, and eliminating labor and environmental protections (i.e., gutting the permitting process). They attacked the idea of a national infrastructure bank and . . . targeted the most important proposal of the Trump administration . . . —to finance new infrastructure by tax reform to enable repatriation of overseas corporate revenues . . . .

In a November 2014 editorial titled “How Two Billionaires Are Destroying High Speed Rail in America,” author Julie Doubleday observed that the US push against public mass transit has been led by a think tank called the Reason Foundation, which is funded by the Koch brothers. Their $44 billion fortune comes largely from Koch Industries, an oil and gas conglomerate with a vested interest in mass transit’s competitors, those single-rider vehicles using the roads that are heavily subsidized by the federal government.

Clearly, not all Republicans are opposed to funding infrastructure, since Donald Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan was a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, and his Republican base voted him into office. But “establishment Republicans” have traditionally opposed infrastructure spending. Why? According to a May 15, 2015 article in Daily Kos titled “Why Do Republicans Really Oppose Infrastructure Spending?”:

Republicans – at the behest of their mega-bank/private equity patrons – really, deeply want to privatize the nation’s infrastructure and turn such public resources into privately owned, profit centers.  More than anything else, this privatization fetish explains Republicans’ efforts to gut and discredit public infrastructure  . . . .

If the goal is to privatize and monetize public assets, the last thing Republicans are going to do is fund and maintain public confidence in such assets. Rather, when private equity wants to acquire something, the typical playbook is to first make sure that such assets are what is known as “distressed assets” (i.e., cheaper to buy).

A similar argument was advanced by Noam Chomsky in a 2011 lecture titled “The State-Corporate Complex: A Threat to Freedom and Survival”. He said:

[T]here is a standard technique of privatization, namely defund what you want to privatize. Like when Thatcher wanted to [privatize] the railroads, first thing to do is defund them, then they don’t work and people get angry and they want a change. You say okay, privatize them . . . .

What’s Wrong with Public-Private Partnerships?

Privatization (or “asset relocation” as it is sometimes euphemistically called) means selling public utilities to private equity investors, who then rent them back to the public, squeezing their profits from high user fees and tolls. Private equity investment now generates an average return of about 11.8 percent annually on a ten-year basis. That puts the cost to the public of financing $1 trillion in infrastructure projects over 10 years at around $1.18 trillion, more than doubling the cost. Moving assets off the government’s balance sheet by privatizing them looks attractive to politicians concerned with this year’s bottom line, but it’s a bad deal for the public. Decades from now, people will still be paying higher tolls for the sake of Wall Street profits on an asset that could have belonged to them all along.

One example is the Dulles Greenway, a toll road outside Washington, D.C., nicknamed the “Champagne Highway” due to its extraordinarily high rates and severe underutilization in a region crippled by chronic traffic problems. Local (mostly Republican) officials have tried in vain for years to either force the private owners to lower the toll rates or have the state take the road into public ownership. In 2014, the private operators of the Indiana Toll Road, one of the best-known public-private partnerships (PPPs), filed for bankruptcy after demand dropped, due at least in part to rising toll rates. Other high-profile PPP bankruptcies have occurred in San Diego, CA; Richmond, VA; and Texas.

Countering the dogma that “private companies can always do it better and cheaper,” studies have found that on average, private contractors charge more than twice as much as the government would have paid federal workers for the same job. A 2011 report by the Brookings Institution found that “in practice [PPPs] have been dogged by contract design problems, waste, and unrealistic expectations.” In their 2015 report “Why Public-Private Partnerships Don’t Work,” Public Services International stated that

“[E]xperience over the last 15 years shows that PPPs are an expensive and inefficient way of financing infrastructure and divert government spending away from other public services. They conceal public borrowing, while providing long-term state guarantees for profits to private companies.”

They also divert public money away from the neediest infrastructure projects, which may not deliver sizable returns, in favor of those big-ticket items that will deliver hefty profits to investors.

A Better Way to Design an Infrastructure Bank

The Trump team has also reportedly discussed the possibility of an infrastructure bank, but that proposal faces similar hurdles. The details of the proposal are as yet unknown, but past conceptions of an infrastructure bank envision a quasi-bank (not a physical, deposit-taking institution) seeded by the federal government, possibly from taxes on the repatriation of offshore corporate profits. The bank would issue bonds, tax credits, and loan guarantees to state and local governments to leverage private sector investment. As with the private equity proposal, an infrastructure bank would rely on public-private partnerships and investors who would be disinclined to invest in projects that did not generate hefty returns. And those returns would again be paid by the public in the form of tolls, fees, higher rates, and payments from state and local governments.

There is another way to set up a publicly-owned bank. Today’s infrastructure banks are basically revolving funds. A dollar invested is a dollar lent, which must return to the bank (with interest) before it can be lent again. A chartered depository bank, on the other hand, can turn a one-dollar investment into ten dollars in loans. It can do this because depository banks actually create deposits when they make loans. This was acknowledged by economists both at the Bank of England (in a March 2014 paper entitled “Money Creation in the Modern Economy”) and at the Bundesbank (the German central bank) in an April 2017 report.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, money is not fixed and scarce. It is “elastic”: it is created when loans are made and extinguished when they are paid off. The Bank of England report said that private banks create nearly 97 percent of the money supply today. Borrowing from banks (rather than the bond market) expands the circulating money supply. This is something the Federal Reserve tried but failed to do with its quantitative easing (QE) policies: stimulate the economy by expanding the bank lending that expands the money supply.

The stellar (and only) model of a publicly-owned depository bank in the United States is the Bank of North Dakota (BND). It holds all of its home state’s revenues as deposits by law, acting as a sort of “mini-Fed” for North Dakota. According to reports, the BND is more profitable even than Goldman Sachs, has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase, and has seen solid profit growth for almost 15 years. The BND continued to report record profits after two years of oil bust in the state, suggesting that it is highly profitable on its own merits because of its business model. The BND does not pay bonuses, fees, or commissions; has no high paid executives; does not speculate on risky derivatives; does not have multiple branches; does not need to advertise; and does not have private shareholders seeking short-term profits. The profits return to the bank, which distributes them as dividends to the state.

The federal government could set up a bank on a similar model. It has massive revenues, which it could leverage into credit for its own purposes. Since financing is typically about 50 percent of the cost of infrastructure, the government could cut infrastructure costs in half by borrowing from its own bank. Public-private partnerships are a good deal for investors but a bad deal for the public. The federal government can generate its own credit without private financial middlemen. That is how China does it, and we can too.

For more detail on this and other ways to solve the infrastructure problem without raising taxes,  slashing services, or privatizing public assets, see Ellen Brown, “Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure,”a policy brief for the Next System Project, March 2017.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, a Senior Fellow of the Democracy Collaborative, and author of twelve books including Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

Can cute Canadian Caribbean dreams about enchanted islands come true? Or is reality more complicated and Canada a far less benign actor than we imagine ourselves to be?

In a recent Boston Globe opinion titled “Haiti should relinquish its sovereignty”, Boston College professor Richard Albert writes,

“the new Haitian Constitution should do something virtually unprecedented: renounce the power of self-governance and assign it for a term of years, say 50, to a country that can be trusted to act in Haiti’s long-term interests.”

According to the Canadian constitutional law professor his native land, which Albert calls “one of Haiti’s most loyal friends”, should administer the Caribbean island nation.

Over the past 15 years prominent Canadian voices have repeatedly promoted “protectorate status” for Haiti. On January 31 and February 1, 2003, Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government organized the “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti” to discuss that country’s future. No Haitian officials were invited to this assembly where high-level US, Canadian and French officials decided that Haiti’s elected president “must go” and that the country would be put under a Kosovo-like UN trusteeship.

Four months after Ottawa helped overthrow Haiti’s elected government Prime Minister Paul Martin reaffirmed his government’s desire to keep Haiti under long-term foreign control.

“Fragile states often require military intervention to restore stability”, said Martin at a private meeting of “media moguls” in Idaho. Bemoaning what he considered the short-term nature of a previous intervention, the prime minister declared “this time, we have got to stay [in Haiti] until the job is done properly.”

A few months later a government-funded think tank, home to key Haiti policy strategists, elaborated a detailed plan for foreigners to run the country. According to the Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL) plan for Haiti’s future, commissioned by Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, the country’s different ministries would fall under Canadian oversight. Québec’s ministry of education, for instance, would oversee Haiti’s education system. The FOCAL plan put Haiti’s environment ministry under Canadian federal government supervision.

FOCAL’s proposal was made after the 2004 US/France/Canada coup weakened Haiti’s democratic institutions and social safety network, spurring thousands of violent deaths and a UN occupation that later introduced cholera to the country. Irrespective of the impact of foreign intervention, colonialists’ solution to Haiti’s problems is to further undermine Haitian sovereignty.

Haiti is but one piece of the Caribbean that Canadians’ have sought to rule. Earlier this year NDP MP Erin Weir asked if Canada should incorporate “the Turks and Caicos Islands into Confederation.” Weir echoed an idea promoted by NDP MP Max Saltzman in the 1970s, Conservative MP Peter Goldring through the 2000s and an NDP riding association three years ago. A resolution submitted to the party’s 2014 convention noted,

“New Democrats Believe in: Engaging with the peoples and government of Turks and Caicos Islands, and the British government to have the Turks and Caicos Islands become Canada’s 11th Province.”

As I discuss in the current issue of Canadian Dimension magazine, leftists have long supported the expansion of Canadian power in the region.

In a 300-page thesis titled “Dreams of a Tropical Canada: Race, Nation, and Canadian Aspirations in the Caribbean Basin, 1883-1919” Paula Pears Hastings outlines the campaign to annex territory in the region.

“Canadians of varying backgrounds campaigned vigorously for Canada-West Indies union”, writes Hastings. “Their aspirations were very much inspired by a Canadian national project, a vision of a ‘Greater Canada’ that included the West Indies.”

Canada’s sizable financial sector in the region played an important part in these efforts. In Towers of Gold, Feet of Clay: The Canadian Banks, Walter Stewart notes:

“The business was so profitable that in 1919 Canada seriously considered taking the Commonwealth Caribbean off mother England’s hands.”

At the end of World War I Ottawa asked the Imperial War Cabinet if it could take possession of the British West Indies as compensation for Canada’s defence of the empire. London balked. Ottawa was unsuccessful in securing the British Caribbean partly because the request did not find unanimous domestic support. Prime Minister Robert Borden was of two minds on the issue. From London he dispatched a cable noting,

“the responsibilities of governing subject races would probably exercise a broadening influence upon our people as the dominion thus constituted would closely resemble in its problems and its duties the empire as a whole.”

But, on the other hand, Borden feared that the Caribbean’s black population might want to vote. He remarked upon

“the difficulty of dealing with the coloured population, who would probably be more restless under Canadian law than under British control and would desire and perhaps insist upon representation in Parliament.”

Proposing Canada acquire Turks and Caicos or rule Haiti may be outlandish, but it’s not benign. These suggestions ignore Caribbean history, foreign influence in the region and whitewash the harm Ottawa has caused there. Even worse, they enable politicians’ to pursue ever more aggressive policies in the region.

Yves Engler is the author of A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Canada in Africa: 300 years of aid and exploitation. Read other articles by Yves.

“Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved” –Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“In this frightful round of unchecked means, nobody knows any longer where they are going, purposes are forgotten, and ends are overtaken.  Human beings have set off at astronomically high speeds toward nowhere.” –Jacques Ellul, Presence in the Modern World

In a previous article, I argued that those who think science can solve our major social problems – in particular, world destruction with nuclear weapons and the poisoning of the earth’s ecology and atmosphere – were delusional and in the grip of the myth of science and technology. These problems were created by science when it became untethered from any sense of limits in its embrace of instrumental rationality. Once it became wedded to usefulness and the efficiency of technical means, it lost its original aim: the search for truth. (Obviously this doesn’t include all scientists.) In embracing means as ends, it produced an endless loop of means justifying means that has resulted in what Weber called an “iron cage.” Concomitantly, the ideology of pure objectivity and impartial innocence was joined to elite state power and the capitalist profit motive where it was supported and instantaneously and completely applied to technical applications, including nuclear, biological, chemical and “conventional”weapons;bio-engineering; GMO foods and people; eugenics and cloning;  and chemical/oil production, etc.  It is indisputable that if our planet is incinerated or slowly destroyed through toxic pollution that modern science with its Faustian “prohibition to prohibit” will stand indicted, if anyone is left to make the case.

Albert Camus warned us long ago:

And even though we do it in diverse ways, we extol one thing and one alone: a future world in which reason will reign supreme.  In our madness, we push back the eternal limits, and at once dark Furies swoop down upon us to destroy. Nemesis, goddess of moderation, not of vengeance, is watching.  She chastises, ruthlessly, all those who go beyond the limit.

Ostensibly rational, the illogical logic of modern science has resulted in a mystifying double-bind that denies human freedom and leads to widespread despair and hopelessness. Many people feel trapped by this deterministic ethos, while others fail to see that the cause of our problems can’t be their solutions.

In this essay, I will explore the possibility of a path out of the seeming impossibility of escaping the cul-de-sac of our spiritually disinherited and disenchanted condition.

Max Weber argued that modern rational capitalism was informed by a religious impetus of inner-directed worldly asceticism derived from Protestant Christianity. In essence, modern capitalism was a religion. Likewise, modern mainstream science, despite the discoveries of quantum physics, rests upon a materialistic presupposition that is a self-contradictory act of faith that it denies to others. Committed to determinism, this materialistic scientific world view offers no basis for its truth claim since what is determined cannot be disputed when it wasn’t freely chosen.To espouse a position that was predetermined is to choose nothing. In essence, such science is also a religion that, like capitalism, serves no end but its own regeneration.

Is it any wonder that so many people feel trapped on an endless merry-go-round that contradicts their felt experience and their hopes for a better world? They look around and see a mad world of war and lies and science run amok. The physical scientists tell them that everything started with a bang and will end with a bang or a whimper of one sort or another and that’s how it goes since when did people so puny think they were anything but specks in a vast cosmos of meaningless gas that will devour them in a few billion years, give or take a year or so. The psych folks tell them they are the products of their brain chemicals and neurotransmitters and must submit “freely” to chemical treatment if they know what’s good for them and want to be happy. The social scientists insist that all knowledge is socially conditioned and relative and therefore everything they think and feel is also relative and so they are lost souls forever wandering in a world of relativity where true wisdom is impossible and the difference between right and wrong is a relative choice that has no basis in any “reality.” And of course the power elites and media play with their minds in endless games of mind control as they insist the only real truth comes through screens that they control. Mind and body warped, so many people stumble through their days like the living dead in search of some exit from their pain and confusion.

Or to say it differently. Science – both physical and social – has resulted in the systemization of doubt and the embrace of the relativity of thought and knowledge. The modern predicament is such that whereas in former times people felt that their knowledge was fact or truth and that it was  grounded in a physically palpable reality, we have been exposed to systematic doubt and the suspicion has grown that all the various standpoints are limited and “relative.”  While not consciously espoused by the majority of people, this doubting worldview permeates social life as a vague insecurity and uncertainty. It may be left to intellectuals to circulate such relativizing ideas, but they have become part of the cultural air we breathe. For people today in a scientifically based society, faced with the relativizing of all knowledge and every eternal verity, the question of how to understand their deaths, and thus their lives, has become acutely problematic.  Uncertainty has undermined people’s wills as they have forgotten they are free.

The question that modernity forces us to ask is this: once knowledge is seen to be relative; old cosmologies are transformed by science; symbol systems and religions are seen as the products of humans’ own creativity; reality is understood to be socially constructed; once these developments take place consciously and unconsciously, how then can people understand their lives and deaths and find the confidence to live in peace and harmony with the earth and all living creatures?

Tolstoy put it this way:

“Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ ”

In order to make our way out of this maze, we might contemplate the underlying presupposition that “everything is relative.” That, of course is an absurd position. Everything can’t be relative when the statement “everything is relative” is an absolute statement. Joined to that, one can muse on the self-contradiction of materialistic determinism and perhaps glimpse an escape from the iron cage, the prison, the closed room, the garbage pail, or the no-exit -so many terms that our best writers have used to describe the modern condition.

Rudolf Steiner did that as follows in The Philosophy of Freedom:

Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of the world. For every attempt at an explanation must begin with the formation of thoughts about the phenomena of the world. Materialism, thus, begins with the thought of Matter or material processes. But, in doing so, it is ipso factoconfronted by two different sets of facts, viz., the material world and the thought about it. The materialist seeks to make these latter intelligible by regarding them as purely material processes. He believe that thinking takes place in the brain, much in the same way that digestion takes place in the animal organs. Just as he ascribes mechanical, chemical, and organic processes to Nature, so he credits her in certain circumstances with the capacity to think. He overlooks that, in doing so, he is merely shifting the problem from one place to another. Instead of to himself he ascribes the power of thought to Matter. And thus he is back again at his starting-point. How does Matter come to think of its own nature?

But these are intellectual exercises and are therefore probably not very helpful to the average person.

Tolstoy maintained that for the modern person death had no meaning because civilization was based on progress – an ‘infinite’ progress – which according to its own internal logic should never come to an end.

On this road of progressiveness everything is provisional and indefinite and so individual death seems like a failure and meaningless because it marks an end. But what then, asked Tolstoy, is the meaning to our lives? Are they meaningless means to meaningless ends?

Materialistic science can only answer in the affirmative. A negative affirmative.But for most people this doesn’t satisfy. They sense the truth that we live by faith – scientists do, religious believers do, atheists do, agnostics do, everyone does – faith is the water we swim in; it is our element. It is what impels us to get out of bed in the morning.  But getting out of bed in the morning is a choice, a judgment. It is not inevitable.  We do it in faith that the day will be meaningful and worth meeting. We encounter others in good faith and hope they do the same with us. This awareness of the faith dimension of life is a daily human experience that points beyond itself and is a source of hope, even when confusion reigns. While modern science and philosophy have largely attempted to treat all things, including people, as objects to be controlled by subjects, most people encounter others in daily life not as Its, as in Buber’s I-It, but as Thous, as in I-Thou.

Where have I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? These are life’s basic questions that science answers with nowhere, no reason, and nowhere in that order. Such answers are attestations of of a faith in nothing, what is usually called nihilism.

The psychiatrist R.D. Laing maintained that the key to a sane world is for people to truly regain experiencing their experience and not to make-believe. He felt that most people had become estranged from the roots of their being.  He put it thus:

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves…. There is everything to suggest that man experienced God. Faith was never a matter of believing. He existed, but of trusting, in the presence that was experienced and known to exist as a self-validating datum. It seems likely that far more people in our time experience neither the presence of God, nor the presence of his absence, but the absence of his presence…. The fountain has not played itself out, the frame still shines, the river still flows, the spring still bubbles forth, the light has not faded. But between us and IT, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.

So what can we do to break through this mystification of experience that has resulted in a double-bind that has trapped us?

I say nothing, at first. We are so busy doing and thinking our doing is the solution to our problems. We must stop the world we know by first not doing and by simply being in the presence of Being. We must develop a contemplative discipline of allowing the awareness of our egocentric thinking to reveal to us the arrogance of our confused belief that we can coerce others and the natural world to do our bidding and that every problem has a solution. The grotesqueness of nuclear weapons is the physical manifestation of that willfulness. For the magician, the applied scientist, and the technologist all wish to conquer reality with techniques from the outside rather than being open to the truths that Reality (that we are in and is us and that goes by different names – Being, the Tao, Logos – all names for the unnameable) might reveal to us.

“To ‘know’ reality,” writes Alan Watts, “you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, feel it.” So the first thing we must “do” is to do nothing so we may heal our divided minds; otherwise we are spinning in a vicious circle, “like everything else which the divided mind attempts.”

This seems self-evident to me and “doing” this should be our first “act” of dissent – our break-out (by breaking in) – from the reigning consensus that underlies the violent and sick condition of the world today. James Douglass, author of the ground-breaking book, JFK and the Unspeakable, says this perfectly in Lightning East to West: Jesus, Gandhi, and the Nuclear Age:

What we know ‘out there’ as the most resistant evil reality to be transformed, is in reality “in here” in its primary being. The precise nature of that correspondence, or identity, between inner and outer worlds is the mystery which Jung was attempting to describe with his theory of Synchronicity, whereby outer events can be increasingly recognized as unifying correlations of a profoundly traveled inner way. Once webegin to see this profound interpenetration of inner and outer worlds in a oneness of reality, the insoluble enigma of the world of evil gives way to the edge of the unifying mystery of Oneness, or of Love, a mystery that we cannot fully understand but which we can in fact move into with our lives and participate in to the extent of experiencing an ever-more-united world in Reality.

I think if we can see the big picture by “doing nothing,” we will have taken a major step toward a solution, or at the least an insight into how we can act to resist the evil that is occurring in the world.

“Seeing through” is to diagnose – dia, through + gignoskein, to know, perceive – which can allow us to see through to the roots of world problems. Without a deep comprehension of the causes of these problems, and how so many of our solutions have failed because they are based on false premises, we will get nowhere.

“The way one sees through the situation changes the situation,” writes Laing.  Then, “as soon as we convey in any way…what we see or think we see, somechange is occurring even in the most rigid situation.”

I think we can agree that we are in a “most rigid situation” as the nuclear weapons await discharge, countries and people are destroyed by U. S. war-making, the environment is poisoned, elite capitalist crooks line their pockets at the expense of everyone else, etc. Many of us convey this again and again, seemingly to no avail. Perhaps this is because we are missing the forest for the trees in our understandable haste to remedy it all. I suspect this is so and scatter these thoughts like breadcrumbs in the hope they may suggest a way home. “Conveying” my thought experiments in the hope “some” change occurs in the process. First, in me.

The word spiritual has acquired a bad name with its embrace by New-Agers et al. with its association with magic and out of the world mumbo-jumbo. So I use it reservedly. But if we look to those so many hold in such high regard for their fight against violence and injustice – e.g. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, to name but two – it is apparent that their “truth-force” and “non-violent resistance” were rooted in a spiritual understanding of the human condition. We don’t need to get caught up in words, for they have a way of missing the truth. Gandhi said God was truth and truth was God. King equated God with love. Truth, God, Love –do the words matter? Did not these men grasp the deepest dimensions of our problems? Didn’t they understand the root causes of hate and violence? Didn’t they see the Tao? Didn’t they see that the way we conceive existence through our deterministic and instrumental sciences is a reflection of our violent world? Didn’t they realize that we can’t force change on anyone from the outside without doing violence and that the only way forward is to move the world through love and truthful resistance? Didn’t they tell us that freedom is our birthright and is indivisible, and when you deny existential freedom you are lost in despair?

Despite the question marks, these are rhetorical questions. Don’t our deepest experiences confirm their truth?

Let me end with James Douglass’s words, for it seems to me they ring true, despite being far outside the reigning scientific paradigm and “common sense.”

Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb? Einstein discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single particle of matter into enormous physical energy.  Might there not be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world? I believe that there is, that there must be, a spiritual reality corresponding to E=mc² because, from the standpoint of creative harmony, the universe is incomplete without it, and because, from the standpoint of moral freedom, humankind is sentenced to extinction without it. I believe that the human imperative of our end-time is that we discover the spiritual equation corresponding to Einstein’s physical equation, and that we then begin to experiment seriously in its world-transforming reality while there is time.

We must experiment in truth, for time is running out.

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

Thousands of people are suffering from cholera in Yemen as the Health Ministry of the National Salvation Government declared a state of emergency.

Sanaa, the capital of the Middle Eastern state, was the scene of a high-level meeting by leading officials seeking to develop a plan to halt and eliminate the epidemic.

The meeting was chaired by the President of the Supreme Political Council Saleh al-Sammad and attended by other ranking figures within the administration. During the meeting there was an assessment of the epidemiological situation prevailing in the capital and other areas of the country.

Statistics released from the Ministry of Health indicated that 8,567 cases of the disease had been documented. A statement also stressed that the present crisis exceeded the capacity of the current government to effectively address.

An appeal for assistance was issued to international organizations. Hospitals in Sanaa were already overcrowded and a further spread of the infectious ailment would be catastrophic.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has said that there have been 11,000 cases of diarrhea confirmed in Yemen with many of them being related to cholera. At a press conference in Geneva on May 16, UNICEF’s spokesman Christophe Boulierac said that 130 people had died from cholera and that a third of all these cases involved children.

This disease resulting from the contamination of drinking water and lack of sanitary conditions is rapidly spreading in Yemen. With the daily bombing and shelling of civilian populated areas by the Saudi Arabian and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) forces, the basic infrastructure of the country has been severely damaged.

UN reports reveal that its agencies and their partners are supplying diarrhea disease kits, oral rehydration salts and water treatment tables to residents in the affected areas. Nevertheless, the spread of the disease is proving to be more widespread than the previous epidemic during October 2016.

Approximately 7.6 million people in this most impoverished country in the region are residing in areas designated as high risk for cholera infection. The targeting of civilian areas, electricity sources, healthcare facilities, water supplies and food storage centers indicates that the U.S.-backed military intervention is aimed at forcing the people of Yemen into submission to Riyadh, Washington and London who supply intelligence coordinates, refueling technology and military hardware for the carrying out of the war.

Trump Visit to Reinforce Imperialist Militarism in the Middle East

President Donald Trump in his first trip to the Middle East since coming to office in January is seeking to maintain the firm alliance between Washington and Riyadh. The war against the Yemeni people has escalated since the Republican president came to the White House.

Direct bombings and a deadly commando unit raid on a village in Yemen after only days in office has illustrated the expansionist program of the Trump presidency. U.S. coordination and support for the air strikes and ground assaults against the Ansurallah-led government in Sanaa is designed to wage a proxy war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Ansurallah movement has denied direct military and economic support from Tehran while the coalition of U.S.-Saudi allied forces continues their relentless attacks on Yemen. Official estimates of deaths since the bombing and ground campaign that began in March 2015 due to the war range from 5,000-12,000 people.

It has been the war that has created the monumental crisis that worsens week by week. The relentless bombing and shelling by the Saudi-GCC Coalition and their allies have destroyed the ports preventing the distribution of medical supplies, food, water, tents and blankets.

An article from the UN News Center said of the situation in Yemen that:

“The United Nations refugee agency today confirmed that for only the third time this year, its field teams were able to distribute humanitarian aid in the embattled district of Mokha, in Yemen’s Red Sea governorate of Taiz. Hostilities in Taiz escalated in January, with nearly 50,000 people displaced, about 27 per cent of the internally displaced people in Yemen. The governorate also hosts about 304,000 additional displaced people.” (May 16, un.org)

This same report goes on to emphasize:

“In parallel, north of Taiz, in Al Hudaydah, UNHCR team provided aid for about 17,745 people. Mr. Spindler said that aid workers noted ‘a huge spike’ in needs, with displaced people living on streets, and turning to begging and child labor to survive. More than three million who have been uprooted since the start of the conflict two years ago, and more are expected as hostilities are likely to intensify.”

The visit by the U.S. president is also related to the arming of Saudi Arabia in order that Riyadh can act as a surrogate to imperialist aims in the Middle East. A report on May 16 published by Press TV said the visit was related to a military contract worth over $100 billion. This deal will be discussed between Trump and the Saudi government.

Conditions surrounding the weapons consist of both arms sales and maintenance services. This is only the initial phase of the program which will eventually be valued at $300 billion.

Deadly Strikes against the Yemeni People Intensify 

Many people are being killed in daily airstrikes and ground operations in Yemen. In response the forces allied with the Ansurallah (Houthis) and the military units of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh are inflicting casualties on the U.S.-backed units.

On May 17, Saudi fighter jets carried out four bombing raids in the Serwah district of Marib province. Bombs dropped from the aircraft hit Serwah Souk sides and Harib Nehm area.

Armed groups aligned with the Saudi-GCC Coalition launched artillery missiles into numerous neighborhoods of the same district. Extensive destruction was evident damaging homes and other structures.

Later on the same day, 23 people, including women and children, died as a result of a U.S.-backed Saudi-GCC aerial bombardment against the Mawza’a district in Taiz province. Residents said the air strikes hit an automobile in Sha’abu area in Mawza’a district as well, fatally wounding a civilian. Eyewitnesses said three children and six civilians had not been identified.

Nonetheless, the anti-U.S. forces have continued their attacks on Saudi-GCC allied fighters operating on the ground. Despite the air campaign and ground attacks in various parts of the country by armed forces operating in conjunction with the ousted Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi exiled regime along with commandos from Riyadh, Qatar and other states, the popular forces are quite capable of retaking territory and eliminating threats.

According to Saba News based in Yemen:

“The army and popular forces destroyed a military vehicle of the Saudi-paid mercenaries in northern Midi desert, a military office told Saba on Wednesday (May 17). Also, the artillery of the army shelled groups of the mercenaries in the same desert, hitting target directly, the official added.”

In another dispatch from the same above-mentioned press agency reporting on the military operations of the forces seeking to defend the National Salvation Government based in Sanaa:

“The missile units of the army and popular forces fired Katyusha rockets on Saudi military sites in Najran province, a military official told Saba on Wednesday (May 17). The missiles hit a Suqam headquarters building. Moreover, the artillery of the national forces shelled gatherings of Saudi soldiers in military sites of Raqabat Al Humer, Al Qatarin hilltop and Raqabat Al Sudis, the official added.” (Saba News)

Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia connotes the continuing war policy towards Yemen, Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Palestine. The objective of the White House and its surrogates is to stifle the alliance of revolutionary anti-imperialist forces throughout the Middle East in favor of the pro-western organizations and states.

This is a short follow up on yesterday’s false news stories topped with a Comey leak.

1. The New York Times tries to add to the story of the WannaCry ransom virus (which is based on NSA exploits),  hyping the unfounded claim that North Korea is behind it: Focus Turns to North Korea Sleeper Cells as Possible Culprits in Cyberattack. The story curiously does not even mention the nonsensical claim of a Google staffer that points to common code snippets in reused software stacks. Instead we get a long elaboration on how North Korea sends students abroad to be trained in IT and programming. In paragraph 4 the story asserts:

As evidence mounts that North Korean hackers may have links to the ransom assaults …

But no evidence, none at all, is cited in the piece. The “mounting evidence” is a molehill without the hill. Eleven paragraphs later we learn that:

It also is possible that North Korea had no role in the attacks,

Duh. Six NYT reporters collaborated in writing that twenty paragraph story which contains no reasonable news or information. What a waste.

2. The State Department claim that Syria built a crematorium inside a prison to burn executed prisoners saw no follow up. But it had consequences. The presented “evidence” was too thin to make it believable. Even the staunchly anti-Syrian SPIEGEL doubted it: USA bleiben Beweise für Assads Leichenöfen schuldig. Translated: “U.S. fails to give evidence for Assad crematorium claims.”

The State Department claim was presented in a special news conference by Stuart Jones (photo on the right), the acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. A day later Jones announced that he would retire:

Jones, 57, told colleagues the decision was his own and that he had not been pushed out or asked to leave the department.

Ahem. Sure. Maybe. Or Secretary of State Rex Tillerson disliked the lame propaganda shows Jones presented under the official State Department seal.

3. Yesterday’s “Trump revealed critical intelligence to Russia” nonsense is already dying down. Even regular NYT readers criticize their paper’s reporting of it:

It’s quite strange that the media is giving such prominence to and broadcasting so much detail about supposedly highly secret information and its source in order to show how irresponsible President Trump is.
…
It seem that of the two, the media and the President, the media is by far the most at fault for leaking state secrets. Strange indeed: it seems the goal of bringing down Trump overrides all other considerations.”

To recap – in March the U.S. and the UK had issued a ban on laptops for fights from certain Middle Eastern airports:

The U.S. officials said intelligence “indicates terrorist groups continue to target commercial aviation” by “smuggling explosive devices in various consumer items.”

It was known from other reports that the threat was from ISIS. Trump repeated this to the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and added that the origin of the treat is the ISIS capital Raqqa. Anyone would have guessed that. It was no secret. But “current and former officials” phoned up reporter after reporter to claim that Trump revealed critical intelligence because the Russians might now guess which country the information was coming from. A few hours later the Washington Post and the New York Times, not Trump, revealed that the original information came from Israel. It will be difficult to blame Trump for “leaking to the Russians” less information than “current and a former American official” leak to mainstream paper.

But as that smear against Trump and Russia has failed a new one is needed.

A week ago Trump unceremoniously fired FBI boss James Comey:

After six months of investigation the FBI had no evidence for any of the rumors about Russian interference [in the U.S.] that were thrown around. It should have closed the case with a clear recommendation not to prosecute the issue. That Comey kept the case open was political interference from his side. Hearings and public rumors about the case blocked the political calendar. Instead of following the facts, and deciding based upon them, he was himself running a political campaign.

Comey had hoped that he would not be fired as long as the investigation was running. Since Trump kicked him out Comey tried to get a public hearing in Congress to spill the beans and get some revenge. The Republican majority leaders smelled the trap and did not invite him. Today he upped his game: Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation

President Trump asked the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.“I hope you can let this go,” the president told Mr. Comey, according to the memo.

Comey leaked the memo to raise new allegations against Trump and to finally get his day in Congress. But Trump’s “I hope you can let this go” is not a clear interference in a judicial investigation. Trump just wished that the FBI would use its resources to look into other issues, like the extensive leaking of secret intelligence that occurred during recent months. Nothing nefarious can be constructed from that reasonable explanation. The investigation into Flynn, for violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act with relation to Turkey(!), continues. Trump has had no influence on it. If this talk has been so important as to possibly constitute a breach of law why did Comey wait months, until after he was fired, to leak it?

The Comey claim is another non-issue and non-story. The Republican congress leaders will not jump on Comey’s bandwagon (- or will they?) If this was the worst Comey can present he has lost the fight.

The deep-state, which opposes any collaboration with Russia and wants Trump impeached (RealNews vid), will now have to find a new angle for its attack.

In these unprecedented economic times, the world has been experiencing as a whole what most of the non-industrialized world has experienced over the past several decades. For a nuanced examination of the intricacies of the global political-economic landscape and the power players within it, pick up your copy of:

The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order
by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky takes the reader through an examination of how the World Bank and IMF have been the greatest purveyors of poverty around the world, despite their rhetorical claims to the opposite. These institutions, representing the powerful Western nations and the financial interests that dominate them, spread social apartheid around the world, exploiting both the people and the resources of the vast majority of the world’s population.

As Chossudovsky examines in this updated edition, often the programs of these international financial institutions go hand-in-hand with covert military and intelligence operations undertaken by powerful Western nations with an objective to destabilize, control, destroy and dominate nations and people, such as in the cases of Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

To understand what role these international organizations play today, being pushed to the front lines and given unprecedented power and scope as ever before to manage the global economic crisis, one must understand from whence they came. This book provides a detailed, exploratory, readable and multi-faceted examination of these institutions and actors as agents of the ‘New World Order,’ for which they advance the ‘Globalization of Poverty.’

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Synopsis

Click here read the Preface to the Second Edition

In this expanded edition of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky’s international best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women. The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a globalization of poverty.

This book is a skillful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving financially and economically.

In this updated and enlarged edition – which includes ten additional chapters and a new introduction – the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the demise of State social programs and the devastation resulting from corporate downsizing and trade liberalization.

“This concise, provocative book reveals the negative effects of imposed economic structural reform, privatization, deregulation and competition. It deserves to be read carefully and widely.”
– Choice, American Library Association (ALA)

“The current system, Chossudovsky argues, is one of capital creation through destruction. The author confronts head on the links between civil violence, social and environmental stress, with the modalities of market expansion.”
– Michele Stoddard, Covert Action Quarterly

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca. He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Get your copy “The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order” today!

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Global Research Publishers, 2003 | ISBN 978-0973714708 | 400 pages with complete index

Yet another agreement has been reached aimed at ending unrest among military forces in the West African state of Ivory Coast.

Over a five day period, soldiers took control of several cities including Bouake, the second largest in the country, after a spokesman for the disgruntled troops claimed that they were dropping demands for full payment of promised funds which totaled US$8,400.

In repudiation of the apparently false statements ending the appeal for the bonuses, Bouake was placed under the control of the soldiers who regulated passage in and out of the city. The rebellion quickly spread to several major urban areas including the commercial capital of Abidjan where the Republican Guards who are loyal to President Alassane Ouattara fired shots above the heads of protesting troops.

Ivory Coast is the world’s largest producer of cocoa. Exports had been impacted due to the mutiny when ports had been closed on May 15.

Some reports which surfaced on May 16 indicated that some of the angry soldiers had already begun to be paid. Banks which had not been operating in Abidjan were reopened as well.

Just one day prior to the announcement of an agreement, cocoa firms, banks, along with government buildings in the western regional center of Daloa were shuttered. Residents reported that gunfire could be heard throughout the day.

A cocoa cooperative manager Aka Marcel told the international press in regard to the tense situation in Daloa that:

“All businesses are closed here. The banks are closed and so are the cocoa buying businesses. The soldiers are in the streets on foot and on motorbikes. They’re shooting in the air.” (Reuters, May 15)

During the course of the unrest several more cities were impacted in addition to both Bouake and Abidjan. The port city of San Pedro near neighboring Burkina Faso saw the blocking of the border by the rebelling soldiers.

One spokesman for the soldiers in the most recent dispute, Sergeant Seydou Kone, said that

“We accept the government’s proposal … We are returning to barracks now.”

Kone was speaking from the center of the mutiny in Bouake.

Another spokesperson for the rebel soldiers who wanted to be called simply Sergeant Cisse, said:

“We’ve just handed back control of the entrances to the city (Bouake) to the police and gendarmes this morning, and we’re returning to our barracks. There’s no one on the streets. It’s finished. They are all in the barracks. There hasn’t been a single shot fired since 8 a.m.” (Retuers, May 16)

However, during the early morning hours outside of Bouake it was reported that soldiers were blocking the entrance of some 200 commercial trucks. Military forces which remained loyal to the Ouattara regime emphasized that they were working to reestablish control in order to maintain the existing political order.

There are approximately 8,000 troops out of 22,000 in total within the military apparatus involved in the dispute. Nonetheless, on May 13 three people who were said to have been demobilized former soldiers were shot by the mutineers.

Sergeant Kone was quoted as saying the former troops were shot to prevent them from organizing their own separate demonstrations. In other cities such as Korhogo, Daloa and Abidjan, demonstrations against the mutinous soldiers took place.

Altogether there were at least six people reportedly wounded. One person who had suffered gunshot injuries died in Bouake.

Sergeant Kone said during the attempts to suppress the protests that the rebellious troops had no problem with the population. The spokesperson for the mutinous soldiers said their only objective was to get paid.

The regional Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) condemned the mutiny demanding that the soldiers return to their barracks immediately. Republic of Liberia President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who is the current Chair of the Authority of Heads of State for ECOWAS, emphasized that the unrest placed the stability of region in jeopardy.

With the purported resolution of the most recent split within the military, it still does not address the broader questions of economic stability and political accountability.

Background to the Crisis and Its Political Dimensions

These mutineers are the forces that supplemented French paratroopers in the putsch against former President Laurent Gbagbo who was targeted for removal after he defied France and the United States in a dispute over the national elections in 2010.

In April 2011, Gbagbo, his wife Simone and other top officials were arrested by French troops at a makeshift headquarters in a hotel. The president was later deported from his own country to The Netherlands where he is now facing trial by the controversial International Criminal Court (ICC).

Since the ascendancy of the Ouattara regime, the western-based firms have made substantial investments inside the country. Up until recently, the West African state was being hailed as having one of the fastest growing economies in the region.

However, over the last two years there has been a precipitous drop in the prices of cocoa and oil. Petroleum workers engaged in a strike during February 2016 demanding an end to lay-offs which would impact up to 10 percent of the workforce of a leading employer.

Simone Gbagbo, who is a political figure within the Popular Front Party (PFI) that was overthrown in April 2011, was charged and convicted by the Ouattara regime for alleged crimes committed during the struggle against French foreign policy machinations in 2010-2011. She was imprisoned under a 20-year sentence and charged again for alleged crimes against humanity.

In late March a court in Ivory Coast acquitted her on the additional charges of human rights crimes. Nonetheless, she has not been released on the previous convictions which are highly politicized.

Former President Gbagbo is being targeted in the Netherlands by an institution, the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has been criticized within the highest deliberative body of the continental African Union (AU). At the 50th anniversary Jubilee summit in May 2013 commemorating its predecessor the Organization of African Unity (OAU), member-states raised the potential for a massive withdrawal from being signatories of the Rome Statue which laid the framework for the creation of the ICC.

ICC officials have also issued warrants against Mrs. Gbagbo. In this instance the current government of Ouattara has refused to extradite the former first lady to the Netherlands to join her husband in detention in Europe.

Several African states have made the declaration of resignation from being under the jurisdiction of the Netherlands-based institution. These include Burundi, South Africa and Gambia. The U.S. and EU-backed ECOWAS intervention and subsequent coup which removed Gambian President Yahya Jammeh in February replacing him with Adama Barrow, immediately resulted in the western-backed leader reentering the small West African nation back into the ICC.

A High Court in South Africa has attempted to render the African National Congress (ANC) government’s rejection of the ICC null and void ruling that the withdrawal is unconstitutional without parliamentary approval. Such decisions prompted by legal action initiated by the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) illustrates that key rulings handed down by the South African courts are reflective of the ideological struggle emerging within the post-apartheid political construct.

Almost all of the investigations, indictments and trials by the ICC are directed against African heads of state and rebel leaders. In the cases of Libya and Ivory Coast investigations by the ICC were carried out in tandem with military bombings and invasions to topple governments at variance with the administrations in Paris and Washington.

Moreover, the egregious imperialist war crimes and acts of genocide resulting in the deaths, injuries and displacement which factor into the millions against the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Angola, Somalia, etc., have never been the focus of the ICC and its prosecutors. Consequently, many African states, if not publicly raise concerns privately, in the belief that the ICC is an instrument for the extension of colonial rule.

The ICC is a mechanism designed for the explicit purpose of facilitating the interference in the internal affairs of African states. Although the leading western capitalist governments have refused to adhere to the purported authority of the ICC, the institution is utilized as a foreign policy tool to maintain destabilization campaigns against adversarial forces and those which can be identified as constituting a rationale for U.S., European Union, NATO and their allies to carry out aerial bombardments, the imposition of draconian sanctions and the engineering of military and political coups.

This recent unrest among the defense forces in Ivory Coast follows a similar rebellion in January where promises were also made which have apparently not been met. The government has acknowledged that despite the foreign direct investment model of economic policy, the implementation of such an approach is heavily dependent upon exports of primary products to western markets and the granting of tax havens to the transnational corporations and financial institutions.

Ouattara was a long time functionary of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which as a result of the contemporary world crisis is becoming more involved in loan projects that have historically proven extremely disadvantageous to African states. The neo-colonial systems of relation between the former industrialized countries in regard to their previous colonial and semi-colonial territories have long exhausted economic usefulness. AU and popular forces outside of governments have continued to address the need for deeper integration of African states and the development of regional monetary and industrial zones which place priorities on continental development.

The ongoing detention and prosecution of President Gbagbo does not serve the interests of the Ivorian and African people. Such a scenario only serves as a means to reassert western dominance of the political affairs of the continent.

Remember “Saydnaya Military Prison”? It was the subject of enormous media attention a while back on the basis of a “report” from Amnesty International that turned out to have been fabricated in the UK by a virtual reality company “using 3D models, animations, and audio software, based on the admittedly baseless accounts of alleged witnesses who claim to have been in or otherwise associated with the prison.”

Well, the totally imaginary interior of Saydnaya now – according to US State Dept – has a totally imaginary “crematorium” added to it in which to dispose of all the totally theoretical corpses being generated by the completely unsubstantiated mass-murders. Here is the impressive and plausible Stuart Jones telling us all about it.

Yes, he lies about the “well-documented” chemical attacks. Yes, he manipulates and exaggerates and omits to the point of fraudulence in his summary of the “civil war.” Yes almost every detail of his claims about the goings-on in Saydnaya is based on Amnesty’s invented “report” and the completely unverified testimony of alleged inmates…

…but, but…they have satellite images!

In case you’re not getting the message WaPo kindly enhanced and simplified things:

See? That thing on the right that could be absolutely anything is actually a crematorium. The State Department “believes” it with all its heart and wants us to believe it too. As do the Guardian the WaPo and the BBC and every other mainstream outlet. They want us to ignore the total absence of any evidence whatsoever for any part of their narrative and simply take their word.

That’s a “crematorium”. And it’s being used to burn masses of bodies. Just like in the Holocaust.

Because Assad (and Russia) = Hitler.

We need to tear up the ceasefires and ignore the de-escalation zones and invade Syria.

Everyone got that?

Israel’s Housing and Construction Minister Yoav Galant called for the assassination of Syrian President Bashar Assad following yesterday’s US State Department report that the Syrian regime was using a prison crematorium to hide mass killings outside Damascus, the Jerusalem Post reported.

Speaking at a conference outside Jerusalem, Galant, a retired Israeli Defence Forces general, said that in light of recent allegations that Assad’s regime carried out mass executions and burned the bodies of the victims, he had to be killed.

“The reality in which people are executed in Syria, being hit deliberately by chemical weapons, their bodies being burned, something we haven’t seen in 70 years. In my view, we are crossing a red line. And in my view, the time has come to assassinate Assad. It’s as simple as that,” said Galant, who previously served as the head of the IDF’s Southern Command.

The minister said Assad’s actions in Syria amount to nothing less than a “genocide,” with “hundreds of thousands killed.” 

Galant also likened the assassination of Assad to cutting off the “tail of the snake.” After that, he said,

“we can focus on the head, which is in Tehran.”

In a conversation with The Times of Israel after his speech, Galant stood by his comments and acknowledged that targeted political assassinations are considered illegal under international law, but clarified that he “wasn’t speaking about practicalities.” However, he added,

“Anyone who murders people and burns their corpses does not have a place in this world.”

As reported on Monday, the United States State Department accused the Assad regime of carrying out mass killings of thousands of prisoners and burning the bodies in a large crematorium outside the capital.

The US said it believed about 50 detainees a day are being hanged at Saydnaya military prison, about 45 minutes north of Damascus. Many of the bodies, it said, are then burned in the crematorium.

“We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place,” said Stuart Jones, the top US diplomat for the Middle East, in accusing the Syrian government of sinking “to a new level of depravity.”

According to Galant, while it is unclear whether or not the crematorium was in use for all those years, it is imperative that something must now be done. The Obama administration made a “strategic mistake” Galant said by “deviating” from the course of supporting Sunni countries in order to try to come closer to Shi’ite countries, something which Galant said is different in the Trump administration.

During his speech, Galant also said that in a wider view, Assad and his ally Hezbollah, the Lebanese terror group, are larger threats to the world order than the Islamic State and other Sunni terrorist groups. Galant was speaking at the Israel Defense publication’s “Ground Warfare and Logistics” conference at the tank museum in Latrun.

Up until a year-and-a-half ago, Syria looked like it was heading towards a Sunni rule, but following the Russian intervention, who used methods first used in Chechnya such as blockading cities while continuing aerial bombardments, the will of the rebels to fight was broken and the tides turned.

But while the Russians are currently backing Assad, they realize the importance of the region and understand who they are aligned with, Galant said.

“They realize that once the war is over there will still be 20 million Sunnis in Syria who will be wanting to avenge their dead and the Russians know they will be a target,” Galant said adding that the Russians will “seek avenues to make relations better with the Sunnis, including sacrificing Assad.”

As for ISIS, the Israeli minister was laconic:

“The world will wipe out Daesh, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda,” he said.

Galant said his assessment came from the fact that those terrorist groups do not enjoy the same level of support as Syria and Hezbollah, which are backed by Iran.

Indeed, his main focus was Tehran:

“What is behind Syria is Hezbollah who is backed by Iran. Iran is a danger to the security of the entire world. Iran is the problem, not the solution.” By getting to Assad, Galant said, we get to Tehran. “When we get the tail of the snake we can get the head in Tehran too.”

In short, it’s refreshing that in an increasingly volatile world, absolutely nothing has changed in the middle-east.

The two-day Forum on the Belt and Road, held in Beijing on May 14 and 15, which attracted much attention of the world has come to an end. This forum has the highest level as well as largest scale among all the China-initiated meetings so far, according to Li Baodong, China’s Vice Foreign Minister.[1] For such a big event, China gave it top priority and mobilized as much resource as it can to guarantee a “success”. The outcome of this forum released by Chinese government to date looks more generalized than concrete, except for China’s 100 billion RMB additional investment to Silk Road Fund and 60 billion RMB aid to the developing countries along the Belt and Road. In the meantime, the joint declaration is basically reiteration of the principles and the approaches of this initiative and little significant change can be found.

Nevertheless, the evaluation of this forum is not determined by the joint declaration released or letter of intent on cooperation signed only, but to a great extent the list of the participants, especially for Chinese government, the host of this forum. It will be quite meaningful to study how many countries sent representatives to the forum, which countries they are and what level official were present and explore why. This may help us understand both the achievement that this initiative has made and challenges facing it.

More than four decades ago I went to lunch with a diplomatic historian who, like me, was going through Korea-related documents at the National Archives in Washington. He happened to remark that he sometimes wondered whether the Korean Demilitarised Zone might be ground zero for the end of the world. This April, Kim In-ryong, a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of ‘a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that

‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’

American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up enough soot and debris to threaten the global population:

‘A regional war between India and Pakistan, for instance, has the potential to dramatically damage Europe, the US and other regions through global ozone loss and climate change.’

How is it possible that we have come to this? How does a puffed-up, vainglorious narcissist, whose every other word may well be a lie (that applies to both of them, Trump and Kim Jong-un), come not only to hold the peace of the world in his hands but perhaps the future of the planet? We have arrived at this point because of an inveterate unwillingness on the part of Americans to look history in the face and a laser-like focus on that same history by the leaders of North Korea.

The former President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, is 87 years old but still sharp. He told a delegation of 30 Americans in a two-week visit to Russia organized by the Center for Citizen Initiatives, “This is a time to be concerned. We should worry about relations between our two countries. … Things cannot continue as they are.”

President Gorbachev recalled his initial meetings with President Reagan, which came after six years of poor relations and hostility. In the first summit meeting, Reagan issued a long list of accusations against the Soviet Union; Gorbachev responded with his own accusations against the U.S. After that meeting Gorbachev said “He’s not a hawk; he’s a dinosaur” while Reagan said about Gorbachev “He’s a die-hard communist.”

At the next summit meeting, Reagan continued lecturing Gorbachev. After listening for 15 minutes. Gorbachev stopped Reagan saying,

“That’s enough. If you want to talk as equals we can go very far. Differences can be bridged. Problems can be resolved. But as equals.”

Reagan asked how the Soviet Union would respond if the United States was at risk because of some kind of natural calamity. When Gorbachev said his people would want to help, not take advantage, the mood changed.

Gorbachev recalled his own friendly experience talking with average Americans. He suggested that perhaps the U.S. needs its own perestroika. He reminded us that it was President John F Kennedy who said

“We need peace but not a Pax Americana ….. not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women.”

Gorbachev continued saying,

“The current situation is not right. We need to change that. Let us stop provoking each other. Let us stop trying to tear up other countries. …. Our two countries are still central to world peace. We need peace in order to resolve other world problems. One percent of the world controls 90 percent of the wealth. The ruling class is happy with this but things cannot continue as they are. … Budgets smell of gunpowder. … Fear is being cultivated. This is resulting in a new arms race.”

Gorbachev asked,

“Does the USA want Russia to just submit?”

Referring to Russia’s history with invasions by France in the early 1800s and Germany in the 1940s, he explained

“This is a country that can never submit…. There will be no winners in a nuclear war.”

The Ukraine Crisis

The 30-member delegation has been having informative meetings with numerous people to gain a better understanding of modern Russia and its relations with the United States and the world. Another especially interesting meeting was held with Vladimir Kozin, member of the Russian Academy of Military Science. 

Vladimir Kozin is an arms control specialist and member of the Russian Academy of Military Science who has worked on arms control issues since the 1970s. Kozin says that Russians see themselves being encircled by NATO. Of the 16 countries bordering Russia, eight have anti-Russia sentiments. He notes that the U.S. military budget is 12 times greater than that of Russia and increasing.

Kozin said it is a “fairy tale” that Russia interfered in the U.S. election. What is NOT a fairy tale, he said, is that the U.S. has spent a huge amount of money to influenceRussian elections in the past and funded 400 Non-Governmental Organizations (or NGOs), which were part of the destabilization campaign in Ukraine leading to the 2014 coup.

Regarding key conflict points emerging from the Ukraine crisis, Kozin noted that Crimea was part of Russia since 1783. He added that the despite the presence of 16,000 Russian troops (who were in Crimea as part of the Sevastopol naval base agreement) and 18,000 Ukrainian troops, the Crimea plebiscite to re-unify with Russia was handled without violence, with huge turnout and overwhelming vote in favor.

As for hostilities in eastern Ukraine, Kozin asked why this fighting has happened just because the largely ethnic Russian population resisted the overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych and demanded some form of autonomy from Kiev.

If Scotland can consider secession from the United Kingdom and Catalonia from Spain, he argued, what’s wrong with Donbass (eastern Ukraine) wanting more autonomy within Ukraine? Why has Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko turned to military conflict instead of negotiating with the dissidents in eastern Ukraine?

Kozin believes it is vital to have an arms control summit meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin. He thinks we should work toward the complete elimination of nuclear weapons by 2045. In the meantime, the easiest way to reduce tension and the risk of war would be an agreement on

“No First Use of Nuclear Weapons,” he said.

In a sober assessment of Trump’s first 100 days as President, Kozin concluded,

“Aggravating these facts of life is the deep degree of mistrust between Washington and Moscow, which the Americans spawned and have continued to nurse. A vicious circle has emerged in the interrelationship between weapons and trust … Clearly such an irrational phenomenon cannot go on indefinitely.”

From both Kozin and Gorbachev the message was clear:

We need to do something to restore discussion and stop the slide toward ever greater tension and danger.

Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Some 300 US Marines are once again being deployed to Helmand province, Afghanistan after upward to 20,000 US Marines had spent between 2009-2014 attempting, but clearly failing to secure the province for the US-installed client regime in the nation’s capital of Kabul. 

The latest deployment of US forces in Afghanistan after allegedly “ending” combat operations and the “Afghanistan War” in 2014, exposes several realities surrounding US foreign policy that directly conflict with the political narratives emanating from Washington.

The War Isn’t Over 

The United States and members of its coalition involved in the invasion and now 16 plus year occupation of Afghanistan have not in fact ended the war, let alone won it. The fact that entire districts, and even provinces remain beyond the control of America’s client regime, and even those that are under Kabul’s control remain contested, reveals an ongoing conflict with little prospect of ending.

Fighters resisting the US occupation and the US-backed client regime have established networks that extend beyond Afghanistan’s borders far from where US forces can reach. Afghanistan’s neighbors have attempted to broker practical peace deals between groups like the Taliban and other factions within Afghanistan’s patchwork of tribes for the sake of long-term stability, undermining entirely the artificially imposed political order the US has attempted to create and maintain. 

Attempts at “nation building” have failed, with foreign contractors and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) seeking to profit from their activities within Afghanistan with little to no genuine interest in a collaborative and fundamentally constructive effort to develop the nation.

Attempts to build up local Afghan governance and military forces have also failed because of a fundamental disconnect with American objectives and the actual aspirations of the people the US is attempting to impose its version of governance upon.

The New York Times in an article titled, “Marines Return to Helmand Province for a Job They Thought Was Done,” explains the current situation in Helmand province:

The Marines’ new mission is a difficult one: to assist and train Afghan soldiers and police to defend the provincial capital. The Taliban control seven of the province’s 14 districts and are encroaching on five others. The government fully controls just two, local officials say.

The process of US Marines taking and holding towns, cities and districts only to have them fall immediately back into the armed opposition’s hands after withdrawing is a familiar one for US foreign policy. It is the same process that played out repeatedly in Southeast Asia as the United States struggled to impose its political will upon the people of Vietnam.

Ultimately the US conceded defeat in Vietnam with the nation then able to determine its own future for itself. Fear-mongering over the consequences of a communist Vietnam creating a cascading effect across all of Asia and placing entire nations under the control of the Soviet Union and communist China were revealed as unfounded. The people of Vietnam were just as adamantly opposed to being dictated to by their Asian neighbors as they were by French and American invaders.

Afghanistan is no different.

The War Has Nothing to do with “Terrorism” 

The entire premise for the initial invasion of Afghanistan was fighting terrorism. Predicated on the attack on September 11, 2001 in New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania which cost nearly 3,000 lives and blamed on Al Qaeda, the invasion of Afghanistan was meant to strike at the senior leadership of the terrorist organization, including Osama Bin Laden.

Instead, from the beginning, the US invasion focused almost exclusively on regime change, targeting the ruling Taliban, not Al Qaeda. The invasion and toppling of the Taliban government transformed into a protracted occupation and counterinsurgency as the United States struggled to assert its political order via a supremely corrupt and incompetent client regime residing in Kabul.

And while time to time news stories would circulate regarding alleged US military operations targeting Al Qaeda, it is clear, specifically with the most recent deployment of US Marines to Helmand, that asserting, reasserting and struggling to maintain control over the Central Asian state remains America’s primary objective. 

In fact, within the body of the New York Times’ nearly 1,000 word article regarding the return of US Marines to Helmand province, Al Qaeda and “terrorism” weren’t mentioned once.

Sadly, actual terrorists, including Al Qaeda itself, have been intentionally bolstered by the US and its allies, specifically in Syria where weapons, training, money and other forms of material support are being funneled into their hands to carry out regime change by proxy against Damascus.

The common denominator defining US foreign policy appears to be  imposing Washington’s political will upon nations and regions, with terrorism serving as the most tenuous of excuses, and at other times, being used explicitly as a tool to carry out US foreign policy.

America, Its Client Regime Unwanted

Toward the end of the article, the New York Times admits (emphasis added):

But the biggest challenge for the Marines will be to help Afghan forces regain territory and hold it. Abdul Jabar Qahraman, President Ashraf Ghani’s former envoy in charge of operations in Helmand, said that for a long time the people of Helmand had sided with the Afghan forces, but that the government had repeatedly failed the civilian population and “left them handcuffed for the brutal enemy.” He said he expected that the Afghan forces would struggle to regain the population’s trust.

“There is no contact between the security forces and the local people,” Mr. Qahraman said. “People do not believe the promises of security forces, and the security forces always remain inside their bases, they don’t get out.”

It is clear that the problem is not just the “Taliban,” but rather the United States’ entire agenda, not only in Helmand province, or even in Afghanistan, but overseas in general. 

It is attempting to impose a self-serving political order that suits its sociopolitical and economic interests at the cost of peace, stability and security for entire regions of the planet. Its presence in Afghanistan and the proxies it has established to administer the nation to serve Washington’s interests are admittedly unwanted by the very people being administered.

The 300 US Marines who have dutifully deployed to Helmand will once again risk life and limb for a nebulous objective serving a geopolitical agenda divorced from the best interests of both the American and Afghan people.

Far from enhancing the national security of the United States, the costly, protracted occupation of Afghanistan is demonstrating tactical and strategic weakness, geopolitical ineptitude and exposing the dangerous shortsighted greed that drives US foreign policy at the cost of long-term, rational planning and implementation.

What 300 US Marines are supposed to accomplish that 20,000 couldn’t years before with a much larger NATO force supporting them is difficult to discern. Like during the late stages of the Vietnam War, it appears that US foreign policymakers are designating these US Marines as the “last to die” in Afghanistan for the sake of “saving face,” though 16 years onward and with the state of Afghanistan as it is, there is little left to save.  

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.   

Syria has been living under Western sanctions for many years now. These sanctions concern even such an important sphere of the country as its medicine and medical supplies. Western medicines and spare parts for expensive European medical devices are not available in the country and that has a devastating effect on its civilians.

A pharmaceutical plant in the suburbs of Aleppo has started its production after Sheikh Najar district was liberated from militants. The workers at the plant are seen packing tablets, along the conveyor belt medicines in bottles are seen being transported. Although production has started once again after years of being shut down, the plant is not enough to help everyone.

Despite the popular belief of war affecting the production in the country, it was not the terrorists that caused the greatest harm to this industry, it was the western sanctions.

“The sanctions of the Western countries almost killed the entire pharmaceutical industry in the country, as we cannot buy medications or ingredients for their production. Now imports only come from Russia, China, Iran and some other countries,” production director Mahmoud Abu Abed told Sputnik.

Sanctions against Syria first of all hit the ordinary people and soldiers fighting against terrorist organizations such as Daesh and al-Nusra Front.

Civilians cannot buy medications to fight cancer, diabetes and other diseases. There are not enough vaccines against poliomyelitis, anti-inflammatory and other vital pills.

“There is no insulin, you know what happens when there is no insulin: an increase in diabetes mellitus, that’s what, happens to people,” pharmacist Mahmoud Makteri told Sputnik.

He, like many Syrian doctors, had studied in Russia before returning to serve his country.

Before the war, Syrian pharmaceutical plants supplied 95% of the country’s medicines. Now production has fallen to less than half. Many production facilities have been destroyed or captured by militants.

Another reason for falling production was the fact that many specialists fled the country due to the war.

Medical students at the University of Aleppo

However, despite all the recent hardships, Syria is trying to develop its pharmacological industry. The development of new vaccines, medications and vitamins is taking place at the University of Aleppo.

“We are conducting research in the laboratory of molecular biology and are developing a cure for cancer, with practically all its components being of plant origin. They are extracted from plants growing in Syria,” post-graduate student of the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Aleppo, Muhammad Abu Rashid, said.

He further said that the process of training medical specialists, including pharmacists, has not stopped in Aleppo. On the contrary, the competition for admission to the local medical university has become higher now.

The university continued teaching students even during the war, despite the constant shelling. Now, that the city has been liberated from militants, a memorial to the dead students was erected on the university campus.

“I lost many friends, many of them were disabled because of their injuries,” student Omar al-Qasem said.

According to him, this makes students take their education and future more seriously.

“After completing our training, we will devote our life to assisting those who had suffered from the war,” Qasem said.

However, the university greatly lacks medical supplies. Due to the sanctions, it has no opportunity to purchase modern laboratory materials.

Just recently, a device that was used in analyzing the properties of medicines did not work at full capacity — a sensor that is only manufactured in the European Union had failed.

The price of this sensor is about $ 600 but it cannot be delivered because the country is under sanctions and that is despite the fact that this expensive device is still under the warranty.

“Our statements that these spare parts are needed exclusively for peaceful purposes are not accepted, as we are trying to find a way out of this situation. We are asking for help from friendly countries, primarily Russia, India and China. This equipment however, we will have to throw out,” Dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Aleppo, Mahar Harman, told Sputnik.

Such hurdles are occurring despite the fact that it is Syria and its army that are at the forefront of the fight against terrorism.  It is not only the soldiers but also the civilians who are greatly being affected by bullets and mines.

But it looks like Syria, building on its own strength, is going to save its citizens without waiting for help from the other European countries.

It has the air of a hunting party, and the quarry, on this occasion, was a lumbering US President with a loose tongue. The individual aiming the rifle in this case was The Washington Post, assisted by the murmurings and breathless whispers of various concerned officials as to what Donald Trump did in his meeting with Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

The Russian theme has been following Trump like a dedicated stalker, though it has had fanning assistance across a range of quarters. The frequency of allegations are starting to look like a White Hall farce with confused romances and misplaced fidelities. The star of the show still remains The Donald.

The script begins with firm determination. FBI Director, with a good portion of his term still to run, receives a good knifing, followed by a meeting between the president, Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. It then transpires from the army of the disgruntled that Trump had been sloppy, even criminally so, in sharing classified material with a Russian official.

Trump’s dizzying spin on the matter was that he was receiving gold from his Russian counterparts. In the description afforded by an official, naturally unnamed, to the Washington Post,

“I had great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day.”

The sizzling material in question (so called “code-word information”), however, was the disclosure of a threat learned through a key partner in the intelligence business, noting how parts of a specific plot hatched by Islamic State had supposedly been uncovered. Trump then went on to reveal the city in Islamic State territory where the threat was detected.

Reuters threw in its bit, suggesting that the conversation revealed material about “an Islamic State terrorist threat to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.” The issue is bound to affect the next daft policy limiting the use of laptops on flights in the cabin of US-bound flights.

National security advisor H.R. McMaster had few concerns, though there was a sense that he was attempting, vainly, to smooth matters with some tongue twisting.

“The president and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organisations to include threats to aviation. At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed, and no military operations were disclosed that were not already publicly known.”[1]

Deputy national security advisor Dina Powell was more forthright, insisting that the entire story alleging an improper intelligence disclosure was false.

“The president only discussed the common threats that both countries faced.”[2]

The official account of the Trump-Lavrov meeting is bland, a creaseless account.

“President Trump emphasized the need to work together to end the conflict in Syria, in particular, underscoring the need for Russia to rein in the Assad regime, Iran, and Iranian proxies.”[3]

Ukraine was also raised, as was Russian responsibility to implement the Minsk accords. Nothing specific, however, was noted about the Islamic State source.

USA Today wondered whether Trump could have been tossing about details of classified material like confetti at a raucous wedding. There was “no question” he could, having the “legal authority” to do so, even including rivals and adversaries.

“What complicates this incident is that the information wasn’t his to give: The information came from an unnamed US ally.”[4]

Harvard University’s Alan Dershowitz was dramatic.

“Let’s not minimize it,” he claimed to CNN’s Erin Burnett Outfront. What took place was possibly “the most serious charge ever made against a sitting president.”[5]

What followed was a response to Burnett’s pressing observation about what be, effectively, a new domain of seriousness in public office.

“You’re saying this is the most serious charge ever made against a sitting president and yet it’s not criminal, it’s not impeachable, and yet it’s more serious than things were?” Dershowitz is emphatic: “Absolutely right.”

Given the abuses from the ever evolving imperial presidency, this is a tall if confusing order indeed, though commentators have been quick to note that there was no breaking of any regulation in any criminal sense, nor did this constitute a “leaking of classified information”. As Lawfare asserts,

“Nixon’s infamous comment that ‘when the president does it, that means it is not illegal’ is actually true about some things. Classified information is one of them.”[6]

Constitutional affirmation of this has also been provided by the US Supreme Court in Department of the Navy v Egan (1988), in which it was stated that the President’s

“authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security… flows primarily from his Constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.”[7]

The implication of that for the sharing of intelligence is clear enough. If sensitive information reaches the knowledge of President Trump, it will simply be another tit bit to barter, an item to casually mull over in the presence of other representatives.

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

Notes

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/2017/05/15/530c172a-3960-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html?utm_term=.576594e4607f

[2] https://twitter.com/abbydphillip/status/864249105857622016

[3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/05/10/readout-president-donald-j-trumps-meeting-foreign-minister-sergey-lavrov

[4] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/05/15/5-unanswered-questions-latest-trump-russia-intelligence-leak/101731194/

[5] http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/333541-dershowitz-this-is-the-most-serious-charge-ever-made-against-a

[6] https://www.lawfareblog.com/bombshell-initial-thoughts-washington-posts-game-changing-story

[7] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/484/518.html

It never ceases to amaze me–the bottomless depths of compassion the Israelis try to convince us they feel for the suffering people of Syria…while at the same time they display open hatred and contempt for Palestinians. The mainstream media are now pedaling a State Department claim about Syria operating a “crematorium,” ostensibly to dispose of the bodies of thousands of murdered prisoners, and a member of the Israeli cabinet, Housing Minister Yoav Galant, has used the opportunity to issue an open call for the assassination of Syrian President Bashar Assad (see article below).

All this comes just a week after revelations that Israeli police staged a mock execution of a “terrorist” in front of a group of school children. A video of the demonstration, showing the children looking on, can be found here, and in a commentary on the episode, Jonathan Cook notes that in the video the youngsters can be heard clapping:

As he [the “terrorist” in the demonstration] lies badly wounded, the officers empty their magazines into him from close range. In Israel it is known as “confirming the kill”. Everywhere else it is called an extrajudicial execution or murder. The children can be heard clapping…The purpose of exposing children at an impressionable age to so much gore and killing is not hard to divine. It creates traumatised children, distrustful and fearful of anyone outside their tribe. That way they become more pliant soldiers, trigger-happy as they rule over Palestinians in the occupied territories.

So it appears that in the Israeli scheme of things, it is okay to murder Palestinians but not Syrians, or at least not the terrorists that certain foreign backers paid good money to equip, finance, and send into Syria for the purpose of overthrowing the country’s democratically elected president. Of course, the “news” that the Syrian government incinerated massive numbers of people in a crematorium is in all probability about as fake as last month’s chemical attack, but no matter. The Zionists will likely milk it for all it’s worth.

What a bizarre idea: that those who wage war act rationally and seek “gain.”

Political leaders collude with historians to maintain this psychotic fantasy.

.

.

First World War Casualties

It is unfortunate that despite the practice of Western-backed color revolutions becoming a widely familiar tactic exposed across the alternative media including larger national networks like RT – ideology, emotions, and ignorance are still being used to perpetuate this tactic in the service of Western special interests.

More unfortunate still is that occasionally the alternative media charged with exposing these tactics ends up an unwitting accomplice because of sloppy research, emotions, and ideology taking over where realism, fact, and solid research should guide headlines and analysis.

Not only is Western-backed regime change still being carried out on well-known battlefields like Syria, it is a tactic the West has aimed at other nations all around the world from Venezuela to Azerbaijan, and from North Korea to Thailand. The West depends on touching raw ideological and emotional nerves to circumvent the facts regarding who opposition groups really are, who funds them, and what wider agenda their activities truly fit into.

However, when a nation, leader, or institution suddenly finds itself under concerted attack by the West, warning bells should go off.

Thailand is Targeted by US-Backed Regime Change

Thailand is the only Southeast Asian state to avoid Western colonization. For seven centuries Thailand has been unified and led by its own sovereign institutions including its widely revered monarchy. Modern attempts to overthrow and replace the monarchy by British and American interests stretch back to an Anglo-American backed coup in 1932 that ended absolute monarchy in Thailand. Since then, attempts have been made to co-op or topple the monarchy, up to and including present day.

Thaksin Shinawatra, client regime of choice for US and European special interests. 

Currently, efforts to destabilize, divide, and destroy Thailand are led by US-backed opposition groups and an ousted US client regime headed by billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra. He assumed office as prime minister between 2001-2006. In 2006 he was ousted in a military coup. He has attempted to seize back power in two Western-backed color revolution – the color of choice being “red” – in 2009 and 2010. His sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, would assume the office of prime minister as his illegal proxy between 2011-2014 before a second coup ousted her from power.

Throughout the process, the Shinawatras’ efforts to take and hold power has been augmented by fronts funded by the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), convicted financial criminal George Soros’ Open Society foundation, and a collection of other US and European government funds.

Posing as nongovernmental organizations. “academics,” media platforms, and student groups, these fronts have worked not specifically on promoting the Shinawatras, but instead on concerted attacks aimed at the Shinawatras’ opponents – Thailand’s independent institutions.

Former US Ambassador Kristie Kenney touring US-funded Prachatai’s office in Bangkok, Thailand. Prachatai had previously denied it was funded by the US government despite the information being available on the US NED’s own website. 

These include Prachatai – who initially both withheld information about its US State Department funding and even lied to its readers about a lack of resources while soliciting cash from them – fronts like the Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, Democracy Cafe, ENLAWTHAI, and many others. Many share offices, openly collaborate and coordinate campaigns among themselves and with the Western media, and many have gone through great lengths to conceal or downplay the significance of their US funding and their dealings with US representatives.

And while these fronts claim they stand for “human rights” including “democracy” and “free speech,” they selectively target Thailand’s independent institutions while omitting, spinning, excusing, or otherwise deceiving the public regarding abuse carried out by the Shinawatra regime and its supporters. This includes covering up concerted and widespread terrorism, mass murder, and an array of very real human rights abuses.

“Thailand is a nation many are not familiar with. The concept of “monarchy” to many in the West is unappealing, and issues of “free speech” regarding it get almost instinctual and unconditional support. Exploiting this ideological and emotional flaw, the West has managed to get many of the sharpest minds in the alternative media to help spread their concerted attack rather than expose it.” 

More important than understanding US designs for Thailand is understanding that they go beyond dividing and destroying a single nation. It is part of a much larger and long-term agenda of encircling and containing China either with a unified front of US-controlled client regimes, or failed states that drag Beijing down in a series of political, economic, and security crises.

It is a verbatim replay of other US-backed destabilizations either having already divided and destroyed other nations around the world, or currently consuming them. Despite the obvious body of evidence regarding Thailand’s current and ongoing political crisis, some are still falling for the same tricks and tactics used to garner support for US regime change operations elsewhere such as in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Ukraine, and beyond.

How the West is Short-Circuiting Critical Thinking 

In order to get an increasingly astute global public to forget the West’s history of meddling worldwide and to sidestep evidence of its involvement elsewhere, the Western media seeks ways to prey on ignorance, emotions, and ideology.

An example of this comes in the form of an unfortunate article gracing RT’s headlines regarding the current Thai head of state, King Maha Vajiralongkorn.

The video included in the article itself allegedly features inconsequential details of his private life, depicting him on an outing abroad with “tattoos” covering his upper body. Despite its inconsequential nature, it was spread across the Western media in a deliberate and concerted manner. It is a “juicy” video for gossipers and those seeking to present the head of state of a nation targeted for US-backed regime change in an unflattering light.

That the Western media is now eagerly and concertedly attempting to undermine the Thai head of state and create controversy over the Thai government’s reaction should immediately have warning bells go off for any objective analyst applying critical thought. But because of ideology, emotions, and sloppy research, many have failed to hear these bells.

Thailand is a nation many are not familiar with. The concept of “monarchy” to many in the West is unappealing, and issues of “free speech” regarding it get almost instinctual and unconditional support. Exploiting this ideological and emotional flaw, the West has managed to get many of the sharpest minds in the alternative media to help spread their concerted attack rather than expose it.

In reality, King Maha Vajiralongkorn and his circle of advisers represents a continuity in leadership and principles that have guided Thailand through centuries of stability and defended it against centuries of attempts by outside powers to subjugate and colonize it. This goes far in explaining why the Western media has committed to a concerted effort to undermine and overthrow this institution.

For the majority of Thais, they revere their institutions and share pride and prestige with them in a way unique from Western “monarchies” and “democratic” institutions. They have been unphased by literally decades of rumors and slander aimed at their institutions by the Western media.

The Thai government’s move to control the spread of Western-backed sedition across social media like Facebook is not out of fear of the truth, but out of fear of what Western-backed lies have done to other nations when allowed to spread unchecked.

The West’s ability to create the illusion that the majority of a population stands against a targeted nation was key in provoking and perpetuating the crisis in Syria. That Syria has failed to fall precisely because the majority was not behind regime change, exposes not only this tactic, but the absolute danger of not stopping it in time.

Clearly, there is much more behind this story than meets the eye. RT has been instrumental in telling both sides of stories like these, and hopefully will continue to do so. It was encouraging to see in the comment section of the story, regular readers of RT catching on to the possibility that the controversy represents Western-backed agitation more than an issue of “free speech.” Hopefully RT will be more careful in the future and continue exposing and opposing Western lies rather than serving as a means of magnifying them.

As for those in the alternative media who have lent this narrative credibility, they stand as proof that there are still buttons the West can push even among the most informed to illicit emotional and ideological knee-jerk reactions where sober analysis and research should be applied.

Iraqi security forces (ISF) have continued putting pressure on ISIS terrorists in the western part of the Iraqi city of Mosul. Recently, ISF troops have recaptured the 17 Tamouz district, the Al-Aurabi district, and further advanced against ISIS in the Al-Rafaee and Old Mosul areas. Some 49 ISIS terrorists were killed and 4 SVBIEDs destroyed during the clashes. According to the Iraqi military, ISIS controls only 9% of the city of Mosul.

The Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) have liberated a notable number of villages from ISIS terrorists in the area southwest of Mosul. PMU fighters took control of Khilo, Tal Qassab, Karkash, Sultan, Tal sheik, Kabar, and other villages near the town of Qayrawan.

Earlier this month, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Deputy Commander of the PMU, announced that the PMU is seeing the Syrian-Iraqi border as a strategic objective of their military operations against ISIS. Al-Muhandis pointed out that forces of the PMU will enter the Syrian territory only in case of full coordination between the Syrian and Iraqi governments, and confirmed the existence of official channels with the Syrian government in case of the PMU need to do this.

Thus, the PMU advance in the Qayrawan area could be seen as a preparation to further push to the Syrian border that will likely be synchronized with the Syrian military’s efforts in it’s own territory.

On Monday, reports appeared that Syrian government forces started a military operation against US-backed militant groups in the eastern Sweida countryside. According to pro-government sources, the goal of the Syrian forces effort is the al-Tanaf border crossing.

Some sources indicate that the PMU and the Syrian military may privately coordinate efforts in order to prevent the progress of Western-backed militant groups along the Syrian border.

About 150 servicemen of the US and UK special operations forces entered southern Syria in order to support a ‘rebel advance’ against ISIS in the area.

On Monday, Jaysh Mughawyr Al-Thurah, backed by the US and UK special operation forces, was in about 90km east of the government-held city of Palmyra in the province of Homs. Militants were advancing in the northwestern direction along the Syrian-Iraqi border.

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Recently I learned from a feature article in a print magazine that George W. Bush, as Jimmy Carter and Winston Churchill did, has taken up painting.

Among Bush’s subjects are 98 war veterans from Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who suffered traumatic injuries. Some of the portraits were reproduced in the magazine, and they are good.

Three months ago 98 portraits were published in a coffee table book, Portraits of Courage, the proceeds from which are donated to the Bush Center.

I have wondered if Bush feels responsibility and remorse for the deaths and injuries of so many people.

I have wondered if he knew at the time or even now that he was fighting wars for Israel.

Israel’s efforts to annex southern Lebanon have been blocked by Hezbollah, a militia supplied by Syria, Iran, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. This is why these countries were on the list of countries to be invaded prepared by the Zionist neoconservatives who controlled George W. Bush’s admin
stration.

It is certainly conceivable that Bush was manipulated by his neocon National Security Council, neocon Department of Defense, neocon State Department, and his vice president. Presidents only know what their advisors tell them.

I have wondered if afterward when Bush admitted that there were no weapons of mass destruction he thought he had been manipulated

 

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney

I have also wondered if Bush was part of what many believe to be the 9/11 inside job pulled off by Dick Cheney, Israel, and the neoconservatives occupying the government’s high offices. I don’t think he was for these reasons:

(1) his expression when told by the Secret Service of the attack does not show any pre-awareness,

(2) he had been moved far out of the way on 9/11 to a distant children’s school and was not present on the scene to issue orders inconsistent with the plan,

(3) had he been part of the plot, he would have been present to show presidential leadership during the crisis, and

(4) he was not allowed to testify alone or under oath before the 9/11 Commission. He had to be chaperoned by Dick Cheney.

I suspect that Bush has wondered if it was just a coincidence that he was scheduled to be out of Washington on 9/11. Nevertheless, it would require a lot of inner strength for Bush to conclude that he was a pawn in a game of death. Even if he came to such a conclusion, to express it publicly would shake the public’s confidence in their government. I doubt anyone who has served as president could bring himself to do that. We will never know from Bush himself whether my suspicions are on the mark.

President Donald Trump is not exactly known for his self-restraint. The recent firing of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey was not handled with any delicacy and has unleashed a firestorm of criticism coming from across the political spectrum. And since Comey’s abrupt dismissal the backstabbing has become even worse, with many coming around to the view that Trump is actually crudely threatening Comey over the issue of what might or might not have been said at dinners and meetings between the two men.

What exactly drove the firing at this time remains somewhat of a mystery though the media has been quick to link it directly to Trump’s reported anger at the seemingly endless investigation into his Administration’s possible ties to Russia, an investigation that nominally Comey headed as FBI Director. But that explanation somehow makes no sense as even a white-hot Trump would have realized that getting rid of Comey would only make the Russiagate problem worse as everyone would assume cover-up and would come after the White House with even greater intensity, which is precisely what has happened. Was Trump dumb enough to dig himself into a deeper hole? Possibly, but it seems unlikely.

What is real, however, is that constant innuendo means that anti-Russian hysteria has been mounting, including completely speculative pieces wondering whether the entourage of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had sought to sneak a recording device into the White House during last week’s visit.

And what if there really is a conspiracy against Donald Trump being orchestrated within the various national security agencies that are part of the United States government? The president has been complaining for months about damaging leaks emanating from the intelligence community and the failure of Congress to pay any attention to the illegal dissemination of classified information. It is quite possible that Trump has become aware that there is actually something going on and that something just might be a conspiracy to delegitimize and somehow remove him from office.

President Trump has also been insisting that the “Russian thing” is a made-up story, a view that I happen to agree with. I recently produced my own analysis of the possibility that there is in progress a soft, or stealth or silent coup, call it what you will, underway directed against the president and that, if it exists, it is being directed by former senior officials from the Obama White House. Indeed, it is quite plausible to suggest that it was orchestrated within the Obama White House itself before the government changed hands at the inauguration on January 20^th. In line with that thinking, some observers are now suggesting that Comey might well have been party to the conspiracy and his dismissal would have been perfectly justified based on his demonstrated interference in both the electoral process and in his broadening of the acceptable role of his own Bureau, which Trump has described as “showboating.”

Two well-informed observers of the situation have recently joined in the discussion, Robert Parry of Consortiumnews and former CIA senior analyst Ray McGovern of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. McGovern has noted, as have I, that there is one individual who has been curiously absent from the list of former officials who have been called in to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee. That is ex-CIA Director John Brennan, who many have long considered an extreme Obama/Hillary Clinton loyalist long rumored to be at the center of the information damaging to Team Trump sent to Washington by friendly intelligence services, including the British.

Ray (picture on the right) suggests that Brennan and also Comey may been at the center of a “Deep State” combined CIA-NSA-FBI cabal working to discredit the Trump candidacy and delegitimize his presidency. Brennan in particular was uniquely well placed to fabricate the Russian hacker narrative that has been fully embraced by Congress and the media even though no actual evidence supporting that claim has yet been produced. As WikiLeaks has now revealed that the CIA had the technical ability to hack into sites surreptitiously while leaving behind footprints that would attribute the hack to someone else, including the Russians, it does not take much imagination to consider that the alleged trail to Moscow might have been fabricated. If that is so, this false intelligence has in turn proven to be of immense value to those seeking to present “proof” that the Russian government handed the presidency to Donald Trump.

Robert Parry asked in an article on May 10^th whether we are seeing is “Watergate redux or ‘Deep State’ coup?” and then followed up with a second Piece “The ‘Soft Coup’ of Russia-gate” on the 13^th. In other words, is this all a cover-up of wrongdoing by the White House akin to President Richard Nixon’s firing of Watergate independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox and the resignations of both the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General or is it something quite different, an undermining of an elected president who has not actually committed any “high crimes and misdemeanors” to force his removal from office. Like Parry, I am reluctant to embrace conspiracy theories, in my case largely because I believe a conspiracy is awfully hard to sustain. The federal government leaks like a sieve and if more than two conspirators ever meet in the CIA basement it would seem to me their discussion would become public knowledge within forty-eight hours, but perhaps what we are seeing here is less a formal arrangement than a group of individuals who are loosely connected while driven by a common objective.

Parry sees the three key players in the scheme as John Brennan of CIA, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and James Comey of the FBI. Comey’s role in the “coup” was key as it consisted of using his office to undercut both Hillary Clinton and Trump, neither of whom was seen as a truly suitable candidate by the Deep State. He speculates that a broken election might well have resulted in a vote in the House of Representatives to elect the new president, a process that might have produced a Colin Powell presidency as Powell actually received three votes in the Electoral College and therefore was an acceptable candidate under the rules governing the electoral process.

Yes, the scheme is bizarre, but Parry carefully documents how Russiagate has developed and how the national security and intelligence organs have been key players as it moved along, often working by leaking classified information. And President Barack Obama was likely the initiator, notably so when he de facto authorized the wide distribution of raw intelligence on Trump and the Russians through executive order. Parry notes, as would I, that to date no actual evidence has been presented to support allegations that Russia sought to influence the U.S. election and/or that Trump associates were somehow coopted by Moscow’s intelligence services as part of the process. Nevertheless, anyone even vaguely connected with Trump who also had contact with Russia or Russians has been regarded as a potential traitor. Carter Page, for example, who was investigated under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant, was under suspicion because he made a speech in Moscow which was mildly critical of the west’s interaction with Russia after the fall of communism.

Parry’s point is that there is a growing Washington consensus that consists of traditional liberals and progressives as well as Democratic globalist interventionists and neoconservatives who believe that Donald Trump must be removed from office no matter what it takes. The interventionists and neocons in particular already control most of the foreign policy mechanisms but they continue to see Trump as a possible impediment to their plans for aggressive action against a host of enemies, most particularly Russia. As they are desirous of bringing down Trump “legally” through either impeachment or Article 25 of the Constitution which permits removal for incapacity, it might be termed a constitutional coup, though the other labels cited above also fit.

The rationale Trump haters have fabricated is simple: the president and his team colluded with the Russians to rig the 2016 election in his favor, which, if true, would provide grounds for impeachment. The driving force, in terms of the argument being made, is that removing Trump must be done “for the good of the country” and to “correct a mistake made by the American voters.” The mainstream media is completely on board of the process, including the outlets that flatter themselves by describing their national stature, most notably the New York Times and Washington Post.

So what is to be done? For starters, until Donald Trump has unambiguously broken a law the critics should take a valium and relax. He is an elected president and his predecessors George W. Bush and Barack Obama certainly did plenty of things that in retrospect do not bear much scrutiny. Folks like Ray McGovern and Robert Parry should be listened to even when they are being provocative in their views. They are not, to be sure, friends of the White House in any conventional way and are not apologists for those in power, quite the contrary. Ray has been strongly critical of the current foreign policy, most particularly of the expansion of various wars, claims of Damascus’s use of chemical weapons, and the cruise missile attack on Syria. Robert in his latest article describes Trump as narcissistic and politically incompetent. But their legitimate concerns are that we are moving in a direction that is far more dangerous than Trump. A soft coup engineered by the national security and intelligence agencies would be far more dangerous to our democracy than anything Donald Trump can do.

The first stage of U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to restore America’s former dominance as a “manufacturing country” will be announced this coming weekend in Riyadh Saudi Arabia and Washington DC, but its outlines are now already more than clear.

The biggest-ever foreign sale of U.S.-made weaponry will be announced at that time, and, according to a little-noticed report by Reuters on May 12th, an unidentified U.S. government official informed Reuters that “We are in the final stages of a series of deals,” whose size will be of truly extraordinary historic proportions. 

Trump will announce during this, his first trip abroad as the U.S. President, starting on Friday May 19th, deals for the fundamentalist-Sunni government of Saudi Arabia to purchase more than $100 billion, and perhaps more even than $300 billion, in U.S.-made weaponry.

The announced intention of Saudi princes is to defeat what they declare to be the ‘existential threat’ they face from Iran and from Shia Islam, and so these weapons will presumably be used for ‘defense’ against the fundamentalist-Shiite government of Iran, and against any nation whose leader is Shiite (even if not fundamentalist, and including non-sectarian and even secular Shiite, such as Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad, and such as the Houthis in Yemen).

The U.S. (especially the major investors in corporations such as Lockheed Martin) will therefore be in a position to profit from intensification of the wars in Syria and in Yemen, as well as from other national battlefields between Sunni and Shia. That’s the plan, and, on this basis, as soon as Trump won the 2016 election, he appointed to all of his national-security posts people who have solid records as being rabidly hostile, above all, towards Iran, and secondarily, toward Iran’s allies, such as Russia and Syria. (Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, was hostile, above all, toward Russia; her aim was to conquer it, which would entail unlimited spending on nuclear weapons. Trump’s plan is focused instead on unlimited spending on conventional weapons, and the deal that he has reached with the Sauds is designed specifically to supply them with that — not with nuclear.)

The key international ally of the American government has long been the fundamentalist-Sunni Saudi royal family, the world’s wealthiest family, who own Saudi Arabia, including the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, which is 100% owned by the Saudi government, which is 100% owned by the Saud family, actually by whomever the royal family’s princes select to be the King. No one can be selected by the Saud family to become the King who is disapproved of by the nation’s fundamentalist-Sunni Wahhabist clergy, who have been committed ever since 1744 to eliminating Shia Islam. Israel also is allied with the Saud family. Consequently, on the Sunni side are the U.S. and Israel; and, on the Shiite side are Russia and Syria. Other countries are secondary.

For example, Sunni Turkey is part of America’s NATO military alliance against Russia, but is obsessed against America’s Kurdish allies and therefore more on Iran’s and Russia’s side in that regard. (A Kurdish state being carved from Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, would please only the U.S. government.)

The Reuters news-report also quoted this unnamed U.S. government official as saying that “Israel would still maintain an edge” so as to remain the most powerful military nation in the Middle East. This suggests that part of these “deals” will be that the Sauds will continue to say no-thank-you to the repeated offers by Pakistan to sell some of their nuclear weapons to the Saudi government. And it also means that the Sauds will continue to rely upon the U.S. nuclear force as protection or ‘umbrella’ against any possible nuclear attack, from Israel or any other nation. (The full terms of the ‘deals’ won’t be made public but will also include purely spoken agreements, more in the nature of the 1945 original deal that was reached in private between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and King Saud.)

The Sauds are buying the U.S., as their ally in their centuries-old war against Shia Islam; and, the U.S. is selling the Sauds the weaponry, and the military trainers (so as to be able to use America’s weapons), against Iran and other Shiia-controlled or -allied countries.

The Trump Administration has already been applying pressure against Russia in an attempt to get them to abandon their support of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and of Iran; but this pressure has not yet borne any fruit, and is not currently a front-burner issue in Trump’s plan; it’s on the back burner right now.

The Trump Administration has still not decided whether to continue the Obama Administration’s refusal to label as a “terrorist organization” the Syrian jihadists who are led by Al Qaeda, which is funded by the royal Saud family and has been the most effective fighting force in Syria to overthrow Assad’s government.

As regards domestic U.S. issues, they’re viewed, by the top levels in both the Republican and Democratic Parties, more as vote-getting baits, than as issues of actual primary concern. Whereas the public focuses mainly upon those issues, the political-donor class (owners of international corporations) are concerned mainly about foreign affairs; and, in domestic affairs, on lowering the taxes that they pay and the economic regulations that increase their costs of doing business — and even those domestic issues have a large foreign-affairs component. So: international alliances are the central concern of America’s wealthy. Since the general public knows and cares little about those matters and doesn’t understand them but instead misunderstands them, there is virtually no political cost to any politician who, as a public official, gives away the store to the donor-class, on what they care about the most. What the public see in the ’news’media is propaganda that’s paid for by advertisers and/or by the aristocratically controlled government itself, and therefore carefully veils key realities that would enable the public to understand what’s going on and why. Of course, individuals such as Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning, are viscerally hated by the donor-class and get thrown into prison even while people such as George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, walk free and are even honored by large portions of the electorate (not to mention by their own financial sponsors) (and even win such things as the Nobel Peace Prize).

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

On the heels of an evidence-free “atrocity” allegation leveled against Syria and Syrians, yet another in a long list of stories used as fake pretexts to escalate criminal warfare and support international terrorism, U.S-led NATO is finding it increasingly difficult to climb down from its tree of lies.

Despite its best efforts, and increasingly creative cover stories, the West’s on-going support for terrorists in Syria most recently emerged when it refused to designate a newly-branded al Qaeda-affiliated group – Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – as a terrorist group.

In Canada, a May 15, 2017 CBC report, entitled “Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate escapes from Canada’s terror list” notes that

(t)he reasons for the reluctance to list the new al-Qaeda formation may have to do with one of its new members, the Nour ed-Dine Zenki Brigade, a jihadi group from the Aleppo governorate.

The Zenki Brigade was an early and prominent recipient of U.S. aid, weapons and training.

Zenki was cut off by the State Department only after Amnesty International implicated them in killings of Orthodox Christian priests and members posted a video of themselves beheading a young boy.

For the U.S. to designate HTS now would mean acknowledging that it supplied sophisticated weapons including TOW anti-tank missiles to “terrorists,” and draw attention to the fact that the U.S. continues to arm Islamist militias in Syria.

In other words, if the West were to acknowledge that HTS (al Qaeda) is a terrorist group, then the Western war criminals would be admitting to their own complicity. And NATO, like the CIA, tries conceal its criminality beneath the cover of “plausible deniability” whenever possible.

All of this is consistent with the West’s on-going propaganda campaign against Syria.  The fake stories, the false flags, and the evidence-free demonization campaigns have been known and documented for years. Prof. Tim Anderson’s new e-book, “Countering War Propaganda of the dirty war on Syria” documents it all in an easy-to-read infographic format.

All of this underscores the West’s on-going support for international terrorism in its campaign of globalized war and poverty.

And all of this highlights the irony that the same terrorist group that supposedly flew airplanes into the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon – al Qaeda – is U.S –led NATO’s proxy in Syria.

Despite public opinion and the facts, he intends to serve the Telecom Industry. Pai is behaving like he is still Verizon’s lawyer, not someone required to serve the public interest.

Arlington, VA – Ajit Pai, the Chair of the FCC, is on a mission to destroy the Internet by reclassifying it so that it is no longer a common carrier where we all have equal access and repeal net neutrality rules so Comcast, Verizon and A&T can discriminate based on content.

Net neutrality activists began a vigil at the FCC chairman’s home in Arlington on Sunday, May 14 to protest. They will continue on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday until the public meeting at the FCC on Thursday, May 18. Twenty people stood outside of his home holding signs urging “Save The Internet,” “We Want Democracy Not Net Monopolies,” “Ajit Pai Stop the Lies” “Protect the Internet” and “Equal Access for All.”

Net neutrality protesting outside of Ajit Pai’s home on May 14, 2017. By Anne Meador, DC Media Group.

The protest was supported by every neighbor who spoke to them, one even offered the use of their bathroom if net neutrality advocates needed it. Three of the participants were from the neighborhood and attended because the week before they found a door hanger describing Ajit Pai and the issue on their front door. The door hangers were placed on 200 doors in Pai’s neighborhood so when the protest occurred,people would understand what was happening.

Pai has made it clear in public statements that he intends to repeal the Title II classification of the Internet as a common carrier. He also intends to repeal net neutrality rules that allow regulation so that there can be no discrimination in access to content on the Internet. The former Verizon lawyer is acting in the interests of his former employer and other big telecoms rather than in the public interest. He is announcing what looks like a sham public comment proceeding on May 18 since he has already announced his decision. It is going to take an overwhelming mobilization of people to prevent him from destroying Internet freedom.

Some of Ajit Pai neighbors came out and joined the protest in his neighborhood. May 14, 2017. Photo by Eleanor Goldfield.

CLICK HERE TO SEND HIM A DIRECT MESSAGE.

The Internet has been a vibrant tool for innovation, creativity, free speech and independent media and an engine for the economy because there is equal access. Under Title II, as it is currently classified, the Internet is a common carrier like electricity coming to your home. Title II is also essential for putting in place net neutrality rules as the DC Court of Appeals ruled when Verizon sued the FCC in 2014. Net neutrality is the idea that access to the Internet should not be based on content. If the content is legal then it should be treated like all other content on the web. Preference cannot be given to sites whose content is approved by the Internet Service Providers, e.g. Comcast, Verizon and AT&T, and corporations and people cannot purchase better service than others. Equal access for all is the current rule and we must protect it.

Lee Stewart protests outside Ajit Pai home on May 14, 2017. Photo by Eleanor Goldfield.

Complicating the issue further is that Internet Service Providers are rapidly becoming Internet content providers too. Comcast now owns NBC/MSNBC, AT&T is seeking to purchase CNN, Verizon owns Huff Post. AT&T already owns the largest pay-TV provider in the US thanks to last year’s purchase of DirecTV. If the ISP’s are able to discriminate based on content, then they can prioritize their content and suppress others’ content. This sets us on a path towards monopolization and consolidation of the Internet as commercial media is now.

The critical issue for our future is to keep the Internet competitive and creative, where innovators in products, services and political thought have a place where they can break through and help lead humankind to advance. The telecom corporations, with their well-paid spokespeople like Grover Norquist, are putting out a fog in order to increase their profits and take advantage of the Internet. Here are some thoughts to consider:

– Net neutrality is essential as we cannot have a free market of ideas and services if a handful of corporate monopolies (created with the assistance of government) can control what people see on the Internet. Monopoly control of access and quality of web service is anti-free market. Repealing net neutrality is crony capitalism destroying a free market of products, services and ideas.

Kevin Zeese protesting outside of Ajit Pai home on May 14, 2017. By Anne Meador of DC Media Group.

– A competitive market requires that everyone have equal access to the Internet. Tim Berners Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, wrote in Keeping the Internet Competitive that when the trucking industry was deregulated it worked because everyone had access to the roadways and could go wherever they needed to go without restrictions. Competition on the Internet works because everyone has equal access to it and can go where they need to go without restrictions. Title II is the strongest legal foundation to protect equal access.

– “Start-ups for Net Neutrality” is 1,000-member group of start-up businesses that have written to Commissioner Pai urging him to keep net neutrality and Title II. They see it as essential for allowing new businesses to compete, to be able to put out their product or service and get a niche in the economy and be able to challenge existing businesses.In their letter to Pai they write, after applauding efforts to create a faster Internet, that:

We also depend on an open Internet—including enforceable net neutrality rules that ensure big cable companies can’t discriminate against people like us. We’re deeply concerned with your intention to undo the existing legal framework.

Without net neutrality, the incumbents who provide access to the Internet would be able to pick winners or losers in the market. They could impede traffic from our services in order to favor their own services or established competitors. Or they could impose new tolls on us, inhibiting consumer choice. Those actions directly impede an entrepreneur’s ability to “start a business, immediately reach a worldwide customer base, and disrupt an entire industry.” Our companies should be able to compete with incumbents on the quality of our products and services, not our capacity to pay tolls to Internet access providers.

Every conversation with Pai neighbors was positive. No one in the community criticized the protest. Neighbors of Pai oppose what he is doing. Photo by Eleanor Goldfield.

The same is true for entrepreneurs and small business. They need an open Internet accessible equally to all in order to compete, innovate and succeed. No person or business should be paying tolls for better Internet service.

– The same is true for media. Pai is also allowing big mergers so the already concentrated corporate media is getting more concentrated. Upcoming is a merger between AT&T and Time Warner, which includes CNN and HBO. If Comcast — who owns NBC/MSBC is legally allowed to regulate access to the Internet by content, what will this mean for alternative, independent and non-profit media — or to social media — that challenges the narrative of the corporate mass media? They can throttle other views and without net neutrality it will be legal. Think of the Internet as a mall where the owners allow you in but puts the stores they own closer to the entrance and places obstacles in the way of getting to their competitors. That would be the opposite of a competitive market. It would be a closed market controlled by a corporation.

– In the future ISP’s that own MSNBC , CNN and other media will have the power not to allow competitive news sources or advocacy news sources to stream live on their broadband networks. If the ISP’s have the choice to shut down independent news sources that compete with them for viewers, they will. That is what is coming. The Internet will be more of a tool for big media (and government) propaganda and shut down the vibrant free speech that a wider media is allowing to occur.

Photo by PopularResistance.Org

Unfortunately, because the telecoms choose not to compete with each other, most people do not have a choice of provider. They are in Comcast, Verizon or AT&T territory so they have nowhere else to go. That is why they get away with overpriced access, lousy service and slow Internet speeds compared to the rest of the world.

It is also why they are among the most unpopular corporations in the country. Monopolies do not need to create faster Internet like the rest of the developed world has, and they will not need to be content neutral or allow equal access to all if Title II net neutrality rules are repealed. Don’t let that happen. Act now to protect our Internet.

The Syrian Army continues to conduct its successful counter-terrorist operations. On May 14, after heavy fighting against ISIS, the government forces managed to take full control over al-Jarrah in eastern Aleppo. Undoubtedly, not only high spirit, cohesion and unity, but also panic in the ranks of the radicals contributes to the Syrian Army’s success.

Thus, recently, the number of violent clashes between various radical groups once acting as a united front against the government of Bashar Assad, has increased. As a result, the real number of casualties among them has already reached hundreds of dead and seriously wounded.

Nowadays, it is reported that the most violent clashes are between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and Ahrar al-Sham radical groups in Eastern Ghouta near Damascus. It is also reported about the deaths of more than 30 radicals and the destruction of several units of military equipment. So, during a month of fighting, the both radical groups lost more than one hundred people, including field commanders.
It should be mentioned that the confrontation among the anti-government forces in Eastern Ghouta has significantly weakened the jihadist troops and, has allowed the Syrian army to conduct counter-terrorist operations in Al-Qaboun in Damascus as quickly as possible.

In addition, fierce fighting is also taking place between Jaysh al-Islam and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. According to al-Masdar, militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham have recaptured the town of Hazzeh east of Damascus from Jaysh al-Islam. At the same time, both sides suffered significant losses.

It also should be mentioned that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group is also fighting against ISIS in Yarmouk refugee camp.

It is noteworthy that military operations are being conducted not only between radical groups, but also between the Free Syrian Army (SSA) and ISIS in the province of Deraa. According to sources from Inside Syria Media Center, the SSA units are cooperating with US-led coalition, whose commanders intend to conduct to a full-scale offensive immediately after the armed opposition formations pushed ISIS terrorists into the territory of Jordan.

It is obvious that the confrontation in the ranks of radicals will only play into the hands of the Syrian army. The government forces’ victories that brought serious discord and mutual accusations between the anti-government groups. It is likely that this fact will become a decisive step that will bring the radicals closer to a quick failure.

Anna Jaunger is a freelance journalist at Inside Syria Media Center.

Under the new US administration, the ruling order of the country has not drastically changed. Domestically, the rising power of policing agencies alongside cuts in social spending has not ceased. Internationally, the USA still stands with western Europe against the bloc of independently developing countries centered around Russia, China and Iran.

While trends in actual policy remain roughly the same, one thing has certainly been altered. While the international order of western liberalism and globalist capitalism remains intact, statements hostile to it and contrary to its values continue to flow from the White House.

On an almost daily basis, statements that are completely contrary to the narrative of the “international liberal order” flow from the mouth of the commander-in-chief. The examples are numerous.

While the narrative of neoliberalism presents Russian President Vladimir Putin as a bloodthirsty tyrant, unlike figures in the “civilized” and “democratic” western nations, Trump thundered back “Do you think this country is so innocent?” when questioned about Putin being a “killer.”

While the voices of global capitalism insist that Kim Jong-Un is a mentally unstable, unintelligent, delusional, paranoid lunatic, Donald Trump has called Kim a “smart cookie” and said he is open to meeting him.

Trump said that Obama had utilized the surveillance apparatus of the USA to “wiretap” him during the election. The US media responded angrily insisting that the federal government always follows due process and standard procedures and that such an occurrence just could not have happened.

“Blasphemy” in the 21st Century

While Trump’s statements are absolutely contrary to the narrative and worldview of the prevailing international order, they have not translated into any concrete changes. If anything, Trump has escalated the policy trends of his predecessors. Trump did what Obama proved ultimately unwilling to do, and directly struck the Syrian Arab Republic with cruise missiles. Trump now threatens war against North Korea, and has escalated the anti-Iranian and pro-Israeli tone of US leadership. Furthermore, Trump cuts social programs and spending much more vigorously than his opponents, and has positioned himself as an ally of the policing agencies against those who protest them.

The crime that Trump is continuously castigated for is a 21st century version of “blasphemy,” a crime that people were often executed for during medieval times. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines “Blasphemy” as “irreverence toward something considered sacred or inviolable.”

During the age of feudalism, the political and economic order depended on the absolute obedience of society to authority. Nobles claimed to have the authority of God, the “divine right” to rule over serfs and peasants. The church, based in Rome, led by the Pope, was considered to have infallibility in defining and articulating God’s wishes, the basis the state.

To utter statements that were contrary to that of the Church was to call into question the entire order of society. To deny the existence of God or to question the theology of Rome was one of the most wicked and harshly punishable crimes.

Galileo Galilei was famously forced to recant his belief that the earth was not the center of the universe, as this simple astronomical fact put the entire social order in danger.

Much like Galileo’s belief in that the earth was not the center of the universe, Trump’s heretical statements are pretty much true, driving the mainstream media to harshly castigate him for making them.

Dangerously True Words

Trump’s response to the allegations about Putin:

“do you really think this country is so innocent?” should be obviously agreeable to any student of American history.

The USA was founded with the slaughter of Native Americans and the exploitation of African slaves. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has worked to topple numerous independent governments, while backing many bloodthirsty and repressive regimes that were friendly to Wall Street and London. Within US borders many dissidents such as Martin Luther King Jr., Joe Hill, and Chelsea Manning have faced the wrath of the state.

There’s nothing untrue about questioning the innocence of the United States in response to the accusation that a foreign leader is a “killer.” However, such a statement is blasphemous. The US government and the international system orbiting it depend on the mythology that the USA is a benevolent democratic power that goes around liberating oppressed people from “dictators.”

Trump’s statement that Kim Jong-Un is a “smart cookie” does not defy logic. The entire world objects to the DPRK’s continued proliferation of nuclear weapons. The DPRK faces crushing economic sanctions, as well as a huge hostile military presence in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. The Korean territory controlled by the DPRK is mainly mountainous, with very little arable land, making food self-sufficiency quite difficult to maintain.

Yet, despite all of this, the Korean Workers Party holds on to power, and the centrally planned socialist economy, based on the principles of “Juche” remains fully intact. Under these most hostile circumstances, not only does the DPRK not collapse, but it has launched satellites into space, and continues to conduct missile and nuclear tests, flying against the wishes of highly powerful enemies.

Whether one approves of him or not, why would a leader capable of presiding over such activities, under such hostile circumstances, not be considered a “smart cookie?” Such ability certainly demonstrates prowess of leadership.

Furthermore, Trump’s suspicion that Obama or the NSA may have abused powers of surveillance against him, while still unproven, is not completely incredible. The response of the media, citing the elaborate procedures and legal protections of US citizens seems to ignore the fact that US officials violate such rules all the time.

For many years a police officer in the Chicago Police Department tortured people in order to extract confessions from them. Jon Burge was eventually caught and punished for his activities, but for years he was carrying them out on a routine basis. Many individuals were convicted of crimes and sent to prison based on confessions extracted with electrical shocks and other illegal methods. The fact that Burge’s actions were illegal and violates standard procedure did not prevent them from occurring.

During the 1950s and 60s, the FBI launched a program called COINTELPRO designed to silence political dissidents. The program involved surveillance, infiltration, and active disruption and repression of many political activists groups. The COINTELPRO program not only targeted the US Communist Party, but also pacifist groups, civil rights organizations, and many others which opposed the status quo in the USA by only peaceful means. The program obviously violated constitutional protections of free speech and assembly, but it continued for many years.

To think that authorities in the United States always respect the right to privacy and civil liberties of the population, and would never abuse their power is absurd. Edward Snowden revealed a widespread apparatus of surveillance in the USA. Is claiming that this apparatus may have targeted Trump really such a big stretch?

“God Save The King”

Trumps willingness to stray from the standard narrative and make statements against the status quo probably caused many of his supporters to believe that his Presidency would lead to a complete re-shuffling of America’s domestic politics and foreign policy. This obviously appears not to be the case.

So, if not serving as the basis of policy, what purpose do Trump’s routine “blasphemous” statements really serve? Perhaps the answer can be found by once again looking back into the medieval social order known as feudalism.

During the time of feudalism, nobles ruled over serfs and peasants with almost complete and absolute power. Peasants could be tortured, killed, starve, or otherwise repressed at their convenience. Concepts like ‘the rule of law’ and ‘human rights’ had not yet emerged.

However, there was an entity that did occasionally protect peasants and serfs from the extreme violations reigned down on them by the land owning aristocrats. This was the King. The King was part of the aristocracy who did not have a small principality of his own to rule over, but instead ruled over all the nobles as the head of state. The King often served the purpose of disciplining and restraining the nobles, on behalf of the peasants.

Peasants often sang ‘God Save The King’ and viewed the King as the one who was on their side against the local landowning noble, their direct oppressor.

By holding back the landlords, the King served the purpose of keeping the feudal order intact. Peasants were far less likely to revolt against the system that claimed divine authority, if it appeared that there was at least one figure within the feudal structure, who worked on their behalf.

By occasionally demanding that the nobles provide services or show acts of kindness to peasants, and reprimanding them for particularly outrageous acts, the King presented the illusion that the system of feudalism wasn’t all bad. The problem wasn’t the system, it was just those bad nobles who were selfish. The peasants could be reassured by the fact that despite the outrages of their local day to day oppressor, there was a good man at the top who occasionally stepped in to protect them.

Containing an Explosion?

Trump’s blasphemous statements against the liberal order may serve the same purpose as the King’s repression of nobles. With the increased accessibility of information, millions of people are aware that the USA is not innocent of repression and murder; that the standard narrative about the DPRK and other demonized countries is not correct; or that policing agencies and federal officials often abuse their power for selfish reasons.

Such rising sentiments, inflamed by the accessibility of information and the economic crisis, have fed protests, rising dissent and the growth of alternative political forces on the far-left and the far-right.

By saying what he says, Trump is reassuring the increasingly critical and cynical population that there is someone who agrees with them on the inside. While the rise of the low wage police state continues, Americans get poorer, civil liberties disappear, and international tensions escalate, those Americans who are displeased can feel reassured by the fact the most powerful man in the country sounds like he might possibly agree with them.

Trump’s blasphemous words, while in no way backed up with policy changes, may actually serve to reinforce the status quo he contradicts. As long as those who agree with his cynicism feel like they can be heard and that someone as powerful as the President agrees with them, they will be less likely to actually work toward challenging the powers they despise. It appears that in a world based on myths, where an increasing number of people realize that they are surrounded by falsehoods, a loud mouth in the most powerful seat, who routinely blasphemes against the standard narrative, can be essential to maintaining order and preventing a social explosion.

Caleb Maupin is a political analyst and activist based in New York. He studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and was inspired and involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Turkey’s authoritarian leader, who recently brilliantly played a central role in both brokering the recent ‘safe zones’ deal – backed by Iran and Russia – and signing off a new trade deal with Russia, seemed to be rising above the parapet as a regional leader.

For a fleeting moment, this autocratic figure, who just scraped in by a whisker through a referendum to usher in new laws which would hurl Turkey truly into the depths of a third world country, shone for a moment. Coming out of the Astana talks, you watched the newsreel footage and almost forgot about the human rights apocalypse which the country is undergoing – from thousands of teachers, judges and civil servants being rounded up on charges linked to an attempted coup in the summer of 2016, right through to the worrying number of journalists locked up in jails, which is constantly compared to North Korea by many rights groups. There are currently over 250 journalists in jail in Turkey in a country where journalism has been pronounced dead under Erdogan’s brutal crackdown.

No matter. That won’t bother Trump. But Erdogan’s luck is still about to run out when he visits the US president who will bring him down to earth and show him exactly how much the Turkish leader is worth as a regional ally. We should all expect a bump, followed by a tantrum.

Birds of the same feather?

Could it be about personalities? When we look at both Erdogan and Trump, there are an alarming number of similarities which one might have thought would have played a role in bringing them closer. Both are nationalist leaders, frothing over their daily ratings, both extraordinarily thin-skinned and more importantly, equal in their colossal contempt for democracy and freedom of speech. Both leaders absolutely hate genuine journalists and what journalism, as an empirical, feature of democracy stands for: the absolute truth.

But they are not twins. Erdogan is a political animal whereas Trump came into politics late and is driven by corporate power. Both though understand and resort to very short-term political churlishness and buffoonery. And here’s where the worries lie, with Erdogan’s plea for Trump to stop backing the Kurds in Northern Syria. When Trump sent 59 Tomahawk missiles into an Shayrat airbase in Syria, he was proving a point: that he, and America, is ultimately a super power. And super powers can do capricious, illogical things like that and still come out a winner. Trump needed to prove to regional leaders that he is capable of exulting military might after nearly all of his Middle East plans seemed to wane since taking office. And it worked. We may all be scratching our heads about the wisdom of hitting the Syrian Army’s military infrastructure when the real target in Syria is ISIS, but it generated the media coverage and his popularity lifted back home. When Erdogan however bombed a number of Kurdish installations a few days later – almost following the example of the US president – it didn’t have the same effect. Turkey aspires to be a super power but in reality is a fledgling compared to Saudi Arabia and Iran, or even Israel.

Back home it was met with mixed reaction, while in Washington it backfired spectacularly. The Pentagon was shocked at how stupid the move was, given that US soldiers were only about 6 miles from the bombing and if they had been wounded or killed, then anything that Erdogan would have hoped to have achieved would have been dashed.

Erdogan got the attention he wanted but he just made himself look like a loser in negotiations over how much power and support he demands in northern Syria as a new plan to take Raqqa unfolds; and how the US should now consider no longer arming the only fighting group on the ground in Syria which is fighting ISIS to any real degree, the YPG.Erdogan is beginning to come across as a jilted girlfriend who keeps making the moves to get the attention of Trump, but who just keeps on getting the cold shoulder though.

He has been hoping since January that the so-called architect of the attempted coup in Turkey, Fethullah Gülen, could be extradited by Trump. He has been also hoping for the Kurds to be left out of the push for Raqqa; and he has been suggesting that Turkey and the US should take the city together in the final push for the epicentre of Islamic extremism.

Ultimate threat and unsavoury alliances

Erdogan has misjudged Trump though, which might explain why none of the three plans have unfolded. This is not a US leader who will be intimidated with threats, like the Kurd bombing. Quite the contrary. The result is that US officials and Donald Trump himself have started to humour Erdogan, for two chief reasons. Trump has investments in Turkey and Erdogan’s ultimate threat would be to kick US soldiers and airman out of Incirlik airbase and to sell it to the highest bidder on the geopolitical circuit. The problem with Erdogan, Trump advisers will no doubt be telling him, is not that he has so little to offer militarily in the region. It’s that he can’t be trusted. They will point to his irrational relations he courts, then rejects, then restores again which makes him look erratic and untrustworthy – whether its erratic relations with Israel, Russia or even NATO and the EU. There are just too many u-turns. Erdogan sees Russia as the new trading partner and this is where his real interests and loyalties lie. And then there’s Iran, considered by the Trump camp to be the very crux of America’s problems in the region and vehemently hated by most of his advisers who are planning to bomb it at some point  – which Turkey desperately wants to develop relations with both with trade and energy deals.

But it’s not just Iran and Russia which will irk Trump when he considers Erdogan’s last chance gambit to save the Turkish leader’s neck as he has to convince voters in two years that he – and his new anti-democratic grasp on the country’s judges, media and other key institutions – is the winning ticket for Turkey. No, it’s more about the relations that Erdogan has had with groups in Syria – like ISIS and Jabat al Nusra, which few doubt were being supported by Turkey at some point. Let’s not forget that ISIS managed to swell its numbers dramatically by foreign jihadists crossing its southern border; for a long time, extremists were seen as a way to destabilize the Assad government in Syria, hence allies of Turkey.

Erdogan has left it too long to come into the anti-ISIS theatre to be taken seriously.

And so Erdogan’s point of view that the US should not be backing the YPG and PYD in Syria – due to their links to the PKK – is actually a triumph of futility, as arguments go. Washington, certainly the Pentagon which Trump takes seriously, doesn’t take Erdogan’s offer to take Raqqa together seriously. It would probably involve too many US soldiers (whereas the Kurd plan won’t) and the Turks would probably shift the goalposts at the last moment.

Russia’s foreign minister’s meeting with Trump is a different matter. Super powers meet super powers and important decisions are thrashed out. When Erdogan arrives, he will be treated like an annoying neighbour who has arrived at the party late, on the pretext of complaining about the noise but really wanting to just worm his way in for a free drink. Small people, small issues.

Adversaries of Erdogan close to Trump will also no doubt be raising the obvious question of how far can the US trust a regional leader, who, just days before a referendum which would give him more power, changed the voting rules which gave him the critical few percent at the polls?

Erdogan’s people have no confidence in their own leader in DC

Moreover, the unspoken but very real threat that he may attack the Kurds on a grander scale is also not a point which Trump will appreciate. Even from a political dimension, it would make him look isolated and petulant as sour grapes never won anyone any votes at the polls. But it’s also the lack of confidence Erdogan and his people have in their own arguments. Senior advisors to Erdogan have told me that the Washington trip is so important that they don’t want to risk anything ruining the event. Yet how much credibility in the first place can you give to Erdogan’s visit when paranoia and a shocking lack of confidence in Erdogan’s ploy are so patently evident?

Recently, an Oped article I wrote for a newspaper I have since discovered is Erdogan’s english language propaganda sheet, was rejected because its criticism of Trump might scupper the talks. Hilariously, it was explained to me by one of the ‘journalists’ on The Daily Sabah that

“the talks are so important that we can’t publish anything which is critical of Trump” – hardly a sterling mark of confidence from an Erdogan fake news journal whose entire role is to promote the Turkish leader.

If an innocuous Oped from a British journalist in a propaganda sheet is all it takes to ruin the talks, one could only assume that even Erdogan’s own people have no faith in their leader’s arguments or charisma, let alone his geopolitical edge.

Where will the deluded Erdogan go after this inevitable climb down? I’m expecting a grand tantrum and an even closer relationship with Russia. I’m expecting some bombing of Kurds. And I’m also expecting Erdogan to play the Incirlik card. What I am not expecting is my Turkish editors to keep their word and pay me what I am due for work which was commissioned by them. Erdogan’s people just can’t be trusted.

Journalist Martin Jay recently won the U.N.’s prestigious Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize (UNCA) in New York in 2016, for his journalism work in the Middle East. He is based in Beirut and can be followed on Twitter at @MartinRJay. 

It is a fake news day. Three stories are making the rounds through the media that are each based on false or widely exaggerated interpretation of claims. North Korea, Syria and the U.S. President are the targets.

1. The Wall Street Journal asserts with a #fakenews headline that bits of computer-code in the recent WannaCry ransom virus are identical with bits of computer code that was allegedly used in a 2014 hack of Sony. (The Sony attack was falsely attributed to North Korea.)

Researchers Identify Clue Connecting Ransomware Assault to Group Tied to North Korea

Neel Mehta, a security researcher at Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit, on Monday pointed out similarities between that earlier WannaCry variant and code used in a series of attacks that security specialists have attributed to the Lazarus group.

The “Lazarus group” (which probably does not exist at all) was attributed to North Korean state agencies. Six paragraphs later we learn that the “similarities” were found in often reused code:

The findings don’t necessarily demonstrate that Lazarus or North Korea was involved in the WannaCry attack, researchers said. The culprits in the latest attack, who haven’t been identified, could have copied the code in question, for example.
…
The connection found in the old version lies in software that both programs use to securely connect to other systems over the internet, said Kurt Baumgartner, a Kaspersky Lab researcher.

Common code is found in nearly all software that sets up an internet connection. The reason for that is quite simple. No longer does anyone ever write such code. There are well tested examples of such program snippets widely available in open-source software on Github and elsewhere. “Copy and paste” is done faster than re-inventing the wheel. Even worse – the code snippet in question here is so trivial that any decent programmer would likely write it the very same way (a call to the Time() function to get a seed value for a following call to the Random() function). There are only X reasonable ways to add 1 to 1. Two people doing it the same way proves nothing at all. People copying publicly available code proves nothing either. It certainly does not prove that code for two different hacks was written by the same people. It does not provided that these bugs have anything at all to do with North Korea. The bits of similarities are of zero factual news value.

2. Back in February Amnesty International (which promotes NATO interventions) issued a sensational report about alleged killings in Syrian prisons. As we wrote at that time:

A new Amnesty International report claims that the Syrian government hanged between 5,000 and 13,000 prisoners in a military prison in Syria. The evidence for that claim is flimsy, based on hearsay of anonymous people outside of Syria. The numbers themselves are extrapolations that no scientist or court would ever accept. It is tabloid reporting and fiction style writing from its title “Human Slaughterhouse” down to the last paragraph.

The U.S. State Department now reused that fake report and adds wrongly interpreted satellite pics to further slander the Syrian government:

US: Syria is burning bodies to hide proof of mass killings

In its latest accusations of Syrian abuses, the State Department said it believed about 50 detainees each day are being hanged at Saydnaya military prison, about 45 minutes north of Damascus. Many of the bodies are then burned in the crematorium “to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place,” said Stuart Jones, the top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East, accusing Assad’s government of sinking “to a new level of depravity.”The department released commercial satellite photographs showing what it described as a building in the prison complex that was modified to support the crematorium. The photographs, taken over the course of several years, beginning in 2013, do not prove the building is a crematorium, but show construction consistent with such use.

If there was a crematorium being build in the Saydnaya prison how is it that none of the Amnesty witness said so in the recent Amnesty report? These witnesses, Amnesty claims, have been in that prison and observed all kind of details. They claim that any dead were buried in mass graves.

A Dutch military expert looks at the commercial satellite pictures and the interpretation State provided and asks:

Ian Grant‏ @Gjoene – 6:02 PM – 15 May 2017Is this a joke @StateDept? Even before 27 Aug ’13 these “vents” were present. See included Terraserver footage (03 april ’13) #Sednaya

Another reconnaissance specialist expands on that:

Aldin Abazović @CT_operative – 5:33 PM – 15 May 2017Pictures that allegedly show crematorium of Saidnaya prison, #Damascus #Syria. As much as I hate to get involved into this matter, these #1
#2 images prove nothing at all. This building could be simple boiler/heating room for the prison compound. Unless you visit there is no
#3 way to prove anything. Its easy to manipulate with satellite imagery. You just put the right label on thing and there you have it
#4 I can’t confirm what the particular part of prison is nor for what it’s used.

The State Department has no evidence for its “crematorium claim” but the Amnesty report which says nothing about a crematorium at the prison and some satellite pictures that do not show what the State Department claims. It is throwing dirt at the Syria government in the hope that some of it will stick. This release of nothing will create some headlines in “western” outrage publications. It may be in propaganda preparation for a wider war on Syria.

3. The deep state is out to get U.S. President Trump impeached. Yesterday a new, well prepared and coordinated campaign against Trump was launched. Anonymous claims to the Washington Post were “confirmed” by similar claims from (likely) the same sources to Buzzfeed. The claims may have some grounds in reality but the actual facts, even as described in shrill words, are harmless. WaPo:

Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

(Hmm – how would “former U.S. officials” know what was said in the Oval Office and to what consequences?) It takes six paragraphs of such slander to learn what Trump actually disclosed:

Trump went off script and began describing details of an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.

“Terrorist threat[s] related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft” are a well known method of Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula. If ISIS in Syria has copied that modus operandi it is interesting, but nothing sensational. The details, where ISIS is preparing these operations, may be somewhat relevant, but over how many cites does ISIS actually rule?

National Security Advisor McMaster, who was in the room with Trump and Lavrov, is on the record (down in paragraph eight!) denying that any sources or methods were revealed.

The only real claim here is that Trump gave Lavrov a tip-off with regard to a terrorist threat.

If Putin would learn of a potential ISIS attack on a U.S. passenger jet would you want him to share that secret information with the U.S. government? Of course you would.

But Buzzfeed and other anti-Trump organs blow the claims up to high heavens, The Lawfare writers go off their meds:

If the President gave this information away through carelessness or neglect, he has arguably breached his oath of office.

Utter bullshit. Trump would have offered such intelligence out of courtesy as part of his deal-making with the Russian government. Exchange of threat intelligence is regular business even between parties who otherwise dislike each other. It is in the interests of all to do such. That such an exchange happened is not newsworthy.  even it touched some details.

Even worse – it is the publishing about the Oval office talk that can only help the terrorists. As Emptywheel says:

these very outraged sources are [..] sharing the information that it is so outrageous to share.

If Trump’s information sharing is outrageous why did the sources offer that same information to the global media? Why did WaPo and others publish on it?

Trump was elected with the support of the U.S. military. Clinton was supported by the corporate and intelligence sides of the power triangle. Trump won. Now the deep-state intelligence side, together with the moneyed part of the Democratic party, is out to impeach him. The constant sensationalized dribble of false or irrelevant claims against him prepares the ground for that.

The three fake-news examples above contain no news at all. The bits exposed in them have no information value. Their only purpose is to influence the readers by exaggerating outlandish claims based on little, if any, real facts of minor importance.

This full-throated propagandizing on all channels, without any critical voices challenging the basic facts, is endangering the functioning of democracy. The fourth estate is now just a tool to influence. It can no longer claim to have any inherent value.

For the average person one way out of this onslaught is to search for, use and foster alternative and discerning sources of news. The other is to give up.

A group of about 50 combat engineers based at Canadian Forces Base Gagetown were deployed to Latvia on April 29 as part of Operation Reassurance. The mission is to build a town for 500 soldiers. According to commanding officer Lt.-Col. Chris Cotton, the installation will have “everything you would expect in a small town, from its kitchen to its quarters, its electrical distribution system, water distribution system, internet, gym facilities that would allow people to survive over the long term in Latvia”. Obviously, this is an element of vast infrastructure to provide for a long-term commitment.

In early April, a US-led battle group of 1,350 soldiers for NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence in Eastern Europe arrived at its base near Orzysz in northeastern Poland. It took place just a few days after a NATO-Russia Council meeting took place on March 30. Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called the talks with Moscow “frank” and “constructive”. Then the usual song and dance followed under the slogan of Russian threat.

British RAF fighters are scheduled to be stationed to Romania this May. In March the first of 800 UK troops arrived in Estonia supported by around 300 armed vehicles. Along with French and Danish forces they’ll be stationed there on what NATO leadership calls “rotational basis”. In January, German and Belgian forces arrived in Lithuania near the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

The UK leads the Estonia Battlegroup while other NATO members are deploying forces to Latvia, Lithuania and Poland as part of the bloc’s Enhanced Forward Presence battalion. All in all, 4,000 NATO troops with tanks, armored vehicles, air support, and high-tech intelligence centers deployed to Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

In accordance with the fiscal year 2017 European Reassurance Initiative budget proposal, the US Army is reopening or creating five equipment-storage sites in the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium and two locations in Germany.

Last September, the service began to assemble more Army Prepositioned Stocks (APS) for permanent storage in Europe. Those stocks will be sufficient for another armored brigade to fall in on. The rotating brigade will bring its own equipment. The move will add hundreds of the Army’s most advanced weapons systems to beef up the US European Command’s combat capability. It will also free up an entire brigade’s worth of weapons currently being used by US forces training on the continent to enable more American troops to be rushed in on short notice.

An armored brigade combat team comprises about 4,200 troops and includes approximately 250 tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Paladin self-propelled howitzers, plus 1,750 wheeled vehicles. The proposed budget increase includes a $1.8bn outlay on 45,000 GPS-guided smart bombs and laser-guided rockets to boost the precision strike capability.

Also last month, more than 1,200 troops from 12 countries, including the non-bloc participant Sweden, took part in two-week NATO military drills in Latvia dubbed Summer Shield.

“This deployment is, of course, a threat to us”, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksey Meshkov said, arguing that the large-scale drills at Russia’s doorstep are bound to “gravely increase the risk of incidents”.

He vowed a proportionate response.

“They always have one thing on their mind: the ‘Russian threat’ myth, ‘Russian aggression’ slander and endless mantras about the need to confront it collectively”, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in March following a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting.

The Baltic States and Poland will have to shoulder the financial burden of maintaining the military facilities. The Baltic States incurred significant expenses in rebuilding Ämari and Zokniai airbases. For instance, Estonia has spent 70 million euros in three years to modernize and maintain Ämari airbase. The new base in Latvia built by Canadian engineers is also not a free lunch.

The buildup is viewed by Russia as a provocation and a threat to the entire region’s security and peace. The alliance is trying to whip up tensions in Europe to reinforce its relevance in the ever changing world. It needs a fictional enemy to keep it together.

The deployment breaches the Russia-NATO Founding Act (1997). By signing the document NATO pledged not to seek “additional permanent stationing of substantial ground combat forces” in the nations closer to Russia “in the current and foreseeable security environment”. The argument that the forces are being deployed on temporary basis doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Each army combat unit has an operational cycle, including training events. It will inevitably hold exercises somewhere. The forces are training nowhere else but in the proximity of Russia’s borders.

The Canadian engineers are constructing nothing else but a town. The official used the term “town” in his statement. Towns are not built to enable army units to hold exercises and then go. A town for the military is an element of permanent infrastructure. Once the expenditure is approved, it means the living quarters and facilities are to remain in Latvia for many years.

The announced plans are nothing else but a permanent military presence of substantial forces. With the Founding Act invalid, the Russia-NATO military relationship will be left without a legal basis to go upon.

The document has played a very important role in the relationship for 20 years. Now this fundamental document appears to be dead as a result of NATO’s provocative activities near the Russia’s territory. The war preparations greatly reduce European security and the chances for revival of constructive dialogue between Russia and NATO. It leads to the conclusion that the alliance is preparing for a new Cold War with unpredictable results.

“Financial war and cyberwar can be more destructive than standing armies, able to cause enormous harm to many millions worldwide, severely damaging and halting government, commercial, and personal online activities.” (Stephen Lendman) 

“But let’s not forget who the really big culprits are here. The American and British government’s are at total fault. They both fund the NSA and GCHQ. Both advocate government snooping and spying into every citizen of the world, let alone their own. Both advocate the banning of secure encryption communication services and both have spent millions on developing tools to hack and crack these systems at will.” (Graham Vanbergen)

Massive Global Malware Attack

By Stephen Lendman, May 13, 2017

Developed by the NSA for cyberattacks, the malware is now widely available, including to elements responsible for Friday’s incident – maybe a precursor for more widespread attacks against governments, businesses, and virtually any other digital targets worldwide.

The NSA’s Malware, The Exponential Growth of Insecurity

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, May 16, 2017

The news spin is to not blame NSA for its carelessness, but to blame Microsoft users for not updating their systems with a patch issued two months ago. But the important questions have not been asked: What was the NSA doing with such malware and why did NSA not inform Microsoft of the malware?

The Global Information Environment: Malware, Data Hijacking, Encrypted Files, Unpatched Computer Systems…

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, May 15, 2017

This delightful worm capitalises on a vulnerability evident in the network protocol in Microsoft Windows termed Server Message Block. This is where the ransomeware does its bit, encrypting the files in question, and locking out users on pain of ransom.

British Nuclear Submarines, Microsoft and That Ransomware Attack

By Graham Vanbergen, May 15, 2017

The NSA in America lost all of these hacking tools, specifically the one that caused this attack and subsequent mayhem across the world. The hackers exploited a piece of NSA code known as “Eternal Blue.”

NSA Malware: Built Despite Warnings, Used in Global Cyber Attack

By Nadia Prupis, May 15, 2017

At least two hospitals in London were forced to shut down and stop admitting patients after being attacked by the malware, which operates by locking out the user, encrypting data, and demanding a ransom to release it. The attacks hit dozens of other hospitals, ambulance operators, and doctors’ offices as well.

An NSA-Derived Ransomware Worm Is Shutting Down Computers Worldwide

By Dan Goodin, May 13, 2017

Wcry is demanding a ransom of $300 to $600 in Bitcoin to be paid by May 15, or, in the event that deadline is missed, a higher fee by May 19. The messages left on the screen say files will remain encrypted. It’s not yet clear if there are flaws in the encryption scheme that might allow the victims to restore the files without paying the ransom.

*     *     *

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The Russia-gate affair has taken a strange turn as advocates for President Trump’s removal say his ouster should take precedence over completing the investigation and actually seeing how much there is there – whereas at least one target of the inquiry wants the U.S. government to put its cards on the table.

Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign who is reportedly under an FBI counterintelligence investigation for his contacts with Russians, has called on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing the investigation, to immediately release “any documents related to [the Obama administration’s] alleged wiretapping of me.”

In Page’s view, it was the Obama administration’s spreading of allegations about the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia that represented “government meddling in the 2016 election,” rather than Russia’s alleged hacking Democratic emails and publicizing them via WikiLeaks, a claim made by President Obama’s intelligence chiefs but denied by WikiLeaks and Russia.

Yet, what has been perhaps most remarkable about the entire Russia-gate affair is that it has been conducted with almost no evidence being shared with the American people. Thus, we have the prospect of a duly elected President of the United States being targeted for removal by the political and media Establishment without the citizens being let in on exactly what evidence exists and how significant it is.

The impeachment spotlight has already shifted from the underlying issue of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russians to President Trump’s inept firing of FBI Director James Comey, who played a key role in sinking Hillary Clinton’s campaign by reopening an investigation into possible security breaches in her use of a private email server while Secretary of State — before Comey took another star turn in pursuing the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia.

Trump, whose fitness for the presidency was always a profound concern to many American voters, again displayed his incompetence in firing Comey. You might have thought that Trump — as a former reality-TV star whose trademark line was “you’re fired!” — would have had the process down, but apparently not.

Trump didn’t even fire Comey face to face, but rather clumsily at long distance. Then, Trump had his subordinates justify Comey’s abrupt removal as a response to the FBI director’s violation of Justice Department protocols in announcing the politically sensitive investigation of Clinton in a way that appeared to influence a national election. But Trump undercut that rationale by blurting out comments that seemed to tie Comey’s removal to his lack of loyalty and to the Russian inquiry.

This latest botched move again showed that Trump can’t follow one of the most elementary rules of politics: stick to your own talking points. When one considers what Republicans did with the Obama administration’s initial confusion about the causes for the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, you might think that Trump would have learned the lesson about getting a story straight before telling it, but apparently not.

Whatever the justification for Comey’s firing, what Trump did was shift the Russia-gate “scandal” from the actual facts of the case to the process of the investigation. One of Official Washington’s favorite slogans is “the cover-up is worse than the crime” – although that’s usually a cop-out for journalists and members of Congress who don’t have the skills to investigate the underlying crime or determine if one even exists.

A ‘Soft Coup’

While the Establishment’s outrage over Comey’s firing has been widespread, one might have thought there would be a countervailing concern about the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies intervening to affect electoral outcomes, whether that was torpedoing Clinton or now sinking Trump.

The curious role of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the FBI in spearheading the Russia-gate investigation – including having handpicked “senior analysts” from the three agencies produce a clearly biased and nearly evidence-free report on Jan. 6 – has raised concerns of a “soft coup” or “deep-state coup” to negate the 2016 election.

Considering the seriousness of such a move in a constitutional republic that prides itself as the gold standard of democracy, it might have been expected that that the law-enforcement and intelligence agencies would go the extra mile in sharing their evidence with the American people whose electoral judgment would, in effect, be made meaningless: both by Comey’s late intervention against Clinton and now the pressure to impeach Trump.

Yet, instead of a commitment to openness, the intelligence community is telling the citizens that we must accept the fact of Russian “meddling” as “a given,” sans evidence. In addition, influential voices are emerging to declare that Trump’s impeachment should proceed even without the results of the Russia-gate investigation of possible Trump-Russia collusion being known to the public.

On Sunday, The Washington Post published an opinion article by Harvard University law professor Laurence H. Tribe declaring:

“The time has come for Congress to launch an impeachment investigation of President Trump for obstruction of justice. … Now the country is faced with a president whose conduct strongly suggests that he poses a danger to our system of government.”

Tribe continued:

“Ample reasons existed to worry about this president, and to ponder the extraordinary remedy of impeachment, even before he fired FBI Director James B. Comey and shockingly admitted on national television that the action was provoked by the FBI’s intensifying investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia.”

Grave Threat

According to Tribe, Trump’s threat to the system is so grave that his removal should precede any conclusions from the Russia-gate investigation. Tribe wrote that immediate impeachment could have been fashioned around other issues, “even without getting to the bottom of what Trump dismissed as ‘this Russia thing’,” though Tribe acknowledged that such an extreme step might have seemed premature at the time.

“No longer,” Tribe continued. “To wait for the results of the multiple investigations underway is to risk tying our nation’s fate to the whims of an authoritarian leader. Comey’s summary firing will not stop the inquiry, yet it represented an obvious effort to interfere with a probe involving national security matters vastly more serious than the ‘third-rate burglary’ that Nixon tried to cover up in Watergate.

“The question of Russian interference in the presidential election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign go to the heart of our system and ability to conduct free and fair elections.”

Like many mainstream “experts,” Tribe doesn’t seem to understand what Watergate was really about; recent historical discoveries show it to be an outgrowth of Nixon’s cover-up of his 1968 sabotage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks, a maneuver that secured Nixon the presidency but extended the war for four more years. Nixon’s fear that his dirty trick might get leaked led to formation of the Watergate “plumbers.”

Tribe also ignores the fact that the “Russian interference” still remains a “question,” not a proven fact, and no investigator has cited any evidence of the Trump campaign’s collusion. To skirt that problem, Tribe focuses on the firing of Comey as the grounds for impeachment:

“To say that this does not in itself rise to the level of ‘obstruction of justice’ is to empty that concept of all meaning. Obstruction of justice was the first count in the articles of impeachment against Nixon and, years later, a count against Bill Clinton. In Clinton’s case, the ostensible obstruction consisted solely in lying under oath about a sordid sexual affair that may have sullied the Oval Office but involved no abuse of presidential power as such.

“But in Nixon’s case, the list of actions that together were deemed to constitute impeachable obstruction reads like a forecast of what Trump would do decades later — making misleading statements to, or withholding material evidence from, federal investigators or other federal employees; trying to interfere with FBI or congressional investigations; trying to break through the FBI’s shield surrounding ongoing criminal investigations; dangling carrots in front of people who might otherwise pose trouble for one’s hold on power.

“It will require serious commitment to constitutional principle, and courageous willingness to put devotion to the national interest above self-interest and party loyalty, for a Congress of the president’s own party to initiate an impeachment inquiry. It would be a terrible shame if only the mounting prospect of being voted out of office in November 2018 would sufficiently concentrate the minds of representatives and senators today.

“But whether it is devotion to principle or hunger for political survival that puts the prospect of impeachment and removal on the table, the crucial thing is that the prospect now be taken seriously, that the machinery of removal be reactivated, and that the need to use it become the focus of political discourse going into 2018.”

Lay Out the Evidence

There is, of course, another alternative: the FBI and other intelligence agencies could expedite whatever investigations they’re doing and let the American people in on the evidence.

The key question, as Russia-gate was first being formulated as a political scandal, was whether some member of the Trump campaign colluded with Russian intelligence operatives to deliver, by memory stick or other means, hacked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks.

Yet, beyond the fact that the Jan. 6 report offered no government evidence that the Russians even hacked the Democratic emails, there also seems to be no rush to question the “usual suspects” from the Trump campaign – Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Page – about what they might know regarding the possible delivery of the emails to WikiLeaks.

Nor has there been any public testimony regarding another source of the Russia-gate allegations, ex-British spy Christopher Steele who prepared a series of opposition research reports on Trump and Russia apparently funded by Clinton supporters. It’s still not even known who paid for the Steele dossier.

Typically, the FBI and Justice Department refuse to discuss investigations until they’ve reached a conclusion, but that rule has already been broken by Comey, who justified announcing both the Clinton and Trump investigations because of their political significance.

In the Clinton case, Comey was urged to expedite his work so Clinton could be cleared before the election and he appeared to do so, terminating the reopened investigation of her email server two days before the Nov. 8 election. Today, the public interest in wrapping up the Russian inquiry is arguably even stronger.

In congressional testimony, Comey announced that the FBI began the Russia investigation last July, so it’s not as if the investigators haven’t had time to assess the evidence and decide what to do.

An Open Process

Carter Page’s suggestion – in effect waiving his privacy rights to get out in the open whatever evidence was used by the Obama administration to justify a reported Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against him – could be a start.

Congressional committees also could call as many willing Trump campaign people as possible to testify about their knowledge of any collusion with Russia. So far, the only witnesses have been law enforcement and intelligence officials appointed by President Obama, who have presented various allegations while refusing to offer back-up on the grounds that the evidence is “classified.”

While Professor Tribe and other advocates for impeaching Donald Trump may not care whether the Russia-gate evidence is ever released, they should recognize that – for better or worse – nearly 63 million Americans voted for Trump and – under the U.S. political process – he won the election (although Clinton got about 3 million more votes nationwide).

For the past several days, I’ve been traveling through Trump country of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio and have talked to several Trump voters along the way. Some indicated that they voted more against Clinton and the “elites” than enthusiastically for Trump. And some criticized Trump for his egotistical excesses. But they wanted him to be given a fair chance to govern.

It’s hard to know how angry these citizens would be if their judgment is overturned by the same “elites” whom they blamed for foisting on them the unpopular choice of Clinton versus Trump.

Reversing – or “correcting” – the result of the presidential election may seem like an obvious move for the editors of The New York Times and for Professor Tribe, but it is a deadly serious proposition that demands as full a release of evidence as possible, not long-running secret investigations or an impeachment based on an alleged “cover-up” of a crime that may or may not exist.

Negating the will of the voters as expressed through the constitutional process – as flawed as that process may be – requires its own process that is perceived as open and fair, not some star chamber or kangaroo court where the intelligence community gets to hide the evidence as “classified” and tells the citizenry to “trust us.”

As unfit and inept as Donald Trump may be, he was elected – and no one should underestimate how dangerous it could be for Washington insiders and other Establishment figures to undo the electoral choice through a process cloaked in secrecy.

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

Due giorni prima del test missilistico nord-coreano che ha fatto suonare l’allarme nucleare in tutto il mondo, è apparso sulla rivista Politico (12 maggio) un articolo intitolato «Perché gli Usa fanno bene a investire nelle armi nucleari». Non a firma di un opinionista, ma dei due generali che sono al comando dei tre quarti delle forze nucleari statunitensi: il capo di stato maggiore dell’Aeronautica, Dave Goldfein, e il capo del Comando aereo per l’attacco globale, Robin Rand.

Essi affermano che, «nonostante possa sembrare illogico, le armi nucleari sono uno strumento fondamentale della pace mondiale». Lo dimostra secondo loro il fatto che, da quando è iniziata l’era nucleare, non vi sono più state grandi guerre. È per questo essenziale, sostengono, che i nostri bombardieri e missili nucleari siano mantenuti in piena efficienza.

Oggi gli Stati uniti devono procedere all’upgrade delle proprie forze nucleari, poiché hanno di fronte «potenziali avversari che stanno aggressivamente modernizzando ed espandendo le loro forze nucleari e che vogliono sempre più imporsi». I generali nominano «le aperte minacce della Corea del Nord», ma è chiaro il loro riferimento implicito a Russia e Cina. «I nostri potenziali nemici – avvertono con tono minaccioso – devono sapere che la nostra direzione nazionale prenderà sempre le dure decisioni necessarie a proteggere e assicurare la sopravvivenza del popolo americano e dei suoi alleati», ossia che è pronta a combattere la terza guerra mondiale, quella nucleare, a cui in realtà nessuno sopravviverebbe. Rivolgono quindi una perentoria richiesta all’amministrazione Trump: «Gli Stati uniti devono mantenere l’impegno a ricapitalizzare le nostre forze nucleari».

L’impegno cui si riferiscono non è stato preso dal bellicoso Trump, ma dal Premio Nobel per la Pace Obama insignito nel 2009 per «la sua visione di un mondo libero dalle armi nucleari e il lavoro da lui svolto in tal senso». È stata l’amministrazione Obama a varare il maggiore programma di riarmo nucleare dalla fine della guerra fredda, del costo di circa 1000 miliardi di dollari, che prevede la costruzione di 12 nuovi sottomarini da attacco nucleare (ciascuno con 24 missili in grado di lanciare fin quasi 200 testate nucleari), altri 100 bombardieri strategici (ciascuno armato di circa 20 missili o bombe nucleari) e 400 missili balistici intercontinentali con base a terra (ciascuno con una potente testata nucleare).

È stata avviata allo stesso tempo con rivoluzionarie tecnologie la modernizzazione delle attuali forze nucleari che – documenta Hans Kristensen della Federazione degli scienziati americani (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 1 marzo 2017) – «triplica la potenza distruttiva degli esistenti missili balistici Usa», come se si stesse pianificando di avere «la capacità di combattere e vincere una guerra nucleare disarmando i nemici con un first strike di sorpresa». Capacità che comprende anche lo «scudo anti-missili» per neutralizzare la rappresaglia nemica, tipo quello schierato dagli Usa in Europa contro la Russia e in Corea del Sud contro la Cina. Si sta di conseguenza accelerando la corsa agli armamenti nucleari. Significativa la decisione russa di schierare nel 2018 un nuovo missile balistico intercontinentale, RS-28 Sarmat, con raggio fino a 18000 km, capace di trasportare 10-15 testate nucleari che, rientrando nell’atmosfera a velocità ipersonica (oltre 10 volte quella del suono), manovrano per sfuggire ai missili intercettori forando lo «scudo».

Possiamo però dormire sonni tranquilli, fiduciosi che «le armi nucleari sono uno strumento fondamentale della pace mondiale».

Manlio Dinucci

The following short report brought to us by Washington’s Blog is fundamental, if it is a leak rather than a hack, the Russia-gate agenda falls flat, the Russia Probe has no legitimacy. Read carefully, view video. (GR Editor)

We’ve reportedly documented that the DNC emails were leaked … not hacked.

(And the “evidence” that it was the Ruskies has collapsed.)

The head of Wikileaks – the organization which published the leaked DNC emails – has previously hinted that the leaker was DNC insider Seth Rich.

Today, the local Washington DC Fox news channel reports that the Rich family’s private investigator – a former Homicide Detective in Washington DC and white collar criminal investigator for the Attorney General of the State of Ohio – says that evidence on Rich’s computers proves that he communicated with Wikileaks:

We’ll update details as they’re released …

While Washington is in turmoil, Trump’s firing of FBI’s Director Comey being hailed by some, condemned by others and questioned with innuendo by yet another group of critics, it looks like the U-turn The Donald has supposedly made a few weeks ago, is fizzling out – into a cloud of confusion and chaos. And who are the beneficiaries of this chaos? – The Neocon-Zion-Democrats, who else?

Is Trump becoming, or has already become a Banana Republic dictator? Should he be tried as war criminal along with Obama, Bush, Clinton and their illustrious predecessors, including those who instigated world wars and conflicts around the globe for the last 200 years? Sadly, there is no justice left in so-called international courts of justice today. They have all been coopted by the hidden bloody fingers, pulling the strings in Washington and Brussels.

Is Trump’s government about to collapse from the pressure of the Neocons of the Deep State? Speculations no end, with emerging suggestion that the controversial President had already committed enough unconventional deeds to be impeached; and Russia-gate, one of them, is just not going away, despite all logic to the contrary.

It is another reflection of the idiocy of the Western media. A measured and purposeful idiocy, that is. They get away with it, as long as brainwashed masses still swallow the mass-media’s lies and deceptions in their comfortable armchairs. The swamp in Washington is steaming – and about to swallow politicians from all walks.

Will there be a nuclear war? Who will strike first? Western war-mongering Pentagon and NATO generals hope – that the US will launch a pre-emptive strike against Russia and /or China. It would most likely be triggered by a false flag. For example, North Korea is made believe to having launched a (nuclear) attack on Japan. Speculations to this effect have already circulated.

But what if Russia’s early warning system which is based on top-notch technology, detects such an intended first strike and reacts instantly? An atomic WWIII – with full destruction and almost no survivors? All these realistic ideas are tossed up and down – leaving a public on either side of the Atlantic in fear. And we know that fear and confusion are the best weapons to panic and stalemate a population.

Who will survive? – Who will be next? And some even go as far as speculating, who may replace President Trump? – Most obviously, his Vice President, Mike Pence, who fits the neocons’ gambit very well. After all, they were the ones who chose him on Trump’s behalf.

That’s the state of things according to the mainstream media. The US is crumbling and the West along with it. The crumbling is very loud. The softer noises are becoming undetectable.

On the European Continent, hidden from the common ear and eye, clandestine warfare against European cities and citizens is planned by – the German Bundeswehr, NATO and other European armed forces. They are preparing for subjugating possible social upheavals, if necessary killing their own citizens – that’s what NATO-inspired Brussels is up to. And the leader, who else, is NATO-inspired Germany – the front runner of European puppets, a position for which France is now competing with Macron – and perhaps winning.

As reported by Susan Bonath, independent investigative journalist, working as a regular contributor for the German Die Junge Welt (The Youth World) – something horrendous is emerging in a small north-eastern town of Germany’s landlocked Federal State of Saxony-Anhalt.

In one of Europe’s most modern military training camps, an entire ghost town is being built at the tune of millions of euros. Most of the German (or European) tax-payers have never heard of it. By 2018 the facility will be ready for troop training to fight European citizens in European cities, should they dare to go on the barricades against the atrocities of their leaders and oligarchs. See Susan Bonath’s  report (in German) at kenfm.de entitled Trainieren für Angriffskriege  Training for Aggressive Wars .

The concept is only new to Europe. The US, for years, has been building hidden garrisons around ‘vulnerable’ agglomerations – New York, Detroit, Chicago – and many more – ready to strike if massive protests should break out. For last November’s US Presidential election, they have been put on high alert. In fact, intensive troop movements could be observed from the air.

With Macron’s ‘election’ to President of France – or rather the Rothschild shoe-in – to protect the financial oligarchs of France and Europe, to shield unfettered capitalism from social disturbances, Europe is fast moving towards a state of fascist repression, accompanied by a fascist economy, a double whammy for the rich, and a double barrier aimed at eliminating peoples’ freedom to live decent and happy lives.

In his victory speech, Macron said as a priority that France will be first in ’fighting terrorism’. This is unconstrained support to the continuation of the ‘false flag’ approach, killing a few of your own citizens or policemen, to justify further and further clamp-downs on civil liberties. France, under Hollande, Washington’s ultra-puppet, has Europe’s most solid track record for false flag attacks. France may become the first country in Europe to put a permanent State of Emergency – akin to Martial Law – into her Constitution. Where Hollande so far had failed, Macron may succeed. Such an example would most like make school throughout vassal Europe. The training facilities in northern Germany, supported by Madame Merkel, to oppress and kill protesting Europeans fall right in line with Macron’s Machiavellian philosophy.

On the other hand, Greece is the epitome of the killing of a nation by financial instruments. The Greek allow it for reasons beyond logic. Maybe for fear not obeying and choosing the only way out, GREXIT, might be worse than financial strangulation? – These are apparently the arguments voiced, but unsubstantiated, by former Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis, who is ever so much interested in staying in the limelight, influencing public opinion by his self-styled stardom. Is this caviar leftist supporting his country’s demise as a deterrent for others who might want to regain sovereignty from the bulldozers of Washington and Brussels?

George Orwell comes to mind, when he says, referring to James Burnham’s The Machiavellians –

“a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud… Power can sometimes be won and maintained without violence, but never without fraud.”

This extends well to Globalization’s declaration of Justice:

“All that’s yours is mine, and all that’s mine is mine.”

Wake up and beware, what’s brewing at the NATO-German urban training camp ground is a defense mechanism to assure the ruling class privileges will never be lost. Europeans – on the barricades now, before it’s too late!

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The 4th Media (China), TeleSUR, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

In February 2017, the US would attempt to leverage an Amnesty International report claiming to detail unfolding atrocities at Sednaya prison in Syria.

While painting a picture of torture, neglect, and even mass executions, Amnesty forgot to include any actual evidence to corroborate its claims. The only actual evidence included in a report that otherwise consisted only of alleged interviews and 3D models of the prison made in London, was a picture taken from outer space by an imaging satellite.

The satellite image itself revealed nothing besides a building resembling a prison.

The report’s release and leveraging by the US came just ahead of another round of talks aimed at stemming the catastrophic 6 year conflict. The move by the US was a bid to give Washington and its regional allies extra leverage at the negotiating table. And now – months later – and just when the US is in need of more leverage, the Sednaya story has once again been revived.

The US State Department not only has repeated previous and discredited claims drawn from the Amnesty International report, it now claims the prison includes a crematorium facility – an oblique attempt to link the current Syrian government with historical arch-villains like Germany’s Nazis.

The Washington Post attempts to give legs to this revived narrative in an article titled, “U.S. says Syria built crematorium to handle mass prisoner killings,” which claims:

The Syrian government has constructed and is using a crematorium at its notorious Sednaya military prison near Damascus to clandestinely dispose of the bodies of prisoners it continues to execute inside the facility, the State Department said Monday.

In terms of “evidence,” the Washington Post claims (emphasis added):

The State Department distributed satellite photographs it said documented the gradual construction of the facility outside the main prison complex and its apparent use this year. Jones said that “newly declassified” information on this and other atrocities by the government of President Bashar al-Assad came from “intelligence community assessments,” as well as from nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International and the media. 

In other words, the US State Department is referencing a discredited report from Amnesty International which admittedly contained no physical evidence corroborating its claims, and additional photographs taken from outer space by imaging satellites.

Elaborating on the “evidence,” the Washington Post would report (emphasis added):

The newly released information included a satellite photo of the snow-covered Sednaya complex with an L-shaped building labeled “probable crematorium.” 

The word “probable” is an open admission to having no actual evidence that the building is in fact a “crematorium.” The word “probable” also means that no evidence exists that the alleged “crematorium” is being use to mass incinerate bodies, or that the bodies are the result of a systematic process of mass torture and executions.

No responsible intelligence agency would submit final reports containing the word “probable,” and more importantly, no responsible state department would cite reports containing the word “probable” to accuse a foreign government of crimes against humanity.

But an intelligence agency tasked with fabricating a narrative and a state department tasked with selling it to the international community would – and as the US State Department has done numerous times in the past and at great cost in human lives and global stability – Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya for example – that is precisely what has happened yet again.

The Washington Post – just in case readers failed to make the oblique connection to Germany’s Nazis – connects the dots for its audience by characterizing the US State Department’s briefing as

“accusations of mass murder and incinerated bodies, evoking the Holocaust.”

While the US State Department and the Washington Post attempt to paint an elaborate picture of abuse to shock the international community into condemnation of Syria, what it has really essentially done is resort to the schoolyard tactic of calling the Syrian government, “Hitler.”

The Amnesty International report was published in February 2017. Admittedly presenting no actual evidence, and considering the industrial scale of alleged mass murder and now alleged “incineration” taking place at the facility, one would assume the largest, most powerful intelligence network on Earth in human history could present something months later more substantial than a photograph taken from outer space labeled, “probable crematorium.”

That the largest, most powerful intelligence network on Earth, in human history failed to find anything more substantial indicates there is nothing to find and that instead, the US has deferred once again to fabricating pretexts for its continued meddling beyond its borders, amid catastrophic conflicts it itself engineered and is perpetuating, toward an outcome that suits Washington first and foremost – and especially at the cost of all others involved.

While spokespeople behind the US State Department’s podiums insist that the Syrian “slaughterhouse” is being organized and directed from Damascus, it is clear that just like the dismemberment and destruction of Iraq and Libya – the Syrian “slaughterhouse” is a project organized and directed from Washington.

The outcome of the French presidential elections did not suggest a France on the verge of rapid, vigorous renewal. It suggested the opposite, a state in atrophy, the Fifth Republic in terminal decline before unleashed historical forces.

Dejected, voters feared by way of a majority that Marine Le Pen was simply too potent to be catapulted into the Élysée Palace on May 7. A coalition of sentiment and convenience converged, giving the 39-year-old opportunist a chance to market himself as France’s saviour.

For all that, Emmanuel Macron still did not convince the twelve million who swooped to Le Pen, or the four million who preferred to destroy their ballot papers in a huff of disapproval of both candidates in the runoff election. Hardly peanuts from the perspective of voter behaviour.

And marketing himself Macron is. Essential to this campaign is an effort to link victory to a broader, European, if not global one. (When France is in internal crisis, it often looks to save the causes of others.)

“The world needs what the French have always taught. For decades France has doubted herself.” Such self-doubt can hardly be a terrible thing, putting the brake on overly patriotic, and parochial measures. But not for Macron, who promises that his mandate would give back to the French the confidence “to believe in themselves”, to effectively convince the world that French power, far from being on the decline to some retirement home of geopolitics, was on “the brink of a great renaissance.”

This hardly seemed to be the case, given the admitted fracture on the president’s part of France’s political fabric, and the state of emergency that keeps the state apparatchiks busy. Since 2015, the Fifth Republic continues to live in a state that made Macron speak of “a living fraternity” open and welcoming, rather than private and fearful. Such vague calls cry out for evidence, though Macron had better things to worry about.

He will have much convincing to do. One will be to inject his En Marche! Movement – now named République en marche – into Parliamentary elections, again humming the theme of centrist wisdom. To garner victory, he will need a majority of the 577-seat National Assembly through issuing a siren call for defections. On Monday, Macron published a list of 511 candidates for the June legislative ballot.

Short of that, the prospects of La Cohabitation with a prime minister of different political persuasion may be in order, one where the leader in the lower chamber is approved by majority. Such situations have previously led to an un-greasing of the pathway of policy reform, and stress a distribution of power away from the executive to the parliament.

So far, Macron’s man for the prime minister’s office is Édouard Philippe, mayor of Le Havre and of the Les Républicains party. He has indicated that, in all manner of things, one may well lean, when required, to the left of politics or the right. (Do we sense here a French variant of the British “wobbler”?)

What matters to Philippe are issues of economic freedom and “freedom of thought, freedom of expression.”[1] He concedes to being right wing, “and yet the general interest must be to dictate the engagement of the state, of elected officials and of the citizen.”

As of Macron, Philippe was not entirely convinced prior to his appointment that the soufflé had come together quite as promised. There was little doubt, in his mind, that new President had the “power of seduction and reformist rhetoric,” but he could hardly be compared on the charm metre to a John F. Kennedy.

None of these views detract from the visible fact that Macron’s choice is very much one that seeks to court establishment values, whilst sending teasing signals to the conservatives. Bruno Retailleau of the French senate smelled an enormous rat, suggesting that Macron had moved to weaken “the right in the parliamentary elections.”

Reform, it would seem, is being promised from within the establishment, making use of traditional figures to bring about a change. Philippe’s party is that of the old guard, of Nicolas Sarkozy and failed, disgraced presidential candidate François Fillon. As Le Pen suggested, with some substance and disdain, the nomination of Philippe is telling on one level, that of a “perfect summary of the last 10 years in France”. The forces of the traditional left and right, in other words, would continue to have the dance of State.

To add some padding to these tactics, Macron is also facing a range of decisions on how to pursue the “road map” of European change with the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. On the one hand, the centrist wants greater EU centralisation within the euro bloc, not to mention that headache of headaches, a budget; on the other, he wishes to quell technocratic urges and trim unneeded bureaucracy.

What, then, should this suggest? A policy of a “Europe of two circles,” one capitalising on Brexit, has been suggested by Macron’s economic aide and mastermind, Jean Pisani-Ferry, along with traditional observance of the EU-imposed public deficit limit. Given what is currently happening to the unfortunate continent, he might as well go for three, all turbulent, concentric, and in need of severe repair.

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

Note

[1] http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2017/05/15/edouard-philippe-le-maire-les-republicains-du-havre-nomme-premier-ministre_5127912_823448.html

The ongoing Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation will make future-oriented plans for cooperation and push forward the construction of the routes on a new starting point, said a commentary published by People’s Daily on Sunday, the same day the two-day event opened in Beijing.

The following is an abstract translation of the article:

A total of 29 heads of state and governments, over 70 leaders of international organizations, and 1,500-plus representatives from worldwide attended the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation being held in Beijing.

As the highest-level Belt and Road international meeting since the initiative was firstly put forward, the historical event will definitely usher countries around the world into a new chapter to build it together.

Better than expected, progress and achievements have been scored by the efforts to construct Belt and Road. So far, more than 100 countries and international organizations have responded to the initiative, with 40 of them signing agreements of cooperation with China.

These accomplishments obtained in such a short period of time indeed indicated the initiative’s conformity with the trend of international peaceful development and the demand of Eurasian countries for cooperation and development.

The Belt and Road initiative is for China, but more importantly, it is for the world.

Now the world economy is still in a gloom, with rising tide of protectionism and anti-globalization. The conflicts between openness and conservatism, reform and fogyism economic integration and fragmentation have emerged as well.

Amid such background, the Belt and Road development provides a new engine to boost trade growth and accelerate the reform of global economic governance.

Fruitful harvests have been reaped from the endeavor to build the routes. The “Belt and Road” countries, for instance, have aligned their development strategies and construction plans, while investment and financing platforms such as Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and Silk Road Fund have been set up.

The infrastructure projects like Jakarta-Bandunghigh speed rail and Gwadar Port are underway as well.

Photo taken shows a terminal of the Gwadar Port in Pakistan. (Photo by MengXianglin from People’s Daily)

These have not only accelerated China’s process to open up in an all-round way, but also brought development opportunities and tangible benefits for the countries and regions along the routes. The contribution of all involved countries was rewarded.

Such common actions are pushing the world toward an innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive economy.

Chinese President Xi Jinping once pointed out that

“the world will be a better place only when everyone is better off”.

To put Xi’s words into practice, Chinese enterprises have established 56 economic cooperation zones in Belt and Road countries during the last 3 years, creating nearly $1.1 billion tax revenue and 180,000 jobs. In addition, China’s direct investment in these countries reached $14.5 billion in merely 2016.

China is implementing the initiative and devoting to economic globalization with maximum sincerity and firm actions.

Xi stressed that the Silk Road is a common treasure for people all over the world. The continuous promotion of the initiative will not only effectively deepen the cooperation between China and the Belt and Road countries, but also deliver them and the world at large the conception to build a community of shared interests and future for the mankind.

The achievements in the past 3 years have made the Belt and Road initiative important international public product goods. The forum will determine the key cooperation areas for the next phase through consultation, make future-oriented plans for cooperation, and promote the construction of the Belt and Road on a new starting point, in a bid to further build consensus, set direction and plan visions.

The forum is not about empty talks. It will make itself into a highly-efficient global cooperation platform to encourage connectivity.

Closer alignment, effective implementation and other concrete actions will be taken to convert consensus into development engines and welfare for the public, so that the Belt and Road initiative will be strong enough to carry the hope and dream of the people from en-route countries.

The ongoing Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation will make future-oriented plans for cooperation and push forward the construction of the routes on a new starting point, said a commentary published by People’s Daily on Sunday, the same day the two-day event opened in Beijing.

The following is an abstract translation of the article:

A total of 29 heads of state and governments, over 70 leaders of international organizations, and 1,500-plus representatives from worldwide attended the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation being held in Beijing.

As the highest-level Belt and Road international meeting since the initiative was firstly put forward, the historical event will definitely usher countries around the world into a new chapter to build it together.

Better than expected, progress and achievements have been scored by the efforts to construct Belt and Road. So far, more than 100 countries and international organizations have responded to the initiative, with 40 of them signing agreements of cooperation with China.

These accomplishments obtained in such a short period of time indeed indicated the initiative’s conformity with the trend of international peaceful development and the demand of Eurasian countries for cooperation and development.

The Belt and Road initiative is for China, but more importantly, it is for the world.

Now the world economy is still in a gloom, with rising tide of protectionism and anti-globalization. The conflicts between openness and conservatism, reform and fogyism economic integration and fragmentation have emerged as well.

Amid such background, the Belt and Road development provides a new engine to boost trade growth and accelerate the reform of global economic governance.

Fruitful harvests have been reaped from the endeavor to build the routes. The “Belt and Road” countries, for instance, have aligned their development strategies and construction plans, while investment and financing platforms such as Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and Silk Road Fund have been set up.

The infrastructure projects like Jakarta-Bandunghigh speed rail and Gwadar Port are underway as well.

Photo taken shows a terminal of the Gwadar Port in Pakistan. (Photo by MengXianglin from People’s Daily)

These have not only accelerated China’s process to open up in an all-round way, but also brought development opportunities and tangible benefits for the countries and regions along the routes. The contribution of all involved countries was rewarded.

Such common actions are pushing the world toward an innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive economy.

Chinese President Xi Jinping once pointed out that

“the world will be a better place only when everyone is better off”.

To put Xi’s words into practice, Chinese enterprises have established 56 economic cooperation zones in Belt and Road countries during the last 3 years, creating nearly $1.1 billion tax revenue and 180,000 jobs. In addition, China’s direct investment in these countries reached $14.5 billion in merely 2016.

China is implementing the initiative and devoting to economic globalization with maximum sincerity and firm actions.

Xi stressed that the Silk Road is a common treasure for people all over the world. The continuous promotion of the initiative will not only effectively deepen the cooperation between China and the Belt and Road countries, but also deliver them and the world at large the conception to build a community of shared interests and future for the mankind.

The achievements in the past 3 years have made the Belt and Road initiative important international public product goods. The forum will determine the key cooperation areas for the next phase through consultation, make future-oriented plans for cooperation, and promote the construction of the Belt and Road on a new starting point, in a bid to further build consensus, set direction and plan visions.

The forum is not about empty talks. It will make itself into a highly-efficient global cooperation platform to encourage connectivity.

Closer alignment, effective implementation and other concrete actions will be taken to convert consensus into development engines and welfare for the public, so that the Belt and Road initiative will be strong enough to carry the hope and dream of the people from en-route countries.

“Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.” Frantz Fanon, 1961. (1925-1961.)

Although the US’ entirely illegal attack on Syria’s Shayrat Airbase in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government, showed not a thought towards Congressional debate, United Nations mandate or the rule of law, it seems that some thought might have gone in to the date.

Not alone was embarking on the action on 6th April – US time – the 100th anniversary of the United States entering World War 1, but in Europe and the Middle East, as the fifty nine Tomahawk Cruise missiles struck on the dawn of 7th April, it was the 61st anniversary of Syria’s independence from France being officially recognized – and of the 2003 fall of Baghdad to the illegal invaders, the US, UK and Poland committing Nuremberg’s “supreme international crime …”

Incidentally, April 7th was also the day Attila the Hun “the scourge of all lands”, sacked the town of Metz and widely slaughtered other cities in Gaul in 451.

A reminder: On 12th September 2013 Syria’s President al-Assad committed to surrender Syria’s chemical weapons, with the caveats that the United States must stop threatening his country and supplying weapons to the terrorists.

On 23rd June 2014 at 11.32 pm., then Secretary of State John Kerry Tweeted:

“Today the last 8% of declared chemical weapons were removed from Syria. Great work done by all involved.”

Further,

“We struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out”, Kerry said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in July 2014.

Kerry was referring to the deal between the U.S., and Russia in September 2013 in which the Russians agreed to help remove and destroy Syria’s entire chemical weapons stockpile.

Moreover:

“The last of the remaining chemicals identified for removal from Syria were loaded this afternoon aboard the Danish ship Ark Futura”, confirmed Ahmet Üzümcü, Director General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in June 2014.

However, that said, the chaos that ensued in trying to find countries who would dispose of the weapons hardly augured well for the safety of their disposal or indeed the certainty that quantities were not simply be sold on to terrorist groups. For example sixty containers were:

“ … transferred from a Danish cargo ship to a US ship in the Italian port of Giola Tauro, in Calabria, with further consignments also expected to arrive.”

Amongst numerous crises, the port suffered from allegations of being a:

“major hub for cocaine shipments to Europe by the Calabria-based ‘Ndrangheta mafia.”

Not really the safest place to ship chemical components prized by some very well funded criminals. (See the full story of the mind-bending chaos surrounding the removal by the OPCW at 1.)

As ever, double standards rule. The same article reminds that when it comes to chemical weapons:

“Israel rules the Middle East supreme, its WMD capability intact. This was pointed out by Bob Rigg – former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, former senior editor for the OCPW and former Chair of the New Zealand National Consultative Committee on Disarmament:

“At present, Israel has a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Once the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons is complete, Israel will enjoy a near regional monopoly over a second weapon of mass destruction – chemical weapons. In addition to Israel, Egypt is the only regional power with a chemical weapons capability.”

The “international community” now led by the Presidential “Agent Orange” in the White House is toweringly selective when it comes to accusations of weapons of mass destruction. For example, in 2009, Human Rights Watch, in a shocking, detailed seventy one page document (2) reported that:

“Israel’s repeated firing of white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas of Gaza during its recent military campaign was indiscriminate and is evidence of war crimes

“Human Rights Watch researchers in Gaza immediately after hostilities ended found spent shells, canister liners, and dozens of burnt felt wedges containing white phosphorus on city streets, apartment roofs, residential courtyards, and at a United Nations school. The report also presents ballistics evidence, photographs, and satellite imagery, as well as documents from the Israeli military and government.”

No Cruise missiles were fired at Israel, no worldwide condemnation at an apocalyptic assault on a tiny, illegally fragmented part of Palestine with no army, navy or air force. How selective the US and friends are in their murderous, righteous indignation.

Trump is shortly to embark on a State visit to Israel.

Syria, of course is one of seven countries (Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Iran and Yemen) that General Wesley Clark was told by a Pentagon pal shortly after 9/11, “was going to be taken out.”

Trump has followed his warmongering predecessors declaring himself Judge, jury and executioner within 48 hours of the chemical release, with apparently no thought as to who might have been storing lethal substances in an area entirely controlled by the “moderate” Western backed organ eaters, head choppers and child executioners.

International law, the UN Charter, diplomacy has been damned, ditched and shredded by yet another self appointed “leader of the free world.” The attack on Syria another US illegal assault on a sovereign nation.

On the following Monday night (10th April) sabre rattling US Defence Secretary James Mattis, warned the Syrian government it would be:

“ill-advised ever again to use chemical weapons …”, still without a shred of reliable evidence that Syria was involved.

What there is evidence of is that the US indeed used both chemical and radiological weapons – fifty nine times – in their attack. Tomahawk Cruise missiles used in the attack are thought to contain Depleted Uranium (3, pdf.) “Toxicity of DU is both chemical and radiological …” states that International Atomic Energy Agency Document.

In addition to the fifty nine Tomahawks, the US has been using DU weapons in Iraq since 1991 and eventually admitted to using them in Syria in 2015, though in spite of it being the US weapon of choice no figures for use in Syria in other years have been forthcoming.

US Central Command has acknowledged that DU was fired on two dates – the 18th and 23rd November 2015 … 5,100 rounds of 30 mm DU ammunition were used by A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft. This equates to 1,524 kg of DU. (International Commission to Ban Uranium Weapons, Oct. 21, 2016) Emphasis added.

Here again, lest forgotten, quotes from the US Army itself regarding the terrifying legacy of DU:

“No available technology can significantly change the inherent chemical and radiological toxicity of DU. These are intrinsic properties of uranium.” (US Army Environmental Policy Institute, Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium Use in the US Army, June 1995, p.xxii.)

Further:

“DU is a … radioactive waste and therefore, must be deposited in a licensed repository.” Same source, p 154. Note: “ … a licensed depository.” Not on a school, home, street, farm, Mosque, church, university, hospital, village, town or city. “Short term effects of high doses can result in death, while long term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer.” (Kinetic Energy Penetrator Long Term Study, Danesi, 1991.) Emphasis mine.

So let’s have no more self righteous nonsense over something entirely unproven the Syrian government are being accused of when the US itself has been using chemical and radiological weapons for twenty five years, it’s own Army manuals warning of the dangers. The soaring cancers and birth defects linked to the use of DU in Iraq and where ever else they have been used – mirrored in US servicemen, women and families are chilling proof of the voracity of the warnings. DU has a half-life of 4.5 Billion years. Its use condemns and curses the not yet even conceived – until the end of time.

In 2008 the European Parliament called for a global ban on DU weapons and a moratorium on their use. In a Resolution which:

“strongly reiterates its call on all EU Member States and NATO countries to impose a moratorium on the use of depleted uranium weapons and to redouble efforts towards a global ban.”

The resolution was adopted with 491votes in favour, 18 against and 12 abstentions. (European Parliament external link May 22, 2008)

In March 2007 the Belgium Parliament had voted unanimously to ban DU weapons in a law prohibiting:

“the manufacture, use, storage, sale, acquisition, supply and transit of inert munitions and armour that contain depleted uranium or any other industrially manufactured uranium.” (Belgian Coalition ‘Stop Uranium Weapons’, 22nd March 2007.)

In June 2009, Belgium became the first country to prevent the flow of money to producers of uranium weapons anywhere, the law requiring that:

“ … financial institutions … must bring their investment in large weapon producers such as Alliant Techsystems (US), BAE Systems (UK) and General Dynamics (US) to an end.”

Donald Trump, thus had a chance to turn a new leaf as new President, make good his promises on avoiding foreign interventions with concrete initiatives already in place to endorse and build on.

On January 26, 2017, British Prime Minister May during her visit to President Trump in Washington made the following statement:

“The days of Britain and America intervening in sovereign countries in an attempt to remake the world in our own image are over.”

Yet the UK government immediately supported the shameful radioactive and chemically toxic bombardment of Syria.

Further, it was widely reported that thirty six of the Cruise missiles are unaccounted for, where did they land, who did they kill, or are they lying at the bottom of the Mediterranean decaying, to poison it’s waters and life for all time?

“Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror”, said Trump of the alleged attack in Syria, with no proof of who was responsible, but abundant proof that the us backed terrorists had access to dangerous chemicals.

However, as Chris Ernesto writes with heart searing instances (4):

“In the first three months of his Presidency, Trump has dropped bombs – and killed children (and beautiful babies) – in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.”

However, in a nauseating irony, exposed by the Palmer Report, Trump allegedly may have profited from the deaths he caused. (5):

“Tomahawk missiles are manufactured by Raytheon Inc., and according to this report from Business Insider (link), Donald Trump owned stock in Raytheon up through at least the start of the presidential election cycle. There is no record that he subsequently sold that stock.

“The Tomahawks that Trump just burned up will have to be replaced, meaning he just handed a nearly hundred million dollar payday to a company he owns stock in. Not surprisingly, shares of Raytheon spiked today (link), meaning he’s directly profiting from his Syria attack.”

The shares were, within hours, recorded as up by 2.1%.

In a further twist in integrity ditching, The Washington Post had writer Ed Rogers:

“… to push for and praise military action against Syria without disclosing that he’s a lobbyist for defense contractor Raytheon …”

‘In the piece headlined “Could it be? Is President Trump on a roll?” Rogers wrote that Trump “received bipartisan support for his military strike in Syria …” ‘

“The Post did not disclose that Rogers and his firm, BGR Group, lobbies on behalf of Raytheon … Rogers is listed as a (BGR) lobbyist. BGR is one of the country’s largest lobbying firms, taking in nearly $17 million in reported lobbying income last year.”

So much for “draining the swamp.”

Notes

1. http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2317280/syrias_chemical_weapons_lawbreakers_rule_supreme.html

2. https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/03/25/rain-fire/israels-unlawful-use-white-phosphorus-gaza

3. http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/31/049/31049589.pdf

4. https://www.opednews.com/articles/Trump-has-killed-beautifu-by-Chris-Ernesto-Airstrikes_Al-Qaeda_Assad_Children-170417-581.html

5. http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/tomahawk-missiles-were-wrong-choice-for-syria-attack-but-donald-trump-owns-stock-in-the-company/2224/

6. https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/04/11/wash-post-doesn-t-disclose-writer-supporting-syria-strike-lobbyist-tomahawk-missile-manufacturer/215976

Hugely increased arms shipments and loans will likely be the policy of the Trump Administration for a US­-armed Israel to dominate the Middle East on behalf of America.

The US Republican President will have the use of billions of dollars in casino funds plus the power of the AIPAC and CFI lobbies in Washington and in Westminster, respectively – ­both being key players in an international movement to legalise the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

Upon completion of the land grab, the Netanyahu government apparently intends to carry out a unilateral annexation of the Occupied Territories whilst contemporaneously expelling the 5 million indigenous Palestinians in a forced transfer from their ancestral lands to new refugee camps in adjoining states of Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Syria.

This would signal the commencement of the ‘Greater Israel’ project: an illegitimate expansionist programme that extends from the River Nile to the Euphrates in order to fulfill the Likud Zionist agenda for a nuclear hegemon that would be able to control not only the Middle East but, through its agents and government ministers embedded in the British Parliament and the US Congress, to dictate the global foreign defence and trade policy of NATO, NAFTA, Britain and the EU.

Trump is expected to promise support for the continuation of the settlements and their subsequent annexation as he denies the establishment of a Palestinian state by deliberately rejecting the will of the United Nations in a gross violation of international law.

In direct opposition to the hard­-won democratic values for which so many allied forces died in two world wars, this self-­interested politician and his backers intend to take the world back to a time of military domination in order to nurture a neo­-colonial, nuclear super state that will impose its will upon the political and economic direction of over half the world, which includes the disintegration of Europe.

But only if Britain, Europe, and the UN Security Council, are prepared to allow such a global catastrophe.

There is no such thing as cyber security. The only choice is more security or less security, as the recent hack of the National Security Agency demonstrates.

Hackers stole from NSA a cyber weapon, which has been used in attacks (at time of writing) on 150 countries, shutting down elements of the British National Health Service, the Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica, automakers Renault and Nissan, Russia’s Interior Ministry, Federal Express, the energy company PetroChina, and many more.

The news spin is to not blame NSA for its carelessness, but to blame Microsoft users for not updating their systems with a patch issued two months ago. But the important questions have not been asked: What was the NSA doing with such malware and why did NSA not inform Microsoft of the malware?

Clearly, NSA intended to use the cyber weapon against some country or countries. Why else have it and keep it a secret from Microsoft?

Was it to be used to shut down Russian and Chinese systems prior to launching a nuclear first strike against the countries? Congress should be asking this question as it is certain that the Russian and Chinese governments are. As I previously reported, the Russian High Command has already concluded that Washington is preparing a nuclear first strike against Russia, and so has China.

It is extremely dangerous that two nuclear powers have this expectation. This danger has received no attention from Washington and its NATO vassals.

Microsoft president Brad Smith likened the theft of the NSA’s cyber weapon to “the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen.” In other words, with cyber weapons, as with nuclear weapons and short warning times, things can go wrong in a big way.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39915440

What if the hackers had successfully attacked the Russian Ministry of Defense or radar warning systems, would the Russian High Command have concluded that the cyber attack was Washington’s prelude to incoming ICBMs?

The fact that no one in Washington or any Western government has stepped forward to reassure the Russian government and demand the removal of the US missile bases surrounding Russia indicates a level of hubris or denial that is beyond comprehension.

In my May 12 posting I wrote:

“The costs of the digital revolution exceed its benefits by many times. The digital revolution rivals nuclear weapons as the most catastrophic technology of our time.”

In response, Robert Henderson wrote to me from England that he had addressed the enormous costs of the digital revolution in 2010. Here is the link to his article, “Men and Machines: Which is Master Which is Slave?”

https://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/men-and-machines-which-is-master-which-is-slave/

Reading his article will raise your awareness. When you add up the vast financial costs, the depersonalization of human relationships, and the complete loss of individual privacy and security, the benefit of being connected is vastly outweighed by the costs.

Paper files are far more secure. Malware cannot be introduced into them. To steal a person’s information required knowing the location of the information, breaking into the building, searching file cabinets for the information, and copying the information. To intercept a voice communication required a warrant to wiretap a specific telephone line.

People born into a world where the ease of communication comes at the price of the loss of autonomy never experience privacy. They are unaware that a foundation of liberty has been lost.

In our era of controlled print and TV media, the digital revolution serves for now as a check on the ruling elite’s ability to control explanations. However, the same technology that currently permits alternative explanations can be used to prevent them. Indeed, efforts to discredit and to limit non-approved explanations are already underway.

The enemies of truth have a powerful weapon in the digital revolution and can use it to herd humanity into a tyrannical distopia. The digital revolution even has its own Memory Hole. Files stored electronically by older technology can no longer be accessed as they exist in an outdated electronic format that cannot be opened by current systems in use.

Humans are proving to be the most stupid of the life forms. They create weapons that cannot be used without destroying themselves. They create robots and free trade myths that take away their jobs. They create information technology that destroys their liberty.

Dystopias tend to be permanent. The generations born into them never know any different, and the control mechanisms are total.

And the digital screen serves as Soma.

This article is not an exhaustive analysis of Russia’s foreign policy. Rather, it is a reflection based on Russian and Western sources, without adopting mainstream positions of either. Society gives university professors time to think; presenting original views is our way of repaying our debt to society. Regurgitating mainstream ideas would betray this vocation of the intellectual. It would also contribute to the growing trend of demodernization in foreign policy discourse: ephemeral media images tailored for emotional impact on those with a short attention span take place of rational analysis of broader context and history.

First, two preliminary remarks. One has to do with the personification of policies. In recent years, identification of policies of countries with single individuals has become common. This gross simplification does away with the complexity of the political environments in which these individuals operate. However powerful a Bashar Assad, a Donald Trump or a Vladimir Putin may be, they have to contend with many different forces within their countries. Moreover, it is a worn-out propaganda trick to refer to political systems not to our liking as someone’s “regime”. Irritation with recalcitrant heads of state have taken the form of epithets like “killer”, “monster” and “animal”, used not only by media commentators but also by prominent politicians in the United States, including the president. This kind of discourse tends to impede our understanding of international politics.

My second remark has to do with a related issue: moralistic arguments in Western foreign policy discourse. There are more than ‘cowboys and Indians’ in the picture. Policies of states must be understood in terms of their respective geopolitical interests and realities, not in light of their adherence or lack thereof to liberal post-Christian values embraced by Western countries barely a few decades ago. Denunciations of treatment of dissidents or homosexuals should not substitute for political and strategic arguments.

Such denunciations, amplified by mainstream media, produce default thinking (to the extent this phenomenon can be termed thinking altogether). If a “regime” is deemed evil, military action, with or without a U.N. sanction, is in order. This is how the United States attacked an air base in Syria in April 2017. Washington had produced no evidence that the responsibility for the use of chemical weapons, which triggered this reaction, rested with the Syrian government. The United States also ignored the conclusions of U.N. monitors who documented that the government of Syria had relinquished chemical weapons. Meanwhile, most Western media reported on the event strongly suggesting that the fault lay with “the Assad regime”. The general public in the West was therefore largely supportive of the U.S. attack. Similar default thinking led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In 2006, the then Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper publicly condemned Iran for allegedly obliging Jews to wear yellow signs on the basis of a fake news article published in The National Post and later retracted. Harper had not bothered to check the fact with the Canadian embassy in Tehran before saying that Iran was “very capable of this kind of action”, comparing it with Nazi Germany. In 2012 he made his country break diplomatic relations with Iran without citing any specific reason but in line with this self-righteous sentiment that triggers default thinking.

Immediate Background

In order to understand Russia’s behavior, it is important to review its recent history. Russia (or rather the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, RSFSR) was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union, which was dismantled in December 1991. The referendum on the maintenance of the Soviet state in March 1991 not only showed a remarkable turnout of 80%, but, more importantly, that a vast majority of Soviet citizens did not want their country dismantled. In Central Asia the vote for the preservation of the Soviet Union was over 95 %, while it was also overwhelmingly strong in the Slavic republics of Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine

(http://www.zaoerv.de/75_2015/75_2015_1_a_141_166.pdf).

It is therefore not surprising that many in Russia, the Ukraine, and other republics, continue to see the end of the Soviet Union as one of the tragedies of the last century. This does not mean, however, that they seek to reconstitute it. As Putin put it:

“Those who do not regret the dissolution of the Soviet Union have no heart; those who want to remake it have no brain”.

Gorbachev tried to reform the country and its foreign policy. He called on the East European members of the Warsaw Pact to decide their own policies and agreed on the reunification of Germany. Yet neither Gorbachev nor the population of the former Soviet Union believed then, or believe today, that they had “lost the Cold War.” This is a serious source of misunderstanding and disconnect. While it is common in the United States to hear “We won the Cold War”, few, (if any) in Russia believe that they lost it. Many Russians attribute the loss of international stature to what they see as “Gorbachev’s unilateral and unwarranted concessions”.

The gap becomes even larger when some American politicians and journalists argue that the Russians should assume defeat and behave like the Japanese did after 1945. However, decision makers in Moscow see no reason to act as a defeated nation; for them, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was largely a result of internal pressures and decisions. This kind of disconnect has led to a dangerous mismatch of expectations between Moscow and Washington, and continues to plague the relations between the two countries.

Following the dismantlement of the Soviet Union., President Yeltsin presided over massive and less than equitable privatization, which weakened Russia economically, socially and politically. The country had no clear policy direction and was left to the mercy of the rapacious oligarchs surrounding the Russian president. While their wealth grew with breathtaking speed, the vast majority of former Soviet citizens suffered radical pauperization. The neo-liberal scenario of broadening the gap between the rich and the poor was thrust upon one of the most egalitarian societies on the planet. Tens of millions of people found themselves below the poverty line. It was only under Putin that the country’s economy actually began to benefit the citizens. In the mind of many Russians, this improvement in the citizens’ welfare is associated with a less servile foreign policy.

Unipolar World

The end of the Soviet Union may not have meant the end of history, as some had predicted, but certainly the beginning of a unipolar world, with the United States at its helm. The term “unipolar” was first introduced in France, where there exists acute sensitivity to American hegemony.

Under Yeltsin, American geopolitical interests prevailed, and NATO inexorably moved east, eventually absorbing three former Soviet republics and all the East European members of the Warsaw Pact. His foreign policy varied, as the initially fawning Yeltsin came to resent this development but Russia’s interests were routinely ignored in the West as a result of the self-mutilation that the country experienced during his mandate.

One episode illustrates Russia’s frustration and impotence. When NATO began bombing Serbia (including Kosovo) without a U.N. sanction in 1999, Evgeny Primakov, a career diplomat and political analyst, who then held the position of Prime Minister in the Yeltsin administration, was on his way to Washington. As soon as he found out about the bombing, he turned the plane around and headed back to Moscow. There was little else he could do.

Similar bitter experiences, coupled with the unprecedented impoverishment of the majority of the country’s population during the Yeltsin years, became etched in the collective memory of Russian citizens and their leaders. When Putin succeeded Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s hope of becoming part of “a common European home” had long vanished. Quite a few in Russia see Gorbachev and Yeltsin as naïve and misguided to have expected to be treated as equals in Washington.

Indeed, the Project for a New American Century, which is the name of a Neocon think tank founded in Washington in 1997, clearly articulated the vision of an American hegemony. Many of the authors of this concept found themselves in the upper ranks of the George W. Bush administration. They affirmed that “American leadership is good both for America and for the world,” and called for “moral clarity.” Double standards were thus proudly proclaimed as “moral”, as American self-righteous exceptionalism became the pillar of the country’s foreign policies. According to the new doctrine, no country should ever be allowed to reach military parity with the United States, a clear signal to Russia that it would not be treated as an equal.

At the same time, the Russian government repeatedly stated that they had no intention of competing with the United States in terms of military budgets. Russia acknowledged on many occasions America’s military superiority while expressing concerns regarding the ways in which it was being put to use. Russia’s foreign policy under Putin went through several stages. He was the first to telephone President Bush in the wake of 9/11 offering sympathy and full cooperation. This reinforced friendly and conciliatory overtures toward Western interests, bringing internal critics, even quite a few usually pro-Western ones, to accuse Putin of returning to the submissive attitudes reminiscent of Yeltsin’s mandate. Within a few years, however, it became clear that hopes for becoming an equal partner of the West were indeed unrealistic.

When Primakov, as a special emissary of the Russian president, tried and failed to prevent the American attack on Iraq in 2003, he remarked:

“when one sees an enraged bull rush for the precipice, let it pass”.

Indeed, the American experience in Iraq and later in Libya confirms this perceptive comment. Both interventions resulted in chaos; millions were left dead, wounded and displaced, and the political systems that had held those countries together were destroyed, resulting in violence and instability that continue to this day.

By the middle of his mandate, Putin became a consistent critic of the unipolar structure of international relations and called for multilateral cooperation. Ever since his speech at the security conference in Munich in 2007, Putin has affirmed an end of the unipolar world. Bernard Bradie, a French political scientist, summarized the new reality in the title of his book The Impotence of Power (l’Impuissance de la puissance). Trump has also been critical of unipolar globalization, insisting that he is not “the president of the world”. Another configuration of American involvement in the world may emerge, even though its contours remain uncertain as the institutional inertia in Washington seems to determine actual policies.

Morality Play

After the Western intervention in Libya, authorized by the U.N. Security Council, went well beyond its authorized scope and operated a regime change, leading to a cruel murder of the country’s leader in 2011, two permanent members of the Security Council, Russia and China, realized that they had been duped. Henceforth, they obstructed attempts by Western powers to intervene elsewhere, namely in Syria. Claims of violations of human rights used to legitimize armed action against other countries under the banner of R2P (“Responsibility to Protect” civilian populations) came under closer scrutiny by non-Western powers. Massive civilian casualties inflicted by the U.S. and its allies in Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya and Yemen misuse the otherwise noble principle of defending civilians as just another excuse for military aggression. American politicians found the loss of automatic support from the U.N. disconcerting as Russia and China became overtly critical of American attempts to export values and impose democracy on the tip of a missile.

One may recall how the issue of homosexuals was highlighted by American media on the eve of the Olympic Games in Sochi in 2014. A moralistic campaign portraying Russia as oppressive of homosexuals firmly placed it in the category of evil nations, while Western nations assumed a high moral ground. It was default thinking that promptly put the blame for downing a Malaysian plane over Eastern Ukraine in July 2014 on Russia while no conclusive evidence had been produced. Excuses like human, gender and sexual rights have been used in attacks, military or political, on Afghanistan, Iran and a score of other countries that do not find grace in the eyes of Washington, while no such accusation is leveled against Saudi Arabia or Israel, which remain America’s loyal allies and major purchasers of American weapons. Manifest double standards are at the root of this default thinking. Concerning the export of values to the rest of the world, Foreign Minister Lavrov in a December 2016 interview said half-jokingly,

“Americans should have asked us. We have experience in exporting an ideology. We know what harm it does.”

Cordon sanitaire or a wrecking ball?

Presidential hopeful Trump had voiced his country’s need to cooperate with Russia throughout his electoral campaign. His election brought a degree of enthusiasm in the Russian media and public. One newspaper even parodied a slogan which had become popular soon after the integration of the Crimea into Russia: Krym nash (Crimea is ours). In the wake of the election, Trump nash! ran the headline. However, official Russian circles were pointedly reserved, adopting a wait-and-see posture. This proved to be wise, as a concerted effort of the defeated Democrats, most U.S. media and American Neocons led President Trump to put off or abandon all overture towards Russia. Old Cold War warriors like Senator McCain joined the effort to ban all thought of improving relations with Russia.

The resignation in February 2017 of Michael Flynn, one of Trump’s close advisers, for lying about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador in Washington added further caution to that posture. Trump has been under consistent attack from those who interpret contacts with Russia’s officials as virtually criminal and continue to accuse Russia of interfering in favor of Trump’s election. His decision to attack the Syrian air base in April 2017 put serious stress on the relations with Russia and brought the two countries to the brink of a military conflict.

Another Western tool to “contain” Russia has been the enlargement of NATO right up to Russia’s borders. Most new NATO members are Eastern European nations that had been created in the wake of the Russian revolution of 1917 as a barrier, a cordon sanitaire, against Bolshevism. While Bolshevism is long gone, the strategic role of these countries remains. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are now being cast in the role of potential victims of Russia’s malevolence. NATO troops have been stationed in all three Republics, within a few hundred kilometers from Russia’s second largest city, Saint Petersburg.

Curiously, both publicly and privately Baltic leaders have admitted that there is no danger of a military invasion from Russia. One of them is former Foreign Minister of Estonia, Jüri Luik, who, when asked to define the worst-case scenario at a public lecture on foreign policy in July 2016, replied that there was no danger of military invasion but, rather, a concern about stronger influence from Russia. However, in the same breath he said that he was very happy with the British troops in Estonia because they would serve as “a tripwire against Russian forces.” Similar non-sequiturs were voiced by other Baltic leaders in the post-Soviet space who rejoice in the arrival of Western forces in their countries.

In Russia, this is seen as a continuation of the policy of containment that characterized the Cold War. In fact, the “long cable” authored by George Kennan in 1946, spelling out the need to “contain Russia”, admits that this policy should be pursued regardless of the dominant ideology there.

Of even greater concern to Russia’s foreign policy makers is the situation in the Ukraine. In 2013, Russia negotiated the relinquishment of chemical weapons by Syria, thus averting an imminent military attack from Western powers. The Neocons severely criticized President Obama for agreeing to this peaceful settlement. Within a few days of the agreement on Syria, turmoil began in Kiev. The failure to contain Russia in Syria seems to have reinforced the hand of those in the United States who had challenged Russia in its immediate neighborhood ever since the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008. In Russia, the Ukrainian crisis is seen as having been largely encouraged and funded by Western governments and the NGOs at their service. Pictures of a U.S. Assistant Secretary of State distributing cookies to Maidan protesters have become a visual symbol of Western meddling, while decades of consistent work of American foundations to form anti-Russian elites in the Ukraine and elsewhere in the region have proved crucial albeit largely removed from media attention.

As the crisis aggravated, Russia continued to look for a peaceful solution in concert with the European Union at the same time as radicals continued their anti-Russian agitation. On February 21, 2014, an agreement was signed by the Ukrainian president and opposition activists, and signed by representatives of France, Germany, Poland and Russia. It stipulated a peaceful transfer of power and an early election. However, days after this agreement was signed, Ukrainian radicals violently overthrew their government and a new overtly proAmerican and anti-Russian administration was put in its place.

One of the first measures considered by the new Ukrainian government was to abolish the official status of the Russian language. This caused severe concern in many areas of the Ukraine, where the Russian language is dominant. Those were the days when many local administrations in the Ukraine were overtaken by local activists: by anti-Russia radicals in Western Ukraine and Kiev, and by their opponents in the east and south of the country. One of these regions was the Crimea, where a referendum to re-join Russia was held on March 16, 2014. Russian forces stationed in the Crimea (according to a long-standing agreement with the Ukraine) were put on alert in case of violence, but none occurred. The vote was overwhelmingly supportive, and Russia annexed the peninsula that had been part of the RSFSR prior to 1954 and has been home to Russia’s major naval base for over two centuries.

The referendum reflected the opinion of a population which is overwhelmingly Russian speaking. In Russia, this is viewed as an expression of the will of the peninsula’s population to return to Russia in the face of the violent takeover in Kiev in February 2014. Moreover, as Putin argued, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had transferred the peninsula to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954 without parliamentary approval in either the Russian or the Ukrainian republics. Questioning the legitimacy of that transfer, the Russian leader emphasized the popular vote of the Crimean population supporting the return to Russia. He also recalled that no such referendum had been held in Kosovo before it was separated from Serbia in the wake of the NATO air bombing of that country. In his speech accepting the Crimea into the Russian Federation, Putin accused the U.S. of double standards and of pursuing a policy of containment by surrounding Russia with hostile regimes like the one currently in Kiev.

Western countries deemed the Crimea referendum and the ensuing reunification with Russia illegal. They promptly imposed economic sanctions on Russia. This contrasts with Western refusal to impose sanctions on Israel for its occupation of the Palestinian territories, which, while also deemed illegal, will soon reach the milestone of fifty years. Needless to say, the Palestinians have not been asked to vote on whether they want to be occupied.

The Ukrainian crisis continues. Russia currently offers limited support to the rebel provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk while arguing for reconciliation and a peaceful settlement. An all-out involvement by Russia in the early stages of the conflict would have vanquished the Ukrainian military in a matter of days. Since then, Western powers have come to train Ukrainian forces, including overtly radical ones, but so far largely abstain from supplying the Ukraine with lethal weapons. The Ukrainian government, however, positions itself as a barrier against an alleged Russian aggression targeting the rest of Europe. Since it no longer hopes to join NATO in the near future, Kiev asked Washington to be recognized as a major non-NATO ally of the United States (such as Japan and Israel). Economic ties with Russia continue, albeit on a reduced scale since the Ukraine banned all cooperation in military industries, which had constituted an important source of revenue for both countries. Ukrainian authorities have severed direct air links with Russia and access to Russian TV.

Questions have been asked in Moscow as to whether the new strategic role of the Ukraine is limited to joining the cordon sanitaire or, rather, it has assumed the function of a wrecking ball directed against Russia. The recent inauguration of a new logo of the Ukrainian Intelligence Service, largely trained and funded by Western powers, suggests an answer. It depicts an owl pointing a sword at Russia. The logo was inaugurated by the Ukrainian president seated beneath a slogan “Ukraine above all!”, which has awakened ominous associations with “Deutschland über Alles!” in Russia, Belarus and among quite a few people in the Ukraine, millions of whom suffered from Germany’s aggression.

In order to understand the dominant view of the Ukrainian crisis in Russia one should imagine a scenario of radicals violently replacing the legitimate government in Ottawa with a virulently anti-American one. The radicals in this scenario are supported and financed by Russia or China, who also fund and train vigilantes and a brand new Canadian army. The reaction from Washington would be prompt and determined, to say the least.

Partners in Asia

Western sanctions have encouraged Russia to establish closer relations with partners in Asia, including China, Israel, India and the somewhat volatile Turkey led by President Erdogan. Russia has actively promoted the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which, by the end of 2017, should see India and Pakistan join the founding members of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Russia has taken part in all of its joint military exercises, which also include anti-terrorism and cyberwarfare. Membership in the SCO largely overlaps with that of the Eurasian economic community, and three of the BRICS are also members of the SCO. It is significant that the meeting Russia organized on the Syrian crisis in January 2017 took place in Astana, Kazakhstan, deep in Asia. At the same time, the recent visit of Putin to Japan greatly simplified visa requirements for travel between the two countries and ensured Japanese investment in the development of Russia’s Far East. While China and Japan are important as Russia’s trading partners, trade with Europe continues to remain strong.

Russia’s relations with Israel, which is home to the largest Russian speaking diaspora outside the former Soviet Union, are important in spite of its small size. Putin once remarked, “Israel is a little bit of Russia” (Израиль – это немножко Россия). Indeed, several Soviet-born ministers have served in Israeli cabinets, and the largest number of visitors to Israel from Europe comes from Russia. This cultural affinity also manifests itself in official public events, such as the inauguration of a monument to Soviet soldiers’ decisive role in the Second World War. Netanya has thus become the only city to erect a Soviet war memorial while these are being destroyed, removed and daubed with Nazi symbols in many cities of Eastern Europe. It was inaugurated three years ago by Putin and Netanyahu in a manifestation of friendship between the two countries. There is also significant economic cooperation, including the joint production of drones. In the wake of Western sanctions against Russia and of Russia’s countersanctions, Israel promptly began supplying food products to Russia, including over one half of its imported vegetables.

There has been regular military coordination between Israel and Russia with respect to Syria. Netanyahu has visited Moscow several times in the last three years. At the same time, Russia continues to support Palestinians and maintains relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia. This positions Russia strategically with respect to the major powers in the region. In a speech at the Munich conference on security in February 2017, Russia’s Foreign Minister reiterated his country’s position:

“Each country, based on its sovereignty, will strive to find a balance between its own national interests and the national interests of partners.”

They separate issues, some on which they can cooperate, while on others they cannot. Israel, albeit dependent on the United States, openly undermines Western sanctions against Russia, including military cooperation. This also enables Israel to diversify its international support network.

Israel’s coordination with Russia did not prevent it from treating wounded members of Al-Nusra, sending them back to fight and even bombing Syrian government positions at will. Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry admitted using such terrorist groups as an instrument against the government of Syria.

Russia views the emergence of Daesh and other militant groups involved in Iraq and Syria as a direct menace to its security. They may penetrate Russian territory and reignite some of the terrorist movements within Russia. The explosion in the metro of Saint-Petersburg in April 2017 suggests that this fear is justified. Russia is more concerned about a spillover of terrorism into Russia than about keeping its military base in Syria, which is no match to the large number of U.S. military bases in the region.

Russia also emphasizes that its intervention in Syria is legitimate as it responded to a request from the Syrian government, while Western intervention routinely contravenes international law. Lavrov repeatedly argued that pursuing a regime change in other countries including the mantra “Assad must go!” is illegitimate as it brazenly violates the U.N. charter.

Internal background of foreign policy

There has been consistent internal criticism of Russia’s foreign policy, much of it directed at Putin. He has been called indecisive, hesitant, and negligent in terms of the events in the Ukraine. The government has been blamed for failing to develop an effective support network there, abandoning pro-Russia forces in southern Ukraine in the face of radical violence, particularly after dozens of opponents of the takeover in Kiev were burned alive by militants in Odessa in May 2014 (this tragic episode has never been properly investigated by Ukrainian authorities and simply disappeared from mainstream media in line with the usual default thinking). Russia did nothing to support the population of those coastal areas and to ensure land access to the Crimea, which is now surrounded by Ukrainian territory in the north and by the Azov and Black Seas from the other three sides. Internal criticism of Russia’s foreign policy is part of a larger anti-government sentiment, which is, however, limited in scope.

While a few thousand people demonstrate occasionally in various Russian cities against corruption, opinion polls suggest that most Russians support Putin. He is gaining support precisely because many consider that Russia is cornered into a weak position. And he is trying, according to public opinion, to resist those Western pressures. While Western media often interview individuals billed as “opposition” there is little, if any, organized opposition to Putin. A recent report by Carnegie Center in Moscow, hardly a pro-Kremlin outfit, concluded that there is practically no ideological opposition in Russia and those who consider themselves as such are marginal and so far lack a coherent policy alternative (http://carnegie.ru/commentary/?fa=67873).

Some shift the blame for Russia’s failure in the Ukraine to Putin’s inner circle, high officials with money and children in the West. Russia’s economy has grown dependent on Western financial institutions, making it vulnerable to punitive sanctions. These critics recall that the Soviet Union was impermeable to this kind of pressure as it was largely self-reliant. This echoes criticism of globalization heard in both Europe and the United States in recent months.

In Russia, there appear two distinct groups with respect to the current crisis in relations with the West. One argues for pragmatism and suggests greater integration with the unipolar world created by the United States. The other sees an end to the unipolar world and stands for continuing diversification of economic and political ties without, however, compromising national independence. The latter group, mostly comprising professional diplomats and other state officials, currently defines the country’s policies, while the former consists of those linked with western business circles, a sort of comprador bourgeoisie in Marxist parlance. Since the ascent of Putin to the presidency, direct influence of the oligarchs on the Kremlin has dwindled but the balance of forces may change again after Putin’s departure.

There exists an immense gap between the image of Putin in Russia and his characterization in mainstream Western media. In the West, he is presented as a virtually omnipotent evil genius, capable of influencing election results in the United States, France and other countries and scoring important points for Russia in the international arena. Images on the cover of The Economist provide a good illustration of this demonization in Western press around the globe. These kinds of images cannot be found in Russian mainstream media with respect to Western leaders. The characterization of Putin as devil incarnate is part of the moralistic discourse in the United States, Britain and a few other countries. Putin seems to be presented more negatively than Stalin ever was in the midst of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was disliked and feared, but its status of a superpower was never questioned: its victory over Nazi Germany and subsequent achievements in science and technology earned it begrudged respect.

What does Russia want?

In order to answer this question, one must compare Russia’s foreign policy discourse and the facts on the ground. Russian doctrine of foreign policy is available in English and several other languages. It specifies that Russia has interests in various parts of the world, but does not pursue regime change by trying to impose its ideas and values onto other countries. (http://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/official_documents/-/asset_publisher/CptICkB6BZ29/content/id/2542248).

Russia’s priority remains the preservation of its relations with Europe and the United States while rejecting their moralistic approach to foreign policy. In principle, this should be congruent with the views of President Trump as outlined in his inauguration speech. Russians view their country’s foreign policy as reactive and defensive rather than proactive and aggressive. Russia does not have the means to compete with the United States and recognizes its military superiority. Rather, Russia tries to make use of the force of the United States in order to undermine its position. (Some believe that this policy reflects Putin’s proficiency in martial arts.) Thus Russia regularly voices its support for international law and the United Nations as a strategy to challenge the unipolar hegemony of the United States. International law – like any law – can only be upheld when there is a balance of forces. Currently such a balance is absent, which explains why international law, including the International Criminal Court in The Hague, fails to be activated with respect to the United States and its allies.

One of Russia’s immediate interests is the removal of Western sanctions. Eastern European countries, as well as the overtly anti-Russia Ukrainian government, support the sanctions, while there is markedly less support for them in France, Italy, Germany and even Hungary. Europe is hardly united on this issue, and the growth of nationalist right-wing parties is likely to benefit Russia since most of them openly oppose the sanctions. At the same time, the sanctions do not seem to concern public opinion in Russia which continues to support the reunification of the Crimea, the reason invoked in the application of sanctions. Rank-and-file Russians often joke that the sanctions may hurt wealthy Muscovites, depriving them of Parmigiano or foie gras while having little effect on their own daily diet.

Russian foreign policy spokespeople, particularly Lavrov, emphasize that their position is rational. Stateowned media such as Voice of Russia on the radio and Russia Today on television also articulate this position. Western countries seem unhappy with these broadcasts. Fearful of Western ideas, Soviet authorities used to jam Western short-wave broadcasts, while Soviet publications were available in the West. Nowadays, CNN, Fox News and BBC are freely available in Russia while Russian media encounters growing difficulties reaching Western audiences.

Russian leaders remain patient in the face of Western opprobrium, arguing that their country has been cast in the role of a foe in order to restore Western unity shaken by Trump’s election rhetoric. A better understanding of Russia’s foreign policy should help make sense of the increasing post-Cold War volatility on the international checkerboard.

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The author gratefully acknowledges advice and criticism received from Yuri Akimov, Yann Breault, Richard Falk, Jacques Lévesque, Samir Saul and my daughter Miriam.

Yakov M. Rabkin is Professor of History at the University of Montreal. His recent book is What is Modern Israel? (Pluto/University of Chicago Press, 2016). He has authored Science between the Superpowers and A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, as well as over three hundred articles. He has also edited Diffusion of New Technologies in the Post-Communist World. This article is an updated version of his lecture delivered at Tokyo International University in January 2017.

This article was originally published by the Institute of International Exchange Tokyo (Page 25)