Global Research

Neo-Nazis are being used by the Ukrainian Government,

“That Whole Process was Headquartered in the US  Embassy” (former Ukraine president Yanukovitch)

Nobody should feel safe today… 

Glossary

Xenophobia = an intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries

Nativism = the policy of protecting the interests of native-born or established inhabitants against those of immigrants

 Summaries of the First 4 Points of Lawrence Britt’s 14 Characteristics of Fascism That Apply to the Trump/Pence GOP

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts (aka “false flag operations”) against the targeted scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly. 

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite. 

The pre-Civil War 1850s was an era when there was serious political instability and economic uncertainty partly because of the fear of a rising immigrant population without a concomitant increase in job opportunities. There was, as yet, no stable two party political system in the US. Because of these realities, a relatively new, very inexperienced political party, popularly known as the Know-Nothing Party, came out of nowhere and won 43 seats in the US Congress in the national election of 1856.

Although the existence of the new party was no secret, the names of its members were a closely kept secret. “I don’t know” was the preferred answer when the press asked about the party’s behind-closed-doors meetings and conspiratorial agendas. And so the pejorative label “know-nothing” was quickly applied to the group. It was a well-deserved title.

The Know-Nothing Party had originally named itself the Native American Party, although the name obviously did not refer to the real, non-white “native” Americans who had occupied the land for the previous 10,000 years – and then had it stolen from them. What the party meant by the designation “native” was “native-born”, and membership was limited to white people who were born in the USA. Only white Protestants were allowed in the party, and it specifically excluded Roman Catholics, most of whom were recent immigrants from Europe. The party soon changed its name to the American Party.

The Know-Nothing Party enshrined nativism and virulent xenophobia in its founding document. By today’s standards, it was a white supremacist party and its members would have been good Ku Klux Klan members when that “Christian” organization came into existence after the racist South “lost” the Civil War – pledging on their honor to “rise again” (a pledge still taken quite seriously 150 years later by Confederate Flag-waving, gun-toting southerners in the Tea Party wing of the GOP).

The fact that they actually chose “Native American Party” as their official name at their birth was evidence for why they may actually deserve their “know-nothing” nickname, for they appeared not to know the history of the genocidal way that their American ancestors had dealt with the real native Americans just a generation earlier. What was particularly ironic is the fact that their ancestors had at one time been non-native-born immigrants themselves.

Because of the rash of European migrants in the mid-1850s (many of whom couldn’t speak English) there was naturally a lot of fear of job competition with desperate poor people who would work for subsistence (or lower) wages. So an often hysterical fear of those foreigners arose and politicians exploited those fears. This “xenophobia” and the resultant violence that that fear generated was largely directed at Roman Catholicism which was practiced by the immigrants that came from Ireland and southern Germany.

The young and inexperienced Know-Nothing Party reactionaries were unashamedly racist and also religiously pious, and it turned out to be a flash-in-the-pan reality as more and more moderate and open-minded Americans rejected the vile nature of the party’s goals.

A Party of Religious Fanatics and Unprincipled Demagogues

A Catholic Bishop, J. L. Spalding, said that the Know-Nothings were

“the depraved portion of our native(-born) population….It was not the American people who were seeking to make war on the church, but merely a party of religious fanatics and unprincipled demagogues who as little represented the American people as did the mobs whom they incited to bloodshed and incendiarism. Their whole conduct was un-American and opposed to all the principles and traditions of our free institutions.”

The know-nothing movement reached its peak in the mid-1850s, and by 1859 it had essentially disappeared from national politics. But the ideology obviously did not disappear.

The irrational fear of foreigners and fear of foreign religions that characterized the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s has a lot of similarities to the “America First” party of Donald Trump’s xenophobic GOP and the white supremacist Tea Party that sprang up after Barack Obama became America’s first black president.

Just like today’s right-wing parties in America, the Know-Nothings were again energized by the perception that America’s immigration policies were too liberal. And a lot of narrow-minded voters throughout American and world history have easily become irrational haters of misunderstood or falsely demonized foreigners. And those fears are typically fanned by media outlets that thrive on controversy. Xenophobia became normal and will probably always be easily made to be considered normal. Racial conflict still sells newspapers and biased TV news shows.

Xenophobia is Incompatible with Sermon on the Mount Christianity

Of course, the Know-Nothing Puritanical/Calvinistic Protestants, never having been carefully taught the primacy of the ethics of the non-violent Jesus as summarized so well in the Sermon on the Mount, were not very likely to be truly merciful to the stranger or to lovingly feed the hungry immigrant or to offer shelter to the homeless ones, as Jesus instructed his followers to do.

The helpless refugees who came to America’s “welcoming” shores may have been trying to escape political persecution, pestilence, poverty, homelessness and starvation or they may have been innocent victims of war, simply trying to psychologically or spiritually heal from their traumatizing experiences at the hands of war’s killing soldiers, secret service torturers and ruling tyrannical elites who were trying to maintain their wealth and power by any means possible.

Emma Lazarus’ famous anti-tyranny poem (apparently now newly obsolete in the brave new world of America’s xenophobic Republican Party supporters) is engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty that has inspired so many millions of refugees since it was gifted to America by France in the 1870s. The plaque says “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.” But the Statue of Liberty wasn’t there in the 1850s.

So rather than welcoming beaten-down refugees into the New World, the Know-Nothings had their armed thugs administer beatings, shootings, and torchings of Catholic homes and Catholic churches. They even tarred and feathered a Jesuit priest, sending a clear message to other tired, poor, abused refugees who happened to have been indoctrinated into an “alien” religion.

The clear message was that they should self-deport – or else.

The Know-Nothing’s Xenophobic “America First” Political Party was not Actually America’s First

The Federalist Party of the early 1800s (frequently boasted about by the likes of the NeoCon Newt Gingrich) was probably the first xenophobic political party in the history of America.

During the administration of the Federalist Party president, John Adams, (POTUS # 2 – 1798-1802), that party pushed for the passage of America’s first Alien Act, which allowed the president to deport any and all “aliens” that he regarded as potential threats to the republic.

Even more draconian laws, which are still on the books, were passed during World War I and in the Constitution-shredding Bush-era laws that were hastily passed immediately after 9/11/01. And, it must be mentioned, on New Year’s Eve, 2011, when nobody was looking, President Obama signed the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012“ (NDAA 2012).

Buried deep inside of what is supposed to be next year’s annual Defense appropriation bill (that decides how many more hundreds of billions of dollars of bankrupting national debt with which the Pentagon will be further strangling the US economy for the next year), suspected native-born citizens can now be legally arrested without charge, and they can be kept in hidden prisons without charge and with no explanation to concerned loved ones, for as long as the president desires – if he thinks the arrestee is a possible threat to national security!

And there were other such “America First” movements that were indirect heirs of the Know-Nothings. As one example, American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, who had been wined and dined and duly bamboozled by Adolf Hitler when he and his wife toured Germany in the mid-1930s, led an American First movement that truly believed in the political agendas of Adolf Hitler.

Lindbergh and his followers trusted an infamous sociopathic dictator who was famous for his total lack of compassion and his serial lying, just like most corporate lobbyist-duped politicians tend to do in America. They believed that America should be isolationist-minded and refrain from interfering even with outrageous violent movements such as European fascism and its xenophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic, anti-minority agendas. To Lindbergh and his followers, America First meant that America should always do what is selfishly best for America and keep its hands off of the problems of foreign issues, no matter how evil.

The History of Xenophobia in American Politics

The recent resurgence of the Christian Militias, Christian Dominionists, Christian Theocrats, the Pseudo-Christian Tea Party populist movements and now Trump’s and Pence’s xenophobic movement should give pause to all true patriots who love American democracy. Trump’s campaign rhetoric has successfully recruited millions of short-sighted voters to his cause and, in the last couple of election cycles these groups have come out of nowhere to wield significant – albeit often dysfunctional – power in the US Congress. It should not be a surprise to discover that many of these xenophobic and racist-leaning legislators have come from formerly pro-slavery and segregationist states. The perceived rapidity of the movement should also remind us about what Christian supremacist and Islamophobe Ralph Reed (decidedly not a Sermon on the Mount-type Christian) once said:

“What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time and one state at a time. I honestly believe that in my lifetime, we will see (America) once again governed by Christians….and Christian values….I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.”  — Ralph Reed (Republican Christian Coalition executive director 1987-1989)

But the beneficiaries of all acts of genocide, just like the beneficiaries of inherited wealth, are typically unaware of the fact that they don’t deserve the land or the privileges that accrued to them from the criminal acts and cruelty of their forefathers (or the sociopath-creating indulgent parenting style of doting parents in the case of any number of punitive, conscienceless and independently wealthy conservatives like Donald Trump).

America’s true history is blood-drenched, putrid, genocidal, anti-democratic and un-Christ-like in the extreme, and it contradicts the wide-spread and deeply-indoctrinated (albeit false) “Christian” belief that America has always been “a shining city on a hill” that is blessed by God.

One has to be a historically-illiterate know-nothing to believe that.

The most gruesome parts of American history have been censored out of America’s school books ever since history books began being published. Lying about the past has been true of all pseudo-patriotic nations since the beginning of time. The textbooks from my history classes never mentioned the mass slaughter of America’s First Nation’s peoples, nor was there anything taught about the horrific history of slavery or about the lynchings of black African-Americans at the hand of white supremacists after they had been emancipated. It was the rare history teacher who ever taught about the war crimes committed by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Usually the class never got to that part of the book before the semester ended.

Indeed, the real history of our nation has been profusely sugar-coated. Most of us grew up believing the false history that now desperately needs to be re-learned in this era when America is so profoundly hated for the wartime atrocities and injustices that we naïve ones are being sheltered from understanding. Ever since the homicidal white supremacist Christopher Columbus (and his greedy, sex-starved crew) began raping and pillaging the aboriginal inhabitants and their resources in 1492, the patriotic story/lie has been told over and over again until we sheeple believed that it was true.

The Political Platform of the Know Nothing Party

Following is the platform of the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s: It might sound familiar. Only the type of religion might be different now.

• Severe limits on immigration, especially from predominantly Catholic countries.
• Restricting political office to native-born Americans.
• Extending the residency requirements for citizenship from five to twenty-one years.
• Limiting public office to native-born individuals.
• Restricting public school teachers to (white) Protestants.
• Mandating daily Bible readings in public schools (to be read from the Protestant version of the Bible).
• Restricting the sale of liquor.

Article III of the Know-Nothing Party’s founding document declared that “a member must be a native-born citizen, a Protestant either born of Protestant parents or reared under Protestant influence, and not united in marriage with a Roman Catholic….no member who has a Roman Catholic wife shall be eligible to office in this order”.

When a Know-Nothing Party member was admitted into the secret organization, he was required to take the following oath:

“In the presence of Almighty God and these witnesses, you do solemnly promise and swear that you will never betray any of the secrets of this society.…that you never will permit any of the secrets of this society to be written.…that you will not vote.… for any man for any office.… unless he be an American-born citizen, in favor of Americans ruling America.…that you will not, under any circumstances, expose the name of any member of this order nor reveal the existence of such an association; that you will….obey the command of the.…president or his deputy.”

The candidate that the Know-Nothings ran for president in 1856 was Whig Party POTUS Millard Fillmore (who served under President General Zachary Taylor as Vice President from 1849 – 1850). Fillmore served as POTUS from 1850 – 1853 when President Taylor died in office.

Fillmore had quit the disintegrating Whig Party after 1853 and accepted the nomination of the Know-Nothings in 1855, but, even though he wasn’t as xenophobic as the rest of the party, his “America First” campaign slogan was “I know nothing but my Country, my whole Country, and nothing but my Country.”  He lost in a landslide because voters had finally seen the criminal excesses of the xenophobic party’s agenda and repudiated it at the polls.

Fillmore won only one state in the Electoral College balloting that year and the once national party soon slipped into obscurity.

The Know-Nothings had conveniently forgotten that their ancestors had been complicit with Democratic President Andrew Jackson and his “Trail of Tears” atrocities (which would have easily met the 20^th century’s definition of crimes against humanity). And of course the POW death camps of both the Confederate and Union Armies in the soon-to-erupt War Between the States would have met the definition of international war crimes.

The sorry state of some voters’ intelligence, Christian ethics, their knowledge of basic science and the ease with which they have been led to believe obviously false campaign rhetoric has been breath-taking.

And their apparent studied ignorance on such issues as global climate change, the threat of rising sea levels, the obvious environmental degradation, the mass pollution of the planet’s air, water and soil (thanks to the many sociopathic multinational corporations who care not about anything but next quarter’s earnings), the stubborn racism, and the obvious lack of knowledge of history, science, foreign affairs, drug policy, privatized prisons, gun violence, income and wealth inequality, access to medical care, etc, etc has been appalling and lends further credence to making the comparisons with the Know-Nothings.

Sad.

A century ago, a Southern academic and racist emerged in Europe and the United States as a crusader to “make the world safe for democracy”.¹ Wilson had been elected president in 1913, year before Europe’s imperialists plunged the world into four years of mass murder. That war alone, caused some four million direct battle casualties and untold millions of non-combatant deaths in the aftermath. Woodrow Wilson, despite the policies he actually pursued, would be turned into an icon of the 20th century’s most enduring myth—the benevolence and humanitarian virtue of the great slaveholder republic founded in 1776. Wilson could arguably be called the nation’s first celebrity politician and international celebrity export. This remarkable marketing accomplishment predated television.

The successful promotion of Wilson on both sides of the Atlantic as the archangel of peace and the United States as virtual heaven on Earth was certainly made easier by the cinema (especially the newsreel) and mass literacy (although an overwhelming number of the soldiers slaughtered in the European theatre were illiterate). It was the organisational and manipulative skills honed during the campaign to bring the US into this initially European war that would empower the men who came to dominate the mass media—whose descendants dominate it today.

In 2017, a real estate mogul from New York City, the original headquarters of the propaganda machine that created Woodrow Wilson, became the 45th president of the United States. The country has been waging war almost continuously since 1945, most recently its proclaimed “Global War on Terror”. From all indications the US war efforts have not been all that successful, at least by any literal interpretation of the war’s stated objectives. The “terror” that is the “enemy” does not appear anywhere near defeated. Despite the efforts of US Forces (both overt and covert), the third president has now arrived in the White House with what might best be called a stalemate: as Remarque titled his book Im Westen nichts neues (misleadingly translated into English as “All Quiet on the Western Front”).²

So 2017 begins not unlike 1917. There has been no progress in the war—just a continuous flow of corpses and body parts, albeit mainly those of civilians in the alleged combat zones.

In 1917 Wilson’s handlers needed to create the conditions by which the US population could be persuaded to surrender its men and boys as cannon fodder in Flanders and at the same time convince the belligerents in Europe that the US was not shipping soldiers and materiel to Europe to expand its own empire.

These were no mean tasks. Aside from a significant faction among the ruling elite that was unwilling to spend money defending Britain (a competitor), there was the generally held attitude of a largely immigrant population that Europe was the place they had gladly left behind. Either they wanted nothing to do with Europe or they were sufficiently connected by family ties that they saw no reason to return to shoot relatives who happened to remain in Europe. As for the Black population of the US, they had nothing to say in the matter. The number of Blacks allowed to vote for Wilson was insignificant. Furthermore they did not need to go to Europe to be killed. It was dangerous enough being Black in the US.

The US regime had neutralised the indigenous population and its ex-slaves were largely under control. Hence one could say that domestic peace (for whites at least) prevailed.

However in 1913 Wilson had signed the Federal Reserve Act.³ Explained as a law to establish economic and monetary stability after what had been one of the longest depressions in history, it actually transferred the nation’s finances to a para-state corporation dominated by the country’s most powerful banks—who after 1914 had also become the principal creditors of Britain and France in their war against Germany. In other words, the US regime had created a structure by which its fiscal and monetary policy would be made not by the legislature (as foreseen in the Constitution) but by committees of men for whom the outcome in Europe was far from a matter of indifference.

In the first months of the war—in fact until late 1915—the Allies seemed a sure bet. Their creditors were convinced the war would be won quickly. By 1916 faith in a quick end to the slaughter had disappeared. Much worse were the serious fears of an adverse decision, either a victory for Germany or an end to hostilities with conditions disadvantageous to Britain and France (and hence their US bankers). Anything short of an Allied victory heightened the risk that the Allies would default on their debts. Hence pressure mounted for Wilson to mobilise on the side of Morgan’s debtors. Needless to say the DuPont family was just as thrilled to increase its supply of explosives and munitions to the War Department.⁴

Provocations had been fabricated in the past to justify US military intervention against weak or defenceless countries like Spain and Mexico (and the much hated Black republic of Haiti) whose inhabitants also were considered racially inferior. But a war in Europe would be a war against white people with comparable or even superior weaponry and military aptitude. The last war the US had fought against whites was half a century ago. The Civil War had traumatized the country for decades thereafter.

Hence Wilson’s government was faced with a huge challenge: to create an image of the war in Europe, which could be sold to the white citizenry. Moreover it had to create the illusion of a threat to the country which could make the US intervention appear as self-defence. To do this it was necessary to create a new image of the USA. This image had to be compatible with the various narrative levels of the sales campaign. To accomplish this complex task, the Committee on Public Information was established.

Since the British Empire had been the traditional enemy of the US since 1776, a story had to be concocted in which the US and the UK were now friends bound—as opposed to enemies separated—by history. Then a story had to be invented as to why the German Empire, only constituted in 1871, was an enemy of the US although there had never been a war between the two countries. A story also had to be told that there was something common between Britain and France (historical enemies and constant competitors) and the US, which made them the natural allies of the United States.

Then there were some tricky details. A lot of immigrants actually came from Germany and or had family ties to different parts of the German Empire. Until recently there had been no reason to give this much attention. Now it was entirely possible that such German immigrants would be asked to fight against Germany. Could they be trusted? What about the Irish who had no reason to love Britain as the colonial master of their ancestral homeland?⁵ Complicating this was the known activism of Germans in the emerging labour movement.

Then there was the large number of rural and semi-rural inhabitants far from the centres of power. Leaving aside the notorious ignorance of world geography and affairs, of those farm boys and ranch hands who could be recruited to take land from Indians and Mexicans: Would they volunteer to get their guns and sail far away to Europe, where there was no land to grab?

Thus the Committee on Public Information had to rewrite US history—almost from the beginning. This was the origin of the US mission in World War I to “make the world safe for democracy”. The polemics of the British settler elite, e.g. Thomas Jefferson, notwithstanding, the foundation of the United States was a unilateral declaration of independence from an imperial regime in London that threatened to extinguish the sources of oligarchical wealth in thirteen of its North America colonies in favour of industrialisation and power-sharing with creole elites emerging in the Caribbean: in short an end to chattel slavery and the expense of suppressing slave rebellions^.6

Democracy, a system of government whose spurious origins are attributed to the slave-holding society of ancient Greece, was redesigned as the perennial flower of a state whose landowners and financiers had consistently resisted every attempt to deliver it to the vast majority of the country’s population. At the same time the “melting pot” fantasy was invented to explain why previously separate immigrant communities, successively imported to exploit whatever group had landed in the previous generation, were now mysteriously all Americans. These ethnic and language groups were inoculated with the holy spirit of Manifest Destiny, the political equivalent of the “gift of tongues”—in reality the sediment of America’s acidic political system.

Germany was then reduced to a mere rapine horde of cannibals, ruled by a fanatical dictator (an image to return throughout the 20th century in the depiction of the regime’s enemies). The German emperor, a cousin of the then-reigning British king-emperor, was turned into the enemy of Democracy and humanity.⁷ In essence, the Hohenzollern king-emperor was simply turned into the logical opposite of the emerging fiction. The diplomatic manoeuvres by which France had assured that Germany went to war remained concealed so that even today charitable historians insist that Germany was the sole cause of the war.⁸ The vicious image of Germany then had to be turned into a real threat to the innocence of Europe.

The sinking of the Lusitania (the Latin name for Portugal), a British merchantman plying the Atlantic with munitions, but loaded simultaneously with American passengers, became the Maine or the World Trade Center for US propagandists. The German imperial government had published ample warning in the United States that the ship was transporting munitions to Britain and as such could not enjoy the benefits of neutral shipping. Despite public knowledge that the British ship was deemed a legitimate target for German submarines, the ostensibly neutral US government did nothing to discourage its citizens from taking passage. When it was duly sunk, outrage followed. The incident was converted into a casus belli for the United States regime to abandon its previously declared neutrality and to openly side with the British and French in the European imperialists’ war. The bankers’ president reacted according to a script that is followed to this day.

Then the war atrocities propaganda, which the British had used so successfully to incite their own subjects, was reworked for domestic consumption in North America. Meanwhile an entire industry had been created to fabricate the American Dream (still a central element in school curriculum in the subordinated Federal Republic of Germany).⁹ Needless to say the treatment of non-whites in the US could not and was not heralded as a virtue. Yet since white supremacy was a major part of all European imperial ideology, this omission went unnoticed. British and US propagandists were eventually to elaborate the myth of American independence into the absurd—because truncated—fable of national self-determination as an excuse for fragmenting the Austro-Hungarian and German empires after the war.¹⁰

The history of how these central myths were propagated in the US is too extensive to treat here but Creel, who was the leading light of the Committee on Public Information, gave a detailed account in his book about the Committee.¹¹ However it is crucial to understand that the “Dream” is a 20th century fabrication, designed to sell the war at home and persuade European allies that the US was not entering a war of conquest in Europe. In 1917, the empire that still cannot say its name was shaping the consciousness of subsequent generations for whom the US is merely the purveyor of “freedom”, Coca Cola and Levi’s jeans (later the Internet, a computer system designed for surviving its own plans for global atomic war against the Soviet Union).¹² This is the non-empire with over 800 military bases worldwide and whose ambassadors have the power of pro-consuls in most of the world’s 187 United Nations member-states.¹³

It is necessary to understand the public relations (as Edward Bernays felt compelled to rename “propaganda”) and corporate advertising machine that was created to invent the strange belief that the United States of America is truly exceptional—not only for its citizens, but for the rest of – at least the white part—world. It is this carefully crafted and maintained image of the US—found in every cinema, on almost all televisions, and in the music and consumer goods proliferated even more virally than the weapons supposedly limited by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It is the base for the consciousness of millions who have been taught to abhor every particular quality of their own cultures and countries not consonant with the taste promulgated by the boards of US corporations, esp. among those who think of themselves as “white”. As Bukharin has been cited, Anglo-Saxon ‘love of liberty’ was only “a less vulgar but no less untenable attempt to advance a territorial-psychological theory. The place of “race” is here taken by its substitute, the “middle European”, “American” or some other humanity”.¹⁴

Only then is it possible to grasp the peculiar reaction to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 to the highest elected office of that invisible empire, with its ubiquitous invisible army. George W. Bush was mocked. Barack Obama was canonised. But Trump—who is in every way as much a creature of the real US as his predecessors and competitors—is reviled and treated as a threat to world peace. Ronald Reagan—who actually joked on camera about nuking the Soviet Union—has been forgotten, like the Alzheimer’s he no doubt brought into office.

Not even a month has passed since the inauguration of Mr Donald Trump of Trump Towers as the 45th person authorised by the US Constitution to occupy the slave-built mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania most appropriately named the White House—which with the notable exception of one Kenyan-American and his family, has also been occupied solely by men who consider themselves to be “white” and their domestic servants often enough of the “coloured persuasion”—and the Washington correspondent of the liberal Lisbon daily Publico reported that the world economic system is threatened with destruction by one of the most notorious (though certainly not the richest) New York real estate magnates.¹⁵ No irony was intended.

Portugal, a country whose cultural significance, were it not for Brazil, would probably compete with that of Belgium or Finland, is about as far as one can get in what North Americans call “Old Europe” from the centres of power. Its last great moment was 1755 when the destruction of Lisbon by an earthquake precipitated a European financial panic.¹⁶ Since then—as the 2008 casino collapse amply showed—it has been sufficiently far from power to have become a very realistic place—a showcase for the fraud that drives that world economic system and how a people accustomed to poverty and neglect by their rulers still manages to maintain a kind of quiet dignity and decency noticeably lacking in the Western hemisphere.

The absurdity of the report from Washington ought to be apparent in a country whose 11 million inhabitants—making it slightly larger than Mr Trump’s home town—have been reduced from imperial citizens to inhabitants and customer service employees in a relatively cheap theme park for the rest of Europe’s still employed tourists. They could be forgiven for asking what the new US President could possibly do to more seriously diminish their standard of living than has already been done by the 44 previous. However, its political class continues to pursue the ideals enshrined in the Treaty of Methuen, probably the first subprime mortgage of an entire country to be consummated in modern European history.¹⁷

This reader had to ask which world economic system was threatened with demise by the new tenant in Washington’s most exclusive rental property? By what logic or stretch of the imagination is one to believe that a man made wealthy by real estate speculation in one of the most manipulated property markets in the world could even conceive anything that would destroy the basis of his family’s wealth? Did we all miss something? Is or did Donald Trump become a communist—even after the collapse of the Soviet Union ostensibly proved to us all that there is no alternative to capitalism?

Another bizarre headline heralded the “end of political correctness”.¹⁸ For those who follow this line of thought it may be helpful to remind them that “political correctness” originally meant the hypocritical and deliberately divisive appropriation of the language of political liberation to undermine the very liberating goals of ending various forms of exploitation and oppression based on race, class, or gender. It is a testimony to the effectiveness of reactionary propaganda that the language of liberation has been converted into an instrument for defending its opposite. It is also proof that language is not isomorphic with the real world—an insight only appreciated when the managers of language—the mass media in all its permutations—attack those who hold views with which they cannot agree.

Nazis and the now largely defunct communist parties of what was once called the Soviet bloc are the only ones whose use of language was supposedly deceptive or simply dishonest. In what was once called “the West” or the “free world” the unrestricted expression of ideas was claimed as an exclusive property. Per corollary everything said or written in the West was per se free (and putatively true) whereas everything said in the “East” was putatively false and composed of lies. No matter how many lies were exposed in the West, the West was still “free” and “true”, while no matter how accurate or intelligible the communication in the East was, it was composed prima facie of lies.

One of the most astounding examples of this hypocrisy was the claim that official economic reporting in the East was always doctored, if not outright false. This claim was reasserted when the GDR collapsed as the basis for deliberate undervaluing of state-owned assets awarded for next to nothing to Western bidders (to the extent competitive bidding even applied.) Yet it was not only standard practice of Western governments to falsify cost of living figures by changing the composition of the basket of goods used to measure it or to fake unemployment figures by changing the definition of unemployed, whole batteries of accounting firms specialised in producing deceptive balance sheets to undervalue companies for tax purposes. This practice was especially common for US corporations operating in Latin America, e.g. Cuba and Guatemala.¹⁹

The fraud was only exposed when nationalist governments in those countries tried to enforce compensation for eminent domain actions based on tax returns that had been filed under previous regimes. John Blair, in two studies produced while he was an economist for the defunct US Congressional Committee on Transnational Corporations, wrote quite clearly that the US Government has no reliable economic statistics because it is almost impossible to get accurate disclosure from the principal economic actors—business corporations.²⁰ In other words, the world economic system that Mr Trump supposedly endangers is so opaque that not even those employed by the government to routinely record and analyse its activity are able to attest to the reliability, let alone veracity of the data disclosed. How this condition can be reconciled with the dogma of free information in the West defies comprehension.

So let us leave aside the “nuclear threat” Mr Trump supposedly poses to the world economy, as we know it. The fact is we know very little about it by those criteria we have been told we are to trust, e.g. the Press owned by those very corporations whose secrecy is all but inviolate. We have no reliable or honest information about the status of the world economy from anyone claiming the right to tell us its condition. In political terms we are not even entitled to this information since it is per se private property—free only for those who own it. Ultimately this means the only claims sane people can make on their governments is that they do or do not do certain things, which have a real economic impact—e.g. secure incomes or the basic needs for everyday life for real human beings. Of course that is where the central conflict begins. That “world economic system” to which not only the Portuguese journalist refers is not designed to satisfy real economic (basic needs of everyday life) problems. It is designed to satisfy the needs of legal entities called corporations and other subordinate fictions for those people who “own” them.

So to return to plain language—the author for Publico is saying that Mr Trump poses a threat to the system by which existing corporations and their owners satisfy their needs. But these needs must not be too clearly specified since the more specifically they are described the more obvious it must become that they have nothing to do with what most of the world’s population expects from an economic system. The jargon of the world economic system is so pervasive that few people even realise that their own descriptions of the economy make it impossible to draw a direct connection between what corporations and their owners do and what effects those actions or omissions have on the struggle to satisfy the basic needs of everyday life.

Here it is important to mention the ideological function of the so-called “priority of needs” pyramid which everyone taught economics and business administration in school or university learns. This pyramid claims that humans prioritise their needs beginning with food and shelter and in the last stage—when everything else is done—consider the acquisition of knowledge or wisdom or human rights. This “priority of needs” is really an argument for depriving humans of their humanity—which for better or worse means the necessity of determining themselves what best satisfies their basic needs. Like B.F. Skinner’s primitive behaviourism theories, the hierarchy of needs is really a trick to justify slavery, both physical and intellectual.²¹ The language is deceptively simple. The illusion of simplicity is intended to mirror a supposedly simple reality.

But reality for humans has never been simple. Ungoverned by “instinct” and wholly at the mercy of language, it is impossible for humans to satisfy their own basic needs without cognition—essentially overt and covert verbal behaviour. Of course without cognition they can satisfy the needs of others—and that is why this clever metaphor is a standard “social science” explanation in a discipline that prides itself on pretensions to numeral-mathematical objectivity.

The exaggerated fear of Donald Trump—not confined to the Portuguese middle class—can only be understood in terms of what the image of Donald Trump means to those fed on the American Dream—a neurosis cultivated in the advertising laboratories of Woodrow Wilson’s Creel Committee. This is not to say that people have no reason to fear the future exercise of US imperial and corporate power. Rather it means that Donald Trump—properly speaking the spectacle of Donald Trump, President of the United States—has infected the educated white population with a massive dose of cognitive dissonance. After the phenomenal “Blackwash” of the US “Global War on Terror” purged popular memory of the embarrassing George W Bush era, a garden-variety white billionaire threatens to undermine a century of brainwashing.

This raises an even more important strategic question. Do the invisible people who rule the US not recognise the risk that Donald Trump poses for the carefully nurtured infatuation of Europeans and the white middle classes everywhere with the American Dream? Or do they feel this is an endgame? Are they convinced that they have sufficiently isolated Putin’s Russia and the Chinese tiger so that no matter what the US does it will retain the support Wilson’s Committee on Public Information so carefully engineered—if only because the US remains the lesser of all evils, makes the more popular films and controls the Internet?

We cannot forget that the machinery, which maintains consent, ignorance and ideological conformity with the Business ideology of the United States, is still in place. It is entirely possible that Donald Trump is an accident or evidence of dissent in the US ruling elite—which is still overwhelmingly “white”. Given what we know—or could know—about this machine, the hysteria about Donald Trump may also be a crafted fabrication. Despite all the formal outrage over President Trump’s policies, not a single European government has threatened retaliatory measures against the US. Although Mr Trump declared NATO obsolete neither Greece—which cannot even afford to be in NATO—nor any other member has announced its withdrawal. Nor have there been any calls for such action in the mainstream or compatible media. So is this a lot of “wolf-crying”?

What about the so-called real economy? Donald Trump has trumpeted that his administration will bring Chinese jobs back to the US. One might conclude that he is promising US corporations to reduce workers to the status of “coolies”. No government in Europe—and certainly not the European Commission—has any plans for restoring full-wage employment to its own citizens.

Angela Merkel has successfully suppressed any debate about German military deployment in the US combat theatres where refugees are the second major crop—after opium. The past half year, the Portuguese government, led nominally by a Socialist, spent most of its time concocting a budget to please Germany’s George Wallace, the finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble—little mention of the Portuguese themselves whose wage and consumption taxes have increased every year while salaries have been frozen at 2006 levels. If crypto-socialist Hollande has now decided not to seek re-election it is probably because he did his real job—dividing the French Socialist Party (PSF) beyond the capacity to govern.²² A minister under the last French president declared in an interview that the Americans had bought the Socialist Party years ago—only confirming what Philip Agee wrote in his CIA Diary.²³

The Guardian, part of the compatible Press in the UK, published an article by a “colour revolutionary” from the Gene Sharp cottage industry that brought us the spectacle of Yugoslavia’s explosion and the fascist coup in the Ukraine.²⁴ The author asserts that no more than 3.5% of the population is needed to bring down a tyrannical regime. Apparently there was never 3.5% capable of forcing the release of thousands of Black Americans rotting in US prisons, including such political prisoners as Mumia Jamal or Leonard Peltier—although their “trials” have long been proven to have been rigged by the State. Nor can one avoid the question whether the “special relationship” between Britain and the US allow a major British daily to advocate an unconstitutional challenge to the elected POTUS (never mind for a moment that the US has one of the most archaic and least democratic electoral systems on the planet)? The sincerity of the 3.5% is apparently as selective as the interest of the infamous 1%.

One hundred years after fabrication of the Good America myth, the nightmare of the “American Dream” seems about to end.

The comedian George Carlin once said they call it the “American Dream” because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Maybe it would be a good thing if Donald Trump’s election made people wake up.

Notes

1 Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924, US President 1913-1921) was born in Virginia and educated in Georgia and South Carolina before taking degrees at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) and ultimately becoming president of Princeton University before launching his political career. Among his contributions upon becoming US President was to introduce the post-slavery Jim Crow regime into the federal civil service.

2 Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts neues, was a best-selling novel (1929) describing the conditions on the Western front during World War I from the German side at least. In German “nichts neues” means “nothing new”, a more ambiguous title than the harmless sounding “all quiet”.

3 The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is often included in the catalogue of Wilson’s “progressive” legislation. In November
1910, the secret “council” was held at the Jekyll Island Club on the eponymous Georgia sea island where much of the US ruling class had been accustomed to spending vacations. It was attended by representatives of the US banking elite and its political officials in the Treasury and the Congress: Nelson Aldrich, A. Platt Andrew (members of the National Monetary Commission), Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb & Co.; Frank Vanderlip, National City Bank of New York; Henry P. Davison, J P Morgan & Co.; and Charles Norton of the First National Bank of New York. Together they drafted what was called the Aldrich Plan. The Aldrich Plan in turn formed the basis for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

4 For details see Gerald Colby Zieg, Beyond the Nylon Curtain (1974), reviewed elsewhere by this author. World War I was “a great banquet of gold” for the Du Ponts who grossed over one billion dollars during the war (p. 131).

5 Any doubt about the British attitude toward Irish independence was removed when Roger Casement, who had played a leading role in exposing the slavery and mass murder in the Congo Free State under its owner, Belgium’s Leopold II, was hanged by the British for treason because he took his Irish nationality seriously and was convicted of accepting German promises of aid to the Irish nationalist struggle. It has been suggested that the British were killing two birds with one stone since Casement had earned the enmity of the Belgian empire too.

6 See Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014), reviewed by this author elsewhere.

7 Wilhelm II was a welcome guest in the United States before the war. This author’s grandfather was a witness to one of the yachting enthusiast’s visits to Newport, RI on the occasion of regattas in Narragansett Bay.

8 In 2013, Christopher Clark, an Australian historian “sympathetic” to Germany omits entirely Britain’s interest in provoking war in 1914. See The Sleepwalkers by the current Regis Professor of History at Cambridge University, also reviewed by this author. In contrast Carroll Quigley (1981) provides a more circumspect analysis in The Anglo-American Establishment, a book largely disregarded although Quigley was a Georgetown professor and Bill Clinton mentor.

9 English books in German schools still teach the long-discredited “Thanksgiving feast” story although it is a matter of historical record that Thanksgiving in the US was celebrated as a military victory—like Blood River in Afrikaner history’s Day of the Covenant—until Abraham Lincoln turned it into a national holiday of reconciliation between the North and South in the US Civil War. The American Dream is composed of little lies, exaggerations and outright falsehoods written into textbooks, film scripts and consumer-based celebrations exported wherever a buck is to be made.

10 This became part of the Wilsonian “14 Points”. See Markus Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch (2014) for a detailed discussion of on the intricacies and contradictions of this covert project—which somehow only applied to peoples who were deemed
“white”.

11 George Creel, How we advertised America (1921) Creel was a journalist chairing a group comprising Madison Avenue advertising executives et al. See also Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin, (1996).

12 Fittingly the dean of armed propaganda (counter-terrorism) in the US, Edward G. Lansdale (1908-1987), began his career as the advertising executive who made Levi’s jeans into the famous clothing brand it is today. For some odd reason the worshippers of the Internet forget to mention that it is the successor to the ARPANET, invented by the US military to assure that its computer systems would survive the expected retaliatory strike following the first atomic strike against the Soviet Union—the core of US strategic planning until the end of the so-called Cold War, as can be seen in the official history film produced by the Sandia National Laboratories, the R&D department of the US atomic war establishment.
See https://archive.org/details/U.s.StrategicNuclearPolicy. The fact that almost all crucial servers for the Internet are located in the US—such that the EU felt compelled to adopt consent rules for the storage of data from European users on US servers—is never seen as a risk to “Internet freedom”. Never mind that virtually all Internet software, and much of the hardware, originates from US corporations.

13 There is an old joke on the Left about the US regime: “Why has there never been a coup in Washington D.C.?”
The answer: “Because there is no U.S. Embassy in Washington D.C.” In a conversation the son of a Honduran tobacco plantation owner told this author that in the nation’s capital, Tegucigalpa, the three most important buildings in the country were the Catholic Cathedral, the headquarters of the Honduran armed forces and the US embassy, whereby the latter was paramount.

14 N. Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, London 1972 (1918), p. 112. cited in Kees Van Der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (1984)

15 Rita Siza, “Trump começou a desmantelar a ordem comercial global” Publico, 24 January 2017, pp. 22-23.

16 This event also played a central role in Voltaire’s satirical novella Candide, a work later adapted by Lillian Hellman and Leonard Bernstein to dramatize the political atmosphere of the United States during the post-WWII purges.

17 Treaty of Methuen named after the British diplomat, John Methuen, who negotiated this treaty with Portugal in 1703. Ostensibly a commercial treaty, the British Empire essentially guaranteed Portugal’s sovereignty (against any challenges by Spain) in return for what would now be called “most favoured nation status”. In the course of Anglo-Portuguese relations, Portugal would sacrifice its textile industry to Manchester in return for privileged access of its wine to British markets (e.g. Port and Madeira) and open its Brazilian ports to British merchants. Arguably the Treaty of Methuen made Portugal a permanent extension of the British Empire on the Continent.

18 Ligia Amancio „Trump e o pós-politicamente correcto“, Publico, 27 January 2017, p. 47

19 This was the real source of conflict between United Fruit and the Arbenz government that led the CIA to overthrow the Guatemalan president in 1954. It was also the reason why Fidel Castro nationalised assets of major US corporations—they had refused compensation based on their fraudulent tax returns filed under the defunct Batista regime.

20 See John Blair, The Control of Oil (1976) and Economic Concentration (1972).

21 B.F. Skinner, About Behaviorism (1974) Skinner’s research coincides with a whole range of programs funded by the CIA to investigate manipulation of human behavior. Skinner’s most famous books were Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). It is entirely possible that his work was wittingly or unwittingly promoted by those sources of academic largesse. For a stark contrast to Skinner’s “biological determinism” see Morse Peckham, Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior (xxxx).

22 João Ruela Ribeiro, “A alternativa à austeridade vem desmoralizada e sem poder”, Publico, 28 January 2017, p. 3. “O resultado: a direita não passou a apoiá-lo e a esquerda que o elegeu abandonou-o. Hollande, o mais impopular Presidente da Quinta República, chega a Lisboa com um pé for a do poder, o Partido Socialista totalmente dividido e com a ameaça da Frente Nacional.”

23 Philip Agee, CIA Diary (1975).

24 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/01/worried-american-democracy-study-activist-techniques Gene Sharp (*1928) is a retired political science professor from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and researcher at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, who founded the Albert Einstein Institution in 1983. The institution’s funding has come from the entire host of US political warfare foundations—NED, IRI, Rand, Ford. His cottage think tank (amusingly also located in Cottage Street, East Boston, Massachusetts and its role in the manufacture of synthetic “revolutionary” movements is the subject of a documentary The Revolution Business (https://www.journeyman.tv/film/5171). OTPOR—meanwhile renamed—played a central role in orchestrating the media campaigns that made Milosovic’s Serbia the tyrannical cause of the war which with the power of the US—exercised by counter-terror expert Richard Holbrooke—forced the destruction of the Yugoslav Federation in the early 1990s. The process was described in detail in the documentary The Weight of Chains (2010).

The last week of January holds special significance for Cubans, and indeed for the progressive men and women around the world. This year, January 25 marks the second month since the passing of Fidel Castro (who can forget November 25, 2016?). On January 28, which marks José Marti’s day of birth, Cubans pay a special tribute to his legacy.

On December 27, 2016, the Cuban National Assembly of People’s Power held a debate on how to legislate the will of Fidel to reject any tendency toward the “cult of personality.” The law expressly bans the use of Fidel’s name “to denominate institutions, plazas, parks, streets, avenues and other public places, as well as any type of decoration, recognition or honorary title.”

Likewise, it is forbidden to use denominations or images of, or allusions of any nature to, his figure “to erect monuments, busts, statues, commemorative strips and other similar forms of homage,” as well as to use it as a trademark or for other distinctive signs, domain name and designs for commercial or advertising purposes, except when it comes to the use of his name to denominate any future institution that might be created according the law to study his invaluable trajectory in the history of the nation. [1]

There were a variety of opinions expressed in the Parliament on how to honour Fidel’s desire as expressed to his brother Raúl Castro; at the same time, deputies stressed the need to maintain, study and propagate Fidel’s legacy for the benefit of present and future generations not familiar with Cuba when the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution was still alive.  However, the debate was largely censored by the U.S. corporate media.

Nevertheless, while Raúl Castro’s public announcement of Fidel’s will on December 3, 2016 in Santiago de Cuba was mentioned by the media, it was presented as a footnote with some commentaries even questioning the sincerity of this desire. Perhaps these U.S. media and ruling circles did not believe that it would be institutionalized in the form of law.

Fidel defeated the U.S. twice since November 25. First, he was victorious the day he passed away because he was never defeated by the U.S. Second, in the Cuban parliament, one month later, on December 27, he quashed the preconceived notion that revolutionaries are involved for money and glory, like any status quo political figure in the U.S.

The media were not aware – but even if they were, they did not take it seriously – that Fidel often quoted the champion of Cuban Independence José Martí that “All the glory in the world fits in a kernel of corn.” Fidel put this into practice, as he did with all his precepts. Thus, they could not defame the persona of Fidel on this issue as they would have liked to do as an essential part of their ongoing disinformation campaign against Fidel and the Cuban Revolution.

What is it in Fidel that attracts so much animosity from the U.S., while he has enjoyed so much devotion from the Cuban people and millions of people around the world, who consider him a hero? What is this imperialism that he, along with the Cuban people, defied from 1953 to his last breath?

Let us take only the period toward the end of World War II, at a time when Fidel initiated his political development and action. Aside from the U.S. neocolonial domination of Cuba, including periods of dictatorship, the U.S. is responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A recent vivid French television documentary based on interviews with survivors shows how, during WWII, the U.S. armed forces arriving in Cherbourg, France, supposedly as liberators, used their firearms to rape and aggress French women and their families.

This was symptomatic of a larger problem in that country and elsewhere in Europe. This is not to deny the crucial and courageous role of the U.S. and its armed forces to defeat fascism, nor to pretend that other powers did not carry out the same type of activities or worse, such as the Japanese fascists against the Chinese people.

However, viewing this documentary from the perspective of 2017, one has to keep in mind that the U.S. presents itself as the most civilized country on the planet with the burden of bringing “democracy” and “American values” to the world.

The documentary brings home the fact that this negative feature from WWII proved to be a hint of how U.S. atrocities would play out after WWII. Furthermore, this same documentary also deals with the French Resistance during the war, showing how Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill attempted to keep Charles De Gaulle and the Resistance out of the liberation of France.

The fabricated excuse is very familiar to us today: De Gaulle, the allies claimed, was a military person and therefore a “dictator.”

After WWII, the U.S. carried out aggressions against Korea and Vietnam. A recent visit to Vietnam reinforced the common knowledge that some American armed forces carried out atrocities similar to Nazi Germany. Such was the horror that many U.S. soldiers courageously resisted this barbarism by revolting against their officers and by other means.

From 1948 to date, Israel, with the assistance of the U.S., has been carrying out genocide without let-up against the Palestinian people. Cubans knows about genocide, as the U.S. blockade against Cuba consists of genocide in that the U.S. has explicitly declared since 1961 that its goal is to starve Cubans into submission.

Cuba and Fidel not only challenged the U.S.-backed racial segregation of apartheid in Africa, but went there to help Africa to liberate itself. In Latin America, the U.S. intervention and atrocities are too long to list: for example, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and, more recently, Honduras in 2009, Brazil in 2016 and Venezuela in 2002 and since April 2013.

Fidel stood up to all this and was an outspoken opponent of current American aggression through drones and other means in seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia. Washington has dropped many bombs in that area of the world, including on civilian populations.

It is well-known that the U.S. has 800 military bases in 150 countries around the world. While Cuba is not among them, one cannot overlook the fact that Guantánamo as part of Cuban territory was taken by force by the U.S. as a result of the Platt Amendment, a shameful law adopted by the U.S. Congress at the beginning of the 20th century by means of a one-sided and unfair treaty. [2]

All of this barely veiled bullying of the world’s peoples did not make Cuba and Fidel bend. Nor did U.S. aggression and threats against Russia on Ukraine and other issues succeed in undermining Cuba’s solidarity with Russia.

Fidel Castro challenged all this and more. Yet, instead of desiring recognition for the longest-lasting resistance to the biggest military and economic power in the world, he rejected such remembrance.

If ever there was a world political figure in the 20th century and into this century meriting statues, busts, plazas or parks named after him in this small country that gave birth to Fidel and the Cuban Revolution, it is Fidel; if anyone ever radiated the Cuban Revolution’s anti-imperialist sentiment in admirers of the world, it was he. However, there was never any doubt that he would allow this to happen. By rejecting recognition and honours, he remained faithful to José Martí and his teaching “All the glory in the world fits in a kernel of corn.”

Arnold August, a Canadian journalist and lecturer, is the author of Democracy in Cuba and the 1997–98 Elections and, more recently, Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion. He is a collaborator of Prensa Latina. Arnold can be followed on Twitter @Arnold_August and FaceBook

References

[1] “Cuba Passes Law on Use of Name and Image of Fidel Castro.” Prensa Latina News Agency. December 27, 2016. http://en.escambray.cu/2016/cuba-passes-law-on-use-of-name-and-image-of-fidel-castro

[2] The highest-ranking Cuban authorities have stated on many occasions that they will not accept any negotiations with regard to this illegally occupied territory, other than the unconditional withdrawal of foreign troops stationed there against the expressed will of the Cuban people. With equal seriousness, the Cuban government has ratified that it will not attempt to recover its legitimate rights by force and will wait patiently for justice to be imposed sooner or later.

Source: Prensa Latina, http://www.plenglish.com/index.php?o=rn&id=8989&SEO=marti-in-fidel-all-the-glory-in-the-world-fits-in-a-kernel-of-corn

Neoliberalism and the New World Order. IMF-World Bank “Reforms”, The Role of Wall Street

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Bonnie Faulkner, February 08 2017

Today we discuss global financial war as outlined in Professor Chossudovsky’s article “Wall Street Behind Brazil Coup D’état,” the role played by the IMF and World Bank in the economies of debtor nations, the Real Plan in Brazil, the imposition of the Washington Consensus, loss of national sovereignty, neoliberal institution funding of grassroots movements, the main corporate actors of the new world order, the function of propaganda, and the process of global impoverishment and the destruction of nation-states.

Donald J. Trump and The Deep State

By Prof Peter Dale Scott, February 08 2017

When the uninitiated think of the “Deep State,” they tend to imagine a group of men getting together in a room, smoking cigars and plotting world domination. But the Deep State is not one coordinated network of people controlling the government from the shadows. Instead, it refers to individuals and groups that have the resources to shape the direction of the world to their benefit and don’t hesitate to make use of them.

The US Secretive Government’s “Kill List”: How About NOBODY Should Be “Authorized To Assassinate US Citizens”

By Caitlin Johnstone, February 08 2017

The United States government can and does assassinate people with impunity, including US citizens, and the National Security Council is indeed a fundamental part of its process in doing so. In 2011, US-born citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was executed without trial via US drone strike in Yemen, and two weeks later another drone strike killed his 16 year-old son, also a US citizen. The panel responsible for these decisions conducts itself with total opacity, giving the US public no insight at all into how, when and why the decision to assassinate someone is made, all perfectly legally.

Massacres of Muslims: In Canada Condemned, In Yemen Condoned

By Christopher Black, February 08 2017

The massacre of Muslims in Canada at a Quebec City mosque on Sunday, January 29, raises a number of questions about what happened but also raises deep questions of morality and justice since the massacre of Muslims in Canada is rightly condemned but another massacre of Muslims, in Yemen, is shamefully and criminally condoned. In one situation, a suspect faces trial for murder and is condemned by public opinion, while in the other the guilty are treated as heroes and will receive medals. Let’s deal with the Canadian situation first.

As Netanyahu and Theresa May Chat, a Large Nest of Israeli Spies in London Exposed

By Craig Murray, February 08 2017

Masot was working as an intelligence officer, acquiring and financing “agents of influence”. It is simply impossible that the FCO would normally grant seventeen technical and administrative visas to support sixteen diplomats, when six of the sixteen are already support staff. The only possible explanation, confirmed absolutely by Masot’s behaviour, is that the FCO has knowingly connived at settling a large nest of Israeli spies in London.

Gaining acceptance in Official Washington is a lot like getting admittance into a secret society’s inner sanctum by uttering some nonsensical password. In Washington to show you belong, you must express views that are patently untrue or blatantly hypocritical.

For instance, you might be called upon to say that “Iran is the principal source of terrorism” when that title clearly belongs to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf state allies that have funded Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Islamic State. But truth has no particularly value in Official Washington; adherence to “group think” is what’s important.

Similarly, you might have to deny any “moral equivalence” between killings attributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin and killings authorized by U.S. presidents. In this context, the fact that the urbane Barack Obama scheduled time one day a week to check off people for targeted assassinations isn’t relevant. Nor is the reality that Donald Trump has joined this elite club of official killers by approving a botched and bloody raid in Yemen that slaughtered a number of women and children (and left one U.S. soldier dead, too).

Image: Fox News’ anchor Bill O’Reilly interviewing President Donald Trump.

You have to understand that “our killings” are always good or at least justifiable (innocent mistakes do happen from time to time), but Russian killings are always bad. Indeed, Official Washington has so demonized Putin that any untoward death in Russia can be blamed on him whether there is any evidence or not. To suggest that evidence is needed shows that you must be a “Moscow stooge.”

To violate these inviolable norms of Official Washington, in which participants must intuitively grasp the value of such “group think” and the truism of “American exceptionalism,” marks you as a dangerous outsider who must be marginalized or broken.

Currently, President Trump is experiencing this official opprobrium as he is widely denounced by Republicans, Democrats and “news” people because he didn’t react properly to a question from Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly terming Putin “a killer.”

“There are a lot of killers.” Trump responded. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think — our country’s so innocent. You think our country’s so innocent?”

Aghast at Trump’s heresy, O’Reilly sputtered, “I don’t know of any government leaders that are killers.”

Trump: “Well — take a look at what we’ve done too. We made a lot of mistakes. I’ve been against the war in Iraq from the beginning.”

O’Reilly: “But mistakes are different than —“

Trump: “A lot of mistakes, but a lot of people were killed. A lot of killers around, believe me.”

‘Moral Equivalence’

Though Trump is justly criticized for often making claims that aren’t true, here he was saying something that clearly was true. But it has drawn fierce condemnation from across Official Washington, not only from Democrats but from Trump’s fellow Republicans, too. Neoconservative Washington Post opinion writer Charles Krauthammer objected fiercely to Trump’s “moral equivalence,” and CNN’s Anderson Cooper chimed in. lamenting Trump’s deviation into “equivalence,” i.e. holding the U.S. government to the same ethical standards as the Russian government.

Image: Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush with CIA Director William Casey at the White House on Feb. 11, 1981. (Photo credit: Reagan Library)

This “moral equivalence” argument has been with us at least since the Reagan administration when human rights groups objected to President Reagan’s support for right-wing governments in Central America that engaged in “death squad” tactics against political dissidents, including the murders of priests and nuns and genocide against disaffected Indian tribes. To suggest that Reagan and his friends should be subjected to the same standards that he applied to left-wing authoritarian governments earned you the accusation of “moral equivalence.”

Declassified documents from Reagan’s White House show that this P.R. strategy was refined at National Security Council meetings led by U.S. intelligence propaganda experts. Now the “moral equivalence” theme is being revived to discredit a new Republican president who dares challenge this particular Official Washington “group think.”

Lots of Killing

The unpleasant truth is that all leaders of major countries and many leaders of smaller countries are “killers.” President Obama admitted that he had ordered military strikes in seven different countries to kill people. His Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejoiced over the grisly murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi with a clever twist on a famous Julius Caesar boast of conquest: “We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton chirped.

At the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to conduct a devastating aerial assault on Baghdad, known as “shock and awe.”

President George W. Bush launched an illegal war against Iraq based on false pretenses, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them children and other civilians.

President Bill Clinton ordered a vicious bombing campaign against the Serbian capital of Belgrade, which included intentionally targeting the Serb TV building and killing 16 civilian employees because Clinton considered the station’s news reports to be “propaganda,” i.e., not in line with U.S. propaganda.

After the U.S. bombing in 1991 that incinerated more than 400 civilians, the Amiriyah Bunker in Baghdad was turned into a memorial to the victims. Since the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, the memorial was closed to the public.

President George H.W. Bush slaughtered scores of Panamanians who happened to live near the headquarters of the Panamanian Defense Forces and he killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, including incinerating a civilian bomb shelter in Baghdad, after he brushed aside proposals for resolving Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait peacefully. (Bush wanted a successful war as a way to rally the American people behind future foreign military operations, so, in his words, the country could kick “the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”)

Other U.S. presidents have had more or less blood on their hands than these recent chief executives, but it is hard to identify any modern U.S. president who has not been a “killer” in some form, inflicting death upon innocents whether as part of some “justifiable” mission or not.

But the mainstream U.S. press corps routinely adopts double standards when assessing acts by a U.S. president and those of an “enemy.” When the U.S. kills people, the mainstream media bends over backwards to rationalize the violence, but does the opposite if the killing is authorized by some demonized foreign leader.

That is now the case with Putin. Any accusation against Putin – no matter how lacking in evidence – is treated as credible and any evidence of Putin’s innocence is ridiculed or suppressed.

That was the case with a documentary that debunked claims that hedge fund accountant Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in a Russian prison because he was a whistleblower when the documentary showed that he was a suspect in a massive money-laundering scheme and died of natural causes. Although produced by a documentarian who started out planning to do a sympathetic portrayal of Magnitsky, the facts led in a different direction that caused the documentary to be shunned by the European Union and given minimal distribution in the United States.

By contrast, the ease with which Putin is called a murderer – based on “mysterious deaths” inside Russia – is reminiscent of how American right-wing groups suggested that Bill and Hillary Clinton were murderers by distributing a long list of “mysterious deaths” somehow related to the Clinton “scandals” from their Arkansas days. While there was no specific evidence connecting the Clintons to any of these deaths, the sheer number created suspicions that were hard to knock down without making you a “Clinton apologist.” Similarly, a demand for actual evidence proving Putin’s guilt in a specific case makes you a “Putin apologist.”

However, as a leader of a powerful nation facing threats from terrorism and other national security dangers, Putin is surely a “killer,” much as U.S. presidents are killers. That appears to have been President Trump’s point, that the United States doesn’t have clean hands when it comes to shedding innocent blood.

But telling such an unpleasant albeit obvious truth is not the way to gain entrance into the inner sanctum of Official Washington’s Deep State. The passwords for admission require you to say a lot of things that are patently false. Any inconvenient truth-telling earns you the bum’s rush out into the alley, even if you’re President of the United States.

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 andbarnesandnoble.com).

The Trump administration argued Tuesday for the restoration of its temporary ban on visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries and refugees from any country in an hour-long court hearing conducted by telephone.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in San Francisco, heard the government appeal to overturn the temporary restraining order issued by a federal judge in Seattle, who acted on a lawsuit brought by the states of Washington and Minnesota.

The government’s legal representative, August Flentje, special counsel to the assistant attorney general, faced a skeptical reaction from the panel, which peppered him with questions and did not allow him to develop a coherent argument, although it was unclear whether he could have done so even without interruption.

None of the three judges—William Canby, appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1980; Richard Clifton, appointed by George W. Bush in 2001, and Michelle Friedland, appointed by Barack Obama in 2013—seemed sympathetic to the White House claims that the states did not have legal standing to challenge the executive order.

An analogous case was brought by a group of Republican state attorneys-general in 2015, challenging an Obama executive order on immigration enforcement as unduly lenient. That case was heard by a federal district judge in Texas and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The courts ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, both on standing and on the merits of their suit.

One of the first questions, from Judge Friedland, was whether the Trump administration had any evidence of an imminent threat emanating from any of the seven countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. No traveler from any of those countries has been involved in a terrorist attack inside the United States since at least 1975.

As with most of the public performances of the Trump administration, factual accuracy and logical coherence were replaced by authoritarian bluster and fear-mongering at the court hearing. Flentje sought to base his argument for the travel ban on the claim that the president’s authority on national security matters was virtually absolute.

When asked by Judge Friedland whether the executive order was “unreviewable,” he hesitated, then said, “Yes.” The court was entitled to consider only whether the executive order was properly drafted and not facially invalid. The judges were obliged to confine their scrutiny to the “four corners” of the paper signed by Trump on January 27, he argued.

This line of argumentation ultimately collapsed on itself, since Flentje retreated from the claim that Trump had the authority to strip legal resident aliens, holders of green cards, of their constitutional rights. After customs agents targeted green card holders in the first weekend of enforcement of the executive order, the White House revised its instructions without changing the text of the order, merely issuing an “interpretation” of the order by White House counsel Don McGahn.

Judge Friedland noted the contradiction between the initial claims that the courts had to concede Trump’s unchallengeable authority to make national security determinations, and the White House counsel’s intervention to attempt to salvage the executive order. Could Trump’s national security authority be delegated to a White House lawyer, she asked?

Speaking for the states of Washington and Minnesota, Washington solicitor general Noah Purcell initially avoided the democratic and constitutional issues at stake, instead diverting the proceeding into a discussion of the exact legal steps to be followed, including whether the Appeals Court panel would send the case back to the district court for further review or issue its own opinion that could immediately be appealed to the Supreme Court.

When he finally turned to the main issues, however, the strength of the case against the executive order became plain. He noted that the Trump administration had “no clear factual claim or evidentiary claims” as to the irreparable harm that would result from the suspension of the executive order, adding, “It was the executive order itself that caused irreparable harm.”

He discussed several legal issues relating to proving that the travel ban violates the First Amendment clause forbidding the establishment of religion. Dismissing the argument that since the ban targeted only seven of the 43 Muslim-majority countries it wasn’t a Muslim ban, he explained that this was not the legal standard: “You don’t have to prove it harms every Muslim—you just need to show the action was motivated in part by animus.” Even an action within the legal powers of the president could be illegal and unconstitutional if motivated by religious bigotry.

The discriminatory intent could be demonstrated from Trump’s own statements, both during the election campaign and in preparing the order, Purcell argued. Trump called for a Muslim ban during the campaign, and after his election asked one of his advisers, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to prepare a version of the Muslim ban that would pass legal muster. Trump also discussed his desire to favor Christian refugees over Muslims in an interview with a Christian broadcaster.

It was rare that so much evidence of intent was available even before any discovery had been conducted, he said—hinting at the possibility that Trump administration officials, and even potentially Trump himself, could be called to testify under oath if the case goes forward.

This led to a heated exchange, as Flentje declared, “It’s extraordinary for the courts to enjoin a president’s national security decision-making based on some newspaper articles.” Judge Clifton then asked whether the government attorney was claiming that the reports of Trump’s anti-Muslim comments were false. Flentje backed off, conceding that Trump had made the statements in question, but arguing that no judicial notice should be taken.

All three judges pressed Flentje on whether the president could simply issue a ban on Muslims entering the country, and if he did, would anyone, under the government’s theory, have legal standing to challenge it. Under repeated prodding, Flentje conceded that such an order would raise significant First Amendment and establishment of religion questions, but he maintained that only individuals directly harmed by the order, and not state governments, had legal standing to challenge such an order in court.

So one-sided were the exchanges that at one point Flentje remarked, in an understatement, “I’m not sure I’m convincing the court.” He later offered a compromise ruling, suggesting that the judges could reinstate the travel ban at least for refugees and others who had never previously entered the United States, while allowing it to lapse for green card holders and others with greater ties to the country.

In a media advisory before the hearing, a spokesman said that “a ruling was not expected to come down today, but probably this week.” The Trump White House has already announced that it intends to appeal any unfavorable result to the Supreme Court, which currently has only eight members, making a 4-4 tie vote very possible. That result would leave the Ninth Circuit decision intact.

The Trump administration’s open hostility to the judicial system’s intervention in the travel ban was expressed not only in Trump’s speech to Special Forces soldiers in Florida , but also in remarks by retired General John F. Kelly, Trump’s appointee as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that directly enforced the ban.

Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee Tuesday, Kelly admitted that no one from the seven countries targeted for the travel ban has committed a terrorist attack inside the United States. But he said that it was impossible to rule it out, since US agencies wouldn’t know of such an attack until the “boom,” as he put it. This is an argument, of course, for prohibiting all visitors to the United States from all countries—and for rounding up countless Americans as well.

Kelly made a disparaging reference to the federal judges, both the district court judge in Seattle and the two Appeals Court judges who denied the initial move for an emergency stay of the Seattle ruling, saying they could indulge in “academic” detachment from the danger of terrorism because “in their courtrooms, they’re protected by people like me.”

Eighty people have died in the last two years as a direct result of homelessness in Toronto. That’s one homeless person dying every 10 days. In 1985, people fighting homelessness started keeping track of these senseless, and entirely preventable deaths. Since that time, they’ve recorded over 800 deaths – lives sacrificed in service of a perverse economic logic that demands ever more cuts from the destitute and grants ever more comforts to the rich.

Talk to anyone who has used the City’s emergency shelter system, or anyone who works with people using shelters, and a grim picture emerges of chronic overcrowding, bug infested dormitories, the recurrent spread of contagious diseases, and the perpetual lack of sufficient beds.

The City’s own ‘Daily Shelter Census,’ which provides a nightly count of occupancy rates in shelters, documents the sorry state of affairs. In 1999, City Council set a target of keeping occupancy levels in shelters at a maximum of 90%, in recognition of the fact that anything above that level in practice meant people could not get beds. The target has been acknowledged, and then ignored by the city for 18 years straight. A Street Needs Assessment conducted by the city in 2013 pegged the homeless population in Toronto at just above 5000, a number that has only grown since then, owing to ever-rising rents, a decreasing stock of social housing, and below-inflation increases (effectively cuts) to social assistance year after year.

A recent Toronto Star article reported that the number of homeless people calling the City’s central intake line in need of a bed rose by 13.2% in 2016. The number of individual refugees and families looking for shelter has more than tripled in the same time. Yet, the city only provided an average of 4,122 beds each month last year, significantly below the need. Those unable to get a shelter bed are left to hunt for survival spaces like the volunteer-run Out of the Cold programs or warming centres (which only opened after a fight by homeless advocates), which have no beds or lockers, and lack adequate washroom and storage facilities. Even these overflow facilities fill up, leaving many with no option but to risk death out in the cold. The conditions are bad enough that over 30 organizations, many of which receive funding from the city, decided to speak out publicly, risk losing their funding, and call on the Mayor of the city, John Tory, to add desperately needed shelter capacity and open up the armouries as an interim measure.

Keep Calm and Carry On

Mayor John Tory’s response to this crisis of human suffering is to offer platitudes, misleading numbers and bold-faced lies. In a response to the letter submitted by the agencies, Tory wrote one to the Toronto Star, a longer version of which he published on his own facebook page, telling people to essentially keep calm and carry on. He tells us he really cares about poor people, he tells us that he has visited shelters himself, that spaces are being added and that things are going to be all right. To understand just how dubious his claims are and how disconcerting his actions are, let’s take look at the four statements he makes in his letter.

• ⟿ “…In November, my council colleagues and I provided the city’s general manager of shelter, support and housing administration with an additional $2-million to implement the 2017 Winter Readiness Plan…”

The additional $2-million was approved by the City Council to fund some additional, though still inadequate, survival spaces following ongoing agitation by homeless people and their allies about the appalling conditions plaguing the system and a realization that unless something is done we were looking at a certainty of deaths this winter.

However, John Tory is now set to cut over $1-million from that same administration in his upcoming 2017 budget. The cuts will result in reductions in “front-line positions in shelters include client service workers, counselor, food service workers, program supervisors, registered nurse, street outreach counselor, social housing consultant.” The City will also eliminate the Emergency Cooling Centre Program, which provides heat relief to the homeless in the hot summer months.

• ⟿ “The City of Toronto has opened 126 beds in the last month and, next week, a 96-bed shelter for families operated by Red Door will open.”

The City’s own reports documents how by the last quarter of 2016, owing to three shelter closures in the downtown core, the city was actually 169 beds short compared to the total beds it had in 2015. That number does not include another 103 beds temporarily shut down at Seaton House resulting from a Strep A outbreak in September 2016, resulting from chronic overcrowding at that shelter. So, yes, while the new beds have been added, they don’t come close to making up the number of beds the City has lost.

Also, when new shelters are added to replace ones that are closed down, they are being opened away from the downtown core. Abandoned in the suburbs, without access to the critical support services (e.g. food banks, health centres, soup kitchens, etc.), and with prohibitively expensive transit costs, the homeless are simply expected to vanish.

Adding pressure to the homelessness crisis is the reality that the absence of repair funding in the upcoming budget means Toronto Community Housing will board up 425 units this year, and “a unit a day” in 2018.

• ⟿ “The city has also extended the 24-hour cold weather drop-in service to mid-March. Availability of the 24-hour service was originally planned to end Feb. 28.”

Undoubtedly winters are far less harsh for residents of Tory’s luxurious “Tower of Power,” the downtown condo building Tory calls home, but for everyone else in Toronto the cold weather doesn’t end in February. So extending the 24-hour warming centres for two more weeks, especially when there is a crisis of insufficient beds, is far from praiseworthy. The fact that Tory expects our gratitude for the token extension, which still ends well before the cold weather does, is just shameful.

• ⟿ “As to the ongoing suggestion of opening the armouries, city staff have advised against this as they do not believe those buildings provide adequate or appropriate shelter space.”

The hypocrisy of that statement is simply mind-boggling. The armouries are far from ideal, but they are better than the streets, and they have been used before – at least four times in the past 20 years – for the purposes of providing emergency shelter to the homeless. If the City was so concerned about appropriate and adequate shelter space, it wouldn’t abandon so many homeless to the Out of the Cold programs, where, infamously, basic shelter standards do not apply.

Confronting Tory

Mayor John Tory likes to talk about his “values,” which he claims include “inclusion and acceptance, honesty, fair play, decency and respect.” Much like his letter, polite, yet deceptive, misleading and untrue, his personal belief systems are laid bare by the track record of his actions. This is the same man who when running for the Mayor’s office in 2003 supported a ban on panhandling by poor people in the downtown core; the same man who doesn’t believe that our society has privileged rich white men like him; and the same man who continues to keep Toronto’s property taxes the lowest in Ontario – benefitting multi-million dollar property owners such as himself. Maybe a better gauge of his “inclusive” and “decent” tendencies is his long association with Nick Kouvalis, the racist bigot who ran his election campaign and was the person behind Kellie Leitch’s reprehensible ‘Canadian values’ dog-whistle politics.

Mayor John Tory is a liar, he is more sophisticated than the blundering Rob Ford, but his conservative tendencies and hatred of the poor are not masked by his smooth talking. Actions speak louder than words, and ours certainly will when we confront his hypocrisy and lies on Thursday, February 9th at 11am, when Tory is scheduled to speak at the C.D. Howe institute, a neoliberal policy think-tank. Join us there to demand a reversal of the cuts to shelters and housing in the upcoming budget, and the immediate opening of the federal armouries. •

Yogi Acharya is an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), a poor people’s organization working in the downtown east end of Toronto for over 25 years.

Media coverage of the recent escalation in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine has once again shown that mainstream media provides a slanted view on the military situation in the region. It is especially interesting to observe how various mainstream outlets and so-called “NGOs” blamed militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) for an alleged usage of human shields in artillery duels. However, all these reports just hide how things really work on the ground.

The recent escalation began in late January starting with a large-scale offensive by Ukrainian Armed Forces in the industrial area of Avdeevka, south of the DPR capital of Donetsk. Meanwhile, artillery strikes dramatically intensified along the entire contact line.

This video is based on a military analysis by Denis Seleznev; Voiceover by Harold Hoover

The escalation deeply affected Donetsk, Makeevka, and Yasinovataya which compose a de-facto, united, highly populated, urban, complex with industrial infrastructure.

A Soviet-made 82mm mortar, widely used by both sides in the conflict, has a maximum firing range of 3km. A 120mm mortar has a firing range of 5km. D-30 122mm howitzers and 2S1 Gvozdika self-propelled howitzers have a firing range of about 15km. 2S3 Akatsiya self-propelled howitzers have a firing range of about 18km, and BM-21 Grad military rocket launcher systems have a firing range of between 30 and 40 km in case of the usage of modern rockets.

If DPR and Ukrainian artillery units want to hit each other they are pushed to deploy these weapons much closer to the contact line. In case of a real combat in the area of Donetsk, and especially in case of a counter-battery fire, DPR forces are pushed to operate from areas located close to the urban complex. Furthermore, artillery units have to maneuver on a constant basis in order to avoid artillery strikes by the enemy.

In turn, Ukrainian Armed Forces have many more options to deploy artillery and other combat systems in non-populated areas but they don’t do this because in this case they will not be able to blame DPR units for shelling some residential areas.

It’s obvious that both sides implement a kind of military censorship hiding on an official level. However, this allows the mainstream media and think tanks to highlight some facts while hiding others in order to create a wide range of media forgeries, manipulating public opinion over the conflict.

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The Syrian army’s Tiger Forces and the National Defense Forces (NDF), supported by the Russian Aerospace Forces, have retaken the village of Ma`zulah, the Hawarah Hill, Abu Jabbar, and Birat al-Bab from ISIS terrorists in the area southeast of al-Bab in the province of Aleppo.

The army and the NDF physically cut off the only ISIS supply line to al-Bab and de-facto closed the pocket with about 2,500 terrorists. If ISIS is not able to make a successful counter-attack soon, the fate of its forces in the area is predetermined.

The Israeli parliament passed the legalisation law on Monday night – a piece of legislation every bit as suspect as its title suggests. The law widens the powers of Israeli officials to seize the final fragments of Palestinian land in the West Bank that were supposed to be off-limits.

The following graphics prove that Russia and Iran want war:

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Credit: Azizonomics

Credit: Al Jazeera and Google

These bad people are putting their countries closer and closer to our military bases:

Discussing western reporting of the Syrian war, veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn recently noted “fabricated news and one-sided reporting have taken over the news agenda to a degree probably not seen since the First World War”.

Professor Piers Robinson, Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the University of Sheffield, concurs, arguing

“We must now seriously entertain the possibility that the war in Syria has involved similar, if not greater, levels of manipulation and propaganda than that which occurred in the case of the 2003 Iraq War”.

An incredibly complex and confusing conflict with hundreds of opposition groups and multiple external actors often keen to hide many of their actions, how can journalists and the public get an accurate understanding of what is happening in Syria?

As governments routinely use their public statements to deceive the public, traditionally leaked government documents have been seen as the gold standard of journalistic sources – a unique opportunity to see what those in power are really thinking and doing behind closed doors.

“Policy-makers are usually frank about their real goals in the secret record”, notes British historian Mark Curtis in his book Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses.

When it comes to Syria there have been a number of US government documents leaked about US policy in the region. However, though these disclosures were reported by the media at the time, they have been quickly forgotten and have not contributed to the dominant narrative that has built up about the conflict.

As Professor Peter Kuznick noted about the American history he highlighted in The Untold History of the United States documentary series he co-wrote with director Oliver Stone, “the truth is that many of our ‘secrets’ have been hidden on the front page of The New York Times.”

For example, liberal journalists and commentators have repeatedly stated the US has, as Paul Mason wrote in the Guardian last year, “stood aloof from the Syrian conflict”. The leaked audio recording of a meeting between President Obama’s second Secretary of State John Kerry, and Syrian opposition figures last year shows the opposite to be true.

Challenged about the level of US support to the insurgency, Kerry turns to his aide and says: “I think we’ve been putting an extraordinary amount of arms in, haven’t we?” The aide agrees, noting “the armed groups in Syria get a lot of support”.

Amazingly, before noting the US had sent an “extraordinary amount of arms” to the rebels, Kerry tells the activists “we can always throw a lot of weapons in but I don’t think they are going to be good for you” because “everyone ups the ante” leading to “you all [getting] destroyed”.

This explanation of the logic of escalation is repeated later in the meeting by Kerry’s aide, who notes “when you pump more weapons into a situation like Syria it doesn’t end well for Syrians because there is always somebody else willing to pump more weapons in for the other side”.

A classified 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, published by the right-wing watchdog Judicial Watch, provides important context to Kerry’s remarks. In the heavily redacted document the DIA – the intelligence arm of the US Department of Defense – notes “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI (al-Qaida in Iraq) are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” and “The West, Gulf countries and Turkey support the opposition”.

Speaking at a 2013 Jewish United Fund Advance & Major Gifts Dinner – the transcript of which was published by Wikileaks – former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirmed that US ally Saudi Arabia “and others are shipping large amounts of weapons – and pretty indiscriminately – not at all targeted toward the people that we think would be the more moderate, least likely, to cause problems in the future”.

It gets worse. Discussing the crisis, the DIA report notes “There is the possibility of [the opposition] establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in Eastern Syria… and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”

This appalling revelation was seemingly confirmed by General Michael T Flynn, the Director of the DIA from 2012-14 (and now National Security Advisor to President Trump), in a 2015 interview with Al-Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan – and also, it seems, by Kerry when he told the Syrian activists:

“The reason Russia came in [to the conflict] is because ISIL [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] was getting stronger. Daesh [another name for ISIL] was threatening the possibility of going to Damascus and so forth… And we know that this was growing. We were watching. We saw that Daesh was growing in strength. And we thought Assad was threatened. We thought, however, we could probably manage – you know, that Assad might then negotiate, but instead of negotiating he got Putin to support him.”

In summary, the leaked information wholly contradicts the popular picture of western benevolent intentions let down by President Obama’s ineffective leadership and inaction.

Instead the evidence shows the US has been sending an “extraordinary amount” of weapons to the armed insurgents in Syria in the full knowledge that Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda in Iraq were the “major forces” driving the insurgency. They did this understanding that sending in weapons would escalate the fighting and not “end well for Syrians”.

Furthermore, the US has long known that its regional ally Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have been supporting extremists in Syria. And, most shocking of all if true, both Kerry and the DIA report seem to show the US allowed forerunners to IS to expand and threaten the Syrian government as this corresponded with the US’s geo-strategic objectives.

More broadly, by highlighting how the US welcomed the growth of IS in Syria, the leaks fatally undermine the entire rationale of the “War on Terror” the West has supposedly been fighting since 2001. These are, in short, bombshells that should be front page news, with lengthy investigative follow ups and hundreds of op-eds outraged at the lies and hypocrisy of western governments.

Instead, the disclosures have disappeared down the memory hole, with the huge gap between the importance of the revelations and the lack of coverage indicating a frighteningly efficient propaganda system.

It is worth noting however, that as an observer and newsreader – rather than seasoned expert – there may well be important context or information of which I am unaware, which provides a different take on the leaked material. This would lessen its importance and, therefore, justify the media having largely ignored it.

Of course, the best way of confirming the accuracy and importance of the leaks is for the media to do its job and thoroughly investigate the disclosures, to devote significant resources and manpower to the story, and to ask awkward and searching questions of established power.

I’m not holding my breath.

Ian Sinclair is a freelance writer based in London and the author of The March that Shook Blair: An Oral History of 15 February 2003. He tweets @IanJSinclair

The Israeli Embassy has seventeen Israeli “technical and administrative staff” granted visas by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The normal number for an Embassy that size would be about two. I spoke to two similar size non-EU Embassies this morning, one has two and one zero. I recall I dealt with an angry Foreign Minister during my own FCO career incensed his much larger High Commission had been refused by the FCO an increase from three to four technical and administrative staff.

Shai Masot, the Israeli “diplomat” who had been subverting Britain’s internal democracy with large sums of cash and plans to concoct scandal against a pro-Palestinian British minister, did not appear in the official diplomatic list.

I queried this with the FCO, and was asked to put my request in writing. A full three weeks later and after dozens of phone calls, they reluctantly revealed that Masot was on the “technical and administrative staff” of the Israeli Embassy.

This is plainly a nonsense. Masot, as an ex-Major in the Israeli Navy and senior officer in the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, is plainly senior to many who are on the Diplomatic List, which includes typists and personal assistants. There are six attaches – support staff – already on the List.

Masot was plainly not carrying out technical and administrative duties. The term is a formal one from the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and it is plain from the convention that technical and administrative staff are in official status lower than the diplomatic staff. The majority of support activities are carried out in all Embassies by locally engaged staff already resident in the host country, but a very small number of technical and administrative staff may be allowed visas for work in particularly secure areas. They may be an IT and communications technician, possibly a cleaner in the most sensitive physical areas, and perhaps property management.

These staff do not interact with politicians of the host state or attend high level meetings beside the Ambassador. The level at which Shai Masot was operating was appropriate to a Counsellor or First Secretary in an Embassy. Masot’s formal rank as an officer in his cover job in the Ministry of Strategic Affairs would entitle him to that rank in the Embassy if this were a normal appointment.

The Al Jazeera documentaries plainly revealed that Masot was working as an intelligence officer, acquiring and financing “agents of influence”. It is simply impossible that the FCO would normally grant seventeen technical and administrative visas to support sixteen diplomats, when six of the sixteen are already support staff. The only possible explanation, confirmed absolutely by Masot’s behaviour, is that the FCO has knowingly connived at settling a large nest of Israeli spies in London. I fairly put this to the FCO and they refused to comment.

I asked my questions on 10 January. On 12 January the FCO asked me to put them in writing. On 2 February they finally replied to the first three questions, but refused to comment on questions 4 or 5 about involvement of the intelligence services in Masot’s appointment.

On 2 February I sent these follow-up questions to the FCO by email:

FCO Media Department have replied that they refuse to give me any further information on the subject, and that I should proceed through a Freedom of Information request so the FCO can assess properly whether the release of any further information is in the national interest.

What is it they are always saying to us: if you have got nothing to fear, you have got nothing to hide?

I am confident I know what they are hiding, and that is FCO complicity in a large nest of Israeli spies seeking to influence policy and opinion in the UK in a pro-Israeli direction. That is why the government reaction to one of those spies being caught on camera plotting a scandal against an FCO minister, and giving £1 million to anti-Corbyn MPs, was so astonishingly muted. It is also worth noting that while the media could not completely ignore the fantastic al Jazeera documentaries that exposed the scandal, it was a matter of a brief article and no follow up digging.

This was not just a curiosity, it reveals a deep-seated problem for our democracy. I intend to continue picking at it.

Belgian politician Filip Dewinter, who was the head of the Belgian parliamentarian delegation which visited Syrian Aleppo on Monday, told Sputnik that the mainstream media is distorting the truth about Syria. After visiting a hospital, he learned that it is actually due to Western sanctions that the hospitals are short of medicine and equipment.

“The main stop during out visit was the al Jamia hospital where we met with the chief doctor,” Filip Dewinter told Sputnik.

“He told us about the shortages of medicine and functioning equipment. Most of the equipment is not working simply because it’s impossible to buy any spare parts due to the imposed anti-Syrian sanctions. They can’t buy medicine and expendable materials because the European Union has blocked access to them,” the parliamentarian explained.

© SPUTNIK/
A delegation of Belgian MPs visit the temporary refugee shelter in Jibreen, Aleppo. Photo: Courtesy of The Russian Center for Reconciliation of Opposing Sides in the Syrian Arab Republic

Filip Dewinter also said that during their visit they had “political meetings” with President Assad and Minister of Foreign Affairs Walid Muallem.

“From our mainstream media we were told that Bashar Assad has had a heart attack and is suffering from heart diseases. Our meeting lasted for more than an hour and a half. He was feeling well and looked healthy and cheerful. Now I know for sure that it was fake news,” the politician told Sputnik.

He said that he discussed a number of topics with the Syrian president, including the sanctions imposed by EU, the ever changing position of President Erdogan, the meeting in Astana and future negotiations in Geneva.

They also spoke about the military operation on the ground, especially after the victory in Aleppo and about foreign mercenaries fighting in the country.

There are about 650 Belgians who have been recruited by Daesh. Filip Dewinter said he discussed with Bashar Assad how to deal with this problem in cooperation with the Belgian government.

Parliamentarians from Belgium’s Parti Populaire and Vlaams Belang parties arrived in Syria for a working visit on Thursday. On Monday, the lawmakers visited the Jibreen refugee camp in Aleppo as well as Russia’s Hmeimim airbase.

The politician added that the Syrian government was Europe’s ally in establishing peace across the Middle East as well as ensuring security inside the European Union. He thanked Russia for its involvement into the conflict and provision of humanitarian aid to the local residents.

There’s a viral copypasta going around social media claiming that the National Security Council position President Trump is attempting to push Steve Bannon into entails authority over a secretive government “kill list” which authorizes assassinations of enemies of the US government, including assassinations of American citizens.

Unlike 99 percent of all social media copy/paste trends, this one is actually grounded in fact. The United States government can and does assassinate people with impunity, including US citizens, and the National Security Council is indeed a fundamental part of its process in doing so. In 2011, US-born citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was executed without trial via US drone strike in Yemen, and two weeks later another drone strike killed his 16 year-old son, also a US citizen. The panel responsible for these decisions conducts itself with total opacity, giving the US public no insight at all into how, when and why the decision to assassinate someone is made, all perfectly legally. Reuters reports that according to an unnamed official, these extrajudicial killings are “permitted by Congress when it authorized the use of military forces against militants in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001; and they are permitted under international law if a country is defending itself.”

So this copypasta is going around, and all the armchair liberals on my newsfeed are freaking out about it saying “Oh noes! We can’t let the Breitbart guy have this kind of authority! He’ll be on a panel that gives him the authority to legally assassinate US citizens!” Meanwhile nobody seems to be voicing any concern at all about the fact that THEIR GOVERNMENT CAN LEGALLY ASSASSINATE US CITIZENS.

For God’s sake, liberals. Wake up already. We have here a golden opportunity to shine a big, bright light on a truly reprehensible practice by the US government that everyone wanted to hurry up and forget about under President Obama, and we’re letting it slip through our fingers by making it about some alt-right jerk who probably can’t get on the panel anyway.

It’s fine to ring alarms about Bannon, but can we please stop pretending he’s the most concerning thing about the issue in question? Even if you’re fine with the extrajudicial killings of foreigners, pure egoic self-interest should propel you to fight tooth and claw against a policy which enables your government to kill you with impunity and opacity under the “Trust us, we’re the good guys” post-9/11 authoritarian schtick Bush lulled us into accepting.

What makes this such a perfect opportunity is the way all the establishment fearmongering about Trump can be used in our favor to illustrate just how horrific executive powers have gotten under Bush and Obama. When it was Obama assassinating people liberals were able to compartmentalize away from the jarring reality of what was happening, thinking “Well he seems like a nice guy and he looks good in a suit, and isn’t his family beautiful? What breed is their new dog? I should really google that,” but now that those same exact powers have been transferred to Trump people can suddenly see them since they no longer belong to a trusted member of their pack.

If we can keep it from being dragged into useless partisan inertia, it will move from “Oh well, I trust him” to “Oh my God, this is a fascist government!” And of course it always has been, but beggars can’t be choosers and at least now we can get everyone looking. The fact that horrible people can wind up in positions of power is exactly why it used to be illegal for the government to assassinate its own citizens. We need to turn this from being a conversation about what a creep Bannon is to why we should never allow such practices at all.

The debate about government surveillance and the death of habeas corpus is an interesting one. The federal government is demanding more and more power because of the very real threat of a group of terrorists getting their hands on a nuclear weapon, among other things, and that’s arguably fine as long as we’re not asked to just blindly trust that nobody who wields that power will be nefarious.

Trump’s election is as clear an argument against that trust as we could possibly hope for, so there’s got to be a trade-off at the very least. If the federal government wants absolute power, we should at the very least be receiving absolute transparency so we can see what they’re up to. If America’s constant foreign interventionism and military entanglements are an obstacle to that transparency, then it should have to stop that behavior to enable transparency, and reducing its military interventionism would, of course, greatly reduce the risk of suffering a terrorist attack in the first place. The alternative is trusting that these godlike powers will never fall into the hands of a tyrant, which has already proven to be a naive pipe dream.

So can we get this debate turned in a healthy direction, please? The NSC and the kill lists will still be there long after Bannon’s obesity and hatred keels him over if we don’t. That is way too much power with way too much opacity for any government to be trusted with.

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Billionaire Betsy DeVos was confirmed as secretary of education by vote of 51 to 50 in the Senate Tuesday with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote, marking the first time in US history that such a vote was necessary to confirm a cabinet secretary.

Tuesday’s vote was the culmination of four days of stage-managed and increasingly farcical play-acting, in which Senate Democrats pretended to be putting up a ferocious battle against DeVos, while Senate Republicans pretended to be manning the barricades on her behalf.

In reality, the outcome was determined well in advance. The two Republicans who “broke” with their party to oppose DeVos undoubtedly cleared their actions in advance with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who can afford exactly two defections given the 52-48 Republican majority, and gave them permission.

The Democrats seized on the prospective 50-50 tie to conduct a 24-hour, round-the-clock “debate” highlighted by liberal Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plea for “just one more Republican” to defeat the nomination. Throughout this exercise in empty demagogy, in which the Democrats claimed to be the defenders of public education and oppose its destruction, every Democrat who spoke was aware that DeVos would be confirmed by virtue of Vice President Pence’s tie-breaking vote.

Moreover, the previous Democratic administration, with Barack Obama in the White House and his Chicago crony Arne Duncan as head of the Department of Education, was an unmitigated disaster for public education. More than 300,000 teachers and other school workers lost their jobs under the Obama administration, which through programs like Race to the Top encouraged the growth of charter schools and other efforts to privatize and weaken public school systems.

For all the Democratic chest-thumping about opposing Donald Trump, DeVos is the first of Trump’s cabinet nominees to be confirmed without any Democratic support. Some Democrats have voted for every one of previous six cabinet nominees to be confirmed, and in many cases the votes have been overwhelming. Fourteen of the 48 Democrats had voted for the first five Trump nominees, only defecting in the confirmation of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and now DeVos.

Trump’s pick to head the Department of Defense, recently retired General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, was overwhelming approved last month by a vote 98 to 1, receiving the support of nearly every Democrat in the Senate, including so-called “progressives” Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

An ideological opponent of public education, DeVos has donated millions of dollars to politicians and lobbying groups that support the funneling of tax dollars to private and religious schools through voucher programs and removing oversight of education spending through the establishment of charter schools.

DeVos is associated with some of the furthest right-wing conservative figures and groups in the US.

Her father-in-law Richard DeVos, founder of the Amway pyramid scheme, played leadership roles in a variety of right-wing groups including Focus on the Family, the American Enterprise Institute and the FreedomWorks Foundation. Her brother Erik Prince is the founder of the notorious military contractor and mercenary firm once known as Blackwater.

In 2000, DeVos and her husband, Richard DeVos, former CEO and heir of the Amway corporation fortune, spent $5.6 million on a ballot initiative that would have amended the Michigan state constitution to create a voucher program. The initiative was overwhelmingly rejected by voters.

DeVos has also spent her money founding a variety of organizations that buy politicians’ support for the privatization of public education including All Children Matter, the Alliance for School Choice and the American Federation for Children. From 1995 to 2005, DeVos funded and sat on the Board of Directors of the Action Institute, a right-wing outfit that has advocated for the elimination of compulsory education and child labor laws.

After decades of pushing for the complete destruction of public education, DeVos will now direct the agency responsible for providing federal funding to public schools, collecting pertinent data, and enforcing privacy and civil rights laws regarding education.

During Senate committee confirmation hearings, DeVos exhibited her complete ignorance regarding federal education laws and made clear her fundamental conflicts of interest.

With no experience in public education, DeVos earned her nomination from President Donald Trump to head of the Department of Education as a result of her ideological hostility to public education; she joins a host of Trump appointees who have expressed opposition to the missions of their respective departments.

Additionally, DeVos was able to attain her position through the massive amounts of money she and her family have funneled into the coffers of the Republican Party and the campaigns of a host of Republicans candidates. She admitted during Senate committee hearings that she and her family had donated $200 million to Republican candidates over the last few decades.

In the last election cycle, DeVos and her family donated $2.25 million to the Senate Leadership Fund and $900,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. She personally donated a total of $1 million to 21 of the Republican senators who voted for her confirmation.

As a supplement to the backwardness represented by DeVos, it was announced at the end of last month that Trump had appointed religious obscurantist Jerry Falwell, Jr., son of the televangelist huckster and founder of Moral Majority, to lead a special panel tasked with eliminating and curbing federal regulations on education.

Falwell is the president of Liberty University, a private Christian university based in Lynchburg, Virginia, which teaches creationism and maintains a code of conduct that forbids pre-marital sex and homosexual relationships among its student population. Students can be fined for attending a dance, visiting alone with a member of the opposite sex off campus, or engaging in “inappropriate personal contact.”

The Christian fundamentalist was Trump’s first pick to lead the Department of Education but he turned down the position. He will now essentially join the Trump administration without facing a Senate confirmation vote.

Speaking to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Falwell made clear that he would use his task force to play a leading role in shaping federal education policy. “The task force will be a big help to [DeVos]. It will do some of the work for her,” he said.

Unless the U.S. government’s lies about Crimea — the ‘Russia seized Crimea’ narratives — become acknowledged to be lies, war between the U.S. and Russia can only continue to become increasingly likely, because the world is sliding toward World War III based upon these lies, and will therefore inevitably continue that slide until these lies are publicly repudiated by the U.S. government, which is their sole source. The liar on this is clearly the U.S. and not Russia: the U.S. is the entire source for the alleged cause for war between the U.S. and Russia. 

The preparations for war between the U.S. and Russia continue naturally apace until the United States publicly acknowledges that Russia had not ‘seized’ Crimea — acknowledges that the cause for all of these war-preparations by the U.S. and its NATO and other allies against Russia is fake, a U.S. lie, and that Russia is purely America’s victim in this entire matter and acting in a 100% defensive way against America’s aggressions in this matter.

Anyone who is closed-minded to the possibility that the U.S. is lying and that Russia is telling the truth about the relationship between the two countries, would therefore be simply wasting time to read here, because the solid documentation that will be provided here will prove that that’s not only a possibility; it is the fact, and those widespread false beliefs will, indeed, be disproven here. Proving that, is the purpose of this article. Therefore, a warning is needed beforehand, for any reader who is closed-minded about that possibility — any such person would be wasting time to read this article. Here it is:

(WARNING: The following article asserts many things that are propagandized almost universally in The West to be false, and in each such instance the documentation of the assertion’s being true is provided in a link, so that any reader who doesn’t already know its truth can easily come to know that he/she had previously been deceived about that particular matter — the reader can come to know this just by clicking onto the link. This article depends upon its links, which are rooted in the most-reliable evidence on the given topic — far more reliable than any of the ‘evidence’ that’s cited by defenders of The West’s position, lies on these matters. The links are provided so that a reader can easily connect to the actual evidence, and decide on one’s own, whom the liars are, and are not. It all depends upon the evidence. Any reader who doesn’t want to know the evidence, would be just wasting time to read here.)

PRESENTATION OF THE CASE

Obama-Trump economic sanctions against Russia are based upon the lies that are to be exposed as lies, in the links here. So too are the NATO movements of U.S. troops and missiles right up to Russia’s very borders — ready to invade Russia — based especially upon the lie of ‘Russian aggression in Crimea’. All of the thrust for WW III is based upon U.S. President Barack Obama’s vicious lie against Russia: his saying that the transfer of Crimea from Ukraine to Russia was not (which it actually was) an example of the U.N.-and-U.S. universally recognized right of self-determination of peoples (such as the U.S. recognizes to apply both in Catalonia and in Scotland, but not in Crimea) but was instead an alleged ‘conquest’ of Crimea by Russia. (As that link there documents, Obama’s allegation that it was ‘Putin’s conquest’ of Crimea is false, and he knew it to be false; he was well informed that the people of Crimea overwhelmingly wanted their land to be restored to Russia, and to be protected by Russia, so as not to be invaded by the Ukrainian government’s troops and weapons, after a bloody U.S. coup by Obama had — less than a month earlier — overthrown the democratically elected President of Ukraine, for whom 75% of Crimeans had voted. Obama’s own agents were behind that coup; they were doing his bidding. The aggressor here is entirely the U.S., not Russia, despite Obama’s lies.)

All U.S.-government-sponsored and other Western polling of Crimeans, both prior to the 16 March 2014 plebiscite in Crimea, and after it, showed that far more Crimeans wanted Crimea to be again a part of Russia as it had been until the Soviet dictator in 1954 arbitrarily transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine. U.S. President Barack Obama was actually insisting that Nikita Khrushchev’s diktat on this matter must stand permanently — that the people of Crimea should never be able to choose their own government, but must become ruled by Obama’s coup-installed regime in Ukraine, no matter about that new government’s intense hostility toward those people. And Obama instituted the economic sanctions against Russia on this basis — U.S. as the aggressor, calling Russia the ‘aggressor’, Obama’s lying basis for ‘the new Cold War’. It’s a serious lie — no mere ‘fib’.

In other words: the renewal of the Cold War (and an increasingly hot war by the U.S. against Russia’s ally Syria, and elsewhere) this time against Russia (no longer against the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact military alliance, none of which even existed after 1991) is based upon Barack Obama’s refusal to allow democracy for the people of Crimea. The build-up toward WW III is that simple — a vicious U.S. lie, directed against Russia.

And that’s not the only instance where the U.S. government blocks democracy in order to conquer Russia by grabbing Russian-allied nations (first Ukraine, and then, increasingly, Syria). Twice in one day, U.N. Secretary General Ban ki-Moon said that Obama’s demand that Syria’s current President, the Russia-friendly Bashar al-Assad, must be prevented from being even on the ballot in Syria’s next election for President, is unacceptable, and that (as Ban said) «The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people».

Why is the West allowed to dictate to Crimeans, and to Syrians, that they cannot choose their own government?

This is the new, anti-democratic, United States government. This is the reality.

Lawrence J. Korb, who was U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense during 1981-1985, quit the Cold War against Russia when the Soviet Union and its communism and Warsaw Pact all ended in 1991, and he wrote on 26 February 2016, headlining «Don’t Fall for Obama’s $3 Billion Arms Buildup at Russia’s Door». He was on the correct side about this, against the Obama-initiated thrust toward WW III, but he understated the evilness, by saying:

There is no Russian resurgence. Washington is playing on your Cold War fears to get you to pay for something the U.S. does not need and can’t afford. In one of the key justifications for the new $600 billion defense spending request, the Department of Defense has fallen back on a tried-and-true Cold War boogeyman: the threat of Russian aggression against allies in Europe. While there is no ignoring the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the Russo-Georgian war in 2008, to interpret these events as some kind of Russian ‘resurgence’ is to grossly inflate the danger Russia poses to NATO and the United States.

Neither in Ukraine nor in Georgia was the U.S. guiltless — to the exact contrary: the U.S. had sparked both of those conflicts on Russia’s borders. And Russia is not grabbing territory on America’s borders; the U.S. is grabbing territory on Russia’s. (Is Russia trying to overturn and replace U.S.-allied governments on America’s borders — Mexico and Canada? Of course not. But the U.S. tries to do it to Russia — and then blames Russia for what are actually appropriate responses to such U.S. aggressions.) Korb went on to say:

Though Crimea has been a historic lynchpin of Russian grand strategy for centuries, its open use of military force and political manipulation there in the midst of the Ukrainian Revolution drew an immediate response in the form of sanctions from the West. Russia is paying a massive economic and diplomatic cost for its aggression against Ukraine.

He ignored there that it was no ‘Revolution’; it was instead a U.S. coup in Ukraine, which overthrew the democratically elected government there and installed an illegal one, which was composed of fascists, who went on to do fascist things.

These euphemisms — the lies calling a coup a ‘Revolution’, and pretending that the breakaway of Crimea from Ukraine wasn’t a direct consequence of that bloody and illegal U.S. coup on Russia’s border — are what the buildup toward WW III is built upon; and, so, it must end now, or else civilization will.

Furthermore, Korb’s implicit assumption there, that post-Soviet (post-Empire) Russia, is no different from the USSR, but all just the same «Russian grand strategy for centuries», is no conclusion that he supports with any evidence, but is instead his purely unsupported assumption, which would severely weaken his case if it were true. It happens to be a false assumption. A person doesn’t become influential in governing circles in The West without buying into certain historical and cultural falsehoods; and Korb would not be cited at all here if he had not been such an influential person.

Similarly, his reference there to Russia’s ‘aggression against Ukraine’ is also a falsehood, which fits into the narrative that ‘Russia seized Crimea’, but repeating such lies is the price of admission into, or retention in, such governing circles. Whether the inclusion of such falsehoods is consciously intended or not, it increases the chances that an article in The West will be published. It’s part of the cultural mythology (such as produces almost all wars).

And, similarly, the rest of America’s Establishment trumpet such dangerous lies to the world. That too must stop, but since the U.S. press are mere stenographers for the U.S. government, the only way that it will stop, is if the U.S. government’s lies stop first.

Donald Trump, now as America’s new President, continues Obama’s lies. He was different back on 1 August 2016 when Politico headlined «Trump: Taking back Crimea would trigger World War III», and they showed video of him campaigning in Columbus Ohio saying (at 57:50-59:00 in this video) that as President he would drop the Crimea matter, because «I mean, do you want to go back? Do you want to have World War Three to get it back?»

So, he was elected on the basis of his conveying to voters that as President he would simply end Obama’s anti-Russia sanctions and NATO threats, not continue those punishments and invasion-dangers against Russians unless and until the Russian government forces Crimeans to become ruled again by Ukraine’s government (now even worse than before — Obama’s government). But once ensconced into office, Trump promptly changed his tune, in his actual follow-through, as the now-President: His agent at the U.N., America’s U.N. id at the U.N. on February 2nd:

I must condemn the aggressive actions of Russia… The United States stands with the people of Ukraine, who have suffered for nearly three years under Russian occupation and military intervention. Until Russia and the separatists it supports respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, this crisis will continue. … The United States continues to condemn and call for an immediate end to the Russian occupation of Crimea. Crimea is a part of Ukraine. Our Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns control over the peninsula to Ukraine.

In other words: Trump’s answer to «Do you want to have World War Three to get it back?» is: Yes. He actually does. (Unless he quickly renounces what she said.)

Trump’s commitment there to continue Obama’s vicious lies against Russia, instead of acknowledging that they were and are lies (which acknowledgment must be done if WW III is to be avoided), is extraordinarily dangerous. It is a commitment to WW III, because Russia is in the right here, and will never knuckle under to America’s attempts to coerce Russia to do something shameful, just because the U.S. government demands it.

A matter of fundamental principle is involved here, and the U.S. government is on the evil side of it —  even under the new President, who had promised otherwise. That’s a fact, just as much as such a statement as that «Genocide is evil» is a statement of fact, not merely an assertion of ‘opinion’. The U.S. government is on the evil side of the most important matter imaginable — potentially, WW III. (That’s what it will be unless Trump reverses himself yet again, this time with finality, by publicly acknowledging that Obama’s allegations that Russia stole Crimea were lies. That Obama’s whole basis for ‘the new Cold War’ was actually bogus. That the real aggressor in the entire matter was America.)

Anyone who seeks further background on the historical roots of this evil, is invited here to see the following three terrific documentaries that present the essential origins of it:

Those three documentaries provide the fundamental, the most crucial, history behind Obama’s escalation toward war against Russia. However, one of the essential elements of that historical background is absent from those documentaries, and it’s filled in by this article, which covers the post-1991 history — the portion of the operation that Obama was working so hard to culminate. (Another aspect that’s missing from the three documentaries is the connection to ‘terrorism’ or jihadism, and that’s covered in the links to this — and especially to this, which latter focuses on the royal Sauds’ funding of Al Qaeda.)

The basic excuse for this evil is — as the fake-compassionate (and fake-democratic, and fake anti-invasion) Obama phrased it — «There’s no formula in which this ends up being good for Russia. The annexation of Crimea is a cost, not a benefit, to Russia. The days in which conquest of land somehow was a formula for great nation status is over». He had imposed these costs upon Russia, and then he possessed the nerve there to blame Russia for doing what it needed to do, and was ethically required to do, to respond to Obama’s aggression against Russia (by way of Obama’s prior seizure of Ukraine).

If Donald Trump continues Obama’s course on this, instead of publicly acknowledges that it was founded upon the lies that Crimea’s becoming again a part of Russia constituted ‘conquest of land’, then we’re still heading toward World War III, and doing it on the basis of American lies.

The only way to put a stop to it — other than putting a stop to civilization if not to perhaps all animate life on Earth — is for the U.S. government to acknowledge Obama’s lies about Crimea and Russia, as having been Obama’s lies. It means separation from the prior Administration, on the most important issue of all; and this will require Trump to say publicly that Obama was lying about Ukraine and Crimea and Russia.

Trump thus faces a stark choice here. Either he will declare that Obama was lying about these matters, or else there will be war between the U.S. and Russia. It’s his choice.

He’s no longer just a lying and prevaricating candidate, like he was before. He is now the actual President. If he continues imposing the policy of his predecessor, it will be the end of us all. It’s his choice to make; none of his advisors can make it for him.

La palabra sería “disfuncional”. Así es hoy la relación entre la Argentina y Brasil, la de ellos con el resto de Sudamérica, la de Sudamérica con América Latina y la de todos con Donald Trump y el resto del mundo. 

Nada encastra con nada. 

Todo es un gran chirrido.

Mauricio Macri le dijo en Brasilia a Michel Temer que “tenemos que ser aliados en todos los sentidos”. No dijo en qué sentidos.

Brasil y la Argentina están obsesionados con firmar el acuerdo de libre comercio entre el Mercosur y la Unión Europea. No es un ALCA porque no implicaría la formación de un bloque político. El proyecto de ALCA lo era. Washington quedaría a la cabeza de un bloque regional con normas sobre servicios, industrias, comercio, compras gubernamentales, construcciones y propiedad intelectual, todo con solución de controversias en los Estados Unidos. El problema es que la UE está en crisis, sus inversiones fuera de Europa están frenadas y sus gobiernos neoliberales solo tienen imaginación para competir por ver cuál hace el ajuste fiscal más austero.

Sobre Trump no parece haber otra política común entre Brasil y la Argentina que el desconcierto.

Plantear hoy una relación más intensa con la Alianza del Pacífico suena abstracto. Si es un ejercicio de profesión de fe ideológica común con México, Colombia, Perú y Chile, Temer y Macri lo pueden dar por hecho. Nadie los confundiría con populistas, izquierdistas o progres. En cambio no hay medidas concretas del Mercosur para intensificar el comercio entre los países del bloque, para suavizar la relación con Venezuela y para mejorar la integración con el resto de Sudamérica. Así no crecerá la capacidad de negociación conjunta con el resto del mundo.

Como suele ocurrir en esta zona que en 1974 Alfredo Zitarrosa bautizó como “un inquilinato en ruinas”, a los conservadores les falta imaginación más allá de la obsesión por desmontar el pasado. Por eso hasta cuando hablan de temas concretos, porque las comitivas dialogaron sobre cooperación en seguridad y lucha contra el narcotráfico, los encaran negando la realidad. El principal problema de seguridad de Brasil es que solo contando este año murieron 160 personas en revueltas carcelarias. Las cárceles están superpobladas hasta en un 100 por ciento, la policía abusa de la flagrancia para armar causas pavotas sobre drogas contra chicos y los carteles controlan las prisiones. El principal problema de violencia en la Argentina no son los crímenes del narco sino los espantosos asesinatos entre conocidos con una mayoría de mujeres como víctimas. De esos dos temas, entre Temer y Macri, nada.

Entretanto, las mayores sombras sobre el propio Presidente y sobre su jefe de inteligencia, Gustavo Arribas, tienen sede en Brasil. Los organismos oficiales brasileños no colaboraron aportando información en la causa que se tramita en el juzgado federal de Sebastián Casanello por presunto delito de lavado de activos cometido por Mauricio Macri. Una de sus offshore, Fleg Trading, fue inscripta para que el Grupo Macri operase justamente en Brasil. Y lo hizo. En cuanto a Arribas, luego de que Macri lo convocó a Boca para la compra y venta de jugadores el escribano hizo su fortuna en Brasil, donde vivió diez años y, entre otras cosas, negoció muebles e inmuebles, con el gran cambista de la Operación Lava Jato. Es paradójico: la Operación fue montada para justificar el golpe contra Dilma y la eventual criminalización de Lula, que acaba de sufrir la muerte de Marisa, su “Gallega”, en medio de una ola de difamación, y la dinámica de las pesquisas está dejando al desnudo los nombres de quienes siempre se dedicaron a los grandes negocios con el Estado en Brasil y la Argentina. Aliados en todos los sentidos.

Martín Granovsky

El martes 24 de enero por la mañana circuló entre los miembros del Consejo de Seguridad Nacional de Estados Unidos el borrador de un decreto presidencial que autorizaba la reapertura de las cárceles en el extranjero (desde la de Guantánamo hasta los “black sites” o centros clandestinos de detención) y los interrogatorios (desactivados en 2009 por ser considerados métodos de tortura). 

El borrador se filtró a la prensa y fue publicado por The New York Times el día 25. Y aunque el mismo diario aclara que no se sabe si el presidente Donald Trump lo va a firmar, su solo borrador obliga a un análisis minucioso y a un llamado de alerta.

A partir del 2001, como parte de la “guerra contra el terror”, el presidente George W. Bush autorizó operaciones secretas que incluían el traslado de personas detenidas ilegalmente hacia cárceles clandestinas. Los traslados se hacían en aviones de la CIA con varias escalas en aeropuertos cuyo acceso EE.UU. tenía previamente garantizado.

Cuando los europeos se enteraron que entre 2001 y 2005 los aviones de la CIA habían hecho por lo menos 1.245 escalas en aeropuertos de Europa “llevando a bordo a sospechosos víctimas de ‘desapariciones forzadas’, conducidos ilegalmente hacia la cárcel de Guantánamo o hacia prisiones clandestinas de países cómplices (Egipto, Marruecos), en las que la tortura es una práctica habitual”, según explicita un informe del Parlamento Europeo con fecha del 14 de febrero de 2007, se armó el escándalo. Bush hijo tuvo que blanquear las operaciones como una “versión modificada del Programa rendición, detención e interrogatorios” y el ex premier británico, Tony Blair, tuvo que pedir disculpas ante el Parlamento por el tránsito de detenidos-desaparecidos en la isla.

Los vuelos de la CIA transportaron detenidos ilegales hacia Bucarest, Bakú, El Cairo, Dubai o Islamabad -pero también hacia destinos norteamericanos como Washington y europeos como Roma, Frankfurt, Glasgow o las islas Azores entre decenas de destinos-. El New York Times acompaña su nota del 25 de enero pasado con un mapa donde se señala algunos de esos “black sites” ubicados en Lituania, Polonia, Tailandia y Rumania.

Hay pruebas de que los aviones eran campos de concentración en movimiento donde se torturaba a los prisioneros durante el vuelo. En algunos casos, salvo los descensos para cargar combustibles y pertrechos, el avión estaba hasta tres días en el aire con lo cual técnicamente no existía un lugar geográfico en el que el detenido hubiera sufrido apremios ilegales.

En varias ocasiones el Departamento de Estado alquiló, para estas operaciones, aviones privados. El acuerdo lo realizaron a través de “empresas contratistas” como la muy conocida DynCorp, proveedora de insumos para la guerra que incluye los bien conocidos mercenarios del Plan Colombia o involucrada con la multimillonaria reconstrucción de Irak después de ser destruida por las bombas. Según el sitio The Intercept, el ex marine, general John Kelly, ex jefe del Comando Sur y hoy al frente del Departamento de Seguridad Interior estuvo muy vinculado a Dyncorp. Kelly como jefe del Comando Sur permitió la violación de los derechos humanos en Guantánamo y se opuso a los planes de Obama para cerrarla.

No hay dudas de que Trump es partidario de la mano dura militar. Que igual que Bush hijo tiene un gabinete formado por halcones belicistas. La diferencia con su antecesor republicano es que lejos de mantener estas operaciones en secreto, las exhibe como si por dejar de ser clandestinas dejaran de ser ilegales.

La pregunta es ¿por qué? El proyecto de liderazgo único en manos de EEUU quedó definitivamente sepultado. Agotada esa fase, el imperio apela a la carta militar como herramienta principal para enfrentar este nuevo ciclo de transformación del orden mundial que ya se sabe, es inevitable.

Telma Luzzani

Telma Luzzani: Periodista argentina, autora de Territorios vigilados.

Una de las personas más influyentes en el gabinete de Trump es el economista Peter Navarro, hoy director del recién creado Consejo Nacional de Comercio. Es autor del libro intitulado Muerte por China, en el que acusa al gigante asiático de ser el factor determinante en la desindustrialización de Estados Unidos y, además, de manipular constantemente el tipo de cambio para promover sus exportaciones.

El presidente argentino, Mauricio Macri, realizó una visita fugaz a su par brasileño, Michel Temer, con la agenda enfocada en redoblar las relaciones bilaterales y apuntalar el Mercosur frente a posibles acuerdos comerciales con otros bloques.

Fue una estancia de unas horas, preparada con meses de antelación, que tuvo su precedente con el viaje de Temer a Buenos Aires en octubre del pasado año.

Pero en ese corto tiempo, acordaron avanzar en varios puntos, renovar los compromisos de luchar contra el narcotráfico y el crimen organizado y abrir el Mercosur, del que ahora Argentina lleva las riendas como presidente pro témpore.

‘La rivalidad la dejamos para el fútbol, en lo demás somos socios’, así expresó Macri a Temer tras dar a conocer una declaración conjunta y remarcó ‘tenemos que ser aliados en todos los sentidos’.

Acuerdos, sobre todo económicos entre ambos países, marcaron la agenda, teniendo en cuenta que Brasil es el principal socio comercial de Argentina, pero sobre todo los dos mandatarios resaltaron la intención de abrir el Mercosur al mundo.

‘Que el 2017 sea un año de inflexión positiva para el crecimiento, desarrollo y profundización de esta alianza estratégica, las relaciones del Mercosur con el mundo’, sostuvo Macri.

Asimismo consideró que existe ‘una enorme oportunidad’ de avanzar en acuerdos con la Unión Europea y con la Alianza del Pacífico a partir de la nueva situación política de los Estados Unidos y el proceso del ‘Brexit’.

‘Hoy tenemos que dar señales claras al mundo de que el Mercosur cobra nuevo ímpetu’, puntualizó Macri.

Argentina asumió en diciembre pasado la presidencia de ese bloque en una Reunión Extraordinaria del Consejo del Mercado Común a la cual no tuvo acceso Venezuela, que en ese entonces estaba en ejercicio del cargo y no pudo terminar su mandato tras ser suspendida bajo el argumento de incumplir con el Protocolo de Adhesión.

Desde entonces, el Gobierno de Macri ha dejado claramente abierta su intención de priorizar la negociación de un Tratado de Libre Comercio con la Unión Europea, que movimientos, organizaciones políticas y sociales consideran va contra el desarrollo y la integración regional.

Durante esta cumbre bilateral los dos gobernantes firmaron una carta dirigida al titular del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID), Luis Moreno, en la que le solicitan asistencia para establecer normas técnicas sanitarias y fitosanitarias con la posibilidad de crear una futura agencia binacional.

También hubo acuerdos de cooperación orientados a intensificar el desarrollo de las inversiones y las oportunidades de negocios, uno sobre defensa civil para ayudar a poblaciones fronterizas en situaciones de emergencia y otro en materia consular.

Por su parte Temer señaló que ambos países tienen ‘urgencia en el crecimiento económico y la generación de empleo, y también modos semejantes de enfrentar desafíos, como reformas ambiciosas y el fortalecimiento de la competitividad’ y agregó que coincidieron ‘en promover la eliminación de obstáculos para el comercio que persisten en el espacio del bloque’.

Macri y Temer, que analistas consideran son hoy protagonistas de un neoliberalismo renovado, afianzan su alianza y enfilan así con estos nuevos pasos sus estrategias para la llamada apertura económica.

Maylín Vidal

El parlamento escocés declaró hoy su oposición a la salida del Reino Unido de la Unión Europea (UE) con una votación que no afecta ese proceso, conocido como Brexit, pero tensa más las relaciones con el gobierno británico.

La votación parlamentaria, descrita por el gobierno regional como una de las más significativas, coincide con el debate en la Cámara de los Comunes de una ley para iniciar el Brexit que no se compromete a consultar a Escocia en las negociaciones con Bruselas.

‘Esta votación es algo más que simbólica. Es una prueba clave para saber si la voz de Escocia se escucha y si nuestros deseos pueden ser acomodados’, dijo la ministra principal, Nicola Sturgeon.

Escocia, donde se impuso la posición a favor de permanecer en la UE, promueve establecer una relación especial con el bloque tras la salida del Reino Unido, mientras que la primera ministra, Theresa May, descarta la posibilidad de un estatus diferenciado en los vínculos de esas regiones con el ente.

La también líder del Partido Nacional Escocés se opone al plan del ejecutivo británico de sacar al Reino Unido del mercado único europeo a fin de controlar la migración.

Escocia depende de los jóvenes migrantes para ampliar su fuerza laboral y su población, y debe buscar un acuerdo a medida como parte del Brexit, planteó ayer una comisión parlamentaria de ese territorio.

Anteriormente, el ministro escocés encargado de las negociaciones para la ruptura con Bruselas, Mike Russell, aclaró que la permanencia al mercado comunitario es esencial para la prosperidad económica de Escocia.

El Brexit agudizó las diferencias entre el gobierno británico y la región autónoma, que en 2014 realizó un referendo de independencia, aunque en esa ocasión el 55 por ciento de sus ciudadanos eligió pertenecer al Reino Unido.

Tras el plebiscito sobre la salida británica de la UE, Sturgeon amenazó con impulsar un proyecto de ley para preparar una segunda consulta de escisión.

El pasado 6 de enero, la ministra principal propuso renunciar definitivamente a la convocatoria de dicho referendo, si el gobierno de May negocia con Bruselas un ‘Brexit blando’, en alusión a un escenario con consecuencias positivas para la economía británica que contempla, por ejemplo, la permanencia en el mercado único.

Sin embargo, May plantea que sus prioridades de negociación incluyen limitar la inmigración y abandonar el Espacio Económico Europeo, si bien confía en alcanzar un amplio acuerdo comercial con la UE.

La mandataria prometió colaborar con los gobiernos de Escocia, Gales e Irlanda del Norte para lograr una estrategia unificada para el Brexit.

En un contexto en el que los desacuerdos entre las cuatro países no parecen tener fin, el gobierno británico enfrenta, además, la presión del parlamento que lo obliga a consultar a los diputados antes de implementar el divorcio con la UE.

De esta manera, se prolonga el desenlace del proceso, acompañado de incertidumbres desde su inicio hace más de seis meses.

Se estima que la estrategia de negociación con Bruselas esté aprobada y firmada por la reina Isabel II hacia el próximo 9 de marzo, para así cumplir con el plan de iniciar el Brexit antes del 31 de ese mes.

Prensa Latina

The massacre of Muslims in Canada at a Quebec City mosque on Sunday, January 29, raises a number of questions about what happened but also raises deep questions of morality and justice since the massacre of Muslims in Canada is rightly condemned but another massacre of Muslims, in Yemen, is shamefully and criminally condoned. In one situation, a suspect faces trial for murder and is condemned by public opinion, while in the other the guilty are treated as heroes and will receive medals. Let’s deal with the Canadian situation first.

Instead of facts we have confusion since first reports are of two figures, wearing ski masks, blasting away with Ak-47’s. Now the two are declared to be one. We have a conversation on a bridge between a “suspect” and the police, after the “suspect” is alleged to have called them “because he feels bad,” to tell them he “was involved.” What that means is not stated but is played in the press as a confession, but there is no confession. At his bail hearing on Monday, the sole accused Alexandre Bissonnette, entered no plea and said not a word.

He is portrayed in the press as a right wing oddball, a loner type. Friends and family never saw it coming. Much is made of his mundane “likes” on his Facebook site as if these indicate his guilt or innocence any more than my “likes” indicate mine. Was he a hidden ideological time bomb and killed with an objective in mind, to make a cruel statement, to create terror for political objectives? If so, and after so brazen a massacre, where were the shouts of defiance, of bragging, from this terrorist madman? Instead, a man shuffled and hung his head and dared not look anyone in the eye, tried to keep a low profile when all eyes were focused on him. Why? Is he one of the shooters? Were there two or just one?

The Toronto Star reported on the Sunday, January 30, that,

“Two attackers carried out a shooting at a Quebec City Mosque…”

Quoting Radio-Canada, the Star stated that,

One man who was at the mosque told Radio-Canada that there were two attackers wearing ski masks who burst into the building and opened fire. The man, who didn’t want to be identified by name, said they had strong Quebecois accents, but added that he believed them shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’…The man said he narrowly escaped when a bullet whizzed over his head. He said the gunmen took aim at those who were still praying.

There we have it, a recent direct witness statement that there were two shooters, not one, as the police now claim. The witness talks in the plural all through his statement. There can be no doubt this event is seared in his mind. He was there. There can be no doubt there were two men involved. But now one has disappeared from the official narrative. I am not surprised he feared to give his name because if killers can disappear witnesses can too.

Even the CBC, on Tuesday January 31, in reference to a witness who was arrested as a suspect by mistake, quoted that witness as stating, “I found a victim near the door. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead…when I gave him my jacket to keep warm, I saw the image of someone with a firearm. I didn’t know it was the police. I though it was a shooter who’d returned.”

He refers to “a” shooter not “the” shooter implying there were more than one. He even thought the police officers were the shooters. But clearly he misunderstood why they were there. And the CBC article also cited the witness who saw two attackers and repeated the Radio-Canada story.

The police now state there was only one shooter. Yet the police statement from the Surete de Quebec on January 30 said, “The Surete de Quebec confirms that only one of the individuals arrested yesterday evening is connected with the attack in Quebec and is considered a suspect.” That does not exclude other attackers and does not say that Bissonnette is the only attacker. Now the press are quoting witnesses saying there was one attacker but the police state they have two long guns used in the crime. Witnesses described them as AK 47’s. They also say that a shooter also used a 9 mm pistol after his rifle jammed. The 9mm could hold 15 rounds and since more than 20 people were shot the question of two shooters does not go away.

What is the motive? Not a word on that from anyone though the media is heavy with speculation it is because of alleged right wing views. But many people in Quebec and Canada share these opinions. This is not evidence. If it was Bissonnette, was this a hate attack against Muslims and if so how did this come about? If it wasn’t, is he insane so that now he is arrested we no longer need worry? Very different scenarios cause different reactions and consequences. But we are left with the word “terrorism” as if saying it explains things. Where and how did he or they get the automatic weapons they used? Was CSIS, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service aware of any of this developing? If not, why not?

Who benefits from this crime? We know that President Trump issued an executive order banning entry of Muslims from certain countries on Friday. The Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, in reaction to the Trump travel ban, stated on Saturday,

To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of faith. Diversity is our strength.

One day later, on Sunday, came the message in the form of the attack that Muslims better forget Canada as a safe place to be. So, was there a political objective? If so, was it to damage Trump through the murder of innocents? Was it to slap down Trudeau and damage Canada’s reputation? Will it be another in a long string of such incidents the past few years which have been used to excuse even more draconian security laws and loss of civil rights and freedoms?

The anti-Trump media, political opponents and commentators are using it to link Trump to right wing murderers, while Trump has tried to use it to call for more security and offered Canada the help of American security services.

The Canadian media are in a frenzy putting out stories about Canada as a welcoming country that is horrified by this crime and condemning violence against Muslims. The only thing the public knows is that we do not know the whole story.

But the massacre in Quebec City was not the only massacre that took place on that Sunday. That same day American special forces invaded Yemen and carried out a series of “raids,” in reality a series of invasions of a sovereign country to kill its citizens. One of these raids was against a man they claim was a “suspected Al-Qaeda leader” their code phrase for anyone they want out of the way in the Middle East, since Al-Qaeda does not exist; it is just a label attached to any group in the middle east that resists US hegemony, or in Yemen, is part of the resistance to the US-UK sponsored war conducted by Saudi Arabia against Yemen.

This invasion of Yemen, an act of aggression against a member of the United Nations, was planned by President Obama and approved by President Trump, showing the seamless continuity of American imperialism. It was supposedly to “gather intelligence,” in the form of a computer hard drive. To obtain that hard drive, the Americans slaughtered dozens.

In one version in the US media, the American soldiers descended from their helicopters, surrounded a house, and then killed everyone in it. They then began to meet resistance and more violence ensued as the Yemenis tried to resist the American invaders. A US helicopter was shot down, and as is often the case with them, the Americans fired and bombed indiscriminately and killed, according to local media, 30 people including civilians, 8 women and children among them, and bombed a school, a medical facility and a mosque. It was reported that the Americans killed more people in Yemen in other raids that day.

This is a war crime under international law, a crime against humanity, to invade a country and kill its citizens who have every right to resist the attack. Yet where is the condemnation of President Obama for planning this operation and for President Trump for carrying it out? Where are the arrests of these two men and the soldiers who carried out this atrocity? Are they not as guilty as Alexandre Bissonnette, if indeed he is one of the attackers in Quebec? Why is it insignificant that Muslims are murdered in their homes and mosques in Yemen by a powerful state but a world tragedy when Muslims are murdered in a mosque in Canada?

Yet, as the Surete de Quebec and the other Canadian police forces and intelligence agencies carry out their activities to determine what happened in Quebec City and as the Canadian and world media put out wall to wall coverage of the massacre in Canada, the same media do nothing more than regret the death and wounding of the American murderers who carried out the massacre in Yemen and excuse this mass slaughter while the prosecutor of the ICC sits at her desk and wonders why she and the court she represents have become totally irrelevant to what seems to be a hopeless quest to prevent war crimes and the wars from which they arise and which have led directly to the crimes in Canada and Yemen.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

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.

But the Amnesty report is still not propagandish enough for the anti-Syrian media. Inevitably only the highest number in the range Amnesty claims is quoted. For some even that is not yet enough. The Associate Press agency, copied by many outlets, headlines: Report: At least 13,000 hanged in Syrian prison since 2011:

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian authorities have killed at least 13,000 people since the start of the 2011 uprising in mass hangings at a prison north of Damascus known to detainees as “the slaughterhouse,” Amnesty International said in a report Tuesday.

How does “at least 13,000” conforms to an already questionable report which claims “13,000” as the top number of a very wide range?

Here is a link to the report.

Before we look into some details this from the “Executive Summary”:

From December 2015 to December 2016, Amnesty International researched the patterns, sequence and scale of violations carried out at Saydnaya Military Prison (Saydnaya). In the course of this investigation, the organization interviewed 31 men who were detained at Saydnaya, four prison officials or guards who previously worked at Saydnaya, three former Syrian judges, three doctors who worked at Tishreen Military Hospital, four Syrian lawyers, 17 international and national experts on detention in Syria and 22 family members of people who were or still are detained at Saydnaya.
…
On the basis of evidence from people who worked within the prison authorities at Saydnaya and witness testimony from detainees, Amnesty International estimates that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were extrajudicially executed at Saydnaya between September 2011 and December 2015.

There are several difficulties with this report.

1. Most of the witnesses are identified as opposition figures and “former” officials who do not live in Syria. Some are said to have been remotely interviewed in Syria but it is not clear if those were living in government or insurgent held areas. Page 9:

The majority of these interviews took place in person in southern Turkey. The remaining interviews were conducted by telephone or through other remote means with interviewees still in Syria, or with individuals based in Lebanon, Jordan, European countries and the USA.

It is well known that the Syrian insurgency is financed with several billion dollars per years from foreign state governments. It runs sophisticated propaganda operations. These witnesses all seem to have interests in condemning the Syrian government. Not once is an attempt made to provide a possibly divergent view. Amnesty found the persons it questioned by contacting international NGOs like itself and known foreign financed opposition (propaganda) groups:

These groups include Urnammu for Justice and Human Rights, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, and the Syrian Institute for Justice and Accountability.

2. The numbers Amnesty provides are in a very wide range. None are documented in lists or similar exhibits. They are solely based on hearsay and guesstimates of two witnesses:

People who worked within the prison authorities at Saydnaya told Amnesty International that extrajudicial executions related to the crisis in Syria first began in September 2011. Since that time, the frequency with which they have been carried out has varied and increased. For the first four months, it was usual for between seven and 20 people to be executed every 10-15 days. For the following 11 months, between 20 and 50 people were executed once a week, usually on Monday nights. For the subsequent six months, groups of between 20 and 50 people were executed once or twice a week, usually on Monday and/or Wednesday nights. Witness testimony from detainees suggests that the executions were conducted at a similar – or even higher – rate at least until December 2015. Assuming that the death rate remained the same as the preceding period, Amnesty International estimates that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were extrajudicially executed at Saydnaya between September 2011 and December 2015.

From “between x and y”, “once or twice a week”, “suggests” and “assuming” the headline numbers are simply extrapolated in footnote 40 in a  back-of-the-envelope calculation; “If A were true then B would be X”:

These estimates were based on the following calculations. If between seven and 20 were killed every 10-15 days from September to December 2011, the total figure would be between 56 people and 240 people for that period. If between 20 and 50 were killed every week between January and November 2012, the total figure would be between 880 and 2,200 for that period. If between 20 and 50 people were killed in 222 execution sessions (assuming the executions were carried out twice a week twice a month and once a week once a month) between December 2012 and December 2015, the total figure would be between 4,400 and 11,100 for that period. These calculations produce a minimum figure of 5,336, rounded down to the nearest thousand as 5,000, and 13,540, rounded down to the nearest thousand as 13,000.

2. I will not go into the details of witness statements on which the report is build. They seem at least exaggerated and are not verifiable at all. In the end it is pure hearsay on which Amnesty sets it conclusions. One example from page 25:

“Hamid”, a former military officer when he was arrested in 2012, recalled the sounds he heard at night during an execution:
“There was a sound of something being pulled out – like a piece of wood, I’m not sure – and then you would hear the sound of them being strangled… If you put your ears on the floor, you could hear the sound of a kind of gurgling. This would last around 10 minutes… We were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death. This was normal for me then.”

A court might accept ‘sound of “I’m not sure” “kind of gurgling” noise through concrete’ as proof that a shower was running somewhere. But as proof of executions?

Of all the witnesses Amnesty says it interviewed only two, a former prison official and a former judge, who describe actual executions (page 25). From the wording of their statements it is unclear if they have witnessed any hangings themselves or just describe something they have been told of.

3. The numbers of people Amnesty claims were executed are – at best – a wild ass guess. How come that Amnesty can name only very few of those? On page 30 of its report it says:

Former detainees from the red building at Saydnaya provided Amnesty International with the names of 59 individuals who they witnessed being taken from their cells in the afternoon, being told that they were being transferred to civilian prisons in Syria. The evidence contained in this report strongly suggests that in fact, these individuals were extrajudicially executed.

and

Former prison guards and a former prison official from Saydnaya also provided Amnesty International with the names of 36 detainees who had been extrajudicially executed in Saydnaya since 2011.

Those 95, some of whom may have been “executed” – or not, are the only ones Amnesty claims to be able to name. That is less than 1-2% of the reports central claim of 5,000 to 13,000 executed. All those witnesses could provide no more details of persons allegedly killed?

Amnesty acknowledges that its numbers are bogus. Under the headline “Documented Deaths” on page 40 it then adds additional names and numbers to those above but these are not from executions:

the exact number of deaths in Saydnaya is impossible to specify. However, the Syrian Network for Human Rights has verified and shared with Amnesty International the names of 375 individuals who have died in Saydnaya as a result of torture and other ill-treatment between March 2011 and October 2016. Of these, 317 were civilians at the time of their arrest, 39 were members of the Syrian military and 19 were members of non-state armed groups. In the course of the research for this report, Amnesty International obtained the names of 36 additional individuals who died as a result of torture and other ill-treatment in Saydnaya. These names were provided to Amnesty International by former detainees who witnessed the deaths in their cells

The “Syrian Network for Human Rights” (SNHR) is a group in the UK probably connected to British foreign intelligence and with dubious monetary sources. It only says:

SNHR funds its work and activities through unconditional grants and donations from individuals and institutions.

Now that is true transparency.

SNHR is known for rather ridiculous claims about casualties caused by various sides of the conflict. It is not know what SNHR qualifies as civilians – do these include armed civil militia? But note that none of the mostly civilians SNHR claims to have died in the prison are said to have been executed. How is it possible that a organization frequently quoted in the media as detailed source of casualties in Syria has no record of the 5,000 to 13,000 Amnesty claims were executed?

4. The report is padded up with before/after satellite pictures of enlarged graveyards in Syria. It claims that these expansions are a sign of mass graves of government opponents.  But there is zero evidence for that. Many people have died in Syria throughout the war on all sides of the conflict. The enlargement, for example, of the Martyrs Cemetery south of Damascus (p.29/30) is hardly a sign of mass killing of anti-government insurgents. Would those be honored as martyrs by the government side?

5. The report talks of “extrajudicially executed” prisoners but then describes (military) court procedures and a necessary higher up approval of the judgement. One may not like the laws that govern the Syrian state but the courts and the procedures Amnesty describes seem to follow Syrian laws and legal processes. They are thereby – by definition – not extrajudicial.

6. In its Executive Summary the Amnesty report says that “Death sentences are approved by the Grand Mufti of Syria and …”. But there is no evidence provided of “approval” by the Grand Mufti in the details of the report. On page 19 it claims, based on two former prison and court officials:

The judgement is sent by military post to the Grand Mufti of Syria and to either the Minister of Defence or the Chief of Staff of the Army, who are deputized to sign for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and who specify the date of the execution.

It is very doubtful that the Syrian government would “deputize” or even inform the Grand Mufti in cases of military or criminal legal proceedings. Amnesty International may dislike the fact but Syria is a secular state. The Grand Mufti in Syria is a civil legal authority for some followers of the Sunni Muslim religion in Syria but he has no official judiciary role. From the 2010 Swiss dissertation Models of Religious Freedom: Switzerland, the United States, and Syria quoted here:

In Syria a mufti is a legal and religious expert (faqih and ‘alim) who has the power to give legally non-binding recommendations (sing. fatwa, pl. fatawa) in matters of Islamic law.
…
Queries which are either sought by a shari‘a judge or private individuals regard the personal status laws of the Muslim community only. In the Arab Republic fatawa are given neither to public authorities nor to individual civil servants, ..

Neither the Syrian constitution nor any Syrian law I can find refers to a role of the Grand Mufti in any military or civil criminal court proceding. The Amnesty claim “approved by the Grand Mufti of Syria”is not recorded anywhere else. It is very likely false. The Grand Mufti, Sheikh Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, is a moderate, recognized and accomplished scholar. He should sue Amnesty for this slander.

Syrian law includes a death penalty for certain severe and violent crimes. Before 2011 actual executions in Syria were very rare, most death sentences were commuted. Allegedly the laws were amended in late 2011, after the war in Syria had started, to include the death penalty as possible punishment for directly arming terrorists.

It is quite likely that the Syrian military and/or civil judiciary hand out some death penalties against captured foreign and domestic “rebels” it finds them guilty of very severe crimes. It is fighting the Islamic State, al Qaeda and other extreme groups well known for mass murder and other extreme atrocities. It is likely that some of those sentences are applied. But the Syrian government has also provided amnesty to ten-thousands of “rebels” who fought the government but have laid down their arms.

The claims in the Amnesty report are based on spurious and biased opposition accounts from outside of the country. The headline numbers of 5,000 to 13,000 are calculated on the base of unfounded hypotheticals. The report itself states that only 36 names of allegedly executed persons are known to Amnesty, less than the number of “witnesses” Amnesty claims to have interviewed. The high number of claimed execution together with the very low number of names is not plausible.

The report does not even meet the lowest mark of scientific or legal veracity. It is pure biased propaganda.

Points of Departure

Listening to Donald Trump’s inaugural speech on January 20th led me to muse about what it might mean to live in a pre-fascist state. After reflecting on key passages and conversations with friends, I came to the view that all the elements were in place, although set before us with the imprecision of a demagogue.

Yet I do not doubt that there are many ideologues waiting in the wings, perhaps now comfortably situated in the West Wing, ready to cover the conceptual rough spots, and supply an ideological overlay, and add the semblance of coherence.

Considering the daily outrages emanating from the White House since the inaugural jolt, the coming years will be rough riding for all of us, with many cruelties being readied for those most vulnerable.

Of course, the Woman’s March on January 21st was temporarily redemptive, and if such energy can be sustained potentially transformative. It is odd to contemplate, but there just may be tacit and effective cooperation between the national security deep state and a progressive populism converging around their divergent reasons for being deeply opposed to the shock and awe of the Trump presidency. Trump may invent ‘alternative facts’ to restore his narcissistic self-esteem, but when it comes to program he has sadly so far been true to his word! This alone should encourage a unified, energetic, and determined opposition. If the Tea Party could do it, why can’t we?

The Pre-Fascist Moment

First, it is necessary to set forth the case for viewing Trump’s Inaugural Address as a pre-fascist plea:

1) Locating power and legitimacy in the people, but only those whose support was instrumental in the election of the new president; the popular majority that were opposed are presumed irrelevant, or worse;

2) Denigrating the political class of both political parties as corrupt and responsible for the decline of the country and the hardships inflicted on his followers;

3) Presuming mass and unconditional trust in the great leader who promises a rupture with the past, and who alone will be able overcome the old established order, and produce needed changes at home and overseas;

4) Making the vision of change credible by the appointment of mainly white men, most with alt-right credentials, billionaires either blissfully ignorant about their assigned roles or a past record of opposition to the bureaucratic mission they are pledged to carry out (whether environment, energy, education, economy);

5) An endorsement of exclusionary nationalism that elevates ‘America First’ to the status of First Principle, erects a wall against its Latino neighbour, adopts a cruel and punitive stance toward Muslims and undocumented immigrants, hostility to womens’ rights, gay marriage, trans dignity, as well as posing threats to non-white minorities, inner city residents, and independent voices in the media and elsewhere;

6) Lauds the military and police as the backbone of national character, loosens protection from civilian or military abuse, which helps explain the selection of a series of generals to serve in sensitive civilian roles, as well as the revitalization of Guantanamo and the weakening of anti-torture policies.

7) The disturbing absence of a sufficiently mobilized anti-fascist opposition movement, leadership, and program. The Democratic Party has not seized the moment vigorously and creatively; progressive populist leadership has yet to emerge inspiring trust and hope; so far there are sparks but no fire.

Fortunately, there are some more encouraging tendencies that could mount anti-fascist challenges from within and below:

1) Trump lost the popular vote, casting a cloud over his claimed mandate to be the vehicle of ‘the people.’ Furthermore, his approval rating keeps falling, and is now below 40% according to reliable polls.

2) The signs of intense dissatisfaction are giving rise to protest activities that are massive and seem deeply rooted in beliefs and commitments of ordinary citizens, especially women and young people;

3) American society is not in crisis, and right-wing extremist appeals are forced to rely on a greatly exaggerated and misleading portrayal of distress in the American economy, the evils of economic globalization and unfair trade relations that are widely understood to be largely ‘fake’;

4) There are fissures within the Republican Party and governmental/think tank establishments, especially on international economic and security policy, that could produce escalating tensions within and challenges to the Trump leadership;

5) There is growing dissatisfaction within the bipartisan intelligence and national security bureaucracies as whether Trump and Trumpism can be tamed before it wrecks the post-1945 international order that rests on America’s global military presence, a global network of alliances, and a disposition toward a second cold war focused on hostility to Russia; if untamed, impeachment scenarios will soon surface, based not on the real concerns, but constructed around economic conflicts of interests, emoluments, and unlawful transactions.

Certainly in my lifetime, with the possible exception of the Great Depression, America has not been tested as it is now. Maybe not since the American Civil War has so much been at stake, and put at risk.

Traditional reliance on political parties and elections will not be helpful until the political climate is radically altered by forces from below and without or above and within. It is strange, but the two main forces of resistance to the pre-fascist reality menacing the country’s and the world’s future are progressive populism as evident in the widespread grassroots protest movement taking shape in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s ascension to the presidency, and the deep state as exhibited by the anti-Trump defection of intelligence and national security specialists from both Republican and Democratic ranks during and after the recent presidential campaign.

Finally, the depiction of the present political reality as ‘pre-fascist’ rather than ‘fascist’ is crucial to this effort to depict accurately the historical moment associated with Donald Trump’s formal induction as the 45th president of the United States.

To speak as if the United States is a fascist state is to falsify the nature of fascism, and to discredit critical discourse by making it seem hysterical. There is no doubt that the pieces are in place that might facilitate a horrifying transition from pre-fascism to fascism, and it could happen with lightning speed. It is also sadly true that the election of Donald Trump makes fascism a sword of Damocles hanging by a frayed thread over the American body politic.

Yet we should not overlook the quite different realities that pertain to pre-fascism.

It remains possible in the United States to organize, protest, and oppose without serious fears of reprisals or detentions. The media can expose, ridicule, and criticize without closures or punitive actions, facing only angered and insulting Trump tweets, although such a backlash should not be minimized as it could have a dangerous intimidating impact on how the news is reported.

We are in a situation where the essential political challenge is to muster the energy and creativity to construct a firewall around constitutional democracy as it now exists in the United States, and hope that a saner, more humane political mood leads quickly and decisively to repudiate those policies and attitudes that flow from this pre-fascist set of circumstances.

Richard Falk is an American professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University. He just completed a six-year term as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. Falk is an associate at the Transnational Foundation for Future Research, where this essay originally appeared. 

We bring to the attention of our readers the following:

“On 6 February 2017, the Houston Leader web site published an article  reporting that President Trump had enacted a 90-day ban on childhood vaccinations via executive order”(Snopes)  This article is “fake”.

Trump had indeed express concern pertaining to the vaccine issue prior to the election campaign, but there has been no followup in terms of an Executive order.

To confuse the reader: the article included two genuine tweets which were posted prior to the election campaign:

On March 28, 2014, Trump tweeted:

Additionally, on September 03, 2014, he tweeted:

Less than a week after assuming office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order abandoning the 12 nation Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement negotiated by former President Barack Obama, but not yet ratified by the U.S. Congress. He then quickly attacked Mexico — abruptly cut short a phone conversation with Mexico’s President Peña Nieto, canceled a meeting with Peña Nieto after demanding Mexico pay for a wall on the U.S. border and threatened to impose a 20 percent border tax on goods exported to the United States based on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Trump’s trade representative, Peter Navarro, then dropped another trade policy bomb by publicly declaring Germany was manipulating the euro currency unfairly to its advantage, stealing U.S. exports, while similarly exploiting the rest of the Eurozone economy as well.

Trump, meanwhile, continued to declare that China and Japan were also currency manipulators who were taking advantage of U.S. businesses and increasing their exports at the expense of the U.S. Their currencies declined by 8 percent and 15 percent, respectively, in recent months. The Mexican peso fell by 16 percent after the U.S. election and the euro and British pound each by around 20 percent in 2016.

Trump’s flurry of executive orders canceling trade deals, his phone calls to country leaders, his appointed representatives public statements, and his constant tweets on social media suggest to some, including the U.S. mainstream media, that Trump is anti-free trade, that Trump is ushering in a new trade protectionism, and that his attacks on free trade agreements, like TPP and NAFTA, will precipitate a global trade war. It is this writer’s view, however, that none of this is likely.

Trump is a dedicated free trader. He just rejects multilateral, multi-country free trade deals like TPP and NAFTA. He wants even stronger, pro-U.S. business free trade deals and intends to renegotiate the existing multilateral treaties — to the benefit of U.S. multinational corporations and at the expense of the U.S. trading partners. Trump’s threats of protectionist measures, like the 20 percent border tax and previous election promises of imposing a 45 percent import tax on goods from China, are primarily tactical and aimed at conditioning U.S. trading partners to make major concessions once U.S. renegotiation of past deals and agreements begin.

And as for a trade war, the answer is also a very likely “no.” The big ‘four’ targeted trading partners — China, Japan, Germany, and Mexico — currently exchange goods and services with the huge U.S. economy amounting between US$1 to US$2 trillion a year. China-U.S. two-way trade amounts to nearly US$500 billion a year, Mexico about as large, and Japan and Germany also account for hundreds of billions of dollars of trade with the U.S. per year. These are the countries with which the U.S. has the largest trade deficits: China’s about US$360 billion and the largest, Japan’s close to US$80 billion, Mexico and Germany around US$60-$70 billion. Given the large volume of lucrative trade with the U.S., these countries will eventually agree to renegotiate existing free trade treaties and trade arrangements with the U.S.

What Trump trade policies represent is a major shift by U.S. economic elites and Trump toward bilateral free trade, country to country. Trump believes he and the U.S. have stronger negotiating leverage “one on one” with these countries and that prior U.S. policies of multilateral free trade only weakened U.S. positions and gains. But free trade is free trade, whether multi or bilateral. Workers, consumers and the environment pay for the profits of corporations on both sides of the trade deals, regardless how the profits are re-distributed between the companies benefiting from free trade.

Trump’s shift to bilateral trade represents the intent of U.S. economic elites to increase their share of trade profits and benefits at the expense of their capitalist trading cousins. And this is not the first time the U.S. has set out to “shake up” trade relations to its advantage. In 1985 and 1986, when the U.S. under Reagan was losing out exports to Europe and Japan, the U.S. forced Japan to the bargaining table and negotiated the “Plaza Accords,” in which Japan was forced to make major concessions to the U.S. This was immediately followed up by the “Louvre Agreements” with Europe, with the same results.

The Reagan team, led by James Baker of the U.S. Treasury, decided to abandon multilateral trade negotiations through the then global General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT. GATT was an attempt to negotiate trade on a global scale involving scores of countries. The U.S. could not get the deal it wanted from GATT trade negotiations, so it turned its fire on its biggest capitalist trading partners — Europe and Japan — and forced the Plaza and Louvre Agreements on them. The results were great for U.S. business, especially multinational corporations. But the agreements play a large part in leading to banking crashes in the early 1990s in Europe and in Japan. Japan thereafter went into chronic recession for the rest of the decade and Germany in the 1990s ended up being described as the “poor man” of Europe.

Similarly today, Trump’s nixing of the TPP and his attacks on Mexico, NAFTA, Germany, and Japan reflect a strategic shift from multilateral free trade strategies and a U.S. policy turn to bilateral approaches to free trade where the U.S. can extract even more concessions from competitors in the critical decade ahead.

One reason for this strategic shift is that global trade volumes have been slowing rapidly in recent years. The global trade pie is shrinking, especially since 2010, when global trade grew at a 20 percent rate; but this past year the growth will be less than 2 percent. Capitalist elites are thus increasingly fighting over a smaller share of trade. For the first time, in the past year, the growth of global trade is slower than the growth of global Gross Domestic Product, even as GDP itself is slowing globally.

Another explanation for the Trump shift is that the U.S. dollar and interest rates are expected to continue to rise. That will result in an increase in inflation in the US. The rising dollar and U.S. prices will mean U.S. multinational corporations’ profits from trade will take a hit. They already are. The Trump shift to bilateral trade is therefore in anticipation of having competitors make up the expected losses of U.S. businesses from trade due to the rising U.S. dollar and U.S. price inflation.

The consequences of the Trump trade shift for the “big four” trade deficit trading partners are mostly negative. Eighty percent of all Mexico exports now go to the U.S. and 30 percent of Mexico’s GDP is from U.S. trade. Mexico’s peso will continue to fall, import inflation rise and undermine standards of living. Mexico’s central bank will raise interest rates to try to slow capital flight and that will cause more unemployment in addition to import inflation and a slowing economy.

For Europe, the U.S. turn from multilateral free trade will add impetus to Britain’s “Brexit” from the European Union, as well as further legitimize other countries in the EU exiting the Eurozone. France could be next, should the pro-Trump French National Front party there win the upcoming elections this spring, which the polls show it is leading.

Japan appears to want to be the first major U.S. trading partner to cut a bilateral deal with Trump. Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, continues to shuttle back and forth to Washington to meet with Trump. The first to strike a Trump bilateral deal may get the best terms. Britain’s Theresa May is not far behind, however, equally desperate to cut a bilateral deal to enable the U.K. to “Brexit” sooner than later.

Where the U.S. clearly loses from the trade policy shift is with China. The end of the TPP means that China will likely expand its own free trade zone, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, negotiated now with South Korea, Australia, India and also Japan. The TPP was the U.S. economic cornerstone for its so-called pivot to Asia (China) politically and militarily. That has now been set back. The expansion of China’s regional trade zone will also further solidify its currency, the yuan, as a global trading currency, as well as strengthen its recent Industrial Bank and “One Belt-One Road” initiatives.

The biggest negative impact of the Trump shift on free trade will be the global economy itself. The shift will take time, produce a lot of uncertainty, as well as reactions and counter-measures. That will only serve to slow global trade volumes even further. All emerging market economies will consequently pay a price in lower exports sales for Trump’s strategic trade shift, the ultimate aim of which is to restore U.S. economic hegemony in trade relations over trading partners — a hegemony that has been weakening in recent years. But this is not 1985. And a safe bet is that restoration will not prevail.

Less than a week after assuming office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order abandoning the 12 nation Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement negotiated by former President Barack Obama, but not yet ratified by the U.S. Congress. He then quickly attacked Mexico — abruptly cut short a phone conversation with Mexico’s President Peña Nieto, canceled a meeting with Peña Nieto after demanding Mexico pay for a wall on the U.S. border and threatened to impose a 20 percent border tax on goods exported to the United States based on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Trump’s trade representative, Peter Navarro, then dropped another trade policy bomb by publicly declaring Germany was manipulating the euro currency unfairly to its advantage, stealing U.S. exports, while similarly exploiting the rest of the Eurozone economy as well.

Trump, meanwhile, continued to declare that China and Japan were also currency manipulators who were taking advantage of U.S. businesses and increasing their exports at the expense of the U.S. Their currencies declined by 8 percent and 15 percent, respectively, in recent months. The Mexican peso fell by 16 percent after the U.S. election and the euro and British pound each by around 20 percent in 2016.

Trump’s flurry of executive orders canceling trade deals, his phone calls to country leaders, his appointed representatives public statements, and his constant tweets on social media suggest to some, including the U.S. mainstream media, that Trump is anti-free trade, that Trump is ushering in a new trade protectionism, and that his attacks on free trade agreements, like TPP and NAFTA, will precipitate a global trade war. It is this writer’s view, however, that none of this is likely.

Trump is a dedicated free trader. He just rejects multilateral, multi-country free trade deals like TPP and NAFTA. He wants even stronger, pro-U.S. business free trade deals and intends to renegotiate the existing multilateral treaties — to the benefit of U.S. multinational corporations and at the expense of the U.S. trading partners. Trump’s threats of protectionist measures, like the 20 percent border tax and previous election promises of imposing a 45 percent import tax on goods from China, are primarily tactical and aimed at conditioning U.S. trading partners to make major concessions once U.S. renegotiation of past deals and agreements begin.

And as for a trade war, the answer is also a very likely “no.” The big ‘four’ targeted trading partners — China, Japan, Germany, and Mexico — currently exchange goods and services with the huge U.S. economy amounting between US$1 to US$2 trillion a year. China-U.S. two-way trade amounts to nearly US$500 billion a year, Mexico about as large, and Japan and Germany also account for hundreds of billions of dollars of trade with the U.S. per year. These are the countries with which the U.S. has the largest trade deficits: China’s about US$360 billion and the largest, Japan’s close to US$80 billion, Mexico and Germany around US$60-$70 billion. Given the large volume of lucrative trade with the U.S., these countries will eventually agree to renegotiate existing free trade treaties and trade arrangements with the U.S.

What Trump trade policies represent is a major shift by U.S. economic elites and Trump toward bilateral free trade, country to country. Trump believes he and the U.S. have stronger negotiating leverage “one on one” with these countries and that prior U.S. policies of multilateral free trade only weakened U.S. positions and gains. But free trade is free trade, whether multi or bilateral. Workers, consumers and the environment pay for the profits of corporations on both sides of the trade deals, regardless how the profits are re-distributed between the companies benefiting from free trade.

Trump’s shift to bilateral trade represents the intent of U.S. economic elites to increase their share of trade profits and benefits at the expense of their capitalist trading cousins. And this is not the first time the U.S. has set out to “shake up” trade relations to its advantage. In 1985 and 1986, when the U.S. under Reagan was losing out exports to Europe and Japan, the U.S. forced Japan to the bargaining table and negotiated the “Plaza Accords,” in which Japan was forced to make major concessions to the U.S. This was immediately followed up by the “Louvre Agreements” with Europe, with the same results.

The Reagan team, led by James Baker of the U.S. Treasury, decided to abandon multilateral trade negotiations through the then global General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT. GATT was an attempt to negotiate trade on a global scale involving scores of countries. The U.S. could not get the deal it wanted from GATT trade negotiations, so it turned its fire on its biggest capitalist trading partners — Europe and Japan — and forced the Plaza and Louvre Agreements on them. The results were great for U.S. business, especially multinational corporations. But the agreements play a large part in leading to banking crashes in the early 1990s in Europe and in Japan. Japan thereafter went into chronic recession for the rest of the decade and Germany in the 1990s ended up being described as the “poor man” of Europe.

Similarly today, Trump’s nixing of the TPP and his attacks on Mexico, NAFTA, Germany, and Japan reflect a strategic shift from multilateral free trade strategies and a U.S. policy turn to bilateral approaches to free trade where the U.S. can extract even more concessions from competitors in the critical decade ahead.

One reason for this strategic shift is that global trade volumes have been slowing rapidly in recent years. The global trade pie is shrinking, especially since 2010, when global trade grew at a 20 percent rate; but this past year the growth will be less than 2 percent. Capitalist elites are thus increasingly fighting over a smaller share of trade. For the first time, in the past year, the growth of global trade is slower than the growth of global Gross Domestic Product, even as GDP itself is slowing globally.

Another explanation for the Trump shift is that the U.S. dollar and interest rates are expected to continue to rise. That will result in an increase in inflation in the US. The rising dollar and U.S. prices will mean U.S. multinational corporations’ profits from trade will take a hit. They already are. The Trump shift to bilateral trade is therefore in anticipation of having competitors make up the expected losses of U.S. businesses from trade due to the rising U.S. dollar and U.S. price inflation.

The consequences of the Trump trade shift for the “big four” trade deficit trading partners are mostly negative. Eighty percent of all Mexico exports now go to the U.S. and 30 percent of Mexico’s GDP is from U.S. trade. Mexico’s peso will continue to fall, import inflation rise and undermine standards of living. Mexico’s central bank will raise interest rates to try to slow capital flight and that will cause more unemployment in addition to import inflation and a slowing economy.

For Europe, the U.S. turn from multilateral free trade will add impetus to Britain’s “Brexit” from the European Union, as well as further legitimize other countries in the EU exiting the Eurozone. France could be next, should the pro-Trump French National Front party there win the upcoming elections this spring, which the polls show it is leading.

Japan appears to want to be the first major U.S. trading partner to cut a bilateral deal with Trump. Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, continues to shuttle back and forth to Washington to meet with Trump. The first to strike a Trump bilateral deal may get the best terms. Britain’s Theresa May is not far behind, however, equally desperate to cut a bilateral deal to enable the U.K. to “Brexit” sooner than later.

Where the U.S. clearly loses from the trade policy shift is with China. The end of the TPP means that China will likely expand its own free trade zone, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, negotiated now with South Korea, Australia, India and also Japan. The TPP was the U.S. economic cornerstone for its so-called pivot to Asia (China) politically and militarily. That has now been set back. The expansion of China’s regional trade zone will also further solidify its currency, the yuan, as a global trading currency, as well as strengthen its recent Industrial Bank and “One Belt-One Road” initiatives.

The biggest negative impact of the Trump shift on free trade will be the global economy itself. The shift will take time, produce a lot of uncertainty, as well as reactions and counter-measures. That will only serve to slow global trade volumes even further. All emerging market economies will consequently pay a price in lower exports sales for Trump’s strategic trade shift, the ultimate aim of which is to restore U.S. economic hegemony in trade relations over trading partners — a hegemony that has been weakening in recent years. But this is not 1985. And a safe bet is that restoration will not prevail.

An interview with Ken Stone by Ann Garrison

The Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War (HCSW) issued a statement on the murder of 6 Muslim worshipers and the wounding of 19 more at a mosque in Québec City, Québec, on January 29, 2017. Hamilton is a major city in Canada’s Ontario Province which has also suffered attacks on Muslims and mosques. I spoke to HCSW spokesman Ken Stone.

Ann Garrison: Ken Stone, the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War is against the entire War on Terror, not on just any one of the wars that the U.S. and Canada are waging in Muslim countries. Is that correct?

Ken Stone: That is correct. We regard to Bush and Obama’s War on Terror is really a War of Terror against the mainly Arab and Muslim people of the Global South, in order to steal their energy resources and to use their strategic locations after they’ve been conquered, to further encircle those countries that the U.S. deems their competitors on the global chessboard, including Russia, China, and Iran.

AG: And this statement regards the January 29 shooting attack on worshipers at the Québec City Islamic Cultural Center, also known as the Great Mosque of Québec City, for which French Canadian student and white supremacist Alexandre Bissonnette has been arrested. Is that correct?

KS: That is correct. He has been charged with six counts of first degree murder and five counts of attempted murder. He is also known to like Donald Trump on Facebook and to like Marine Le Pen of the far right party in France, and is known as a troll on the Internet in the Québec City area against immigration to Québec.

AG: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau characterized this as a terrorist attack on innocents for practicing their freedom of religion, and many of your fellow Canadians came out to demonstrate and protect mosques for the same reason. Could you explain how your coalition statement goes further to contextualize this within the War on Terror?

KS: Well, the demonstration that we participated in here in Hamilton was a very impressive turnout of 600 people on less than 24 hours notice with the general theme that “an attack on one is an attack on all.” We appreciated that very much, but then some people were trying to blame this terrorist attack on Donald Trump’s election in the U.S.A., and the changes to immigration and refugee policy that he made on the same weekend that the shooting took place. Our view is that the problem goes a lot deeper. It goes into 16 years of the War on Terror. Canada has participated in virtually every war that the U.S. empire has waged against Muslim countries during this time. Bush waged two wars but Obama stretched it out to seven Muslim countries that he was attacking before he retired. The problem goes as far back as George Bush Senior’s first war on Iraq, the Gulf War of 1990 to 1991.

In all these wars, the main themes are that:

– the U.S. is the cop of the world, and its NATO partners are there to help it do its dirty deeds, which are not supported by the UN Security Council and are therefore illegal;

– violence and war is an acceptable tool for remaking whole regions;

– the countries that are being attacked are run by terrible dictators and that, by association, the people of those countries are bad and even their religion – Islam – is bad.

So with nearly 27 years of this kind of conditioning, it’s not surprising that you have these lone wolf attacks, like that by Alexandre Bissonette, because these ideas are permeating the culture, and they can influence young minds and particularly young and unstable minds. So if we want to stop these kinds of terrorist attacks on Muslims in Canada, we have to stop the wars and we need Canada to get out of NATO.

AG: You have a list of seven demands for the Canadian government here. Could you go through this list?

KS: Sure. We call for the Canadian government to:

– re-establish diplomatic relations with Syria and Iran;

– end its punishing economic sanctions against Syria, Iran, and Russia;

– bring home all Canadian troops and military equipment from Syria and Iraq, Ukraine and all other frontier states bordering Russia;

– terminate the arms deal with Saudi Arabia;

– withdraw from the “Friends of Syria” group of countries that organized the proxy war against Syria;

– quit NATO and join the Non-Aligned Movement instead;

– develop an independent, peaceful, and humane Canadian foreign policy.

AG: That’s quite a list. Do you have any hope that the Canadian government will respond to any or all of these demands?

KS: We hope that the Canadian government will re-establish diplomatic relations with Iran soon. The liberal party promised to do that when they were in opposition, but they have not yet.

The mission to Ukraine is due to end in March, and we hope that there will be pressure from the anti-war movement all across Canada to pressure the liberal government not to renew the mission to Ukraine and other border states bordering Russia because those are provocations against Russia.

And the Saudi arms deal? Well, that is so unpopular in Canada that the liberal government has been running for cover. There’ve been legal cases and other actions to try to end it, so we’re hopeful about that one as well.

AG: OK. thanks to the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War for publishing this statement and to you for speaking to the Black Agenda Report.

KS: Thank you. The Black Agenda Report is invaluable and we have posted many of its articles to our Facebook page. We particularly appreciated Glen Ford’s recent piece, If Americans Truly Cared About Muslims, They Would Stop Killing Them by the Millions.

Ken Stone is spokesman and treasurer for the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War. He is also a former steering committee member of the Canadian Peace Alliance, and a member of the Syria Solidarity Movement. See the Coalition’s website to read the HCSW Statement on the attack on the Islamic Cultural Centre in Quebec City.

Three presentations from the Justice In Focus 9/11 Conference at Cooper Union in New York City on September 10th, hosted by New York University Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, Mark Crispin Miller.

Trial Attorney, Lionel, on 9/11 and Conspiracy Theory;

Former Foreign Services Officer and Whistleblower, J. Michael Springmann, and Investigative Journalist and Syndicated Columnist,

Wayne Madsen, on “Creating Our Enemies: From the Mujahadeen to ISIS”.

Originally Aired: October 12, 2016

El reciente fallecimiento de Fidel Castro ha colocado a Cuba en el centro de la actualidad. Pero, ¿cuál es la situación económica y política de la isla?

Entrevista a Salim Lamrani, especialista de Cuba.

Jacques Sapir: ¿Acaso podemos pensar que habrá menos represión política en los años venideros?

Salim Lamrani: Creo que conviene colocar la realidad cubana en la problemática latinoamericana., particularmente en cuanto a la cuestión de los derechos humanos. Es verdad que en Occidente se habla mucho de represión política. Pero es importante recordar el contenido del informe de Amnistía Internacional. Según Amnistía Internacional, no hay ningún país en América, desde Canadá hasta Argentina, que presente una mejor situación de los derechos humanos que Cuba. No lo digo yo. No se trata de una afirmación del Gobierno cubano. Es el resultado de un análisis comparativo de los informes de Amnistía Internacional. Creo que hace falta recordar esta realidad cuando se trata de disertar sobre el tema de los derechos humanos.

Además, cuando se habla de represión política o del tema de la disidencia en Cuba, es necesario recordar que uno de los pilares de la política exterior de Estados Unidos desde 1960 ha sido financiar y organizar una oposición interna en Cuba con el objetivo de derrocar el orden establecido. Si esta política fue clandestina hasta 1991, es una política reconocida por Washington desde 1992 y la adopción de la ley Torricelli. Conviene recordar que todo disidente que reciba emolumentos de una potencia extranjera –y fue el caso de los opositores políticos encarcelados en el pasado en Cuba– viola la ley penal en Cuba, pero pasaría lo mismo en Francia o en cualquier otro país occidental que tipifica como delito el hecho de recibir financiamiento de una potencia extranjera con el objetivo de cuestionar el orden establecido.

Cuando recordamos esto la perspectiva es diferente y cambia la imagen de Cuba.

Jacques Sapir: Uno se pregunta si Cuba no va a enfrentar un reto nuevo. Miremos la situación. Hay una nueva generación en Cuba que no conoció la Cuba de antes de Castro y la situación de la isla antes de 1959. Hoy tiene expectativos tanto más importantes en cuanto que se trata de una población joven particularmente bien educada. De cierto modo, ¿acaso el Gobierno cubano no estaría confrontado al reto de satisfacer las expectativas de esta nueva generación?

Salim Lamrani: Tiene usted razón al subrayar que Cuba se enfrenta a un nuevo reto. Yo diría que se trata de un triple reto. Primero Cuba se enfrenta a una renovación generacional. En efecto, por las leyes de la naturaleza, la generación que hizo la Revolución cederá el poder en los próximos años. Le queda un año de presidencia a Raúl Castro. Luego está el reto de la actualización del modelo económico. Y finalmente el tercer reto es la nueva relación con Estados Unidos.

No obstante conviene recordar que desde el triunfo de la Revolución cubana en 1959 el país ha estado confrontado a retos titánicos. El primero ha sido desde luego la hostilidad de Estados Unidos, que dura hasta hoy a pesar de la política de acercamiento que emprendió el Presidente Obama en diciembre de 2014. Los cubanos, en el curso de su Historia, siempre han respondido con mucha inteligencia a las nuevas realidades.

Apuntemos que las principales aspiraciones de la juventud cubana de hoy no son de orden político sino material. Los cubanos, incluso las categorías más insatisfechas –que desde luego existen, como en toda sociedad– no están dispuestos a negociar la soberanía nacional, la independencia que es la principal conquista de la Revolución cubana. Esta juventud no aspira tampoco a un cambio de sistema político. Cuando uno conversa con las nuevas generaciones, uno se da cuenta de que no hay reivindicaciones de orden político. La juventud cubana aspira a un mejor nivel material. Es una aspiración legítima del pueblo cubano que ha sufrido mucho, sobre todo desde el Periodo Especial, tras el desmoronamiento de la Unión Soviética y el recrudecimiento de las sanciones económicas por parte de Estados Unidos que, en 1992, en vez de normalizar las relaciones con Cuba –ya que había desaparecido el enemigo histórico, la URSS– recrudeció la hostilidad y la agresión contra Cuba. Conviene recordar que las sanciones económicas constituyen el principal obstáculo al desarrollo del país. Los cubanos han alcanzado un nivel de desarrollo humano similar al de los países más ricos y han resuelto las necesidades básicas. La gran diferencia entre la realidad cubana y la realidad latinoamericana y del Tercer Mundo es que en Cuba se han satisfecho las necesidades básicas. Todos los cubanos comen tres veces al día, tienen acceso a una vivienda, a la educación, a la salud, a la cultura, al deporte –que es fundamental para el desarrollo físico e intelectual del ciudadano- Estas conquistas de Cuba todavía son aspiraciones en los países de América Latina y del Tercer Mundo.

Dicho eso, los cubanos aspiran a un mejor nivel de vida material. Para eso hace falta que la economía cubana aumente su producción y por lo tanto resulta indispensable que se levante el principal obstáculo al desarrollo del país y que Estados Unidos ponga término a las sanciones económicas. Hay un nuevo presidente en Estados Unidos cuyo discurso hacia Cuba ha sido algo contradictorio. En un primer tiempo reconoció la lucidez del Presidente Obama, que admitió que la política de hostilidad era un fracaso y decidió dialogar con La Habana. Después el discurso de Trump evolucionó.

Conviene recordar que desde 1959 las autoridades cubanas siempre han declarado su disposición a dialogar con Estados Unidos siempre que se respeten tres principios: la no injerencia en los asuntos internos, la igualdad soberana y la reciprocidad. Los cubanos siempre han expresado la voluntad de resolver de modo pacífico y cordial los diferendos que oponen Washington a La Habana.

Yo creo entonces que el nuevo reto al cual se confronta Cuba es el tema económico. Hay que mejorar la producción. Insisto, no creo que haya reivindicaciones de cambio de sistema económico. Los cubanos son lúcidos y cultos. Conocen las realidades del mundo. Cuando se les propone un cambio de modelo su primera pregunta es la siguiente: “¿Qué modelo nos proponen?”. ¿Acaso se trata del modelo vigente en los países occidentales donde vemos, por ejemplo, que en un país tan rico como Francia, quinta potencia del mundo, hay nueve millones de pobres? ¿Acaso se les propone la realidad mexicana o latinoamericana a los cubanos? Los cubanos no desean un cambio de modelo. Sólo aspiran a mejorar el suyo.

Artículo original en francés :

Cuba après Castro

Doctor en Estudios Ibéricos y Latinoamericanos de la Universidad Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV, Salim Lamrani es profesor titular de la Universidad de La Reunión y periodista, especialista de las relaciones entre Cuba y Estados Unidos. Su último libro se titula Cuba, ¡palabra a la defensa!, Hondarribia, Editorial Hiru, 2016.

http://www.tiendaeditorialhiru.com/informe/336-cuba-palabra-a-la-defensa.html

Contacto: [email protected] ; [email protected]

Página Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SalimLamraniOfficiel

Is The Trump Administration Already Over?

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, February 07 2017

Hopes for the Trump administration are not burning brightly. Trump’s military chief, Gen. Mattis, is turning out to be true to his “mad dog” nickname. He has just declared that Iran “is the single biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world.” He has declared Russia to be the number one threat to the US. He has threatened intervention in China’s territorial affairs.

Trump Foreign Policy in Turmoil

By Renee Parsons, February 07 2017

Within days of the flawed roll-out for Trump’s Executive Orders regardingBorder Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements andEnhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, the President’s promises on the campaign trail and his Inaugural Address that the US would not pursue regime change or initiate new foreign interventions and that his administration would pursue a new foreign policy based on engagement, have been called into question.  

U.N. Nuclear Weapon Ban May Be Last Exit Before Extreme Tolls for Humanity

By Andrew Kishner, February 07 2017

The first installment of a 2017 international forum aimed at banning humanity’s worst doomsday weapon will happen in late March as the United Nations General Assembly convenes in New York City’s United Nations Headquarters.

Monsanto’s Communications Guru to Visit the UK: Instead of Promoting GM, Take Responsibility for Your Company’s Actions in Wales

By Colin Todhunter, February 07 2017

Monsanto is preparing a fresh effort to promote genetically modified (GM) crops to the UK public, according to a piece in The Scottish Farmer. The article notes the company recently appointed former World Bank communications strategist Vance Crowe as its ‘Director of Millenial Engagement’, a job that involves convincing the public about the benefits of GM.

Queen Mother Moore (1898-1997): A Legacy of Revolutionary Resistance

By Abayomi Azikiwe, February 07 2017

One leading figure in the 20th century movement for African liberation in the United States and around the world is Audley Eloise Moore, widely known as Queen Mother Moore. Her efforts spanned the era of Jim Crow in the South where she was born in New Iberia, Louisiana on July 27, 1898, to the Garvey Movement of the 1920s and the Communist Left of the 1930s and 1940s.

One leading figure in the 20^th century movement for African liberation in the United States and around the world is Audley Eloise Moore, widely known as Queen Mother Moore. Her efforts spanned the era of Jim Crow in the South where she was born in New Iberia, Louisiana on July 27, 1898, to the Garvey Movement of the 1920s and the Communist Left of the 1930s and 1940s.

Queen Mother Moore remained a symbol of resistance through the turbulent years of the 1950s through the 1970s, where she was a stalwart at numerous mass meetings, conferences and demonstrations across the U.S. and the world. Even into her later years of the 1990s she attended significant conferences related to the demand for reparations reminding a younger generation of activists and organizers that the struggle for national liberation extends back for decades.

Fighting Jim Crow in the Struggle for Self-Determination

Queen Mother Moore early on in life faced the challenges of Jim Crow segregation, national oppression and lynching. Her parents died while she was very young propelling her into starting her own cosmetology business at the age of 15. One of her grandfathers was lynched by white men for violating the codes of Jim Crow segregation.

She would later hear the propaganda of the Jamaican-born African nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914. Garvey would travel to the U.S. in 1916 seeking to learn from the establishment of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama by Dr. Booker T. Washington.

However, Washington had died in 1915. Garvey stayed in the U.S. setting up his headquarters in Harlem in New York City. By 1920, he had acquired millions of followers and supporters throughout the country and extending his movement for self-reliance and African emancipation to Europe and territories on the continent.

Queen Mother Moore became a member of the UNIA in New Orleans and was inspired to move to New York in the 1920s. In later years she recounted a rally addressed by Garvey in 1922 when he had been arrested the night before. Armed members of the UNIA came to the rally and ensured that Garvey was able to speak. (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/29/)

After the imprisonment and deportation of Garvey on bogus trumped-up charges of mail fraud from 1925-1927, his movement began to decline. Moore continued in her activism by joining the Communist Party in 1933.

The Communist Party was undergoing its most successful period in the years of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Communists would recruit thousands of African Americans in both the northern cities such as New York and Chicago along with establishing a radical Sharecroppers Union (ASU) in Alabama.

Through the Unemployed Councils (UC) and other mass organizations, Communists led struggles against evictions, for tenant rights, and solidarity campaigns with Ethiopia when the Italian fascist government of Mussolini had invaded the Horn of Africa state in 1935. When asked why she became a Communist in the 1930s, she said in an interview that “the Communists were the only ones interested in my revolutionary rights.” She ran for a seat in the New York State Assembly as a Communist in 1938 and City Alderman in 1940.

According to the African American Registry, Moore had: “organized domestic workers in the Bronx labor market and helped Black tenants in their struggles against white landlords. She was arrested repeatedly for her activities, but she would not stop in her activism. In 1931, she participated in the Communist Party’s march in Harlem to free the Scottsboro boys. Inspired by the party’s stance on anti-racism, Queen Mother joined the International Labor Defense and the Communist Party. During the 1930s, she organized around housing issues, the Italian-Ethiopian war, racial prejudice in film, and a host of other issues confronting poor and oppressed Black communities.”

She would leave the party in 1950. Later she was a co-founder of the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women which engaged in anti-lynching work, welfare rights and charitable efforts.

In addition, she worked with the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). In 1963, she established the Reparations Committee of Descendants of U.S. Slaves calling for reparations for African people from the American government. She built-up  support for this demand across the country acquiring over a million signatures for a petition to the government and presented them to the-then President John F. Kennedy in December of that year, which was the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

An Advocate for National Liberation and Pan-Africanism

It was in the 1950s that the African independence movement began to win victories across the continent. In Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Algeria, Congo, Kenya, South Africa and other states, the masses erupted through labor strikes, boycotts, demonstrations and armed struggle. In 1957, the former British colony of the Gold Coast won its independence under the leadership of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) founded by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

Nkrumah declared on March 6, 1957 at the Ghana Independence Day celebration that “the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total independence of the African continent.” Nkrumah would maintain an open door policy to Africans from across the continent and the Diaspora. Thousands of Africans would visit and resettle in the country during the years of 1957 to 1966 when Nkrumah was overthrown in a right-wing military and police coup that was engineered by the U.S. State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Nkrumah went into exile in Guinea-Conakry, a former French colony and was given the position of Co-President with Ahmed Sekou Toure, the founder of the Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG). Nkrumah died in Bucharest, Romania in April 1972 after a battle with cancer. Moore attended his memorial services in Guinea and Ghana, where she was given the name Queen Mother by the Ashanti people.

Later in 1990 when African National Congress (ANC) leader and eventual President Nelson Mandela was released after over 27 years of imprisonment, she would attend his speaking engagements in New York when he traveled to the U.S. in that year to build support for the liberation of South Africa.

Black Power and the Demand for Reparations

Moore was present at the Black Power Conference held in Newark, New Jersey in July 1967 in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion in that city. The following year she was one of the first signatories to the Declaration of Independence from the U.S. by the Republic of New Africa, founded in Detroit in late March 1968.

On November 5, 1979, a march of 5,000 people from Harlem to the United Nations organized by the National Black Human Rights Coalition (NBHRC) presented a petition to the-then General Assembly President Salim Ahmed Salim of the Republic of Tanzania documenting violations against the African American people. Moore spoke to a rally outside the UN which was chaired by Elombe Brath. She told the crowd that the U.S. government owed African people reparations for the exploitation and rape people were subjected to for centuries.

At a standing room only symposium organized by the Chama Cha Kiswahili (CCK) held in “Tribute to the Revolutionary Legacy of African Women” at Wayne State University in Detroit during February 1980, she told the audience that “it was not abject poverty that drove her to the struggle, but a burning desire for freedom.” She would visit WSU again the following February where she addressed a large audience. In 1983, after suffering a stroke, she attended “Black Nation Day” at WSU commemorating the 15^th anniversary of the founding of the RNA.

In 1994, Moore attended another Detroit conference at Cobo Hall organized by the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA). She participated as an observer in a panel discussion where this writer presented a paper on the international implications of the demand for reparations.

Queen Mother Moore passed away to the realm of her ancestors on May 2, 1997 at the age of 98. She left a legacy of struggle for the contemporary generation of African American and African activists to learn from and emulate.

Note: This writer was a graduate student and leader in the Chama Cha Kiswahili in 1980 and 1981 when Queen Mother Moore was hosted at WSU. She later said that her appearance at these events was a highpoint for her in a long history of political work. The author was also a participant in the November 5, 1979 demonstration to the UN in New York City.

On January 25, President Donald Trump’s team listed the Atlantic Coast pipeline among the White House’s top priorities for infrastructure projects, an attempt to deliver on his campaign promise to invest in U.S infrastructure programs.

Of the 50 on the list, Atlantic Coast is surprisingly the only pipeline project named. Some had suspected Trump’s infrastructure promise would serve as a massive pipeline giveaway. So, why prioritize this one?

A possible answer: Several members of Trump’s transition team, landing team, and current White House operation have connections to companies behind the project or to firms lobbying for it.

The Atlantic Coast pipeline has been proposed by a partnership among Dominion Resources, Duke Energy, and Southern Gas Company.

The natural gas pipeline, currently under review by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), has faced staunch opposition from environmental activists and residents along its 550-mile-long path stretching from West Virginia through Virginia to North Carolina. It will carry natural gas obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”).

Among other things, detractors argue that the pipeline will have adverse effects on sensitive habitats, reduce property values, and introduce dangerous precedents for the seizure of private property through eminent domain.

The pipeline is included in a document listing the Trump White House’s highest priority infrastructure projects. The document, which was leaked recently to the Kansas City Star, had reportedly been sent by Trump transition team members to the National Governor’s Association for review and comment.

Titled, “Priority List: Energy and National Security Projects,” the list includes various highway and rail expansions, airport upgrades, hydro and wind power projects, new transmission lines, and a sole natural gas pipeline: the Atlantic Coast.

Among Trump’s 50 top priority infrastructure projects, Atlantic Coast was the only pipeline that made the cut.

“The projects are among a total investment of $137.5 billion described in the document,” reported the Star. “Half that amount is supposed to represent private investment. The document does not specify how any of the projects, including KCI [Kansas City Airport], would be funded, how the federal government prioritized these projects or any timeline for completion.”

Trump also recently signed an executive order calling for expedited permitting and construction of all pipeline projects.

Trump Beneficiaries

DeSmog research has revealed that a few Trump associates could benefit financially if this prioritized pipeline opens for business.

One is Dan DiMicco, who served as a Senior Economic Adviser to Trump’s campaign and led the new administration’s U.S.Trade Representative transition team. He also sits on the Board of Directors of Duke Energy, one of the pipeline project co-owners.

DiMicco, the former CEO of steel giant Nucor, met with Trump in Trump Tower in mid-December, when he was considering DiMicco for the position of U.S. Trade Representative. Eventually, former Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer got the job.

Another tie can be seen between Trump presidential campaign adviser, U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC), and his former chief-of-staff Pepper Natonski. Since at least January 2016, Natonski has been lobbying on behalf of Duke and its stake in “natural gas utilities regarding pipeline safety legislation and any regulatory regime affecting natural gas utilities” and serves as Director of Federal Affairs for the company, according to Politico Influence.

In its Resource Report submitted to FERC, Atlantic Coast pipeline lists Natonski among the stakeholders it contacted to educate about the project. The company says it met with Hudson or his staff on five different instances and also had seven different pipeline-centric email interactions. Today, this rising influencer among D.C. political circles is lobbying Congress on behalf of one of the project’s owners.

Image Credit: U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission

Yet another connection between the Atlantic Coast project and the Trump White House is Rosario Palmieri, who lobbies on behalf of the pipeline for the National Association of Manufacturers. He formerly worked as a staffer for Vice President Mike Pence when he served in the House of Representatives.

“Very Encouraged”

Dominion appears excited to have been included on the list of Trump’s top infrastructure projects.

“We’re very encouraged by the Trump administration’s strong commitment to rebuilding the nation’s energy infrastructure,” Aaron Ruby, a spokesperson for Dominion Resources, said of his company’s inclusion on the list for Atlantic Coast. “This administration has taken some important first steps to clear the path for critically important projects, and we’re eager to work with the president to ensure that projects like the Atlantic Coast Pipeline are approved and built in a timely manner.”

On the list of priority infrastructure projects, the Trump team claims Atlantic Coast could create 10,000 jobs. By way of comparison, Keystone XL — which is about twice the length as Atlantic Coast — will create 2,500–4,650 construction jobs, according to a report published by Cornell Unversity’s Global Labor Institute. As the Kansas City Star pointed out, there is little information to back up the claims made in the leaked document at this point.

In just a few weeks from now, the first hints of a new spring will emerge in a thawing U.S. metropolis as diplomats seek shelter from chilly winds and collectively brainstorm on how to ward off the threat of a winter that has no end.

The first installment of a 2017 international forum aimed at banning humanity’s worst doomsday weapon will happen in late March as the United Nations General Assembly convenes in New York City’s United Nations Headquarters.

There have been unsuccessful attempts over the past 72 years since the first test of the atom bomb to ban it. The late 1940s saw a surge of efforts to outlaw nuclear weapons, including calls to put sole custodial possession of it in the hands of the United Nations (in the event some powerful nation state aimed to destroy civilization). Subsequent ban the bomb uprisings followed, yet no effort has succeeded to put into force a legal ban, effect full disarmament, or even apply a universally-sanctioned stigma of a weapon that has the power to wipe us out in a blip of geologic time.

The 21st century’s first attempt to ban the atom bomb—an ‘invention’ of the United States in 1945, intended to counter the threat of a much-feared, alleged, but largely nonexistent German Manhattan Project—was birthed just before the United States’ presidential election last year.

Twelve days before America’s Election Day, a preponderance of countries at the United Nations—123 in all—voted to adopt a resolution to proceed with talks to figure out how it can be done—how to decide on a ‘legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination.’ The effort by the U.N. Assembly, a legislative majority vote structure akin to the U.S. House of Representatives (which disallows vetoing by any nation—including a nuclear weapons state), is spearheaded by a diverse collective of nations, including Brazil, Austria, Ireland, Mexico, South Africa and Nigeria, and has been enabled by an optimistic crowd of non-governmental organizations, most notably a coalition named ICANW, short for International Campaign against Nuclear Weapons.

Banning the bomb is a commonsense solution to the stark threat posed by them. Yet, too often we don’t hear enough about the precise threat nor entertain the logical end-result of not acting on a ban.

There are two maxims concerning nuclear weapons that are difficult to argue with. One, there is little hope that in the event of a global nuclear war anything resembling civilization will endure. Major cities will be obliterated from direct nuclear attacks, and the rest of our planet will suffer a tailspin of ecological doom—unprecedented continent-wide fires, reactor meltdowns, and crop-killing-sun-blocking overcast, polluted skies allowing harmful descending fallout and penetrating cosmic radiation will turn Earth into a throwback of its inhospitable early Hadean days.

Makers of nuclear bombs in the 1940s and today exploit a unique chemical property of billion-years old uranium—found in ores located beneath the Earth’s skin—to initiate a ‘runaway chain reaction’ that allows for a scale of destruction from nuclear energy release capable of destroying anything; not just the biggest cities, but entire planets, suns, even solar systems; all can be obliterated if enough of this uranium—and its man-made cousin, plutonium—is collected and assembled into a bomb.

Despite efforts by lunatic scientists like Edward Teller to create a ‘clean’ or fallout-less bomb, nuclear weapons retain and will always retain the qualities of biological weapons. Why? The same chemical process that allows for big nuclear explosions creates, and inexorably spews, radioactive elements and energies at levels that will prevent life from thriving. Days ago, operators of the Fukushima Daiichi complex, the site of three nuclear reactor meltdowns in 2011, estimated radiation levels in the Unit 2 reactor of more than 50,000 Rems (500 Sieverts) per hour near a hole that formed from radioactive lava-like nuclear fuel burning through the reactor containment. The radioactive levels were obscenely high; exposure to 500 Rems in 60 minutes is enough radiation to kill one in two people. Hydrogen nuclear bombs used in war would spew and disperse large amounts of similar radioactivity across the Earth, creating lethal hotspots and severely contaminating food supplies across the globe.

The second maxim about nuclear weapons is that as long as they exist, they will be used. In a future war, everything will be thrown at a hated enemy, including the kitchen sink. It’s inevitable. The recipient of the hurled sink will undoubtedly throw their own sink in retaliation, or in anticipation—that is if they even have one. (The possession of nuclear weapons by the few tempts non-nuclear weapon states to pursue them for military necessity.) Our world is overwhelmingly brimming with organisms with immune systems that never evolved to withstand the powerful effects of nuclear radiation. Nuclear weapons are like big sinks with global life-killing ‘germs.’

Nuclear mutually-assured destruction is a matter—as the saying goes—of ‘not if, but when’… Thus, global nuclear war will happen, and global biological catastrophe awaits us in a gloomy future, as long as these things aren’t banned.

But, despite these maxims, and our overwhelming human instincts for survival and wanting our children to do the same, humanity hasn’t responsibly, successfully dealt with this looming threat.

The time for action is nigh. According to the original experts, we don’t have much distance left between us and the toll bridge. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last week brought the ‘Doomsday Clock‘—a tool ‘that conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making’—to two and a half minutes to midnight. No action, and we edge closer to a threshold that inevitably, and possibly sooner than we all think, will incur a devastating toll.

As diplomats soon face major negotiating decisions, they will be confronting more than the chilling winds of an early spring in New York as they rush to enter a shelter for a historic anti-nuclear pow-wow. The chillier winds of dissuasion will be felt.

Einstein once posited that the control of atomic energy release represents the greatest revolutionary force brought into the world since prehistoric discoveries of fire. Certainly, nukes meet the test of a possession worth protecting at all costs, at least to the kind of person or culture attracted to that sort of thing.

We should never underestimate the compelling power of mental and defensive tactics used by persons and cultures throughout history for the protection and preservation of deeply coveted—and dark—possessions! Related to this point, much has been obscured from the views of both citizens and global leaders—and even scientists—about the biological threats posed by nuclear weapons, the result of careful corruption of knowledge and thought about such effects by seemingly credible and concerned sources.

The writing of the evolutionary last chapters of Earth’s social mammalian creatures with high intelligence will be determined by how international forums counter tactics that get in the way of clear logic and navigate global political games that appear to have no clear goal posts.

The ink is still wet. There is an exit to this road trip to madness marked ‘Ban.’ As we depress the turn signal, and move boldly in a direction towards a ban, the headwinds of resistance will in turn rise to a great gale force and threaten this effort, but humanity will deem it no greater a toll than the one it faces through inaction.

Andrew Kishner is an anti-nuclear author and activist.

Israel passed a law Monday retroactively legalizing about 4,000 settler homes built on privately-owned Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, a measure that human rights groups have called “theft” and one that would end any hopes for Palestinian statehood.

Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the main Palestinian political umbrella body, said in a statement that the law gave settlers a green light to “embark on a land grab.”

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist, racist coalition government are deliberately breaking the law and destroying the very foundations of the two-state solution and the chances for peace and stability.”

The U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov said in a statement that the law “will have far-reaching legal consequences for Israel and greatly diminish the prospects for Arab-Israeli peace.”

The news came just hours after Israel conducted airstrikes in the Palestinian Gaza strip injuring at least two Palestinians, the first attack by Israel in months that results in casualties.

Witnesses told Ma’an news agency that at least eight Israeli missiles were fired at several locations across the besieged Palestinian territory. Israel said it was responding to a rock thrown from the strip that landed in an open space and resulted in no damages or injuries.

Under the new law, settlers could remain on the land if they built there without prior knowledge of Palestinian ownership or if homes were constructed at the state’s instruction. Palestinian owners would receive financial compensation.

But its passage may only be largely symbolic as it violates Israeli Supreme Court rulings on property rights. Israel’s attorney general has said it is unconstitutional and that he will not defend it in front of the Supreme Court.

Ahead of the late-night vote, Likud minister Ofir Akunis told parliament, “We are voting tonight on the connection between the Jewish people to its land. This entire land is ours.”

Although the legislation, passed by a vote of 60 to 52, was backed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, political sources have told news outlets that Netanyahu privately opposed the bill over concerns it could provide grounds for prosecution by the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

But the far-right Jewish Home party, a member of the coalition looking to draw voters from the traditional base of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, pushed for the legislation after the forced evacuation of 330 settlers last week from an outpost built on private Palestinian land.

With Netanyahu under police investigation on suspicion of abuse of office, Likud has been losing in opinion polls, therefore Netanyahu did not stand in the way of the vote because he did not want to alienate his supporters and boost Jewish Home’s base.

The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem condemned the bill’s passage, saying it “proves yet again that Israel has no intention of ending its control over the Palestinians or its theft of their land.”

The group said that the passage of the law just weeks after the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution calling for the halt of settlement building was a “slap in the face” to the international community by Israel.

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.

But the Amnesty report is still not propagandish enough for the anti-Syrian media. Inevitably only the highest number in the range Amnesty claims is quoted. For some even that is not yet enough. The Associate Press agency, copied by many outlets, headlines: Report: At least 13,000 hanged in Syrian prison since 2011:

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian authorities have killed at least 13,000 people since the start of the 2011 uprising in mass hangings at a prison north of Damascus known to detainees as “the slaughterhouse,” Amnesty International said in a report Tuesday.

How does “at least 13,000” conform to an already questionable report which claims “13,000” as the top number of a very wide range?

Here is a link to the report.

Before we look into some details this from the “Executive Summary”:

From December 2015 to December 2016, Amnesty International researched the patterns, sequence and scale of violations carried out at Saydnaya Military Prison (Saydnaya). In the course of this investigation, the organization interviewed 31 men who were detained at Saydnaya, four prison officials or guards who previously worked at Saydnaya, three former Syrian judges, three doctors who worked at Tishreen Military Hospital, four Syrian lawyers, 17 international and national experts on detention in Syria and 22 family members of people who were or still are detained at Saydnaya.
…
On the basis of evidence from people who worked within the prison authorities at Saydnaya and witness testimony from detainees, Amnesty International estimates that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were extrajudicially executed at Saydnaya between September 2011 and December 2015.

There are several difficulties with this report.

1. Most of the witnesses are identified as opposition figures and “former” officials who do not live in Syria. Some are said to have been remotely interviewed in Syria but it is not clear if those were living in government or insurgent held areas. Page 9:

The majority of these interviews took place in person in southern Turkey. The remaining interviews were conducted by telephone or through other remote means with interviewees still in Syria, or with individuals based in Lebanon, Jordan, European countries and the USA.

It is well known that the Syrian insurgency is financed with several billion dollars per years from foreign state governments. It runs sophisticated propaganda operations. These witnesses all seem to have interests in condemning the Syrian government. Not once is an attempt made to provide a possibly divergent view. Amnesty found the persons it questioned by contacting international NGOs like itself and known foreign financed opposition (propaganda) groups:

These groups include Urnammu for Justice and Human Rights, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, and the Syrian Institute for Justice and Accountability.

2. The numbers Amnesty provides are in a very wide range. None are documented in lists or similar exhibits. They are solely based on hearsay and guesstimates of two witnesses:

People who worked within the prison authorities at Saydnaya told Amnesty International that extrajudicial executions related to the crisis in Syria first began in September 2011. Since that time, the frequency with which they have been carried out has varied and increased. For the first four months, it was usual for between seven and 20 people to be executed every 10-15 days. For the following 11 months, between 20 and 50 people were executed once a week, usually on Monday nights. For the subsequent six months, groups of between 20 and 50 people were executed once or twice a week, usually on Monday and/or Wednesday nights. Witness testimony from detainees suggests that the executions were conducted at a similar – or even higher – rate at least until December 2015. Assuming that the death rate remained the same as the preceding period, Amnesty International estimates that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were extrajudicially executed at Saydnaya between September 2011 and December 2015.

From “between x and y”, “once or twice a week”, “suggests” and “assuming” the headline numbers are simply extrapolated in footnote 40 in a  back-of-the-envelope calculation; “If A were true then B would be X”:

These estimates were based on the following calculations. If between seven and 20 were killed every 10-15 days from September to December 2011, the total figure would be between 56 people and 240 people for that period. If between 20 and 50 were killed every week between January and November 2012, the total figure would be between 880 and 2,200 for that period. If between 20 and 50 people were killed in 222 execution sessions (assuming the executions were carried out twice a week twice a month and once a week once a month) between December 2012 and December 2015, the total figure would be between 4,400 and 11,100 for that period. These calculations produce a minimum figure of 5,336, rounded down to the nearest thousand as 5,000, and 13,540, rounded down to the nearest thousand as 13,000.

2. I will not go into the details of witness statements on which the report is build. They seem at least exaggerated and are not verifiable at all. In the end it is pure hearsay on which Amnesty sets it conclusions. One example from page 25:

“Hamid”, a former military officer when he was arrested in 2012, recalled the sounds he heard at night during an execution:
“There was a sound of something being pulled out – like a piece of wood, I’m not sure – and then you would hear the sound of them being strangled… If you put your ears on the floor, you could hear the sound of a kind of gurgling. This would last around 10 minutes… We were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death. This was normal for me then.”

A court might accept ‘sound of “I’m not sure” “kind of gurgling” noise through concrete’ as proof that a shower was running somewhere. But as proof of executions?

Of all the witnesses Amnesty says it interviewed only two, a former prison official and a former judge, who describe actual executions (page 25). From the wording of their statements it is unclear if they have witnessed any hangings themselves or just describe something they have been told of.

3. The numbers of people Amnesty claims were executed are – at best – a wild ass guess. How come that Amnesty can name only very few of those? On page 30 of its report it says:

Former detainees from the red building at Saydnaya provided Amnesty International with the names of 59 individuals who they witnessed being taken from their cells in the afternoon, beingtold that they were being transferred to civilian prisons in Syria. The evidence contained in this report strongly suggests that in fact, these individuals were extrajudicially executed.

and

Former prison guards and a former prison official from Saydnaya also provided Amnesty International with the names of 36 detainees who had been extrajudicially executed in Saydnaya since 2011.

Those 95, some of whom may have been “executed” – or not, are the only ones Amnesty claims to be able to name. That is less than 1-2% of the reports central claim of 5,000 to 13,000 executed. All those witnesses could provide no more details of persons allegedly killed?

Amnesty acknowledges that its numbers are bogus. Under the headline “Documented Deaths” on page 40 it then adds additional names and numbers to those above but these are not from executions:

the exact number of deaths in Saydnaya is impossible to specify. However, the Syrian Network for Human Rights has verified and shared with Amnesty International the names of 375 individuals who have died in Saydnaya as a result of torture and other ill-treatment between March 2011 and October 2016. Of these, 317 were civilians at the time of their arrest, 39 were members of the Syrian military and 19 were members of non-state armed groups. In the course of the research for this report, Amnesty International obtained the names of 36 additional individuals who died as a result of torture and other ill-treatment in Saydnaya. These names were provided to Amnesty International by former detainees who witnessed the deaths in their cells

The “Syrian Network for Human Rights” (SNHR) is a group in the UK probably connected to British foreign intelligence and with dubious monetary sources. It only says:

SNHR funds its work and activities through unconditional grants and donations from individuals and institutions.

Now that is true transparency.

SNHR is known for rather ridiculous claims about casualties caused by various sides of the conflict. It is not know what SNHR qualifies as civilians – do these include armed civil militia? But note that none of the mostly civilians SNHR claims to have died in the prison are said to have been executed. How is it possible that a organization frequently quoted in the media as detailed source of casualties in Syria has no record of the 5,000 to 13,000 Amnesty claims were executed?

4. The report is padded up with before/after satellite pictures of enlarged graveyards in Syria. It claims that these expansions are a sign of mass graves of government opponents.  But there is zero evidence for that. Many people have died in Syria throughout the war on all sides of the conflict. The enlargement, for example, of the Martyrs Cemetery south of Damascus (p.29/30) is hardly a sign of mass killing of anti-government insurgents. Would those be honored as martyrs by the government side?

5. The report talks of “extrajudicially executed” prisoners but then describes (military) court procedures and a necessary higher up approval of the judgement. One may not like the laws that govern the Syrian state but the courts and the procedures Amnesty describes seem to follow Syrian laws and legal processes. They are thereby – by definition – not extrajudicial.

6. In its Executive Summary the Amnesty report says that “Death sentences are approved by the Grand Mufti of Syria and …”. But there is no evidence provided of “approval” by the Grand Mufti in the details of the report. On page 19 it claims, based on two former prison and court officials:

The judgement is sent by military post to the Grand Mufti of Syria and to either the Minister of Defence or the Chief of Staff of the Army, who are deputized to sign for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and who specify the date of the execution.

It is very doubtful that the Syrian government would “deputize” or even inform the Grand Mufti in cases of military or criminal legal proceedings. Amnesty International may dislike the fact but Syria is a secular state. The Grand Mufti in Syria is a civil legal authority for some followers of the Sunni Muslim religion in Syria but he has no official judiciary role. From the 2010 Swiss dissertation Models of Religious Freedom: Switzerland, the United States, and Syria quoted here:

In Syria a mufti is a legal and religious expert (faqih and ‘alim) who has the power to give legally non-binding recommendations (sing. fatwa, pl. fatawa) in matters of Islamic law.
…
Queries which are either sought by a shari‘a judge or private individuals regard the personal status laws of the Muslim community only. In the Arab Republic fatawa are given neither to public authorities nor to individual civil servants, ..

Neither the Syrian constitution nor any Syrian law I can find refers to a role of the Grand Mufti in any military or civil criminal court proceding. The Amnesty claim “approved by the Grand Mufti of Syria”is not recorded anywhere else. It is very likely false. The Grand Mufti, Sheikh Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, is a moderate, recognized and accomplished scholar. He should sue Amnesty for this slander.

Syrian law includes a death penalty for certain severe and violent crimes. Before 2011 actual executions in Syria were very rare, most death sentences were commuted. Allegedly the laws were amended in late 2011, after the war in Syria had started, to include the death penalty as possible punishment for directly arming terrorists.

It is quite likely that the Syrian military and/or civil judiciary hand out some death penalties against captured foreign and domestic “rebels” it finds them guilty of very severe crimes. It is fighting the Islamic State, al Qaeda and other extreme groups well known for mass murder and other extreme atrocities. It is likely that some of those sentences are applied. But the Syrian government has also provided amnesty to ten-thousands of “rebels” who fought the government but have laid down their arms.

The claims in the Amnesty report are based on spurious and biased opposition accounts from outside of the country. The headline numbers of 5,000 to 13,000 are calculated on the base of unfounded hypotheticals. The report itself states that only 36 names of allegedly executed persons are known to Amnesty, less than the number of “witnesses” Amnesty claims to have interviewed. The high number of claimed execution together with the very low number of names is not plausible.

The report does not even meet the lowest mark of scientific or legal veracity. It is pure biased propaganda.

Note: An earlier version of this piece mixed up the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). Both are registered in the UK and claim to provide accurate casualty data from Syria. Only SNHR is referenced in this Amnesty report.

The Obama Administration, with the help of the CIA and main stream media, cleverly diluted the fact they they violently overthrew the democratically elected government in Ukraine, and encouraged the illegal, putsch government to attack its own citizens in the east of the country.

Oliver Stone was never fooled by Obama’s Ukraine game, which resulted in the former POTUS getting outplayed in Crimea by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Oliver Stone is now urging US President Donald Trump to make public any secret documents he has in his possession on the origins of Obama’s conflict in Ukraine.

We are certain that Trump now knows the full truth of the Obama Administration’s action in Ukraine, and will use this truth as leverage to hold over Obama, Kerry, Nuland, Clinton, McCain, Brennan and the rest of the neo-liberal/neocon warmonger elite.

In an interview with Russia’s Channel One, the Academy Award winning director said that unfortunately, most Americans do not know the origins to the crisis in Ukraine.

“If I were President Trump, I would declassify all this information on Ukraine, as well as Syria, but above all Ukraine, because it’s the focal point of where this [new] Cold War has come about.”

Stone went further in his characterized of the current government in Kiev, calling it a government that is…

–‘unelected, extremely-right wing, heavily corrupted and controlled from abroad.’

Stone said that the Kiev regime’s survival solely depends on financial support from the US, EU, and the CIA.

“Ukraine was one of the main objectives of the CIA”, Stone noted…saying that since the start of the Cold War, the United States provided covert aid to militia and dissident groups looking to dislodge the country from its Russian heritage and history.

Exposing Ukraine’s restrictions against the work of journalists, and attacks against anyone who speaks out against the putsch government, Stone said, “I don’t see any real democracy in Ukraine.”  

Sputnik News notes that Oliver Stone called the current resurgence of hostilities in eastern Ukraine “disgusting,”saying that Kiev was obviously trying to get Trump to provide financial and other assistance.

The mainstream US media, he noted, has been nearly unanimous in blaming Russia for the fighting.

The director noted that the US establishment has stuck to the same false narrative about Russia ‘seizing’ Crimea, about Russian involvement in the Ukrainian civil war, its posing a ‘threat’ to Ukraine, etc. There are important facts left unsaid about the origins of the Ukrainian crisis, Stone said, including the ‘color revolutionary’ techniques employed in the lead-up to the Maidan coup, who provided the funding, and who the mysterious snipers were that fired on police and protesters alike at the height of the crisis.

*****

In 2016, Stone co-produced the documentary ‘Ukraine on Fire’, a film which discussed the historical origins of the crisis in Ukraine, the lead-up to the Maidan coup, US and European involvement, and the danger the ongoing crisis poses to Europe and to the world. The film, a response to the 2015 pro-Maidan film ‘Winter on Fire’, featured an interview with former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted by the coup, as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This year, Stone plans to release a new documentary about Vladimir Putin. The director told Sunday Vremya that the film was just as important as his film about Ukraine.

The “military-industrial security state needs enemies,” Stone said, “because that’s where the money is,” and Russia and its President have long been presented as one of America’s main adversaries. Stone’s film will attempt to set the record straight.

Oliver Stone interview, below, begins at the 44:15 mark…

President Bashar al-Assad stressed that Syria is owned by the Syrians and that the peace is two things: fighting terrorists and terrorism, stopping the flowing of terrorism, every kind of logistical support. Second, dialogue between the Syrians to decide the future of their country and the whole political system.

On his expectations from the new administration in Washington,  President Assad said, in a statement to Belgian media,

What we heard as statements by Trump during the campaign and after the campaign is promising regarding the priority of fighting terrorists, and mainly ISIS, that’s what we’ve been asking for during the last six years. So, I think this is promising, we have to wait, it’s still early to expect anything practical. It could be about the cooperation between the US and Russia, that we think is going to be positive for the rest of the world, including Syria. So, as I said, it’s still early to judge it.

Question 1: Mr. President, we’ve been to Aleppo, we’ve seen the destruction, how do you see the way forward to peace nowadays after Astana?

President Assad: If you want to talk about how to see the peace, it’s not related mainly to Astana; it’s related to something much bigger: how can we stop the flowing of the terrorists toward Syria, or in Syria, how can we stop the support from regional countries like Turkey, Gulf states, or from Europe like France and UK, or from the US during the Obama administration. If we deal with that title, this is where you can talk about the rest, about the political procedure. Astana is one of the initiatives during this war on Syria, and it’s about the dialogue between the Syrians. Now it’s too early to judge Astana, the first one was positive because it was about the principles of the unity of Syria, about the Syrians deciding their future. How can you implement this communique? That’s the question, and I think we are going to see Astana 2 and so on. So, the peace is two things: fighting terrorists and terrorism, stopping the flowing of terrorism, every kind of logistical support. Second, dialogue between the Syrians to decide the future of their country and the whole political system. These are the headlines about how we see the future of Syria.

Question 2: We have seen many breaches in the ceasefire, would you consider the ceasefire is still upholding, or is it dead?

President Assad: No, it’s not dead, and it’s natural in every ceasefire anywhere in the world, in every war, in any conflict, to have these breaches. It could be sometimes on individual levels, it doesn’t mean there’s policy of breaching the ceasefire by the government or by any other party, and this is something we can deal with on daily basis, and sometimes on hourly basis, but till this moment, no, the ceasefire is holding.

Question 3: In the fight against terror group Daesh, do you think all means are justified?

President Assad: Depends on what do we mean by “all means,” you have to be…

Journalist: Literally all means.

President Assad: Yeah, but I don’t know what the means that are available to tell you yes or “all means,” so I don’t what the “all means” are. But if you want to talk about military means, yes of course, because the terrorists are attacking the people – I’m not only talking about ISIS; ISIS and al-Nusra and all the Al Qaeda-affiliated groups within Syria – when they are attacking civilians, and killing civilians, and beheading people, and destroying properties, private and public, and destroying the infrastructure, everything in this country, let’s say, our constitutional duty and legal duty as government and as army and as state institutions is to defend the Syrian people. It’s not an opinion; it’s a duty. So, regarding this, you can use every mean in order to defend the Syrian people.

Question 4: But we have seen the destruction in Aleppo, you have seen the images as well. Was there no other way to do it?

President Assad: Actually, since the beginning of the crisis, of the war on Syria, we used every possible way. We didn’t leave any stone unturned in order to bring people to the negotiating table, but when you talk about the terrorists, when you talk about terrorists, when you talk about Al Qaeda, when you talk about al-Nusra and ISIS, I don’t think anyone in this world would believe that they are ready for dialogue, and they always say they’re not; they have their own ideology, they have their own way path, they don’t accept anything that could be related to civil state or civil country, they don’t, and I think you know as a European about this reality. So, no, making dialogue with al-Nusra and Al Qaeda is not one of the means, but if somebody wanted to change his course on the individual levels, we are ready to accept him as a government, and give him amnesty when he goes back to the normal life and gives up his armament.

Question 5: The Belgian government is contributing in the fight against Daesh. There are six F-16 fighter planes in the fight against Daesh. Are you grateful to the Belgian government for that contribution?

President Assad: Let me be frank with you, when you talk about contribution in the operation against ISIS, actually there was no operation against ISIS; it was a cosmetic operation, if you want to talk about the American alliance against ISIS. It was only an illusive alliance, because ISIS was expanding during that operation. At the same time, that operation is an illegal operation because it happened without consulting with or taking the permission of the Syrian government, which is the legitimate government, and it’s a breaching of our sovereignty. Third, they didn’t prevent any Syrian citizen from being killed by ISIS, so what tobe grateful for? To be frank, no.

Question 6: You have stated several times that it is up to the Syrian people, it is up to the constitution, to decide who their leadership should be, who their president should be. If the Syrian people would decide for a new leadership, would you consider to step aside?

President Assad: If the Syrian people choose another president, I don’t have to choose to be aside; I would be aside, I would be outside this position, that’s self-evident, because the constitution will put the president, and the constitution will take him out according to the ballot box and the decision of the Syrian people. Of course, that’s very natural, not only because of the ballot box; because if you don’t have public support, you cannot achieve anything in Syria, especially in a war. In a war, what you need, the most important thing is to have public support in order to restore your country, to restore the stability and security. Without it, you cannot achieve anything. So, yes, of course.

Question 7: Mr. President, I am 43 years old, if I would have been born in Syria, there would always have been an Assad in executive power. Can you imagine a Syria without a member of the Assad family in executive power?

President Assad: Of course, we don’t own the country, my family doesn’t own the country, to say that only Assad should be in that position, that’s self-evident, and this could be by coincidence, because President Assad didn’t have an heir in the institution to be his successor. He died, I was elected, he didn’t have anything to do with my election. When he was president, I didn’t have any position in the government. If he wanted me to be an heir, he would have put me somewhere, gave me a responsibility, I didn’t have any responsibility, actually. So, it’s not as many in the media in the West used to say since my election, that “he succeeded his father” or “his father put him in that position.” So, yes, Syria is owned by the Syrians, and every Syrian citizen has the right to be in that position.

Question 8: Do you think the European Union or even NATO can play a role in, like, rebuilding the country, like, rebuilding Syria?

President Assad: You cannot play that role while you are destroying Syria, because the EU is supporting the terrorists in Syria from the very beginning under different titles: humanitarians, moderate, and so on. Actually, they were supporting al-Nusra and ISIS from the very beginning, they were extremists from the very beginning. So, they cannot destroy and build at the same time. First of all, they have to take a very clear position regarding the sovereignty of Syria, stop supporting the terrorists. This is where the Syrians would – I say would – accept those countries to play a role in that regard. But in the meantime, if you ask any Syrian the same question, he will tell you “no, we don’t accept, those countries supported the people who destroyed our country, we don’t want them to be here.” That’s what I think.

Question 9: Do you think Belgium can play a role in Syria?

President Assad: Let me talk about the European political position in general; many in this region believe that the Europeans don’t exist politically, they only follow the master which is the Americans. So, the question should be about the Americans, and the Europeans will follow and will implement what the Americans want. They don’t exist as independent states, and Belgium is part of the EU.

Question 10: There is a new administration in Washington, with Trump in power. What do you expect from it? Are you looking to work closely together?

President Assad: What we heard as statements by Trump during the campaign and after the campaign is promising regarding the priority of fighting terrorists, and mainly ISIS, that’s what we’ve been asking for during the last six years. So, I think this is promising, we have to wait, it’s still early to expect anything practical. It could be about the cooperation between the US and Russia, that we think is going to be positive for the rest of the world, including Syria. So, as I said, it’s still early to judge it.

Question 11: If you look back on the last couple of years, are there any things that you regret?

President Assad: Every mistake could be a regret, by any individual, and as a human…

Journalist: Have you made mistakes?

President Assad: As a human, I have to make mistakes to be human. Otherwise, I’m not a human.

Journalist: What would you consider a mistake?

President Assad: A mistake is when you either take a wrong decision or make a wrong practice, it depends on the situation. But if you want to talk about the crisis, as I understand from the question, the three decisions that we took from the very beginning is to fight terrorism, and I think it’s correct, is to make dialogue between the Syrians, I think it’s correct, to respond to every political initiative, whether it’s genuine or not, and I think it’s correct, and actually we supported the reconciliation between the Syrians, and I think it’s correct. Anything else could be trivial, so you have a lot of things regarding the practice, regarding the institutions, you always have mistakes.

Question 12: If you look back, was this war avoidable?

President Assad: No, because there was bad intention regarding the different countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, France, UK, and the US in order to destabilize Syria, so it wasn’t about the Syrians. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have many flaws before the war and today as a country that allow many of those countries to mess with our country. I’m not excluding, I’m not saying it’s only about them, but they were the one who took the initiative in order to wage this war, so I don’t think it was avoidable.

Question 13: You have just had a visit from a Belgian parliamentary delegation with Mr. Dewinter and Mr. Carcaci, do you consider them as friends?

President Assad: The most important thing about those visits is not to be friends with them. As a politician, you don’t come to Syria to visit your friend; you come to Syria to see what’s going on.

Journalist: Do you see them as political allies?

President Assad: No, they’re not my allies at all. They are coming here not for that reason; they are here in order to see what’s going on. They are the allies of the Belgian people. They came here because the government, the Belgian government, like many European governments, are blind today, they have no relation with this country on every level, so they don’t see what’s going on, they cannot play any role. So, now the only eyes that you have are the delegations that are coming from your country, and this is one of them, this is one of the eyes that your government could have, and you could have many other eyes and delegations coming to Syria. So, they’re not my allies, they’re not coming here for me; they’re coming here to see the situation, and I’m one of the players in the Syrian conflict, it’s natural to meet with me to hear what’s my point of view.

Question 14: Mr. President, just one more question: after the victories in Aleppo, Wadi Barada, your troops are close from al-Bab, do you think that all these major victories can change the mind of European governments concerning the Syrian government?

President Assad: I don’t know, I think they have to answer that question. For us, it’s our war, we need to liberate every single inch on the Syrian territory from those terrorists. If the European governments think that their efforts went in vain, that’s good, they may change their mind, and at least to stop supporting those terrorists that don’t have the support of the public in Syria; they only have the support of the Europeans and the Gulf states, the Wahabi Gulf states, in order to have more terrorism and extremism in Syria. We hope, I think during the last two years, the whole world has changed, the United States has changed, the situation in Syria has changed, the situation in the region in general has changed. Two things didn’t change or hasn’t changed till this moment: first of all, Al Qaeda is still there through ISIS and al-Nusra, and the mentality of the European officials, it hasn’t change yet, they live in the past.

Question 15: Mr. President, in your opinion, what is our ______ to question if after the war, the international court in the Hague should go over some responsibles on the crimes against humanity against the Syrian people, do you support that view, that the responsibles of the crimes at war should be judged by the international court in the Hague?

President Assad: We all know that the United Nations institutions are not unbiased, they are biased, because of the American influence and the French and British, mainly. So, most of those institutions, they don’t work to bring the stability to the world or to look for the truth; they are only politicized to implement the agenda of those countries. For me, as president, when I do my duty, the same for the government and for the army, to defend our country, we don’t look to this issue, we don’t care about it. We have to defend our country by every mean, and when we have to defend it by every mean, we don’t care about this court, or any other international institution.

Question 16: Yes. Do you accept the position of the United Nations?

President Assad: It depends on that position. Most of the positions are biased, as I said, regarding every organization, regarding every sector, regarding most of the resolutions against Syria. That’s why it was for the first time maybe for Russia and China to take so many vetoes in few years, because they know this reality. So, no, we don’t accept, we don’t accept.

Watch video here

The Fukushima Disaster

We noted a few days after the Japanese earthquake that the amount of radioactive fuel at Fukushima dwarfs that at Chernobyl … and that the cesium fallout from Fukushima already rivaled Chernobyl (we also noted that Fukushima radiation could end up on the West Coast of North America. And see this.).

The next month, we noted that Tepco admitted that the radiation from Fukushima could exceed that from Chernobyl.

And that Fukushima’s reactors had actually suffered something much worse than a total meltdown: nuclear melt-throughs, where the nuclear fuel melted through the containment vessels and into the ground.   A few months later, we reported that radiation will pollute the area around Chernobyl for 5 to 10 times longer than models predicted – between 180 and 320 years.

The following year, we pointed out that the operator of the Fukushima plant admitted that they couldn’t find the  melted fuel from Fukushima reactor number 2 … and that the technology doesn’t yet even existto clean up Fukushima.

Highest Radiation Level At Fukushima Now Dwarfs That At Chernobyl

The highest radiation levels ever measured at Chernobyl were 300 sieverts per hour … an incomprehensibly high dose which can kill a man almost instantly.

But a radiation level of 530 sieverts per hour has just been measure at Fukushima’s number 2 reactor.

This new record at Fukushima is 70% higher than that of Chernobyl. (The highest level previously measured at Fukushima was 73 sieverts per hour, in March 2012.)

Postscript: For background on how this could have happened, see this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.

The furor unleashed by the remarks of President Donald Trump in response to Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly’s calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “a killer” during an interview broadcast Sunday has continued to reverberate, drawing hypocritical condemnations from leading figures in both the Republican and Democratic parities.

In response to O’Reilly’s denunciation of Putin, Trump stated: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

Trump went on to cite Iraq in support of his statement. O’Reilly’s face went slack. He clearly did not know what to say. The new leader of the “Free World” had wandered seriously off message.

As far as the capitalist politicians of both parties and the media are concerned, Trump committed an unpardonable offense: he—in this one instance, and for purely pragmatic reasons related to his immediate political needs—had said something true about US imperialism’s role in the world.

The official posture of outrage over Trump’s off-hand comment will have little effect on the broader public. Do the politicians and media really believe that the public is so naïve and its memory so short? The United States is a country where The Bourne Identity­ and its innumerable sequels–whose basic premise is that the US government is run by murderers–are among the most popular movies of the last twenty years. This premise is well grounded in fact. Over the past 70 years, presidents and other high government officials have been implicated in the authorization and implementation of countless atrocities. Many of these crimes have been substantiated in official government reports and congressional hearings.

In a review of Joshua Kurlantzick’s A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of the Military CIA, reviewer Scott Shane wrote in the February 3 edition of The New York Times :

“Speaking last September in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, Barack Obama mentioned a staggering fact: that the United States had between 1963 and 1974 dropped two million tons of bombs on the country, more than the total loosed on Germany and Japan together during World War II. That made Laos, which is slightly smaller than Michigan, the most heavily bombed nation in history, the president said. More than four decades after the end of the war, unexploded ordnance is still killing and maiming Laotians, and Obama announced that he was doubling American funding to remove it.”

Calling attention to information in Kurlantzick’s book, Shane noted:

“In his first presidential term, Richard M. Nixon escalated the bombing from about 15 sorties per day to 300 per day. ‘How many did we kill in Laos?’ Nixon asked Henry Kissinger one day in a conversation caught on tape. Kissinger replied: ‘In the Laotian thing, we killed about 10, 15’–10,000 or 15,000 people, he meant. The eventual death toll would be 200,000.”

When it comes to killing, the US Government is without equal. In multiple wars of aggression, from Korea to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the proxy war for regime-change in Syria, US imperialism has killed and maimed tens of millions.

The chief accusation being leveled against Trump–by both supposed liberals in the Democratic Party and right-wing Republicans–is that he implied a “moral equivalence” between Russia and the US. This was a phrase used during the Cold War to justify every crime committed by the US and its allies, from Latin America’s bloody dictatorships to the Apartheid regime in South Africa, on the grounds that there could be no “moral equivalence” between the leader of the “Free World” and the Soviet “Evil Empire.”

There is, in fact, no equivalence. When it comes to killing and global thuggery, Putin is a small fry compared to the leaders of the United States.

That the Democratic Party jumps on this reactionary bandwagon only proves that there is nothing progressive whatsoever in its purported opposition to Trump. This was exemplified Monday by the remarks of California Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a supposed “left” Democrat and leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus, who suggested that Trump should be impeached for “wrapping his arms around Putin while Putin is continuing to advance into Korea [sic].”

Underlying the furor over Trump’s remarks are fierce divisions over US imperialist strategy and Washington’s preparations for war that have been brought into the open with the change of administrations.

These differences have been exacerbated by recent events in Syria. The Syrian government’s retaking in December of eastern Aleppo, the last urban stronghold of the US-backed “rebels,” represented a colossal setback for US policy in the Middle East.

There are bitter recriminations within the foreign policy establishment over the Obama administration’s backing off of its “red line” in 2013, when it nearly went to war over false charges of Syrian government use of chemical weapons. Within these circles, there are many who feel that a military intervention would have been better for US interests, no matter what new catastrophe it unleashed.

An article published in the Washington Post Monday, warning that the US faces “a far stronger Iran” after “years of turmoil in the Arab world,” spelled out the situation that Washington now confronts in stark terms:

“Iran and Russia together have fought to ensure the survival of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and they are now pursuing a peace settlement in alliance with Turkey that excludes a role for the United States. America has been left with few friends and little leverage, apart from the Kurds in the northeast of the country.

“Russia controls the skies over Syria, and Turkey wields influence over the rebels, but Iran holds sway on the ground …”

Talk of “respecting” Putin, possible collaboration with Russia against ISIS in Syria, and an easing of sanctions is not, as the Democrats have suggested, evidence of some secret control exercised by the Kremlin over Trump. It is, rather, part of a definite strategy of peeling Russia off from Iran in order to pave the way for a new war in the Middle East, while sharply escalating provocations against China.

Citing unnamed administration officials, the Wall Street Journal spelled this policy out on Monday: “The administration is exploring ways to break Russia’s military and diplomatic alliance with Iran… The emerging strategy seeks to reconcile President Donald Trump’s seemingly contradictory vows to improve relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and to aggressively challenge the military presence of Iran.”

Trump’s chief White House strategist and adviser, Stephen Bannon, a student and admirer of Adolf Hitler, no doubt views the administration’s pivot toward Moscow through the historical prism of the Stalin-Hitler pact, which set the stage for the Second World War, a war that ultimately claimed 20 million Soviet lives.

Putin’s government is susceptible to such maneuvers. It shares all of the stupidity, backwardness and shortsightedness of the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy headed by Stalin. Putin sits atop a regime that represents a rapacious clique of oligarchs who enriched themselves through theft of state property and the extraction and sale of the resources of the former Soviet Union. They are anxious to see US sanctions lifted so that they can accelerate their accumulation of wealth at the expense of the Russian working class.

Within the US political establishment and Washington’s vast military and intelligence apparatus, there exists sharp opposition to Trump’s turn in foreign policy. Immense political, military and financial resources have been invested in the buildup against Russia, from the coup in Ukraine to the deployment of thousands of US and NATO troops on Russia’s western border. There are concerns within ruling circles that a shift in imperialist strategy is reckless and poses serious dangers.

While popular attention and outrage have been focused on Trump’s anti-democratic executive orders imposing a ban on Muslims and refugees, ordering a wall built on the southern border, and laying the groundwork for a mass dragnet against undocumented immigrant workers, within the ruling class a serious fight is being waged over global imperialist strategy.

This fight over policy is between two bands of cutthroats, each of which is committed to an escalation of US militarism to further the profit interests of the US-based banks and transnational corporations. Whichever one wins out, the threat of world war, rooted in the crisis of global capitalism, will only grow.

Finalmente il telefono ha squillato e Gentiloni, dopo una lunga e nervosa attesa, ha potuto ascoltare la voce del nuovo presidente degli Stati uniti, Donald Trump. Al centro della telefonata – informa Palazzo Chigi – la «storica amicizia e collaborazione tra Italia e Usa», nel quadro della «importanza fondamentale della Nato». Nel comunicato italiano si omette però un particolare reso noto dalla Casa Bianca: nella telefonata a Gentiloni, Trump ha non solo «ribadito l’impegno Usa nella Nato», ma ha «sottolineato l’importanza che tutti gli alleati Nato condividano il carico monetario della spesa per la difesa», ossia la portino ad almeno il 2% del pil, il che significa per l’Italia passare dagli attuali 55 milioni di euro al giorno (secondo la Nato, in realtà di più) a 100 milioni di euro al giorno. Gentiloni e Trump si sono dati appuntamento a maggio per il G7 a presidenza italiana che si svolgerà a Taormina, a poco più di 50 km dalla base Usa/Nato di Sigonella e di 100 km dal Muos di Niscemi. Capisaldi di quella che, nella telefonata, viene definita «collaborazione tra Europa e Stati Uniti per la pace e la stabilità».

Quale sia il risultato lo confermano gli Scienziati atomici statunitensi: la lancetta dell’«Orologio dell’apocalisse», il segnatempo simbolico che sul loro bollettino indica a quanti minuti siamo dalla mezzanotte della guerra nucleare, è stata spostata in avanti: da 3 a mezzanotte nel 2015 a 2,5 minuti a mezzanotte nel 2017. Un livello di allarme più alto di quello della metà degli anni Ottanta, al culmine della tensione tra Usa e Urss.

Questo in realtà è il risultato della strategia dell’amministrazione Obama la quale, con il putsch di Piazza Maidan, ha avviato la reazione a catena che ha provocato il confronto, anche nucleare, con la Russia, trasformando l’Europa in prima linea di una nuova guerra fredda per certi versi più pericolosa della precedente.

Che farà Trump? Nella sua telefonata al presidente ucraino Poroshenko – comunica la Casa Bianca – ha detto che «lavoreremo con Ucraina, Russia e altre parti interessate per aiutarle e ristabilire la pace lungo le frontiere». Non chiarisce però se entro le frontiere dell’Ucraina sia compresa o no la Crimea, ormai distaccatasi per rientrare a far parte della Russia. L’ambasciatore Usa all’Onu, Haley, ha dichiarato che le sanzioni Usa alla Russia restano in vigore e ha condannato le «azioni aggressive russe» nell’Ucraina orientale. Dove in realtà è ripresa l’offensiva delle forze di Kiev, comprendenti i battaglioni neonazisti, addestrate e armate da Usa e Nato.

Contemporaneamente il presidente Poroshenko ha annunciato di voler indire un referendum per l’adesione dell’Ucraina alla Nato. Anche se di fatto essa ne fa già parte, l’ingresso ufficiale dell’Ucraina nella Alleanza avrebbe un effetto esplosivo verso la Russia.

Intanto si muove la Gran Bretagna: mentre intensifica la cooperazione delle sue forze aeronavali con quelle Usa, invia nel Mar Nero a ridosso della Russia, per la prima volta dalla fine della guerra fredda, una delle sue più avanzate unità navali, il cacciatorpediniere Diamond (costo oltre 1 miliardo di sterline), a capo di una task force Nato e a sostegno di 650 soldati britannici impegnati in una non meglio precisata «esercitazione» in Ucraina. Allo stesso tempo  la Gran Bretagna invia in Polonia ed Estonia 1000 uomini di unità d’assalto e in Romania cacciabombardieri Typhoon a duplice capacità convenzionale e nucleare.

Così, mentre Gentiloni parla con Trump di collaborazione tra Europa e Stati Uniti per la pace e la stabilità, la lancetta dell’Orologio si avvicina alla mezzanotte nucleare.

 Manlio Dinucci

Trump signed an executive order. Airports filled up with protesters. The media screamed about a Muslim ban. Federal Judges intervened. Anger and chaos erupted.

What is actually going on? The answers from both sides of the political spectrum are loaded with emotion and lacking truthful content.

“Trump is trying to protect us from terrorists! He’s keeping the Muslims out of our country!” shout Trump’s defenders. Well, no terrorist attack on US soil has ever been carried out by anyone from the 7 countries restricted. The countries that have been linked to recent terrorist attacks, such as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, are not included.

“Trump is a racist! He’s banning Muslims! We can’t block people because of their religion!” Scream the liberal protesters. Well, many Muslim majority countries such as Turkey and Indonesia are not included in the ban. Furthermore, the ban applies to all people from these countries, not just Muslims. The Syrian Arab Republic, for example, is home to many Christians, Druze, and even a small Jewish community. The Islamic Republic of Iran has a large population of Armenian Christians, Jews, and many adherents to an ancient faith called Zoroastrianism. All of these non-Muslims are also subject to the ban.

One contributing factor to the outburst of rage is the crass, sudden, “slap in the face” nature of the executive order. Until the administration backed down, even green-card holding permanent residents were being turned away at airports, something that definitely caused anguish and panic among many people.

Calling It A “Muslim Ban” – Good for Trump & the Democrats

Throughout his Presidential election campaign, Trump repeatedly appealed to contempt and distrust of those who practice Islam. He talked about “banning Muslims” from entering the USA. His speech to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee included a lot of pandering to Anti-Islamic sentiments. Millions of working class people in rural and suburban areas voted for Trump, because of these very statements. In the aftermath of 9/11 many Americans have come to see all adherents of the Islamic faith as a single scary, foreign, violent group.

The idea that Trump would enact a “Muslim ban” is something that will increase, not decrease his credibility to millions of the middle aged right-wing working class whites who voted for him in rustbelt and southern states. It plays into Trump’s well crafted image as a bold defender of the common man, who is not politically correct, and unafraid of being scorned by elitist urban liberals.

However, as much as it would please his right-wing, anti-Islamic base, and as much as his opponents proclaim it in condemnation, the reality is that Trump has not enacted a Muslim ban. Donald Trump has temporarily suspended entrance to the United States from seven countries: Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Libya, and Sudan. Now the US public is having a heated argument about a “Muslim Ban.” Opponents call it bigoted, supporters call it bold, and neither side acknowledges reality.

Observers of American politics should be reminded of the healthcare debate in the early years of the Obama administration. The Affordable Care Act or “Obamacare” was not universal healthcare or socialized medicine, and did very little to change the country’s private healthcare system. However, the right-wing rallied against it, proclaiming it was socialism, and the left rallied in its defense, employing socialistic rhetoric. Both sides of the American political spectrum clashed with each other, accepting a similar fictional narrative about the Affordable Care Act.

The Non-Spontaneous Airport Protests

After this sudden action, much like the healthcare debate, “the gloves have come off.” In 2009, Tea Partiers responded to the Affordable Care Act by displaying firearms at townhall meetings and engaging in other acts of protest that are normally considered “out of bounds.” In response to Trump, the Democratic Party apparatus mobilized its supporters to protest inside of airports. The demonstrations were mobilized very rapidly, and got intense with people being arrested, and maced with pepper spray at various locations.

Those who pretend that the protests were completely random, unplanned, or spontaneous are completely delusional. Airports are among the most free speech restricted locations in the country. While decades ago it was permitted to pass out political leaflets or petition at airports, courts long ago forbid such things. Under normal circumstances it is illegal, not only to engage in protest or “public disturbance” at an airport, but even to video record inside one.

Yet, without any widespread public announcement or organizing, thousands of Democratic Party activists flooded into airports for some rather rowdy protests. Under normal circumstances doing such things would result in immediate arrest and perhaps even terrorism charges. Not only did the police not arrest the initial protesters, but they allowed the demonstrations to grow bigger and bigger. Though videotaping is not permitted in airports, live streaming videos found their way on to social media, and TV news cameras conveniently found their way in as well.

In many countries when the elected government is toppled by the military, one of the first actions taken is seizing the airports. One could even read into the sudden mobilizations, clearly supported by some of the most powerful people in Democratic Party, a veiled threat of a military coup d’etat.

The CIA Strikes Back

But why was there such a swift response to Trump’s action? Why did the Democratic Party unleash its forces so rapidly in response to Trump’s move? Are the Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who tweeted in support of the protests, simply humanitarians who hold deep compassion for immigrants?

The real answer can be found, subtly, in the news coverage surrounding the opposition to the ban. This mainstream news reports shows an Iraqi family blocked by Trump’s move, and describes how the father had “risked his life to support the United States” and his family was rewarded with a visa. This is not an uncommon practice. Allies of the United States in conflicts around the world are routinely rewarded with visas. The US military has many “green card soldiers” from Latin America, who are attempting to gain legal residency in the USA by serving in the military.

In each of the 7 countries listed in the ban, there are thousands of individuals who have collaborated with the United States in order to carry out foreign policy goals. In Syria, for example, hundreds of thousands of Wahabbi extremists have been working to topple the government. In Iraq, Saudi Arabia has cooperated with the United States in efforts to roll back Iranian influence among the Shia communities. In Yemen, Al-Queda, Saudi Arabia, and the United States are all working to topple the Revolutionary Committees aligned with the Ansarullah organization, commonly called the “Houthis.”

The individuals who have collaborated with the United States in the 7 countries are often Muslims, who adhere to an interpretation of the faith similar to that of Saudi Arabia or of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the aftermath of the executive order, it has been revealed that Trump is openly discussing a formal ban of the Muslim Brotherhood, and designating it as a terrorist organization.While many countries, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, already outlaw the Brotherhood, the USA does not.

In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood has been a key ally of the United States in the Middle East for decades. The Brotherhood worked with the CIA to destabilize Abdul Nasser’s anti-imperialist, socialist government in Egypt. The Brotherhood staged a violent uprising against the Syrian Arab Republic during the 1980s, and has been aligned with anti-government militants in the current Syrian civil war. The Muslim Brotherhood enthusiastically worked with the Obama administration to topple Moammar Gaddafi and reduce Libya to chaos and poverty.

The Muslim Brotherhood functions across the Middle East. The reigning monarchy of Qatar, which also sponsors the TV network known as Al-Jazeera, is a key financial backer of the Muslim Brotherhood. The CIA has worked for decades to maintain the US government’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, seeing them as allies or proxies in the fight against anti-imperialist, nationalist, and socialist governments in the region.

While the CIA sees the Muslim Brotherhood as a useful ally, other key players in US society disagree. The Israeli government and its network of supporters have deep contempt for the Muslim Brotherhood, due to the fact that its Palestinian affiliate, Hamas, is their battlefield enemy. Other figures in the security apparatus and the military see the Brotherhood as a threat due to its record of assassinations and terrorism.

Trump’s recent move indicates that he may represent a section of the US elite that wants to terminate the relationship between the US government and the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as various Wahabbi fanatics. The CIA, on the other hand, feels that is very important to maintain these alliances which it has worked on for many decades. This disagreement among the most powerful leaders in the United States is the basis on which the sudden executive order, and the sweeping protests at the airports, has taken place.

Soros, Brzezinski & Brennan

Monsanto is preparing a fresh effort to promote genetically modified (GM) crops to the UK public, according to a piece in The Scottish Farmer. The article notes the company recently appointed former World Bank communications strategist Vance Crowe as its ‘Director of Millenial Engagement’, a job that involves convincing the public about the benefits of GM.

In March, Vance will be in the UK to give a series of talks, including one in Glasgow as a guest of Glasgow Skeptics, an organisation committed to “promoting science and critical thinking.” However, according to the article, it seems that organiser Brian Eggo may have already made up his mind on GM. He talks about public fear of GM having held back the technology and says the ban on the growing of GM crops in Scotland was a decision based more on ideology than any actual risk to public health.

Eggo stresses that Glasgow Skeptics is not a pro-GM body but simply wants to air the scientific facts in a neutral setting, “putting aside personal biases, ideologies and preconceived ideas in order to examine what is true.”

Well, it’s not a good start, is it? While wanting to appear neutral, Mr Eggo has already tainted the upcoming event with his own preconceived idea that the views of those promoting GM are based on science, whereas those who oppose GM food are basing their views on ideology and emotion.

Over the years, this has been a tactic that the industry has used in an attempt to discredit critics of GM. It is the thin end of a very large wedge, one that begins by saying the public are confused and have been misled by anti-GM ideologues and ends with vicious ideological-driven pro-GM onslaughts exemplified by the likes of UK politician Owen Paterson or scientists such as Richard John Roberts or Shanthu Shantharam, who fail to appreciate where the line between science ends and public relations begins.

It has been stated many times before, but it is worth repeating: there is plenty of scientific evidence that questions the health and environmental impacts of GM, and there are many respected scientific institutions that have expressed concerns. There is no scientific consensus on GM, and, although the industry likes to portray it as such, it is not some small bunch of maverick scientists who have serious concerns about the technology (for example, see this about the lack of consensus on safety with regard to GM, and this and this, which both challenge the need for and efficacy of GM: these publications cite official reports and statements as well as dozens of [peer-reviewed] academic sources).

Moreover, the onus should not be on critics to prove GM is safe. The onus is on regulators to demand long-term independent epidemiological studies are carried out instead of relying on the industry-invented tactic of labelling GMOs as ‘substantially equivalent’, which is bogus and unscientific.

But GM is not only about ‘science’. There is, however, a strategy to marginalise other voices and to try to keep the GM debate focussed on ‘the science’. There are two main reasons for this.

First, science is being used as an ideological device, whereby it is hoped the public will automatically defer to scientists, who ‘know best’. Scientists can therefore utter any form of nonsense (and they have) and the hope is the layperson will bow to a GM scientific priesthood. The pro-GM lobby hopes that appeals to authority and smearing critics will suffice.

Second, by keeping the debate firmly focused on the (corporate-backed) science of GM and constantly smearing critics as ‘anti-science’, wider discussions about the issues that determine affordable, plentiful and healthy food are sidelined. GM acts as a financially lucrative ideological device: a bogus techno quick-fix promoted by the vested interests of an agritech/agribusiness cartel that neatly diverts attention from the need to address the structural factors which drive inequality and food insecurity and which those interests profit from and have helped to create.

It is interesting that Monsanto is sending a communications strategist to the UK to try and ‘educate’ the public about GM. With the UK on the verge of leaving the EU, the fear is that a US-UK deal could soon be done which could entail GMOs flooding the UK market. The spin machine is thus gearing up. In fact, the UK government has been oiling its wheels for some time as GeneWatch UK disclosed in 2014. But this isn’t unique to the UK. For instance, Health Canada also thinks its role is to product promote on behalf of Monsanto and appears to feel a need to develop a strategy for spinning a positive message about GM to the Canadian public.

Monsanto feels the UK is ripe for picking. The public had better brace itself.

When he visits the UK, perhaps Vance Crowe would like to address the people of Wales and say something about the poisoning of the population that his company has played a major part in. However, the standard company defence mechanism is to try to convince people that the ‘new’ Monsanto is not like the ‘old’ Monsanto, even though Dr Rosemary Msason shows that Welsh adults and children continue to suffer and the company still profits from the massive amounts of glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) being sprayed there.

Monsanto produced tonnes of Agent Orange unmindful of its consequences for Vietnamese people as it raked in super profits and that character remains. We need only read Dr Mason’s publications to appreciate that character or consult experts in Argentina. In fact, we need only refer to Monsanto attorney Trenton Norris, who argued in court against California’s initiative to place a cancer warning label on the company’s multi-billion-dollar earner Roundup.

Norris recently said that the labels would have immediate financial consequences for the company. He stated that many consumers would see the labels and stop buying Roundup: “It will absolutely be used in ways that will harm Monsanto.”

Once again, a case of profit before people.

Despite the massive body of evidence pointing to the health- and environmentally damaging impact of glyphosate, Monsanto is launching a full-frontal assault on science, scientific research and institutions whose findings contradict the company line that glyphosate is harmless.  But anyone who is aware of the history of Monsanto, especially where GM is concerned, knows that attacking scientists and subverting science is par for the course (see this and this).

Maybe Brian Eggo from Glasgow Skeptics should take this into account when attempting to depict Monsanto being on the side of science. It merely buys into the PR message the pro-GM lobby has been pushing ever since GM food was fraudulently placed on the commercial market.

Attorney Alan Phillips, whose practice specializes in vaccine exemption law, lays out the case for legislative activism to counter the wave of coercive state legislation mandating extensive vaccination of children, and the elimination of choice.

The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act freed the vaccine industry of accountability and created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

The corruption of science and research is discussed, as well as the unconstitutionality of many state vaccine laws.

The challenging legal quagmire facing children and adults and the many arenas where vaccines are required is addressed, as well as recent draconian California legislation.

Full Transcript:

This is Guns and Butter.Because while ultimately this is a scientific issue – are vaccines safe, are they effective, are they necessary, are there other things we can do, that’s all science questions. The way it plays out in our lives day-to-day is a legal question. At any given point in time when somebody’s required to get a vaccine there’s either a law that says you can say or no or there isn’t. So where the rubber meets the road primarily is in the state legislature, so we’ve got to become legislatively involved whether we like that or not, we’ve got to be proactive pushing our agenda for informed choice because whether we do that or not they’re pushing their agenda backed by huge sums of money and lobbyists and so forth.I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, Alan Phillips.

Today’s show: Vaccines: Threads of Corruption. Alan Phillips is a practicing attorney headquartered in North Carolina. He is a nationally recognized legal expert on vaccine policy and law. He is the only attorney in the United States whose practice is focused solely on vaccine exemptions and waivers, and vaccine legislative activism. He advises individuals, families, attorneys, legislators, and legislative activists throughout the U.S. on vaccine exemption and waiver rights, and vaccine politics and law. He hosts a weekly radio show, “The Vaccine Agenda.” He is the author of The Authoritative Guide to Vaccine Legal Exemptions, published as an e-book. Guns and Butter co-producer Tony Rango caught up with Alan Phillips for an update on the current vaccination legal and political environment, its effects on doctors and healthcare workers, students and employees, as well as related industries including medical publishing and pharmaceuticals. We begin with the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act that granted legal protection to the vaccine industry.

Tony Rango: Alan Phillips. Welcome to Guns and Butter.

Cry in the Square

“It’s the fourth winter after I became the wife of a person who committed severe crime, rebellion. “

”I long for a day I can say.”

Six victims including my husband are still in prison in charge of insurrection conspiracy with our any conspiracy. And throughout the nation, more than 60 prisoners of conscience are also still in prison.

Last December, 30th, Yoon So-young, Lee Sang-ho’s wife who is one of the victims, stood in front of the citizens holding candlelights in the Square in Seoul, South Korea. She could tell a little bit about the pain that all of the victims’ families had suffered for 4 years. She could express her thanks to the citizens who were warmly welcomed her.

Here is her whole statement.

“Hello. I’m Yoon So-young, the wife of Mr. Lee Sang-ho. Even though the insurrection conspiracy case was revealed innocent, but my husband is still in prison, and it’s the fourth winter after I live as the wife of a prisoner.

The so-called insurrection conspiracy case occurred, and husbands were arrested. Even in the falsified media, the families of the victims organized an emergency planning committee and ran away wherever we could inform the truth. We could have endured hard days vaguely believing that the truth will be revealed someday.

When the public is angry with the incompetence and corruption of the regime of president Park… when the blacklist on the culture and the civil society is investigated… and when the civilian inspections by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) are being investigated in the face of day…, I wanted to say that the person who was victimized and suffered is still in prison. I was likely to feel sick due to my eager to speak something for truth.

I can’t wait to tell that six victims including my husband are still in prison in charge of insurrection conspiracy with our any conspiracy. And throughout the nation, more than 60 prisoners of conscience are also still in prison.

But it is also true that this place was careful. Since we have been subjects to taboos and exclusions for the last three years.

Although, more than 30,000 candlelight citizens here have signed and encouraged my husband and other victims including lawmaker Lee Seok-ki, for their release for over the last two weeks. I would like to take this chance to express my thanks and respect to all of you. My husband said he was not cold even in prison that has no warm thanks to the heat of a million candles spread in the square. Rather he is worrying that we, who are shouting Park’s resignation in the Square, would feel cold.

I can’t wait the day my husband and other prisoners will return to the family’s warm heart and the day Park and her ministers will take over the place where the victims are.

Thank you.”

2016 Human Rights Concert held in the place where the candlelights shout for ‘Step Down, Park’.

‘The night with poems and songs for prisoners of conscience’, which disappeared once, revived in the name of ‘Concert for human rights’. The event was reopened in 2014 in 8 years, and this year’s concert is the third event. ‘2016 Human Rights Concert’ was held at the Gwanghwamoon Square in the evening of the 10th, December, the day after Park Geun-hye’s impeachment motion was approved.

Eight people stood at the start of the event.

They are the victims on human rights.

“It is human rights not to ignore the voices of the victimized families who cry out to reveal the truth. It is human rights to protect the lives of the public and the safety of our children. ” – Choi Yoon-ah, the sister of Yun Min who is a victim of Sewol Ferry

“The Park Geun-hye regime made Han Sang-gyun a mob. The freedom of assembly and association is human rights.” – Kim Deuk-jung, Ssangyoung Motors branch in Metal Union

“It is human rights that freedom of expression is not suppressed. We dream of the democracy in which justice and truth live.” – Lee Gyung-jin, the sister of lawmaker Lee Seok-ki, one of the victims of insurrection conspiracy case.

“It is human rights to ensure the survival and dignity of farmers. The world where peasants can laugh is the world that peasants have dreamed of.” – Baek Do-ra-ji, the daughter of farmer Baek Nam-ki

“It is human rights that chaebols and the capital can not let workers die. I dream of a world without firing and lawsuit for compensation for damages jobs, and a world that the right to work is recognized with pride.” – Hong Jong-in, A-san branch in Yu-sung corporation.

“It is human rights to establish laws and systems for people with disabilities, street vendors, and people who are displaced. It is human rights to guarantee the right of the underprivileged to live.” – Park Gyung-seok, the collective movement for abolishing Disability classification system and the duty of supporting

“It is human rights not to let workers die. It is human rights to let workers do their job without diseases. The real human rights are making chaebols who provided the cause of the industrial disaster responsible.” – Kwon Young-eun, Ban Ol-lim, the committee for victims of industrial disaster in Sam Sung.

“We have kept the Constitution with the power of the people. The nation Park is no longer president, it’s human rights. ” – Na Soo-bin, teenager

On the day after the candlelight beat the president, there were cryings of the people who are victims of the world that the regime ruined and the reality that crashed into a crash. Not only the problems raised by 8 people but the government’s ‘evil deeds’ such as state-led textbooks, anti-terrorism law, humiliating negotiation of the Japanese military comfort women, fabricated espionage cases, earthquake, nuclear issues and so on, were exposed. Cultural performance was followed by singing performances of ‘4.16 Choir’ and ‘Peace Tree Choir’. The performances of ‘우리나라’ and ‘볼빨간사춘기’ electrified the participants.

The moderator said, “Promise the day when the prisoners of conscience can hold up the candlelights with citizens in this square.” and appealed saying that “The world we dream of is a world in which freedom of expression and freedom of political expression is guaranteed.” Participants answered cheerfully.

’Abolition of Park Geun-hye’s Regime’ Is the Answer, Candlelight that Slit the King’s Throat

Excerpts from “We Are Writing World History” by Prof. Kim, Min-woong, prominent writer of indepth series covering national and international issues at Pressian, who is a professor of the Global Academy for Future Civilizations at Kyung Hee University.

Citizens will no longer wait without resistance while the Constitutional Court of Korea rules on whether to accept or reject the impeachment. Question arise deeper, positions of power influence and decision on disbanding the United Progressive Party. During its deliberation, Constitutional Court must keep up with the times. Apprehensive in respect to end of citizens’ revolution, citizens reject the Constitutional Court going against the flow of the course of history. In a way, Constitutional Court itself is on trial.

Task for the second stage of the civil revolution becomes clear. First is the dismantlement of Park Geun-hye’s power. No one knows when a comprehensive dismantlement can/will complete. But the important thing is to begin the process. It is fair to conclude, for those prioritizing amending the constitution or the presidential election is avoiding the dismantlement of corrupted power at large.

The greatest challenge of the second stage is the dismantlement/liquidation of the power at large. Dodging this challenge will only reincarnate nightmares of deception and distortion of citizens’ revolution. Culminating citizens’ political frustration. In this process of liquidation, we must revisit the dissolution of Unified Progressive Party. And must submit proposals with new method and approach to the problem of dissolution of a governmental party. This is not a question of support or non-support for the Unified Progressive Party, but questioning the outrageous abuse of power that violated the spirit of the constitution.

Irony is, the same court that ruled and ordered dissolution of a political party is deliberating on the impeachment. Unified Progressive Party is innocent of charges of plotting to overthrow the government and no evidence found to so-called existence of ’RO (Revolution Organization). In fact, unqualified Constitution Court is ruling on whether to accept or reject the impeachment. Refuse sweeping this crime under the rug. Comprehensive questioning in regards to the unlawful destruction of a political party is overdue. Also, it is worth noting that one of the reasons why today’s politics is so deranged is due to undersized progressive political party.

Here is what everyone is saying: “Actual Starting Point is Now.” “Full-Fledged Revolution is On, We Are Writing World History.”

Kim, Min-woong is one of the most prominent writer of in-depth series covering national and international issues. An author of many books, contributing editor several publications, Kim Min-woong has written for Pressian since the introduction of publication. He is a journalist and professor of the Humanitas College at Kyung Hee University.

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Within days of the flawed roll-out for Trump’s Executive Orders regarding Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements and Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, the President’s promises on the campaign trail and his Inaugural Address that the US would not pursue regime change or initiate new foreign interventions and that his administration would pursue a new foreign policy based on engagement, have been called into question.  

The week began with President Trump praising, as a success, the administration’s first attack on al Qaeda in Yemen which inexplicably included special ops from UAE.  Reports state that the group of Navy Seals unexpectedly walked into an hour long fire fight which contained elements of an ambush including hand grenades and a certain amount of panic with indiscriminate gunfire; leaving one Navy Seal dead with several injured,  at least a dozen civilians dead including an eight year old girl and destroyed a $75 million Osprey – you might say the raid was more of the same kind of failure with which the US military has some long-standing familiarity.    Black Hawk Down in 1993 comes to mind.

Described by Trump press secretary Sean Spicer as a “very, very well-thought out and executed raid”, the mission began on November 7 when the Pentagon presented President Obama with a plan.  From there, the proposed raid went through all the necessary channels arriving in front of Trump Defense Secretary James Mattis on January 24^th.  Mattis approved and forwarded the plan to the White House for the President’s approval which he gave the next day at a dinner which included several key staff members including special assistants to the White House Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon and after consulting with National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn.

All of the reviews and approvals, however, did not guarantee success as there is reason to believe that the alQ stronghold was expecting an American raid with armed female and AQ snipers on a rooftop.  After the raid, anonymous U.S. military officials told Reuters that “Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations.”   In addition, Reuters quoted three unnamed US military officials  that “the attacking SEAL team found itself dropped into a reinforced al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists.”   This does not sound like a surprise raid but more like a disaster waiting to happen.

These unprecedented ‘leaks’ indicate an undercutting of the Administration by anonymous military officials who are in direct contradiction to the timeline as presented by Spicer that the entire plan had been appropriately vetted by the government’s foreign policy structure – with the exception of Rex Tillerson who had not yet been confirmed as Secretary of State.

It has been said that the mission needed to receive a green light to take advantage of a Moonless night and that the mission was to acquire certain computer hard drives with speculation that there was some urgency of obtaining the intel contained potentially embarrassing data regarding the interconnections between the terrorists and certain foreign nation which support terrorists.  In any case, it was a botched mission that was poorly planned and executed and appears to have a major security problem given the unauthorized disclosures by anonymous military officials who disagreed about what the public has been told about the raid.  So which is it – was the raid properly vetted and the right questions asked – or was it insufficiently vetted?

US CommCentral released the clip that they say was obtained from a series of videos during the raid which shows a black hooded individual giving instructions on how to make a do-it-yourself bomb.  The clip, which has no audio and its written instructions are written in perfect English, is now reported to be a decade old AQ training video.   One suspects that the President’s Monday trip to Central Command and Special Ops in Florida was not just a get-to-know-you visit.

As if that were not enough faux pas for the week,  General Flynn took an unprecedented place on center stage at a press conference sounding like the Commandant of Stalag 19, stridently warning Iran and spouting old, worn out rhetoric that the “Trump administration condemns such actions by Iran that undermines security, prosperity  and stability throughout and beyond the Middle East which places American lives at risk. As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.”

The accusations came after Iran reportedly fired a test of a medium-range ballistic missile on February 1^st  with Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan stating that “The test did not violate the nuclear deal or (U.N.) Resolution 2231″ and that “..we will not allow foreigners to interfere in our defence affairs,” striking a chord with Trump’s Inaugural statement that “it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.”

On the heels of Flynn’s rant, the Trump administration quickly announced economic sanctions on twenty five Iranian individuals and entities that have unnecessarily escalated  tensions with:

“The Islamic Republic of Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and engages in and supports violent activities that destabilize the Middle East.”

“The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate Iran’s provocations that threaten our interests. “ 

“The days of turning a blind eye to Iran’s hostile and belligerent actions toward the United States and the world community are over.”

The Flynn/Trump obsession against Iran has little basis in rational thought and is not the kind of nation-building and “forming of new alliances” that the President promised in his Inaugural address.  One reason Flynn may myopic on the subject of Iran is that they supported the insurgents in Iraq during the US invasion in 2003 but he may also be blowing smoke with the realization  that the administration must know that any serious effort to eliminate ‘radical islamic terrorists’ will be dependent upon Iran’s participation.

As Ron Paul has repeatedly suggested, Iran has every reason to want its own nuclear capability, if only as a defensive mechanism to protect itself from Israel and the US.   A spokesperson for the EU foreign policy chief in Brussels said that the “Iranian ballistic missile program was not part of the 2015 nuclear pact and hence the tests are not a violation of it.”

On February 3^rd, President Trump tweeted “Iran is playing with fire – they don’t appreciate how “kind” President Obama was to them. Not me!” to which Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tweeted “We will never, I repeat never, use our weapons against anyone, except in self-defense. Let us see if any of those who complain can make the same statement.”

If the Trump Administration believes Iran is in violation of the Plan, they have the option to initiate a dispute resolution process or to engage the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which has regular access to all Iranian nuclear facilities to verify that Iran is in compliance.     Iran says it will impose its own sanctions and release its own list of  US-related  ‘entities’ entwined with supporting terrorists.

With an imminent visit to the US, it is not outside the realm of possibility that all this Tough on Iran talk is to impress Bibi Netanyahu who hailed Flynn’s statement with “Iranian aggression must not go unanswered” which sounds reminiscent of Sen. John McCain.  As if to tone down the US inflammatory reaction,  new Defense Secretary James Mattis said he sees ‘no need to increase number of troops in the Middle East” in response to the Iranian missile crisis.

Of special interest will be how Trump deals with whatever demands Netanyahu has in his pocket and how Trump’s high regard for Israel may be affected, assuming that he is already apprised of  Israel’s role in funding ISIS in Syria and its support and participation in fomenting terrorist actions throughout the Middle East.   If Flynn/Trump are concerned with who is causing instability in the Middle East, they have no further to look than Saudi Arabia and Israel.  It is difficult to image that Trump does not already have an appreciation for Netanyahu’s expectation to continue to run the show otherwise known as US foreign policy.

As if the Trump foreign policy objectives had not already experienced a week of upsets, contradictions and overall confusion, UN Ambassador Niki Haley’s diatribe against Russia was stunning in its vitriolic attack on Russia alleging “aggressive actions of Russia” and “dire situation in eastern Ukraine is one that demands clear and strong condemnation of Russian actions.”  In addition, Haley asserted, in contradiction to President Trump’s previous positon on the Crimea that “The United States continues to condemn and call for an immediate end to the Russian occupation of Crimea” and that “Crimea is a part of Ukraine. Our Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns control of the peninsula to Ukraine.”

In his February 3^rd press conference, Trump press secretary backed up Haley with “I think Ambassador Haley made it very clear of our concern with Russia’s occupation of Crimea.  We are not — and so I think she spoke very forcefully and clearly on that.”

Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin responded that ‘the belligerent rhetoric toward Moscow over the Ukrainian crisis is nothing new” and that  “it is Kiev that has escalated the situation there”. He also cited “OSCE reports and surveillance data which places the blame squarely on the Ukrainian government and not the rebel forces.”

After the initial shock at Haley’s level of hostility, an immediate reaction was that as a former Republican Governor of South Carolina, Haley had to have a working relationship with Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC), the alter ego of Sen. John McCain who remains an irrational proponent of intervention wherever possible around the globe and that her maiden speech before the Security Council had somehow gone askew as a more combative, divisive script found its way into her file.

However, U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, met with her Ukrainian counterpart “to reaffirm the United States’ support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine,” according to a statement.

In view of another pending humanitarian disaster as a result of US intervention in Ukraine,  the best that the State Department could do, prior to Tillerson taking office, was to issue a statement calling for a ceasefire and return to implementation of the Minsk Agreement

It is reported, though unconfirmed,  that soon after her speech, Haley visited Russian Ambassador Churkin at his home, presumably to reassure him that there was a bureaucratic snafu and that US policy toward Russia was not accurately reflected in her introductory remarks.

As a result of a week of significant snafus, the Trump Administration has either caved in to neo-con pressure like Eliot Abrams (convicted of lying to Congress during Iran-Contra) who is currently vying for the Deputy Secretary position at the State Department or they are dealing with repeated staff blunders and turmoil that are seriously threatening any hope of credibility for Trump’s oft-stated foreign policy goals.

Hopes for the Trump administration are not burning brightly. Trump’s military chief, Gen. Mattis, is turning out to be true to his “mad dog” nickname. He has just declared that Iran “is the single biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world.” 

He has declared Russia to be the number one threat to the US.

He has threatened intervention in China’s territorial affairs.

I was wrong. I thought Gen. Mattis was a reasonable choice as he rejects the efficacy of torture, and, according to Trump, convinced Trump that “torture doesn’t work.” Apparently Mattis cannot reach beyond this realization to higher geo-political realizations. Trump needs to fire Mattis who has placed the Pentagon in the way of normal relations with Russia.

There is no evidence in the behavior of Iran, Russia, and China to support Gen.Mattis’ views. His definition of threat is the neoconservative one—a country capable of resisting US hegemony. This is a convenient threat for the military/security complex as it justifies an unlimited budget in order to prevail over such “threats.” It is this hegemonic impulse that is the source of terrorism.

If truth can be spoken, there are only two countries in the world with hegemonic aspirations—Israel and the US—and they are the sources of terrorism. Israel terrorizes Palestinians and has done so for about 70 years. The US terrorizes the rest of the world.

All known Muslim terrorists are creations of the US government. Al Qaeda was created by the Carter administration in order to confront the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan with jihadism. ISIS was created by the Obama/Hillary regime in order to overthrow Gaddafi in Libya and then was sent by the Obama/Hillary regime to overthrow Assad in Syria, as Trump’s national security advisor, Gen. Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency revealed on TV. The Ukrainian neo-nazis assaulting the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk were also unleashed by the Obama/Hillary overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukraine. All terror is associated with Washington and Israel.

The fact of Washington’s overthrow of Ukraine’s government is incontestable; yet large numbers of brainwashed Americans think Russia invaded Ukraine, just as they believe the fake news that Iran is a terrorist state.

The last time Iran initiated a war of aggression was in the last decade of the 18th century when Iran reconquered the Caucasus and Georgia, which Iran soon lost to Russia.

Iran in our time has done no offense except to refuse to submit to being a Washington vassal state.

Additionally, Iran, and Syria rescued by the Russians, are the only states in the Muslim world that are not US puppet states and mere vassals that are nothing in themselves, no independent foreign policy, no independent economic policy. Only Iran and Syria have independent policies.

Iran is a large country endowed with substantial energy resources. Iran has a long history going back to ancient times of independence and military prowess. Today Iran is essential to Russia as a buffer to the US created jihadism that neoconservatives plan to export to the Muslim areas of the Russian Federation. Consequently, Iran is the most inopportune of targets for Trump if he wishes to restore normal, non-threatening relations with Russia. Yet his mad dog Pentagon chief recklessly makes threatening statements alleging Iran to be a “terrorist state.”

Do we see Israel’s hand at work in the threats against Iran? Iran and Syria are the only countries in the Middle East that are not American puppet states. Syria’s army has been hardened by combat, which is what Syria’s army needs in order to stand up to US-backed Israel. Both Syria and Iran are in the way of Israel’s Zionist policy of Greater Israel—from the Nile to the Euphrates. For the Zionists, Palestine and Southern Lebanon are merely the beginning.

Israel has successfully used the corrupt British and now the corrupt Americans to reestablish themselves on lands from which God evicted them. This doesn’t speak well of the intelligence and morality of the British and US governments. But what does?

We are also hearing from Mattis and from Tillerson threats to intervene in China’s sphere of influence. Trump’s appointees appear to be unable to understand that there can be no improvement in relations with Russia if the Trump regime has Iran and China in its crosshairs.

Is there any prospect that the Trump administration can develop geo-political awareness? Is the tough-talking Trump administration tough enough to overthrow the power that Zionist Israel exercises over US foreign policy and the votes of the US Congress?

If not, more war is inevitable.

For twenty-four years—eight years of the criminal Clinton regime, eight years of the criminal Bush regime, eight years of the criminal Obama regime—the world has heard threats from Washington that have resulted in the death and destruction of millions of peoples and entire countries. The Trump administration needs to present a different Washington to the world.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

Are we able to prove the existence of a corporate media campaign to undermine British democracy? Media analysis is not hard science, but in this alert we provide compelling evidence that such a campaign does indeed exist.

Compare coverage of comments made on Syria by a spokesman for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in October 2016 and by UK foreign secretary Boris Johnson in January 2017.

Boris Johnson’s ‘Triple Flip’ On Assad

There is little need for us to remind readers just how often Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has been described as ‘a monster’ and ‘a dictator’ in the UK press. Assad has of course routinely been reviled as a tyrant and genocidal killer, compared with Hitler and held responsible, with Putin, for the mass killing and devastation in Syria. The role of the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and others has often been ignored altogether.

Assad has been UK journalism’s number one hate figure for years, on a par with earlier enemies like Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi (arguably, Assad is essentially the same archetypal ‘Enemy’ in the minds of many corporate journalists).

In December 2015, the Daily Telegraph reported that Boris Johnson accepted Assad was a monster, but that he had made a further remarkable comment:

Let’s deal with the Devil: we should work with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Johnson wrote that ‘we cannot afford to be picky about our allies’. And so:

Am I backing the Assad regime, and the Russians, in their joint enterprise to recapture that amazing site [Palmyra from occupation by Isis]? You bet I am.

Seven months later, after he had been made UK foreign secretary, Johnson exactly reversed this position:

I will be making clear my view that the suffering of the Syrian people will not end while Assad remains in power. The international community, including Russia, must be united on this.

Six months further forward in time, in January 2017, Johnson’s position flipped once again. The Independent reported:

President Bashar al-Assad should be allowed to stand for election to remain in power in Syria, Boris Johnson has said in a significant shift of the Government’s position.

Johnson was not coy about admitting the reason for this further flip:

I see downsides and I see risks in us going in, doing a complete flip flop, supporting the Russians, Assad. But I must also be realistic about the way the landscape has changed and it may be that we will have to think afresh about how to handle this.

The changed ‘landscape’, of course, is a new Trump presidency that is famously opposed to Obama’s war for regime change in Syria. The Mail reported how Johnson had recalled a trip to Baghdad after the Iraq war when a local Christian had told him:

It is better sometimes to have a tyrant than not to have a ruler at all.

Johnson’s observation on this comment:

There was wisdom… in what he said and that I’m afraid is the dilemma…

When we at Media Lens have even highlighted the US-UK role in arming, funding and fighting the Syrian war, and have discussed the extent of US-UK media propaganda – while holding not even the tiniest candle for Assad – we have been crudely denounced as ‘pro-Assad useful idiots’, as ‘just another leftist groupuscle shilling for tyrants’ that ‘defends repression by President Assad’.

Other commentators have suffered similar abuse for merely pointing out, as Patrick Cockburn recently noted in the London Review of Books, that ‘fabricated news and one-sided reporting have taken over the news agenda [on Syria] to a degree probably not seen since the First World War’.

Nothing could be easier, then, than to imagine the corporate media lining up to roast Boris Johnson for what simply had to be, from their perspective, the ultimate example of someone who ‘defends repression by President Assad’: actually suggesting that the media’s great hate figure might contest elections and even remain in power.

We can imagine any number of spokespeople for Syrian ‘rebel’ groups, human rights organisations and others, enthusiastically supplying damning quotes for news and comment pieces. We can imagine the headlines:

Anger at Johnson’s “shameful apologetics” for Syria regime

Boris slammed for “monstrous” U-Turn On Assad

Johnson’s sympathy for Assad the devil shames us all

And so on…

A second critical theme cries out for inclusion. Donald Trump has been relentlessly lambasted as racist, sexist, fascist, and in fact as a more exotically coiffured version of Hitler. Given that Johnson openly admits the UK government has reversed policy on hate figure Assad to appease hate figure Trump, the headlines are again easy to imagine:

UK Government slammed for “selling out ethics and the Syrian people” to appease Trump regime

“Britons never, never will be slaves”? Boris Johnson’s bended knee before Trump shames us all

And so on…

Instead, these were the actual headlines reporting Johnson’s policy shift:

The Telegraph (January 27):

Armed Forces could have peace role in Syria, suggests Boris

The Guardian (January 26):

Boris Johnson signals shift in UK policy on Syria’s Assad

A comment piece in the Guardian was titled:

Theresa May looks for new friends among the world’s strongmen; Saturday’s meeting with Erdogan in Turkey shows how Britain is re-ordering its international priorities after the Brexit vote

No talk of apologetics, shame, or supping with the devil; just Britain ‘re-ordering its international priorities’.

The i-Independent (January 27):

Johnson signals shift in policy over Assad’s future

The Times (January 27):

Johnson: Britain may accept Assad staying in power

The headline above an opinion piece in the same paper (February 1) merely counselled caution:

May will have to take a stand over Russia. In this new age of realpolitik, Britain must beware bending to Trump’s shifting foreign policy

The article was careful not to criticise Johnson: ‘It would be wrong to pin’ his Syrian ‘triple flip’ on ‘Borisian dilettantism. We have entered an era of intensified realpolitik… That means rethinking everything…’

The Sun (January 27), having raged apoplectically at Assad for years, would have been expected to rage now at Johnson. The headline:

UK TROOPS FOR SYRIA

The only comment:

In a break with UK policy [Johnson] also said a political solution might see tyrant Bashar al-Assad allowed to stand in UN-supervised elections.

The Daily Mail (January 26):

Assad could run in a future Syrian presidential election, Boris Johnson says in shift of UK foreign policy

Clearly, then, there was nothing the least bit excitable or outraged in any of these headlines – the news was presented as undramatic and uncontroversial.

But the point we want to emphasis is that, in fact, none of these news reports contained a single word of criticism of Johnson. They included not one comment from any critical source attacking Johnson for siding with the press’s great bête noire of the last several years, Assad, in bowing to their great bête orange, Trump.

In an important recent book, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh refers to the present era of corporate-driven climate crisis as ‘The Great Derangement’. For almost 12,000 years, since the last Ice Age, humanity has lived through a period of relative climate stability known as the Holocene. When Homo sapiens shifted, for the most part, from a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence to an agriculture-based life, towns and cities grew, humans went into space and the global population shot up to over seven billion people.

Today, many scientists believe that we have effectively entered a new geological era called the Anthropocene during which human activities have ‘started to have a significant global impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems’. Indeed, we are now faced with severe, human-induced climate instability and catastrophic loss of species: the sixth mass extinction in four-and-a-half billion years of geological history, but the only one to have been caused by us.

Last Thursday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their symbolic Doomsday Clock forward thirty seconds, towards apocalypse. It is now two and a half minutes to midnight, the closest since 1953. Historically, the Doomsday Clock represented the threat of nuclear annihilation. But global climate change is now also recognised as an ‘extreme danger’.

Future generations, warns Ghosh, may well look back on this time and wonder whether humanity was deranged to continue on a course of business-as-usual. In fact, many people alive today already think so. It has become abundantly clear that governments largely pay only lip service to the urgent need to address global warming (or dismiss it altogether), while they pursue policies that deepen climate chaos. As climate writer and activist Bill McKibben points out, President Trump has granted senior energy and environment positions in his administration to men who:

know nothing about science, but they love coal and oil and gas – they come from big carbon states like Oklahoma and Texas, and their careers have been lubed and greased with oil money.

Rex Tillerson, Trump’s US Secretary of State, is the former chairman and CEO of oil giant, ExxonMobil. He once told his shareholders that cutting oil production is ‘not acceptable for humanity’, adding: ‘What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?’

As for Obama’s ‘legacy’ on climate, renowned climate scientist James Hansen only gives him a ‘D’ grade. Obama had had a ‘golden opportunity’. But while he had said ‘the right words’, he had avoided ‘the fundamental approach that’s needed’. Contrast this with the Guardian view on Obama’s legacy that he had ‘allowed America to be a world leader on climate change’. An article in the Morning Star by Ian Sinclair highlighted the stark discrepancy between Obama’s actual record on climate and fawning media comment, notably by the BBC and the Guardian:

Despite the liberal media’s veneration of the former US president, Obama did very little indeed to protect the environment.

And so while political ‘leaders’ refuse to change course to avoid disaster, bankers and financial speculators continue to risk humanity’s future for the sake of making money; fossil fuel industries go on burning the planet; Big Business consumes and pollutes ecosystems; wars, ‘interventions’ and arms deals push the strategic aims of geopolitical power, all wrapped in newspeak about ‘peace’, ‘security’ and ‘democracy’; and corporate media promote and enable it all, deeply embedded and complicit as they are. The ‘Great Derangement’ indeed.

Consider, for example, the notorious US-based Koch Brothers who, as The Real News Network notes, ‘have used their vast wealth to ensure the American political system takes no action on climate change.’ Climate scientist Michael Mann is outspoken:

They have polluted our public discourse. They have skewed media coverage of the science of climate change. They have paid off politicians.

He continues:

The number of lives that will be lost because of the damaging impacts of climate change – in the hundreds of millions. […] To me, it’s not just a crime against humanity, it’s a crime against the planet.

But the Koch Brothers are just the tip of a state-corporate system that is on course to drive Homo sapiens towards a terminal catastrophe.

Earlier this month, the world’s major climate agencies confirmed 2016 as the hottest since modern records began. The global temperature is now 1C higher than preindustrial times, and the last three years have seen the record broken successively – the first time this has happened.

Towards the end of 2016, scientists reported ‘extraordinarily hot’ Arctic conditions. Danish and US researchers were ‘surprised and alarmed by air temperatures peaking at what they say is an unheard-of 20C higher than normal for the time of year.’ One of the scientists said:

These temperatures are literally off the charts for where they should be at this time of year. It is pretty shocking.

Another researcher emphasised:

This is faster than the models. It is alarming because it has consequences.

These ‘consequences’ will be terrible. Scientists have warned that increasingly rapid Arctic ice melt ‘could trigger uncontrollable climate change at global level’.

It gets worse. A new study suggests that global warming is on course to raise global sea level by between six and nine metres, wiping out coastal cities and settlements around the world. Mann describes the finding, with classic scientific understatement, as ‘sobering’ and adds that:

we may very well already be committed to several more metres of sea level rise when the climate system catches up with the carbon dioxide we’ve already pumped into the atmosphere.

It gets worse still.

The Paris Climate Accord of 2015 repeated the international commitment to keep global warming below 2C. Even this limited rise would threaten life as we know it. When around a dozen climate scientists were asked for their honest opinion as to whether this target could be met, not one of them thought it likely. Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, was most adamant:

there is not a cat in hell’s chance [of keeping below 2C].

But wait, because there’s even worse news. Global warming could well be happening so fast that it’s ‘game over’. The Earth’s climate could be so sensitive to greenhouse gases that we may be headed for a temperature rise of more than 7C within a lifetime. Mark Lynas, author of the award-winning book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, was ‘shocked’ by the researchers’ study, describing it as ‘the apocalyptic side of bad’

La última semana del mes de enero tiene un especial significado para los cubanos y, por supuesto, para los hombres y mujeres progresistas de todo el mundo. El día 25, este año, se cumplió el segundo mes del fallecimiento de Fidel Castro (¿quién podría olvidar el 25 noviembre de 2016?)  El 28 de enero, día del natalicio de José Martí, los cubanos rinden especial culto a su legado.

El 27 diciembre de 2016, la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular en Cuba sometió a debate  un proyecto para legalizar el deseo de Fidel Castro de rechazar cualquier tendencia de “culto a la personalidad”. La Ley emitida refrendó su voluntad de no utilizar su nombre “para denominar instituciones, plazas, parques, avenidas, calles y otros lugares públicos, así como “cualquier tipo de condecoración, reconocimiento o título honorífico” o  “para erigir monumentos, bustos, estatuas, tarjas conmemorativas u otros homenajes similares”.

De igual modo,  prohibió “el uso de denominaciones, imágenes o alusiones de cualquier naturaleza referidas a la figura del Comandante en Jefe, Fidel Castro Ruz; su utilización como marca u otros signos distintivos, nombre de dominio y diseños con fines comerciales o publicitarios”, con una sola excepción: la utilización de su nombre para denominar en un futuro alguna institución que llegase a crearse conforme a la ley para el estudio de su invaluable trayectoria en la historia de la nación.

Diversas opiniones surgieron en el Parlamento acerca de cómo honrar el deseo de Fidel, expresado por su hermano Raúl Castro. Algunos diputados pusieron énfasis en la necesidad de mantener, estudiar y difundir el legado de Fidel entre aquellas generaciones presentes y futuras no familiarizadas con la Cuba del líder histórico de la Revolución Cubana. Sin embargo, tanto ese debate como la adopción de la Ley fueron opacados por los medios corporativos estadounidenses.

Sin embargo, cuando el 3 diciembre de 2016 Raúl Castro anunció públicamente en Santiago de Cuba el deseo de Fidel, esto fue mencionado por los medios con una nota al pie de página y algunos comentarios cuestionando, incluso, la sinceridad de su deseo.  Quizás dichos medios y los círculos de poder estadounidenses no creyeran que esa voluntad suya fuese institucionalizada en una Ley.

Desde el 25 noviembre Fidel venció dos veces a Estados Unidos: triunfó el día de su muerte puesto que nunca fue derrotado por los gobiernos de ese país, y el 27 diciembre, en el Parlamento cubano, hizo pedazos la noción preconcebida de que los revolucionarios están inmersos en dinero y gloria, como sí lo está cualquier figura del status quo estadounidense.

Los medios mencionados no fueron conscientes pero, aún si lo fuesen, no tomaron en serio una frase del Apóstol de la Independencia de Cuba, José Martí, que Fidel citaba con frecuencia: “toda la gloria del mundo cabe en un grano de maíz”. Así como lo hizo con todos sus preceptos, Fidel llevó a la práctica este postulado martiano. No es posible entonces difamarlo, como hubiesen deseado hacerlo, como parte de la continua campaña de desinformación puesta en marcha contra él y la revolución cubana.

¿Qué hay en Fidel que atrae tanta animosidad de Estados Unidos, mientras recibe, a la par,  la lealtad  del pueblo cubano y de millones de personas de todo el mundo que lo consideran un héroe? ¿Cuál fue el  imperialismo que desafió, desde 1953, y hasta el último momento de su vida, junto al pueblo cubano?

Tomemos como ejemplo el período hacia el final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, cuando iniciaba su desarrollo político y su acción. Aparte de la dominación neocolonial norteamericana en Cuba -incluyendo los períodos de dictadura-, Estados Unidos fue responsable de lo ocurrido en Hiroshima y Nagasaki.

Un reciente documental de la televisión francesa sobre la Segunda Guerra Mundial, basado en entrevistas de los sobrevivientes, muestra cómo en Cherburgo, Francia, las Fuerzas Armadas estadounidenses, actuando supuestamente como liberadoras, utilizaron sus armas para violar y agredir a mujeres francesas y sus familias.

Ello fue sintomático, tanto en ese país como en otros lugares de Europa. No se pretende negar el papel  que jugaron  los Estados Unidos y sus fuerzas armadas para derrotar al fascismo, ni desconocer que otros poderes actuaron de forma similar o peor, como los fascistas japoneses contra el pueblo chino.

Sin embargo, al  a ver de nuevo este documental, desde la perspectiva de 2017, es importante señalar que Estados Unidos se presenta a sí mismo como el país más civilizado del mundo, con el peso de llevar la “democracia” y los “valores estadounidenses” al resto del mundo.

El documental pone en evidencia cómo ese aspecto nefasto de la Segunda Guerra Mundial fue sólo un atisbo del modo que Estados Unidos pudo incurrir en tales atrocidades tras esa contienda bélica. Ese mismo documental, al abordar la resistencia francesa durante la guerra, muestra cómo Franklin Delano Roosevelt y Winston Churchill intentaron apartar a Charles de Gaulle y a la Resistencia de la liberación de Francia.

La excusa elaborada es muy familiar para nosotros actualmente: Charles de Gaulle -pretendían los aliados-, era un militar y, por consiguiente, un “dictador”.

De Corea a Vietnam, una visita a ese país puso de manifiesto el conocimiento público de las atrocidades perpetradas por las fuerzas estadounidenses -comparables a las del nazismo alemán- en esa nación asiática.

De 1948 hasta la fecha, con la asistencia de Estados Unidos, Israel viene llevando a cabo un genocidio  sin tregua contra el pueblo palestino. Los cubanos conocen ese genocidio y saben que el bloqueo de Estados Unidos contra Cuba constituye un genocidio declarado explícitamente desde 1961, cuyo objetivo es pretender llevarlos al sometimiento a través del hambre.

Cuba y Fidel no solamente combatieron el régimen de segregación racial del apartheid en África, respaldado por Estados Unidos, sino que además apoyaron su liberación. En América Latina son incontables las intervenciones y atrocidades cometidas por Estados Unidos: Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Brasil, Chile y, más recientemente, Honduras (2009), Brasil (2016), y Venezuela en 2002 y desde abril del 2013.

Fidel Castro se enfrentó a todo eso y fue un abierto opositor de las agresiones norteamericanas con drones y otros medios contra siete países: Afganistán, Irak, Siria, Yemen, Libia, Pakistán y Somalia. Washington ha lanzado numerosas bombas en esa área del mundo, incluso sobre la población civil.

Es bien conocido que Estados Unidos tiene instaladas 800 bases militares en 150 países. Sin embargo, Cuba no es uno de ellos.  Guantánamo es la única base de Estados Unidos en una porción del territorio cubano, instalada al amparo de la Enmienda Platt, “bochornosa ley del Congreso de Estados Unidos a principios del siglo XX”, mediante la imposición de un leonino tratado.

Todas esas intimidaciones, apenas disimuladas, contra todos los pueblos del mundo, no lograron nunca doblegar a Cuba ni a Fidel; como tampoco las agresiones y amenazas contra Rusia respecto a Ucrania, y otros temas, lograron socavar la solidaridad de la isla con Rusia.

Fidel Castro hizo frente a todo esto y más. Sin embargo, en lugar de buscar  reconocimiento a lo que constituye la más larga y duradera resistencia frente al mayor poderío militar y económico del mundo, siempre rechazó tal reconocimiento.

Si una figura política mundial del siglo XX e inicios del siglo XXI merece estatuas, bustos, plazas y parques con su nombre en el pequeño país -que lo vio nacer a él y a la Revolución Cubana- es Fidel; si alguien irradió su sentimiento antiimperialista en admiradores de todo el mundo, fue él. Nunca hubo duda de que Fidel logró que esto sucediera. Al rechazar reconocimientos y honores, se mantuvo fiel a José Martí y a su enseñanza: “toda la gloria del mundo cabe en un grano de maíz”.

Arnold August

Arnold August: Periodista y conferencista canadiense, el autor de los libros Democracy in Cuba and the 1997–98 Elections y Cuba y sus vecinos: Democracia en movimiento.

En noviembre de 2014, el líder de Estado Islámico, Abu-Bakr al-Bagdadí o el califa Ibrahim, declaró que el mullah Omar: “era un simple señor de la guerra analfabeto, que no estaba preparado para dirigir la creación de un Estado Islámico en Asía Central”.

El fundador y jefe del Movimiento Talibán, para entonces llevaba más de un año muerto, por entonces la noticia era el secreto mejor guardado, por los comandantes talibanes, por lo que el desafió de al-Bagdadí, igual tuvo consecuencias.

Abu-Bakr al-Bagdadí, con la clara voluntad de rivalizar con el movimiento Talibán afgano, y aprovechando, la pugna interna que los talibanes pakistaní mantenían desde finales del 2013, tras la muerte de su jefe, Hakeemullah Mehsud, abatido por un dron norteamericano en la provincia de Waziristán del Norte.

Al-Bagdadí se aprovecha de la debilidad del nuevo líder talibán Mullah Maulana Fazlullah, para crear el Walayat e Khorasan, que incluían Afganistán, Pakistán, India y Bangladesh, colocando en su jefatura Hafiz Saeed Khan, (muerto en julio de 2016)

Fue por esto que a partir de enero de 2015 el Movimiento Tehreek e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) comienza a sufrir una importante ola de deserciones las que estuvieron a punto de hacerlo desaparecer.

Fueron varias las organizaciones que integraban el TTP, como Jamaat-ul-Ahrar o Lashkar-e-Islam, que realizaron juramento de lealtad o bayat a al-Bagdadí.

La más poderosa de las organizaciones Mehsud Mujahideen o Movimiento de los Talibanes en Waziristán del Sur, de la que Khalid Mehsud (muerto en noviembre de 2015), tomó el mando tras la muerte del Hakemullah, si bien esta facción nunca se incorporó a Walayat e Khorasan, se separó del TTP, en enero de 2014, por disputa con el liderazgo de Mullah Fazlullah.

El Mehsud Mujahideen concentró sus operaciones en la región Waziristán del Sur. Otro de los grupos que emigró del TTP y opera de manera independiente es Baitullah Mehsud capitaneado por Sheheryar Mehsud, radicado en Waziristán, del norte.

Por su parte Hafiz Mohamded Saeed (no confundir con el líder de Estado Islámico ya nombrado Hafiz Saeed Khan) quien controla una importantísima organización de bien público, Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD,) prácticamente un estado autónomo dentro de Pakistán, que en realidad enmascara una organización terrorista llamada Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). El JuD posee un extenso complejo en Muridke, al noroeste de Lahore, en la provincia de Punjab, una ciudad al que no tienen acceso las autoridades pakistaníes.

Hafiz Mohamded Saeed está sometido a arresto domiciliario desde este último 31 de enero, por las autoridades de Islamabad acusado, por el gobierno hindú de haber sido el cerebro de los ataques de 2008, en la ciudad de Bombay, que dejaron 166 muertos. Hafiz Mohamded Saeed ya estuvo bajo arresto domiciliario entre 2001 y 2008, sin que sus actividades pudieran ser interrumpidas.

Según los seguidores de Saeed, esta nueva detención se produjo por presiones del presidente norteamericano Donald Trump, quien habría intercedido a pedido de Nueva Delhi.

A pesar de que Washington ofrece una recompensa de 10 millones de dólares por Hafiz Mohamded Saeed y existe una alerta roja de Interpol para su captura, por los atentados de Bombay, Saeed transita libremente por Pakistán, participa en reuniones públicas y de actos donde figura como el principal orador. Según las autoridades indias la organización Lashkar-e-Taiba controlada por Saeed, es responsable además de lo de Bombay, de otros ataques terroristas en la Cachemira hindú.

Tanto Washington como Nueva Delhi, han presionado a Islamabad para desmátele su red terrorista Lashkar-e-Taiba y la organización “humanitaria” Jamaat-ud-Dawa, que sirve de gran tapadera a la primera. Hafiz Mohamded Saeed “reclamado”, desde hace más de diez años por los Estados Unidos, dentro de Pakistán en un intocable.

Existen fuertes indicios de que la organización Lashkar-e-Taiba, es utilizado por la Inter-Services Intelligence o ISI la inteligencia pakistaní a la hora de realizar operaciones militares y terroristas encubiertas en los territorios en disputa con India, como Jammu y la Cachemira.

Lashkar-e-Taiba es una de las más poderosas organizaciones de Asia Central, y se la considera desde hace mucho tiempo un aliado de al-Qaeda. Lashkar-e-Taiba ha llegado a tener centros de entrenamiento en la provincia afgana de Kunar, en las provincias pakistaníes de Khyber y Pakhtunkhwa y en la Cachemira pakistaní.

La red Jamaat-ud-Dawa a lo largo del país cuenta con hospitales, clínicas, escuelas, mezquitas, madrassas entre otros servicios. Su financiación, más allá de las fuentes locales, provienen, como siempre en estos casos, de las monarquías wahabitas del golfo, particularmente Arabia Saudita y Qatar.

Tras el terremoto de 2005, en Cachemira y las inundaciones de 2010 Jamaat-ud-Dawa tuvo mucha más presencia que el propio estado pakistaní. Atendiendo con sus recursos a millones de damnificados.

Viejos aliados, viejos rencores

La presencia del Daesh o el Walayat e Khorasan ha comenzado a desdibujarse, el nuevo giro que está tomando la lucha del Talibán en Afganistán, que durante 2016 se ha afianzado en más de la tercera parte del país y tiene bajo su control más de 2 millones de habitantes, ha dado nuevos impulsos a sus hermanos pakistaníes.

Además de las fuertes derrotas que el Daesh, está sufriendo en Siria, Irak y Libia.

Este último dos de febrero el Tehreek e-Taliban Pakistan anunció que la poderosa Mehsud Mujahideen, también conocido como el Movimiento de los Talibanes en Waziristán del Sur se ha reincorporado a su seno.

En mayo de 2015, después de poco menos de un año, la temible, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, también se reincorporó al TTP. Aunque esta última organización ha operado con un importante grado de autonomía. Como bien lo demuestra el ataque realizado por uno de sus comandos contra los visitantes a un parque de la ciudad de Lahore, cuando una multitud festejaban la Pascua cristiana en abril pasado, en que murieron 72 personas mayoritariamente niños y resultaron más de 300 heridos.

Los grandes ataques de estos últimos meses fueron revindicados tanto por el talibán como por el Daesh, como el de agosto pasado en Quetta, que dejó 71 muertos, lo que hace más difícil discernir quien está en realidad con más operatividad.

Según se cree el ataque de septiembre contra la base militar India que dejo una veintena de muertos fue obra de algunos dirigentes medios que habían abandonado el TTP y se incorporaron a Walayat e Khorasan.

Otro de los letales terroristas que cabalgan entre Estado Islámico y El Talibán es al que la prensa califica como “el hombre más odiado de Pakistán” Khalifa Umar Mansour, el comandante del grupo Tehreek-i-Taliban Geedar, a quien se le adjudica de haber organizado el ataque a la escuela de Peshawar, en diciembre de 2014, la masacre que terminó con la vida de 141 personas, de ellos, 132 eran niños o el ataque contra la universidad de Bacha Khan en el Charsadda, donde quedó un saldo de 25 muertos. A Khalifa Umar Mansour también conocido como naray, voz pastún que significa flaco, fue quien en 2012 dio la orden de asesinar a la militante Malala Yousafzai, Nobel de la Paz 2014.

Otros de los líderes talibanes, que ha tomado gran injerencia a partir del reagrupamiento, es Omar Khalid al- Khurasani, de fluidas relaciones con al-Qaeda y particularmente con su jefe Ayman al-Zawahiri. Al-Khurasani está obsesionado con conseguir armas nucleares, lo que en un país, con los niveles de corrupción oficial no sería nada descabellado, de creer posible.

Teniendo en cuenta la escalada en aumento del talibán afgano, en estos últimos dos años, que está obligando a los Estados Unidos a rediseñar su política respecto Afganistán y este reagrupamiento en Pakistán, esta convirtiendo nuevamente, a ese rincón de Asia Central, en el epicentro de la violencia integrista.

Guadi Calvo

Guadi Calvo: Escritor y periodista argentino, analista Internacional especializado en África, Medio Oriente y Asia Central.

Desde que, en 1525, los primeros corsarios ingleses pusieron pie en la isla de Terranova (hoy dominio canadiense), los teólogos protestantes empezaron a cocinar la tesis del Destino manifiesto, que el Altísimo, según su convicción, habría endosado a la potencia anglosajona.

A Isabel I la encantó la idea y alentó la aventura de conquista de nuevos espacios transoceánicos. En homenaje a tan encumbrada dama, identificada como La Reina virgen, a una entonces colonia que ahora es estado de la Unión Americana se le registró como Virginia.

La propia Inglaterra y Francia auspiciaron a las colonias norteamericanas en su movimiento de Independencia (1776) de lo que hoy son los Estados Unidos.

En 1783, el Conde de Aranda (Pedro Pablo Abarca de Boleo), cursó un memorial al rey Carlos III de España:

“Esta República (Estados Unidos) nació pigmea. Llegará el día en que crezca y se torne gigante y sólo pensará en su engrandecimiento (…) El primer paso será apoderarse de las Floridas a fin de dominar el Golfo de México. Aspirará a la conquista de nuestro Imperio, que no podremos defender contra una potencia formidable”.

En 1817, asumió la presidencia de los Estados Unidos James Monroe. Instituyó la doctrina que lleva su nombre y, tres siglos después de la lucubración protestante que citamos en las primeras líneas de esta entrega, el Destino Manifiesto tuvo como marca de la casa América para los americanos. Entendida como “América, la Unión Americana, en la que cabe todo el hemisferio.

Dios bendiga a América. Así suelen despedir sus discursos los presidentes norteamericanos cuando se dirigen a sus compatriotas en las ocasiones más solemnes.

¿Por qué sorprenderse ahora de que Donald Trump agite las almas de los estadunidenses que votaron por él, con la promesa de volver a hacer grandes a los Estados Unidos?

Humillar el orgullo de México

Demócratas o republicanos en la Casa Blanca, el santo y seña es el mismo: Al sur del río Bravo tenemos el patio trasero.

En 1981, se instaló en el Salón Oval el republicano Donald Reagan. Con la inglesa Margaret Thatcher, proclamaron la Revolución conservadora, placenta del proyecto neoliberal y punto de partida de la globalización comercial.

Por aquellos días, alguien escuchó en la Casa Blanca la consigna: Humillar el orgullo de México.

Con el primer periodo de Reagan, coincidió el mandato de Miguel de la Madrid. Desde su campaña, en el mensaje de toma de posesión y en su Plan Nacional de Desarrollo, De la Madrid postuló, entre siete, la tesis del Nacionalismo revolucionario.

Esa tesis sería el eje en el que se sustentaría la defensa de la soberanía nacional.

Congruente con esa doctrina, De la Madrid fincó su diplomacia activa en el Derecho Internacional, que consagra los principios de No Intervención entre Estados, la libre determinación y la solución pacífica de los conflictos.

De la Madrid auspició la pacificación de la desgarrada América Central. De su iniciativa, surgió el Grupo Contadora, en el que los gobiernos pares reconocieron el liderazgo de México.

Reagan respondió con la Operación Irán-Contra para el derrocamiento del gobierno sandinista de Nicaragua.

Soberanía Nacional, un dogma pasado de moda

El ciclo del Nacionalismo revolucionario se fracturó en el siguiente sexenio mexicano, a finales del segundo mandato de Reagan.

Llegó al poder la neoliberal Generación del cambio, liderada por Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Entonces, el discurso público, en un ominoso viraje retórico, codificó como undogma obsoleto la soberanía nacional.

Para efecto del tema que nos ocupa, está el Tratado de Libre Comercio con los Estados Unidos y Canadá (TLC, hoy TLCAN), el punto de inflexión en la Historia de México, de cuyas consecuencias hoy pagamos la factura.

El TLC, que se presentó inicialmente como Acuerdo, empezó a negociase con la Casa Blanca de Reagan y se selló con su sucesor Bill Clinton.

Una perversa omisión y una cláusula secreta

Dos acotaciones, no precisamente accesorias, deben puntualizarse: 1) Conocida ya la experiencia de la Europa unificada en la materia, lúcidos mexicanos propusieron que en el TLC, con la libertad de Comercio e Inversión, se acompañara el libre tránsito de mano de obra entre los países firmantes. Esos mexicanos no fueron escuchados, y

2) En la biblioteca de El Capitolio, constan testimonios de que la representación de Salinas de Gortari introdujo secretamente la cláusula de los hidrocarburos mexicanos que, obviamente, no apareció en el texto que fue entregado para su sanción al Senado de la República.

¿En qué consiste el pago de factura del que hablamos líneas antes?

Se constitucionalizó la Reforma Energética (RE) en el peor de los mundos posibles, el de la crisis de los precios del crudo: Las insuficiencias y deficiencias de la instrumentación de la RE, dejaron al garete la economía nacional y las finanzas del Estado.

Ahora aflora el costo de la omisión en la negociación del TLC de 1993: No se atendió la propuesta de que se defendiera el libre tránsito de mano de obra.

La raíz de todos los males

Causa efecto: El TLC, con el agregado de la contrarreforma agraria, violentó la economía rural (tanto como la de la pequeña y mediana industria nacional) y disparó la expulsión de mexicanos hacia los Estados Unidos.

Una observación indispensable. 1993: En los días en que se negociaba el TLC, surgió el movimiento América Estamos Unidos. Su paladín fue Ross Perot. Sus proclamas: ¡Norteamericano: Salva tu trabajo… salva tu país”.  La Generación del Cambio no escuchó. Estaba ocupada en colocar a México en “las Grandes Ligas”.

Ha llegado a la Casa Blanca el sedicente depositario del Destino Manifiesto. Desde su campaña en las primarias y en la campaña constitucional, advirtió que el TLCAN o se negociaba o se derogaba. Ya en la Casa Blanca, hace del discurso electoral acción de gobierno. En casi dos años, los conductores del Estado mexicano no escucharon. No tuvieron, no tienen, Plan B.

En esos dos años, Washington militarizó su frontera sur. Para entonces, ya eran más de tres millones de mexicanos deportados. Los responsables de la Política Exterior mexicana no se inmutaron. Ahora están que no los calienta ni el sol: Reaccionan con palos de ciego.

Meyer: Urge líder que recupera el nacionalismo mexicano

Tenemos a la vista un texto actual que no tiene desperdicio. Se le pregunta al sociólogo, historiador y politólogo mexicano, Lorenzo Meyer, ¿en qué momento estamos?

Meyer responde, “en el peor momento” y reflexiona: “En toda crisis, hay una buena oportunidad. Si hay un líder que recupere el nacionalismo, los sacrificios de aceptarán”.

La piel se enchina al leerse esta especulación de Lorenzo Meyer: “Dentro de algunos años, tal vez le pongamos una estatua a Trump como el padre de nuestra segunda independencia”.

Electrizante la propuesta, tiene un alto grado de racionalidad. Podría tomársele la palabra. O para qué se convoca a la unidad nacional, si no es para restaurar nuestra soberanía.

Mouris Salloum George

Mouris Salloum George: Director del Club de Periodistas de México A.C.

El gobierno ucraniano parece crear un escenario, en el que provoca la guerra en Donbass, se presenta luego como víctima y trata de involucrar a la Unión Europea (UE) y, sobre todo, a la nueva administración estadounidense.

Desde el 28 de enero, después de violar decenas de veces y a diario la última de las 35 treguas pactadas en los últimos años, -esta vez en septiembre de 2016-, el ejército ucraniano inició escaramuzas que tenían un abierto carácter de provocación en Donbass.

En lugar de realizar una ofensiva con grandes unidades, Kiev apenas empleaba dos escuadras reforzadas con blindados y apoyadas con fuego de morteros para atacar posiciones aisladas de las fuerzas de autodefensa de la autoproclamada república de Donetsk.

Con ello, consideran analistas, se buscaba una reacción bélica de los rebeldes de Donetsk para presentarlos como agresores ante los ojos de la opinión pública, como ocurrió con la sorpresiva interrupción de una visita del presidente ucraniano, Piotro Poroshenko, a Alemania.

A diferencia de Washington, financiador y creador en su momento de las protestas violentas en Kiev entre noviembre de 2013 y febrero de 2014, así como promotor de la guerra en el Donbass, Berlín y París optaron por buscar a Moscú para un diálogo directo con Poroshenko.

Pero era necesario convencer a potencias occidentales, que por lo general aportan dinero para la desfallecida economía ucraniana, y, como afirmó recientemente el mandatario ruso, Vladimir Putin, presentarse una vez como víctima ante la opinión pública internacional.

Aún cuando el segundo al mando de las fuerzas armadas ucranianas elogió a sus tropas por avanzar paso a paso para reconquistar Donbass, Poroshenko insistía, nuevamente, en acusar a Moscú de ser la responsable de la nueva escalada en el sureste ucraniano.

Una estrategia de la guerra, dirigida, entre otros hechos a desviar la atención de la paupérrima situación de la economía ucraniana, fue situar tanques o sistemas coheteriles entre edificios de zonas residenciales o donde está prohibido por mutuo acuerdo.

Tales acciones, algunas de las cuales ocurrieron ante la mirada indiferente o cómplice de la misión de observadores de la Organización para la Seguridad y Cooperación en Europa (OSCE), buscaban, como todo parece indicar, una respuesta bélica de los rebeldes en esas áreas.

Desde la UE, la dirección de la OSCE y de la ONU, cuyo Consejo de Seguridad preside Ucrania desde la semana pasada, solo se escuchan llamados generales para que las partes enfrentadas pongan fin de inmediato a los combates, sin señalar a los culpables de la crisis.

La presidencia ucraniana afirmó, incluso, que en una conversación telefónica de Poroshenko y su similar norteamericano, Donald Trump, ambos llamaron al fin inmediato de los enfrentamientos y situaron el diálogo como única salida al conflicto en el sureste ucraniano.

El vicejefe de la comandancia militar de Donetsk, Eduard Basurin, denunció que Ucrania concentra cada vez más tropas y medios de combate para formar una fuerza de choque a lo largo de toda la línea de confrontación en Donetsk que alista sistemas coheteriles Tochka-U.

De ser así, Kiev, a donde en febrero de 2014 llegó al poder un gobierno golpista de la derecha con respaldo neofascista, viola el acuerdo pactado en febrero de 2015, en Minsk, para que ambas partes retiraran su armamento pesado de la línea de enfrentamientos.

Kiev para nada ofrece signos de querer cumplir con los acuerdos de Minsk, pero amenaza con aplicar legislaciones internas que podrían empeorar aún más el tema de la integridad territorial ucraniana.

Luego del golpe de Estado, Donetsk y Lugansk rechazaron la asonada y su intento de eliminar el ruso como lengua oficial lo que las llevó a celebrar sendos referendos sobre independencia, en marzo de 2014. Un mes después Kiev empezó contra ellas una operación de castigo.

Ahora la Rada Suprema discute una ley aún más polémica aún para dejar al ucraniano como única habla en la que se pueda educar, difundir noticias y filmes o emitir documentos oficiales.

Mijail Potrobinski, director del Centro de Investigaciones Políticas de Kiev, considera que ello amenaza con formar nuevas repúblicas populares independientes en Odessa o Jarkov.

Con ello coincide el jefe de la revista online Liva.com, Andrei Manchuk, quien estima que esta vez existe el peligro que la ley desestabilice aún más a la sociedad ucraniana.

Mientras la OSCE finge no entender cuando civiles en Donetsk le reclaman hacer algo para parar el cañoneo sobre sus casas en Donbass, Poroshenko parece mantener la guerra como pretexto para garantizar poder y dinero, aunque cada vez le creen menos en Occidente.

Antonio Rondón García

What’s Happening in Syria? The Media “Kills the Truth”, “Terrorism” is Described as “Moderate Opposition”: Eva Bartlett

By Eva Bartlett, February 05 2017

Canadian independent journalist Eva Bartlett is the object of a smear campaign by Canada’s mainstream media. Listen to what she has to say and then decide who is telling the truth. The mainstream media denies the existence of terrorists linked to Al Qaeda. According to mainstream sources, there were no terrorists in Aleppo.  Al Qaeda and the Islamic State are supported by US-NATO, Saudi Arabia and Israel. They are the state-sponsors of terrorism. We are dealing with a war of aggression. Eva Bartlett provides detailed evidence of  war crimes.

Media Disinformation on Purported Aleppo Atrocities Fits Historical Pattern

By Matt Peppe, February 06 2017

Several historical examples are useful to see how stories that coincide with the government line are amplified by the media, no matter how little evidence exists. Later, when evidence emerges which calls into question the original narrative, the media simply ignore it and it is lost to history.

Is Trump Making America Safe or Unsafe? A Scorecard

By Stephen Lendman, February 06 2017

The short answer is it’s too soon to tell. His Office of the Press Secretary claims otherwise, saying “(i)n only two weeks, President Trump delivers on his promise to make America safe again.” It cites Iranian sanctions along with putting Tehran on notice “for provocative action in violation of its international obligations.”

Trump: Trumpeting For a War on Iran?

By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, February 06 2017

The Trump Administration’s rhetoric and actions have alarmed the world.  The protests in response to his visa ban have overshadowed and distracted from a darker threat: war with Iran. Is the fear of the threat greater than the threat itself?  The answer is not clear.

Radiation Levels in the Fukushima Reactor Are Soaring Unexpectedly

By Fiona Macdonald, February 06 2017

The radiation levels inside Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor No. 2 have soared in recent weeks, reaching a maximum of 530 sieverts per hour, a number experts have called “unimaginable“.

“The growing homelessness emergency represents a humanitarian crisis and I view it as a moral imperative that we make treating it a top priority. We cannot call ourselves a progressive community while so many people are living – and dying – on our streets…This unfolding crisis is not only catastrophic for people impacted by homelessness, but it also directly impacts our community’s livability, public health and safety, and our economy.”  – Ted Wheeler, mayoral candidate, February 2016 [1]

 “People think that the caste system is only in India, and we have our own caste system. And the lowest, the bottom of the caste system are the people who live on the streets.” – Mimi German, from this week’s interview

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According to the Weather Channel, Portland, Oregon, may well be America’s most winter-fatigued city for the 2016-2017 season.[2]

During the period from December 8^th to January 17^th, five winter storms have buffeted the city resulting in power outages, tree damage, and closed highways. A particularly intense storm starting January 10 dumped 15.5 inches of snow on the metro area, prompting newly installed Mayor Ted Wheeler to declare a State of Emergency the following day.[3][4][5]

Portland, on average, experiences two days each winter with snow cover of 1 inch or more. [6]

Reinforcing the hardship faced by city residents is the unusually cold temperatures. The Weather Channel documents that the first 18 days of January, and all but 7 days between December 4^th and January 31^st, were colder than average.[7]

These weather conditions have taken a disproportionate toll on the city’s houseless population. Four people died of exposure in the first ten days of 2017, and an infant who perished within hours of its birth to a houseless mother, is likewise suspected of having been impacted by the harsh cold. [8]

A handful of city residents have stepped up to do what they can to assist this most vulnerable population. While some admirable initiatives have been undertaken, community members have reported on Mayor Wheeler’s failure to act urgently to confront the situation. They are pressing a number of urgent demands, chief among these being opening up emergency warming shelters.

One roadblock after another compelled Portland citizens to take desperate actions to get the Mayor to confront the crisis. The following video documents the January 25^th shut down of Portland City Hall, which took place immediately after a memorial for the death of the houseless Portland infant.

Mimi German, the woman depicted above, happens to be a past guest of this program. A self-described Earth Activist, and founder of radcast.org with a history of involvement with the anti-nuclear movement, she is also a poet, and has been among those leading the charge in taking action to address the immediate needs of street-involved people abandoned to the elements.

In this week’s feature interview, German outlines how and why the city has failed to address the crisis appropriately, political indifference and denial, what can and should be done, and lessons in store for the broader population of the United States as they confront the human impacts of abrupt climate disruption, earthquakes and other looming natural disasters.

Bleeding On The Backs Of The Broken –  a poem by Mimi German:

Standing in power on the backs of the broken 
feigning shock and awe 
the fifth class lies beneath your feet
under bridges, their stench a sewer’s scent, 
the filth upon which these women stood, 
blood dripping from their pussy snark, 
down their legs to the street to the curb to the bridge to the edge 
down on to restless scabbing bodies of the huddled masses below, 
on lowlife, the lepers, the polluted, the meek, 
    the wretched refuse
the undone, the poor, the are-they-still-here, the outcasts,
the exiled, the downtrodden, the unknowns, the unnamed,
    the homeless
the anonymous, the uncared for, the unloved, 
the addicts, the whores, the mentally ill
    yearning to breathe free
the untouched, the unwound, the wounded, 
the disparaged, the threatened, the abused, the torn
    the tired, the poor
the traumatized, the swept, the broken,    
all drowning in the blood of one million women
whose calls for respect and intersectionality
rang hollow on the walls beneath the bridge
while dripping blood on the floor of the forgotten.  

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[Updates: As of February 4^th, the Office of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has not responded to this reporter’s February 1st request for comment. On February 2^nd, hours after our interview with Mimi German, Portland City Council adopted an emergency ordinance requiring landlords to pay the moving costs of tenants they evict without cause. The vote was unanimous. – MAW]

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . The show can be heard on the Progressive Radio Network at prn.fm. Listen in every Thursday at 6pm ET.

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Notes:

1) http://www.tedwheeler.com/ted-wheeler-outlines-comprehensive-approach-to-addressing-homelessness/

2) https://weather.com/storms/winter/news/portland-oregon-worst-winter-city-2016-2017

3) http://www.oregonlive.com/roadreport/index.ssf/2017/01/portland_metro_wednesday_traff_98.html

4)  https://weather.com/storms/winter/news/portland-oregon-worst-winter-city-2016-2017

5) Sophia June (January 11, 2017), “Gov. Kate Brown and Mayor Ted Wheeler Declare State of Emergency After Portland Gets a Foot of Snowfall in a Day”, Willamette Week; http://www.wweek.com/news/2017/01/11/oregon-gov-kate-brown-and-portland-mayor-ted-wheeler-declare-state-of-emergency-after-foot-of-snowfall-in-a-day/

6) https://weather.com/storms/winter/news/portland-oregon-worst-winter-city-2016-2017

7) ibid

8) Nigel Jaquiss (January 16, 2017), “A Baby is Dead After Being Found With His Homeless Mother at a Portland Bus Stop”, Willamette Week; http://www.wweek.com/news/city/2017/01/16/a-baby-is-dead-after-being-found-with-his-homeless-mother-at-a-portland-bus-stop/

Near the ancient city of Palmyra in the province of Homs, army and NDF troops, supported by attack helicopters, are clashing with ISIS terrorists in the areas of the Jihar field, the Jazal field and Abo Kula Dam. Earlier government forces secured the Jihhar crossroad, Majbel Asphalt, Al-Baydah al Sharqiyah and al-Baydah al-Gharbiyah. Both sides claim heavy death toll on the other side.

The ISIS-linked Amaq news agency reported yesterday that the Turkish Air Force delivered 4 airstrikes against its own proxy forces on the ground near the town of Bzaah east of al-Bab, by a mistake. The attack took place when the so-called “Free Syrian Army” was fleeing the town as a result of the ISIS counter-attack. Turkish pilots mixed up friendly pro-Turkish militants with enemy ISIS militants due to a poor ground reconnaissance and a low level of coordination of the operation.

Government forces repelled another ISIS offensive in the city of Deir Ezzor last night, killing 7 ISIS militants and wounding 18 others. ISIS forces had attacked army positions the Al-Maqabar area and Ta’ameen Brigade north of the Deir Ezzor Airport.

On January 5, the so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces”, predominantly the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), backed up by the US-led coalition’s airpower and military advisors launched a military operation northeast of al-Raqqah aiming to seize the eastern countryside of the ISIS self-proclaimed capital.

US President Donald Trump’s January 27 executive order banning travel to the US from seven majority Muslim countries and halting all refugee approvals for 120 days has prompted a hypocritical and duplicitous response from Canada’s Liberal government.

The day the ban came into effect, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a tweet that was widely promoted by the liberal media in Canada and around the world as a challenge to Trump’s policy, even though it did not mention the president, his order, or even the US. “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada,” tweeted Trudeau.

A BBC report hailed the tweet, under the headline, “Canada’s Justin Trudeau takes a stand.” The tweet has since been shared more than 400,000 times, giving an indication of the widespread hostility to Trump’s brutal, discriminatory measure.

However, Trudeau’s pose of opposition to the travel ban has nothing in common with the humane sentiments that have animated protests internationally over the past 10 days.

Since coming to power in November 2015, the Liberal government has struck a phony “refugee-friendly” stance, the better to press ahead with a right-wing agenda of expanded militarism abroad and austerity at home.

Canada’s refugee policy only appears “generous” in comparison with Trump’s reactionary anti-immigrant measure. In reality, the Liberal government’s much ballyhooed intake of 25,000 Syrian refugees comprised only a tiny fraction of the millions forced to flee their homes as a result of “regime change” wars that the US, with Canada’s support, has led and instigated in the greater Middle East, from Libya to Afghanistan.

The majority of the Syrian refugees accepted by the Trudeau government in 2015-16 were privately sponsored by churches, charities and refugee-support groups. All were subjected to a strict screening process, which included close collaboration with the US Department of Homeland Security and the exclusion of all single men on the claim that they posed a greater threat to security.

Many who did not make the cut have been left languishing in overcrowded refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and other countries.

Those accepted into Canada face an uphill battle. Reports have emerged of many of the 25,000 Syrians being forced to rely on food banks and donations from charities.

In violation of international law, Canada also routinely detains undocumented child refugees indefinitely in “medium-security prisons.”

And unbeknownst to most Canadians, Canadian warships, under the previous Harper government and now Trudeau’s Liberals, have participated in NATO patrols of the Aegean Sea aimed at enforcing the European Union’s brutal policy towards refugees, thousands of whom die each year attempting to cross into Europe by sea.

Underscoring its indifference to the hundreds of thousands impacted by Trump’s ban—including many who have lived in the US for years—the Liberals announced last week that Canada will not increase its pitifully low refugee-placement target for 2017.

The government has also rejected any suggestion it suspend an agreement with Washington preventing migrants from seeking asylum in Canada if they have arrived from the US. Legal experts argue that Trump’s order is in flagrant violation of the Canada-US “safe-third country agreement,” which is itself a reactionary measure aimed at limiting refugees, especially from Central America, from seeking asylum in Canada.

“At this snapshot in time, the US is clearly in breach of the conditions necessary for this agreement to be in place and, for that reason, we’re calling for an immediate suspension,” commented Sharry Aiken, an associate professor of law at Queen’s University.

Immigration Minister Ahmed Hassen has brushed aside such concerns, describing the ban as “an evolving situation.”

The attempt to portray Trudeau and his Liberal government as crusaders for a more tolerant approach to refugees is even more dishonest given Ottawa’s determination to collaborate intimately with the Trump administration, so as to ensure that Canadian big business retains privileged access to US markets.

Trudeau came to power pledged to deepen the decades-old Canada-US strategic partnership, and he has no intention of allowing the coming to power of the most right-wing administration in US history—an administration committed to trade war, confrontation with China, and a massive expansion of the US military, including its nuclear arsenal—to get in his way.

He shuffled his cabinet last month, placing individuals with strong US connections in key posts, the better to woo Trump and his cabinet of generals, billionaires, and rightwing ideologues. Former Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie, who developed close contacts with the US Army during the brutal war of occupation in Afghanistan, was appointed parliamentary secretary to Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and tasked with playing a leading role in managing Canada-US relations.

Ottawa also lost no time in indicating its readiness to cede to Trump’s demand for a renegotiation of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), even signaling it is ready to strike a bilateral deal with Washington at Mexico’s expense. Top Canadian officials have also indicated that discussions on closer military-security cooperation between Canada and the US are far advanced, including potentially dramatic hikes in military spending and Canadian participation in the US anti-ballistic missile shield, a technology aimed at giving the US the means to prevail in a nuclear war.

This course will inevitably result in Canada’s further integration into the aggressive war plans of US imperialism. Already within the first two weeks of the new US administration, Trump and his senior officials have placed Iran on “notice,” indicated support for the break-up of the European Union, and threatened to block Chinese access to islets its controls in the South China Sea, an act that would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

Whereas the European ruling elites, above all in Germany, have reacted by calling for a more aggressive assertion of their own imperialist ambitions in opposition to Washington, Canada stands out for its willingness to do everything it can to accommodate itself to Trump’s right-wing, “America First” program.

Desperate not to let anything disrupt their Washington “charm offensive,” Trudeau and his ministers studiously avoided making any criticism of Trump’s anti-democratic travel ban in parliamentary debate last week. Asked directly to condemn the ban, Trudeau sought to dodge the question with vague references to “Canadian values” of “openness and diversity.” “I will continue to stand,” Trudeau declared, “for Canadian values any chance I get, in this House and everywhere.”

In truth, the invocation of such “values” amounts to a repackaging of Canadian imperialism’s predatory ambitions on the global stage. The previous Harper Conservative government promoted an explicitly right-wing bellicose nationalism that celebrated the military as the fount of Canadian democracy and Canada as a “warrior nation.”

The Liberals are trying, as they have done for decades, to give the aggressive pursuit of Canada’s imperialist interests a “progressive” gloss. The Trudeau government has expanded Canada’s involvement in the Mideast war, is deploying 450 troops to Latvia as part of a NATO build-up aimed at encircling Russia, and is preparing to send 600 soldiers to Africa, ostensibly as “peacekeepers.” The African initiative is currently on hold, however. This is because, as bluntly related by government officials to the press, the Trudeau government first wants to make sure that the Trump administration does not have more pressing “asks” of the Canadian military.

Trudeau’s refusal to criticize Trump’s anti-democratic, xenophobia travel ban has been met with an overwhelmingly favourable response in the Canadian media.

Writing in the Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente advised Trudeau against repeating even the tepid, implicit criticism contained in his tweet. She wrote, “What our government—and Canadians—need to keep in mind is that Canada is not the opposition party, and Mr. Trump’s not our president. Whatever Mr. Trudeau may feel in his heart, his priority is to protect our interests, not signal our virtues.”

US Defence Secretary James Mattis provoked a hostile response from China when he assured his Japanese counterpart Tomomi Inada on Saturday that the US alliance with Japan covered the disputed islets in the East China Sea known as Senkaku in Japan, and Diaoyu in China.

The rocky outcrops were transformed into a dangerous flashpoint when the previous Japanese government deliberately inflamed tensions with China by “nationalising” them. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who took office in 2012, further stoked the standoff by insisting the Senkakus were Japanese territory and ruling out any negotiations with China over the longstanding territorial dispute.

Mattis, who was visiting Japan and South Korea on his first overseas trip as defence secretary, was intent on reassuring both countries that their alliances with the US stand. During the US election campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly accused Japan and South Korea of not paying enough toward the upkeep of US bases and threatened to pull out of existing defence arrangements.

Mattis reiterated Washington’s support for the alliance with Japan in general, saying it was “critical to ensuring that this region remains safe and secure—not just now, but for years to come.” He specifically declared that the US-Japan Security Treaty applied to the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands—a commitment that President Obama gave in 2014 as tensions rose over the disputed islets.

Mattis’s remarks were precisely what Tokyo wanted to hear: a commitment by the Trump administration to wage war against China, a nuclear-armed power, in the event of a conflict over the Senkakus. It was the type of commitment that Trump derided throughout last year’s election campaign: the willingness of Washington to fight a war on behalf of other nations, in this case over tiny uninhabited islands of no immediate economic or strategic value to the United States.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang reacted to Mattis’s comments by branding the US-Japan alliance as “a product of the Cold War, which should not impair China’s territorial sovereignty and legitimate rights.” Lu urged “the US side to take a responsible attitude, stop making wrong remarks on the issue involving the Diaoyu islands’ sovereignty, and avoid … bringing instability to the regional situation.”

Beijing is deeply concerned over Trump’s threats to launch trade war measures and take an aggressive stance toward China over territorial disputes in the South China and East China Seas, as well as North Korea. Mattis visited South Korea before Japan and confirmed arrangements to install a sophisticated anti-ballistic missile system—Terminal High Altitute Area Defence (THAAD)—on the Korean Peninsula by the end of the year.

Beijing again protested against these plans for a THAAD battery, which is nominally aimed against North Korea, but is integral to the expanding US anti-ballistic missile systems deployed in Asia. This is part of Washington’s military build-up throughout the Asia-Pacific region for war with China.

Japan has already agreed to the installation of two high-power X-band radar stations that are critical to anti-missile systems. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported in December that the Japanese government was considering the purchase of a THAAD battery.

The US and Japan have jointly engaged in developing other anti-missile systems. It is no coincidence that on the same day that Mattis was in Japan, the two countries carried out a successful test near Hawaii of the latest version of the jointly-made SM-3 system, designed to shoot down short- and medium-range ballistic missiles.

Mattis further undercut Trump’s campaign rhetoric by praising Tokyo’s financial support for the more than 50,000 US troops in Japan as a “model of cost-sharing.” At their joint press conference, Japanese Defence Minister Inada declared that there had been no discussion over whether Japan should increase its funding for US bases.

At the same time, Mattis praised the Abe government’s growing military expenditure and suggested it be increased even further “in the face of the growing challenges we face.” He continued: “As our alliance grows, it will be important for both our nations to continue investing in our defense personnel and capabilities.”

The prime purpose of Mattis’s trip to North East Asia appears to have been to consolidate military ties with two important allies as the Trump administration prepares for confrontation with China. The very fact that the defence secretary chose to make his first overseas trip to Asia indicates that Washington’s main target is Beijing.

Mattis lashed out against China over its land reclamation and construction on its islets in the South China Sea, saying it “has shredded the trust of nations in the region, apparently trying to have a veto authority over the diplomatic and security and economic conditions of neighboring states.”

In reality, the Obama administration deliberately stirred up tensions over territorial disputes in the South China Sea in an effort to drive a wedge between China and its South East Asian neighbours. In his confirmation hearing, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went far further, warning China that the US would block access to Chinese islets in the South China Sea—an act of war.

Mattis sought to downplay any threat of immediate military action in the South China Sea. “What we have to do is exhaust all efforts, diplomatic efforts, to try to resolve this properly, maintaining open lines of communication. At this time, we do not see any need for dramatic military moves.”

While Japanese Defence Minister Inada publicly welcomed Mattis’s reassurances, the Japanese government undoubtedly remains concerned that Trump could renege on the guarantee over the Senkakus or ultimately walk away from the alliance with Japan completely. Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida hinted that Mattis’s remarks were not enough, saying Tokyo would seek to confirm the US stance on the islands “on various occasions.”

The erratic and bullying character of the Trump administration has sent chills down the spine of the Japanese ruling elite, like their counterparts around the world. The Financial Times reported that, in private, “senior Japanese officials have said one of their biggest fears is that Mr Trump could act unilaterally against North Korea, leaving them to face retaliation. One of their biggest early priorities has been to extract promises of consultation from the Trump administration.”

Prime Minister Abe, who was the first foreign leader to meet with Trump after his electoral win last year, is heading to Washington for talks with the new president on Friday in a bid to secure guarantees across a range of pressing economic and military issues.

The state of uncertainty surrounding Japan’s relations with the US is undoubtedly fueling a sharp debate in Japanese ruling circles over the need for Tokyo to more aggressively assert its own predatory interests.

The resilience of the US legal system is being tested in the first great and continuing confrontation between the Trump administration and his marshalled opponents. The battle is testing the Republic to its limits, pitting views of sovereign will and legality against each other with near unprecedented viciousness.

The wail on the part of the Trump administration is that of the prerogative power, the executive unshackled from the Promethean crag in the name of the people to combat threats actual and potential. Trump wants a revolution, and the establishment is dragging down his swirlingly confused efforts in protecting the US.

On Sunday, Trump specifically directed his ire against federal judge James Robart from Seattle, who suspended the President’s ban on refugees and travel on February 3. An emergency appeal by the White House to immediately reinstate the ban was also dismissed by the ninth US circuit court of appeals, further adding to those jittery Twitter fingers.

“Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril,” shot Trump, questioning the patriotic credentials of the legal brethren. “If something happens blame him and the court system. People pouring in. Bad!”

Vice President Mike Pence, lurking in the background with dark reassurance, justified Trump’s truculent behaviour, suggesting that the President had “every right to criticize the other two branches of government”. Doing so did not question “the legitimacy of the judge.” This sat oddly with the remarks made by Trump on Saturday claiming Robarts to be a “so-called” judge.

The argument made on February 4 by lawyers from the US Department of Justice took aim at the injunction itself. The specific judicial order, according to the DOJ, “contravenes the constitutional separation of powers; harms the public by thwarting enforcement of an Executive Order issued by the nation’s elected representative responsible for immigration matters and foreign affairs; and the best means of minimizing that risk.”[1]

The submission also observed that Congress had granted the President under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 broad discretionary authority, whenever he “finds that entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States” to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

The world suggested by the submission is at times necessarily parochial, with a vigilant commander-in-chief guarding the gates against the inappropriate, the dangerous and ill-suited. To exclude aliens who refuse to melt in the US pot, in other words, is the ultimate act of sovereignty. The awkward Achilles heel in this whole business has been the inability of the DOJ to actually show imminent harm and utility.

None of the arguments swayed the judges of the federal appeals court sitting in San Francisco, which requested that the administration and the state of Washington file for arguments by Monday afternoon. Lawyers for the states of Minnesota and Washington also added to the fray by insisting that the order had caused unmitigated chaos.

As the submission went, “Over 7,000 noncitizen immigrants from the affected countries reside in Washington.” There were those abroad prevented from returning home; husbands had been separated from wives, brothers from sisters, and parents from their children.[2]

The Order had also another impact, one that always cuts deep in debates about rights and liberties in the US context: it had proven to be economically harmful. The travel ban affected sales tax revenue of state coffers; the Washington-based travel company Expedia had incurred costs in attempting to repair the mess. Additionally, companies such as Microsoft and Amazon were hurt in their means to recruit skilled immigrants. The balls-up had been total.

The US legal system has, in its own way, made use of the spirit of sovereignty in various guises: the Constitution, artificial as the assertion of a sovereign will, supposedly embodies the highest beliefs and sentiments of “we the people”. But nothing gets away from the fact that the US remains a vast sprawling entity of vectors and forces, a system of constraint and, at times, fractious deadlock.

Legitimate questions have been raised about the extent a judge, for instance one sitting in the district court system, should be able to issue nationwide orders that halt the enforcement of an executive order, regulation or statute.

The power would seem to those favouring a stronger executive a monstrous intrusion, one that asserts the universal from the particular. The vital question to advance here is how far judicial power, which should, technically, only bind specific parties, be exerted. Such orders move beyond the specifics of the plaintiffs’ grievance at hand, extending beyond their remit.

President Barack Obama’s administration was the recipient of such orders, arguably even more expansive than those facing Trump, on matters touching on overtime pay, immigration and gender identity.[3] Unsurprisingly, these spoiling efforts came from Texas courts, where resistance was deemed more likely. Trump, in contrast, is facing orders in ostensibly more “liberal” courts, though this can never a hard and fast rule. The assumption in the US Republic is that forum shopping between opponents is alive and well.

Judicial representatives, as high priest functionaries reading the meaning of the Constitution with its separation of powers, have played a powerful part in the first days of the Trump administration. They must also adjust to text and context, to read the mysterious signs that constitute the Constitution. So far, it is a battle the Trump administration has yet to win.

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

Notes:

[1] http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/general/2017/02/04/17-35105%20motion.pdf
[2] http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/general/2017/02/06/17-35105%20Washington%20Opposition.pdf
[3] https://www.lawfareblog.com/case-against-national-injunctions-no-matter-who-president