Global Research

Introduction

For more than two decades, the global nuclear industry has attempted to frame the debate on nuclear power within the context of climate change: nuclear power is better than any of the alternatives. So the argument went. Ambitious nuclear expansion plans inthe United States and Japan, two of the largest existing markets, and the growth of nuclear power in China appeared to show—superficially at least—that the technology had a future. At least in terms of political rhetoric and media perception, it appeared to be a winning argument. Then came March 11, 2011. Those most determined to promote nuclear power even cited the Fukushima Daiichi accident as a reason for expanding nuclear power: impacts were low, no one died, radiation levels are not a risk. So claimeda handful of commentators in the international (particularly English-language) media.

However,from the start of the accident at Fukushima Daiichi on March 11 2011,the harsh reality of nuclear power was exposed to billions of people across the planet, and in particular to the population of Japan, including the more than 160,000 people displaced by the disaster, many of whom are still unable to return to their homes, and scores of millions more threatened had worst case scenarios occurred. One authoritative voice that has been central to exposing the myth-making of the nuclear industry and its supporters has been that of KanNaoto, Prime Minister in 2011. His conversion from promoter to stern critic may be simple to understand, but it is no less commendable for its bravery. When the survival of half the society you are elected to serve and protect is threatened by a technology that is essentially an expensive way to boil water, then something is clearly wrong. Japan avoided societal destruction thanks in large part to the dedication of workers at the crippled nuclear plant, but also to the intervention of Kan and his staff, and to luck. Had it not been for a leaking pipe into the cooling pool of Unit 4 that maintained sufficient water levels, the highly irradiated spent fuel in the pool, including the entire core only recently removed from the reactor core, would have been exposed, releasing an amount of radioactivity far in excess of that released from the other three reactors. The cascade of subsequent events would have meant total loss of control of the other reactors, including their spent fuel pools and requiring massive evacuation extending throughout metropolitan Tokyo, as Prime Minister Kan feared. That three former Prime Ministers of Japan are not just opposed to nuclear power but actively campaigning against it is unprecedented in global politics and is evidence of the scale of the threat that Fukushima posed to tens of millions ofJapanese.

The reality is thatin terms of electricity share and relative to renewable energy,nuclear power has been in decline globally for two decades.Since the FukushimaDaiichiaccident, this decline has only increased in pace. The nuclear industry knew full well that nuclear power could not be scaled up to the level required to make a serious impact on global emissions. But that was never the point. The industry adopted the climate-change argument as a survival strategy: to ensure extending the life of existing aging reactors and make possible the addition of some new nuclear capacity in the coming decades—sufficient at least to allow a core nuclear industrial infrastructure to survive to mid-century.The dream was to survive to mid-century, when limitless energy would be realized by the deployment of commercial plutonium fast-breeder reactors and other generation IV designs. It was always a myth, but it had a commercial and strategic rationale for the power companies, nuclear suppliers and their political allies.

The basis for the Fukushima Daiichi accident began long before March 11^th 2011, when decisions were made to build and operate reactors in a nation almost uniquely vulnerable to major seismic events. More than five years on, the accident continues with a legacy that will stretch over the decades. Preventing the next catastrophic accident in Japan is now a passion of the former Prime Minister, joining as he has the majority of the people of Japan determined to transition to a society based on renewable energy. He is surely correct that the end of nuclear power in Japan is possible. The utilities remain in crisis, with only three reactors operating, and legal challenges have been launched across the nation. No matter what policy the government chooses, the basis for Japan’s entire nuclear fuel cycle policy, which is based on plutonium separation at Rokkasho-mura and its use in the Monju reactor and its fantasy successor reactors, is in a worse state than ever before. But as Kan Naoto knows better than most, this is an industry entrenched within the establishment and still wields enormous influence. Its end is not guaranteed. Determination and dedication will be needed to defeat it. Fortunately, the Japanese people have these in abundance. SB

The Interview 

Q: What is your central message?

Kan: Up until the accident at the Fukushima reactor, I too was confident that since Japanese technology is of high quality, no Chernobyl-like event was possible.

But in fact when I came face to face with Fukushima, I learned I was completely mistaken. I learned first and foremost that we stood on the brink of disaster: had the incident spread only slightly, half the territory of Japan, half the area of metropolitan Tokyo would have been irradiated and 50,000,000 people would have had to evacuate.

Half one’s country would be irradiated, nearly half of the population would have to flee: to the extent it’s conceivable, only defeat in major war is comparable.

That the risk was so enormous: that is what in the first place I want all of you, all the Japanese, all the world’s people to realize.

Q: You yourself are a physicist, yet you don’t believe in the first analysis that people can handle nuclear power? Don’t you believe that there are technical advances and that in the end it will be safe to use?

Kan: As a rule, all technologies involve risk. For example, automobiles have accidents; airplanes, too. But the scale of the risk if an accident happens affects the question whether or not to use that technology. You compare the plus of using it and on the other hand the minus of not using it. We learned that with nuclear reactors, the Fukushima nuclear reactors, the risk was such that 50,000,000 people nearly had to evacuate. Moreover, if we had not used nuclear reactors—in fact, after the incident, there was a period of about two years when we didn’t use nuclear power and there was no great impact on the public welfare, nor any economic impact either. So when you take these factors as a whole into account, in a broad sense there is no plus to using nuclear power. That is my judgment.

One more thing. In the matter of the difference between nuclear power and other technologies, controlling the radiation is in the final analysis extremely difficult.

For example, plutonium emits radiation for a long time. Its half-life is 24,000 years, so because nuclear waste contains plutonium—in its disposal, even if you let it sit and don’t use it—its half-life is 24,000 years, in effect forever. So it’s a very difficult technology to use—an additional point I want to make.

Q: It figured a bit ago in the lecture by Professor Prasser, that in third-generation reactors, risk can be avoided. What is your response?

Kan: It’s as Professor Khwostowa said: we’ve said that even with many nuclear reactors, an event inside a reactor like the Fukushima nuclear accident or a Chernobyl-sized event would occur only once in a million years; but in fact, in the past sixty years, we’ve had Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. Professor Prasser says it’s getting gradually safer, but in fact accidents have happened with greater frequency and on a larger scale than was foreseen. So partial improvements are possible, as Professor Prasser says, but saying that doesn’t mean that accidents won’t happen. Equipment causes accidents, but so do humans.

Q: Today it’s five years after Fukushima. What is the situation in Japan today? We hear that there are plans beginning in 2018 to return the refugees to their homes. To what extent is the clean-up complete?

Kan: Let me describe conditions on site at Fukushima. Reactors #1, #2, #3 melted down, and the melted nuclear fuel still sits in the containment vessel; every day they introduce water to cool it. Radioactivity in the vessel of #2, they say, is 70 sieverts—not microsieverts or millisieverts, 70 sieverts. If humans approach a site that is radiating 70 sieverts, they die within five minutes. That situation has held ever since: that’s the current situation.

Moreover, the water they introduce leaves the containment vessel and is said to be recirculated, but in fact it mixes with groundwater, and some flows into the ocean. Prime Minister Abe used the words “under control,” but Japanese experts, including me, consider it not under control if part is flowing into the ocean. All the experts see it this way.

As for the area outside the site, more than 100,000 people have fled the Fukushima area.

So now the government is pushing residential decontamination and beyond that the decontamination of agricultural land.

Even if you decontaminate the soil, it’s only a temporary or partial reduction in radioactivity; in very many cases cesium comes down from the mountains, it returns.

The Fukushima prefectural government and the government say that certain of the areas where decontamination has been completed are habitable, so people have until 2018 to return; moreover, beyond that date, they won’t give aid to the people who have fled. But I and others think there’s still danger and that the support should be continued at the same level for people who conclude on their own that it’s still dangerous—that’s what we’re saying.

Given the conditions on site and the conditions of those who have fled, you simply can’t say that the clean-up is complete.

Q: Since the Fukushima accident, you have become a strong advocate of getting rid of nuclear reactors; yet in the end, the Abe regime came to power, and it is going in the opposite direction: three reactors are now in operation. As you see this happening, are you angry?

Kan: Clearly what Prime Minister Abe is trying to do—his nuclear reactor policy or energy policy—is mistaken. I am strongly opposed to current policy.

But are things moving steadily backward? Three reactors are indeed in operation. However, phrase it differently: only three are in operation. Why only three? Most—more than half the people—are still resisting strongly. From now on, if it should come to new nuclear plants, say, or to extending the licenses of existing nuclear plants, popular opposition is extremely strong, so that won’t be at all easy. In that sense, Japan’s situation today is a very harsh opposition—a tug of war—between the Abe government, intent on retrogression, and the people, who are heading toward abolishing nuclear reactors.

Two of Prime Minister Abe’s closest advisors are opposed to his policy on nuclear power.

One is his wife. The other is former Prime Minister Koizumi, who promoted him.

Q: Last question: please talk about the possibility that within ten years Japan will do away with nuclear power.

Kan: In the long run, it will disappear gradually. But if you ask whether it will disappear in the next ten years, I can’t say. For example, even in my own party opinion is divided; some hope to do away with it in the 2030s. So I can’t say whether it will disappear completely in the next ten years, but taking the long view, it will surely be gone, for example, by the year 2050 or 2070. The most important reason is economic. It has become clear that compared with other forms of energy, the cost of nuclear energy is high.

Q: Thank you.

Interview by Vincenzo Capodici

Introduction by Shaun Burnie

Translation by Richard Minear

Introduction

For more than two decades, the global nuclear industry has attempted to frame the debate on nuclear power within the context of climate change: nuclear power is better than any of the alternatives. So the argument went. Ambitious nuclear expansion plans inthe United States and Japan, two of the largest existing markets, and the growth of nuclear power in China appeared to show—superficially at least—that the technology had a future. At least in terms of political rhetoric and media perception, it appeared to be a winning argument. Then came March 11, 2011. Those most determined to promote nuclear power even cited the Fukushima Daiichi accident as a reason for expanding nuclear power: impacts were low, no one died, radiation levels are not a risk. So claimeda handful of commentators in the international (particularly English-language) media.

However,from the start of the accident at Fukushima Daiichi on March 11 2011,the harsh reality of nuclear power was exposed to billions of people across the planet, and in particular to the population of Japan, including the more than 160,000 people displaced by the disaster, many of whom are still unable to return to their homes, and scores of millions more threatened had worst case scenarios occurred. One authoritative voice that has been central to exposing the myth-making of the nuclear industry and its supporters has been that of KanNaoto, Prime Minister in 2011. His conversion from promoter to stern critic may be simple to understand, but it is no less commendable for its bravery. When the survival of half the society you are elected to serve and protect is threatened by a technology that is essentially an expensive way to boil water, then something is clearly wrong. Japan avoided societal destruction thanks in large part to the dedication of workers at the crippled nuclear plant, but also to the intervention of Kan and his staff, and to luck. Had it not been for a leaking pipe into the cooling pool of Unit 4 that maintained sufficient water levels, the highly irradiated spent fuel in the pool, including the entire core only recently removed from the reactor core, would have been exposed, releasing an amount of radioactivity far in excess of that released from the other three reactors. The cascade of subsequent events would have meant total loss of control of the other reactors, including their spent fuel pools and requiring massive evacuation extending throughout metropolitan Tokyo, as Prime Minister Kan feared. That three former Prime Ministers of Japan are not just opposed to nuclear power but actively campaigning against it is unprecedented in global politics and is evidence of the scale of the threat that Fukushima posed to tens of millions ofJapanese.

The reality is thatin terms of electricity share and relative to renewable energy,nuclear power has been in decline globally for two decades.Since the FukushimaDaiichiaccident, this decline has only increased in pace. The nuclear industry knew full well that nuclear power could not be scaled up to the level required to make a serious impact on global emissions. But that was never the point. The industry adopted the climate-change argument as a survival strategy: to ensure extending the life of existing aging reactors and make possible the addition of some new nuclear capacity in the coming decades—sufficient at least to allow a core nuclear industrial infrastructure to survive to mid-century.The dream was to survive to mid-century, when limitless energy would be realized by the deployment of commercial plutonium fast-breeder reactors and other generation IV designs. It was always a myth, but it had a commercial and strategic rationale for the power companies, nuclear suppliers and their political allies.

The basis for the Fukushima Daiichi accident began long before March 11^th 2011, when decisions were made to build and operate reactors in a nation almost uniquely vulnerable to major seismic events. More than five years on, the accident continues with a legacy that will stretch over the decades. Preventing the next catastrophic accident in Japan is now a passion of the former Prime Minister, joining as he has the majority of the people of Japan determined to transition to a society based on renewable energy. He is surely correct that the end of nuclear power in Japan is possible. The utilities remain in crisis, with only three reactors operating, and legal challenges have been launched across the nation. No matter what policy the government chooses, the basis for Japan’s entire nuclear fuel cycle policy, which is based on plutonium separation at Rokkasho-mura and its use in the Monju reactor and its fantasy successor reactors, is in a worse state than ever before. But as Kan Naoto knows better than most, this is an industry entrenched within the establishment and still wields enormous influence. Its end is not guaranteed. Determination and dedication will be needed to defeat it. Fortunately, the Japanese people have these in abundance. SB

The Interview 

Q: What is your central message?

Kan: Up until the accident at the Fukushima reactor, I too was confident that since Japanese technology is of high quality, no Chernobyl-like event was possible.

But in fact when I came face to face with Fukushima, I learned I was completely mistaken. I learned first and foremost that we stood on the brink of disaster: had the incident spread only slightly, half the territory of Japan, half the area of metropolitan Tokyo would have been irradiated and 50,000,000 people would have had to evacuate.

Half one’s country would be irradiated, nearly half of the population would have to flee: to the extent it’s conceivable, only defeat in major war is comparable.

That the risk was so enormous: that is what in the first place I want all of you, all the Japanese, all the world’s people to realize.

Q: You yourself are a physicist, yet you don’t believe in the first analysis that people can handle nuclear power? Don’t you believe that there are technical advances and that in the end it will be safe to use?

Kan: As a rule, all technologies involve risk. For example, automobiles have accidents; airplanes, too. But the scale of the risk if an accident happens affects the question whether or not to use that technology. You compare the plus of using it and on the other hand the minus of not using it. We learned that with nuclear reactors, the Fukushima nuclear reactors, the risk was such that 50,000,000 people nearly had to evacuate. Moreover, if we had not used nuclear reactors—in fact, after the incident, there was a period of about two years when we didn’t use nuclear power and there was no great impact on the public welfare, nor any economic impact either. So when you take these factors as a whole into account, in a broad sense there is no plus to using nuclear power. That is my judgment.

One more thing. In the matter of the difference between nuclear power and other technologies, controlling the radiation is in the final analysis extremely difficult.

For example, plutonium emits radiation for a long time. Its half-life is 24,000 years, so because nuclear waste contains plutonium—in its disposal, even if you let it sit and don’t use it—its half-life is 24,000 years, in effect forever. So it’s a very difficult technology to use—an additional point I want to make.

Q: It figured a bit ago in the lecture by Professor Prasser, that in third-generation reactors, risk can be avoided. What is your response?

Kan: It’s as Professor Khwostowa said: we’ve said that even with many nuclear reactors, an event inside a reactor like the Fukushima nuclear accident or a Chernobyl-sized event would occur only once in a million years; but in fact, in the past sixty years, we’ve had Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. Professor Prasser says it’s getting gradually safer, but in fact accidents have happened with greater frequency and on a larger scale than was foreseen. So partial improvements are possible, as Professor Prasser says, but saying that doesn’t mean that accidents won’t happen. Equipment causes accidents, but so do humans.

Q: Today it’s five years after Fukushima. What is the situation in Japan today? We hear that there are plans beginning in 2018 to return the refugees to their homes. To what extent is the clean-up complete?

Kan: Let me describe conditions on site at Fukushima. Reactors #1, #2, #3 melted down, and the melted nuclear fuel still sits in the containment vessel; every day they introduce water to cool it. Radioactivity in the vessel of #2, they say, is 70 sieverts—not microsieverts or millisieverts, 70 sieverts. If humans approach a site that is radiating 70 sieverts, they die within five minutes. That situation has held ever since: that’s the current situation.

Moreover, the water they introduce leaves the containment vessel and is said to be recirculated, but in fact it mixes with groundwater, and some flows into the ocean. Prime Minister Abe used the words “under control,” but Japanese experts, including me, consider it not under control if part is flowing into the ocean. All the experts see it this way.

As for the area outside the site, more than 100,000 people have fled the Fukushima area.

So now the government is pushing residential decontamination and beyond that the decontamination of agricultural land.

Even if you decontaminate the soil, it’s only a temporary or partial reduction in radioactivity; in very many cases cesium comes down from the mountains, it returns.

The Fukushima prefectural government and the government say that certain of the areas where decontamination has been completed are habitable, so people have until 2018 to return; moreover, beyond that date, they won’t give aid to the people who have fled. But I and others think there’s still danger and that the support should be continued at the same level for people who conclude on their own that it’s still dangerous—that’s what we’re saying.

Given the conditions on site and the conditions of those who have fled, you simply can’t say that the clean-up is complete.

Q: Since the Fukushima accident, you have become a strong advocate of getting rid of nuclear reactors; yet in the end, the Abe regime came to power, and it is going in the opposite direction: three reactors are now in operation. As you see this happening, are you angry?

Kan: Clearly what Prime Minister Abe is trying to do—his nuclear reactor policy or energy policy—is mistaken. I am strongly opposed to current policy.

But are things moving steadily backward? Three reactors are indeed in operation. However, phrase it differently: only three are in operation. Why only three? Most—more than half the people—are still resisting strongly. From now on, if it should come to new nuclear plants, say, or to extending the licenses of existing nuclear plants, popular opposition is extremely strong, so that won’t be at all easy. In that sense, Japan’s situation today is a very harsh opposition—a tug of war—between the Abe government, intent on retrogression, and the people, who are heading toward abolishing nuclear reactors.

Two of Prime Minister Abe’s closest advisors are opposed to his policy on nuclear power.

One is his wife. The other is former Prime Minister Koizumi, who promoted him.

Q: Last question: please talk about the possibility that within ten years Japan will do away with nuclear power.

Kan: In the long run, it will disappear gradually. But if you ask whether it will disappear in the next ten years, I can’t say. For example, even in my own party opinion is divided; some hope to do away with it in the 2030s. So I can’t say whether it will disappear completely in the next ten years, but taking the long view, it will surely be gone, for example, by the year 2050 or 2070. The most important reason is economic. It has become clear that compared with other forms of energy, the cost of nuclear energy is high.

Q: Thank you.

Interview by Vincenzo Capodici

Introduction by Shaun Burnie

Translation by Richard Minear

At the end of Obama’s presidency, Fiction has become Fact. 

A world of fantasy permeates the mainstream media.  

The Lie has become the Truth.

“Fake New” has become “Real News”. 

And “Real News” by the independent online media is now tagged as Russian propaganda. 

What we are dealing with is a War against the Truth. 

Concepts are turned upside down. 

Political insanity prevails. We are at a dangerous crossroads in our history  The dangers of global warfare are routinely obfuscated by media disinformation.  

According to National Intelligence Director James Clapper Russia’s alleged hacking constitutes an “Existential Threat” against America.

Senator McCain considers it an “An Act of War”

Daily Mail, December 31, 2016, screenshot 

Meanwhile, US tanks and troops have been dispatched to Russia’s border under Obama’s “Operation Atlantic Resolve” and NATO’s European Reassurance Initiative (ERI). And the media remains silent. It’s not front page news.

Realties are turned upside down. Russia is the Threat. The alleged hacking is casually presented as a justification for outright war preparations against Russia: “The move comes as NATO’s relationship with Moscow has hit its lowest point in decades… U.S. national security agencies have also blamed Russia for perceived meddling in the presidential election…” (Reuters, January 6, 2016)

What is envisaged is a scenario of a possible ground war against Russia:

Ships began unloading U.S. tanks, self-propelled howitzers and hundreds of other fighting vehicles Friday in the northern German port of Bremerhaven, to be moved into Eastern Europe to bolster NATO’s deterrence against possible Russian aggression.

The U.S. also plans to move in a combat aviation brigade …  from Fort Bliss, Texas. They’ll be headquartered in Germany with some aircraft positioned in Latvia, Romania and Poland.

…Britain [is] sending fighter jets to the Black Sea area, while a battalion of troops, tanks and light armor will deploy in Estonia in the spring, backed by French and Danish troops. Germany also plans to send troops and tanks to Lithuania.

Albania, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania and Slovenia are also playing roles in what NATO has dubbed its Enhanced Forward Presence. The U.S. plans to relocate a Stryker unit from Germany to Poland as part of that group.

(Associated Press,  January 6, 2017)

Everybody is Scared of Vladimir Putin

Read carefully: “Biggest shipment of American tanks since the Cold War lands in Germany (January 6), Howitzers and fighting vehicles will be joined by thousands of infantry troopers”. This massive military deployment —which is scarcely the object of media coverage— is upheld as a “peacekeeping initiative” in response to Vladimir Putin’s “aggression” and alleged hacking of the DNC.

According to Deputy Commanding General of the US Army  Timothy McGuire (in charge of the deployment of US ground forces in Eastern Europe): “The best way to maintain the peace is through preparation… this is just showing the strength and the cohesion of the alliance and the U.S. commitment to maintain the peace on the continent.” (emphasis added)

Screenshot. The Sun, January 4, 2016

While the alleged hacking is casually tagged as an “An Act of War” against the American Homeland, “Operation Atlantic Resolve” (involving a massive deployment of troops and military hardware on Russia’s border) is categorized as an “Act of Self Defense”.

When war becomes peace, the world is turned upside down.

Conceptualization is no longer possible.  Insanity prevails. The institutions of government are criminalized.

The Western media and politicians, in chorus, obfuscate the unspoken truth, namely that the US-NATO led war destroys humanity.

When the lie becomes the truth there is no turning backwards.

When war is upheld as a humanitarian endeavor supported by the United Nations, Justice and the entire international legal system are turned upside down: pacifism and the antiwar movement are criminalized.

Opposing the war becomes a criminal act.

Obama’s Legacy is War and The Big Lie.

The Big Lie must be exposed for what it is and what it does.

It sanctions the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children.

It destroys families and people. It destroys the commitment of people towards their fellow human beings.

It prevents people from expressing their solidarity for those who suffer. It upholds war and the police state as the sole avenue.

It destroys both nationalism and internationalism.

Breaking the lie means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force.

Virtually all corporate owned or supported broadsheets, magazines, other published material and electronic news reek of anti-Russia fake news – Americans carpet-bombed with it daily.

You’d think by now the vast majority would know they’re being lied to. Yet no matter how often they were fooled before, they’re largely easy marks to be deceived again.

Imagine how many were duped to believe the Reuters fake news story, headlined “US intel report identifies Russians who gave emails to WikiLeaks – officials,” saying:

The CIA has identified Russian officials who fed material hacked from the Democratic National Committee and party leaders to WikiLeaks at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin through third parties, according to a new US intelligence report, (unnamed) senior US officials said on Thursday.

Fact: The claim is fake news because no evidence suggests Russian US election hacking, let alone Putin ordering it. The scheme aims to delegitimize Trump’s election and make it hard for him to work cooperatively with his Russian counterpart.

Reuters:

“The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Central Intelligence Agency and others have concluded that the Russian government escalated its efforts from discrediting the US election process to assisting President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign.”

Fact: When claims aren’t backed by credible evidence, they’re baseless fake news. The fake Russian hacking story has legs because media scoundrels keep pushing it.

Is the neocon WaPo story any more credible, headlined “US intercepts capture senior Russian officials celebrating Trump win,” saying:

The ebullient reaction among high-ranking Russian officials…contributed to the US intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow’s efforts were aimed at least in part at helping Trump win the White House.

Fact: No specifics were provided to give the above claim substance, including names, places, and what celebratory activities went on.

Was the story concocted, fake anti-Russia news following so many previous vilifying Big Lies? Undoubtedly Russia was pleased with the election’s outcome. The risk of US preemptive nuclear war was reduced significantly, a clear reason for joy with war goddess Hillary’s defeat.

During a television interview, I was asked what I thought of the election’s outcome. I said I was ecstatic Hillary lost. Millions of Americans and Russians feel the same way.

A Friday Wall Street Journal piece headlined “Ash Carter Says Putin Is Making It Harder for US to Work With Russia,” saying:

Russia has done nothing to help defeat Islamic State forces in Syria and has adopted a strategy of ‘explicitly thwarting the US’ elsewhere.

Fact: Outgoing US defense secretary Carter has his facts Ash backwards (a derogatory pun intended). America created and supports terrorists groups, ISIS among them.

Fact: Russia is the only world power courageously combating the scourge Washington and its rogue allies aid with weapons, munitions, funding, training and direction.

Fact: Carter is a bald-faced liar. He won’t be missed. Nor will other neocons infesting Obama’s administration – notably the neocon-in-chief, a menace to humanity at home and abroad throughout his despicable tenure.

The above three stories are a drop in an ocean of anti-Russia fake news, media scoundrels proliferating it daily.

In a Friday morning telephone interview with The New York Times, Trump called the alleged Russian hacking story a “political witch hunt,” nothing substantive backing it, made up stuff alone – fakery, not facts.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network

Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.—W.Shakespeare

To clarify for non-experts, ADAMS is the web-based database management system that coordinates anti-doping activities and stores a registered testing pool and its results. Certainly, it simplifies the whole process.

But it turns out the system is not working properly. Let’s look at a few issues of concern.

Uncontrolled access to athletes’ data 

With ADAMS in place, all parties involved receive lab results by email.

At first glance, such a mailing list includes random recipients. As one who’s familiar with WADA’s work, I doubt whether all these people really need to receive notifications.

Even more alarming is that this may suggest leaks of confidential data. Apparently, WADA is unable to control who else may get access to the sent information after the email is delivered.

Below is a message containing U.S. athletes’ doping test results. The recipients that are highlighted in yellow raise some doubts. As an expert, I can barely understand why athletes’ results should be delivered to all these people.

Recipients Errors

WADA’s work is at odds with public statements by WADA officials. Athlete privacy is under threat. And it has nothing to do with cyber-attacks or another type of meddling.

Besides, doping control is far from transparent. I would like to point at the first recipient LAD APMU that refers to the Athlete Passport Management Unit based at Swiss Laboratory for Doping Analyses in Lausanne. In 2012, Dr. Ashenden resigned from the APMU after the Unit had issued new contracts to its experts, with much tighter confidentiality clauses. To read more, see: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-17586597. Ashenden’s story is to demonstrate that anti-doping control is intentionally running behind closed doors.

Errors in completing the Doping Control Form at the 2016 Rio Games 

Here is a summary table created after the 2016 Olympics. ADAMS checking for errors showed that employees are negligent in completing the form. Some athletes do not have their results recorded with their numbers: samples do not match the numbers (6220764, 6221953 and 6220490). A few samples (numbers 303 251 and 161 644) are not even sent to the laboratory. Not to mention the fact that some athletes such as with the ID 6222637 have been wrongly attributed.

ADAMS errors checking

Simon system errors

USADA similar system has practically the same issues.

For example, comparing the information stored in the American management system to the data of the IAAF it has been revealed that 5176 of 12364 athletes have wrong samples number. On the part of the IAAF, no violations have been found, and thus, inaccuracies have been committed by the American part. The USADA was immediately notified of that (see the report below), but don’t expect them to fix it in a hurry.

The report on Simon checking

Certainly, errors or inaccuracies may occur when dealing with large amounts of data and completing forms by hand. You see, however, that half of the athletes have absolutely wrong information registered in the system. So, the software is not working properly. This is not appropriate because a wrong sample ID number could affect decision making, as a result of which many dishonest athletes would still escape punishment while clean athletes would be unsuccessfully trying to justify themselves. Taking into account the number of errors, there is no doubts the agency has done harm to many athletes for no good reason.

This is unacceptable for such organizations as WADA. Before they make decisions on athletes, they need to take care of their own system first. The WADA leadership has been repeatedly reported on systematic errors but no concrete action has been taken. Perhaps, they knowingly turn a blind eye to the errors of the system, updating of which requires a lot of money.

As you can see, claiming to fight for athletes’ rights WADA just fails to fulfill its responsibilities.

Apparently, the CIA not only owns the US and European media, university faculties, the US Congress, the heads of state of the US Empire, many pseudo-fake leftwing and progressive Internet sites, but also the governors of the US states.

How can it happen that the citizens of Vermont elected a mindless individual as governor? Governor Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, called on federal officials “to conduct a full and complete investigation” of Russia’s alleged hacking of Vermont’s electric grid system “and undertake that this never happens again.”

Of course, it never happened at all, as has been confirmed by US intelligence services. But this did not prevent the governor from denouncing Russia for something that not only was Russia not responsible for but which we now know for certain never happened.

Listen to the elected governor by the insouciant people of Vermont:

Vermonters and all Americans should be both alarmed and outraged that one of the world’s leading thugs, Vladimir Putin, has been attempting to hack our electric grid, which we rely upon to support our quality-of-life, economy, health, and safety. This episode should highlight the urgent need for our federal government to vigorously pursue and put an end to this sort of Russian meddling.

Here is Vermont’s Democratic US Senator Patrick Leahy:

This [the alleged Russian hacking] is a direct threat to Vermont and we do not take it lightly.

Here is Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat

It’s systemic, relentless, predatory. They [Russia] will hack everywhere, even Vermont, in pursuit of opportunities to disrupt our country. We must remain vigilant, which is why I support President Obama’s sanctions against Russia and its attacks on our country and what it stands for.

This from a member of the legislature of a country that is known to spy on the entire world, to disrupt operations everywhere, and has slaughtered and displaced millions of peoples in 9 countries during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes.

Where does Rep. Peter Welch get off?

The Washington Post published an unsubstantiated Fake News story of Putin’s hacking of Vermont’s electric grid. Here are the bloody Ruskies interfering with our electricity. Unnamed “senior administration officials” go on and on about what it might mean that Russia is hacking Vermont’s electric utility.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI quickly jumped in by issuing a joint analysis report, alleging

“that the Russian military and civilian services activity ‘is part of an ongoing campaing of cyber-enabled operations directed at the US government and its citizens.’”  

These false charges could not be supported, and were officially disavowed by the US government.

One result was yet another retraction from the completely discredited Washington Post.

What sticks is the false image of Russia as a threat.

Those who produce these fake threats are leading the US into thermo-nuclear armageddon.

El 20 de diciembre pasado, el gobierno de Ecuador inició el proceso para disolver la organización Acción Ecológica (AE), que tiene 30 años de trayectoria ampliamente reconocida a nivel nacional e internacional. Esa medida de extremo autoritarismo e intolerancia a la crítica social, intentando acallar a una organización social independiente, coincide con el escalamiento de la militarización y represión contra el pueblo indígena shuar en la Cordillera del Cóndor y la denuncia por AE sobre las violaciones allí cometidas. ¿A favor de quién tanta violencia armada, institucional, social? Es para abrir paso y defender los intereses de Explorcobres S A (EXSA), empresa minera china, que además de contaminación, desolación y miseria para los pueblos indígenas, dejará apenas migajas al Ecuador.

El pueblo shuar no ha dejado dudas sobre su oposición a la minería y otros megaproyectos en sus territorios. Igual que otros pueblos indígenas han resistido activamente el avance de mineras y petroleras desde hace décadas. Les ha costado represión, criminalización y asesinatos de muchos líderes. Ya en 2006, los shuar expulsaron campamentos de EXSA y una hidroeléctrica que se disponía a abastecerle. Junto a otros pueblos formaron redes de pueblos contra la minería.

Esa fuerte movilización paralizó en 2006 proyectos mineros en varias provincias, motivando que el presidente Correa, entonces en campaña presidencial, asegurara que iba a revisar la política extractiva. Con el proceso de la Asamblea Constituyente se estableció un Mandato Minero, que incluyó terminar las concesiones mineras que no hubieran tenido procesos de consulta ambiental y a pueblos y nacionalidades indígenas, que afectaran las fuentes de agua, las áreas naturales protegidas y bosques y una moratoria a nuevas concesiones. Sin embargo, en la década transcurrida, el gobierno fue promoviendo normativas que vaciaron de contenido el Mandato Minero y en lugar de moratoria a nuevas concesiones, se convirtió en entusiasta promotor de la megaminería, ni siquiera como ejecutor, sino como facilitador de la explotación minera de empresas extranjeras (Acosta y Hurtado http://tinyurl.com/jjce45u).

En este contexto de creciente impunidad, en agosto de 2016, la comunidad shuar Nankintz, parroquia San Carlos Panantza, provincia de Morona Santiago en Ecuador, fue víctima de un desalojo violento por policías y militares, que arrasó sus casas y pertenencias y mató animales domésticos, dejando a los pobladores al descampado para dar paso a Explorcobres.

Este desalojo sucedió luego de una sesgada orden judicial que no tomó en cuenta la falta de consulta libre, previa e informada a que tienen derecho los pueblos indígenas, según lo establecido en leyes nacionales y tratados internacionales suscritos por Ecuador.

El pueblo shuar no aceptó el desalojo. El 21 de noviembre y 14 de diciembre, integrantes del pueblo Shuar intentaron recuperar el territorio en Nankintz, lo cual llevó a graves enfrentamientos con policía y militares que resguardan a la minera, con varios militares y policías heridos y un policía muerto. Desde el primer conflicto, la Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonia Ecuatoriana, Confeniae, exhortó al gobierno a dialogar para evitar nuevas confrontaciones, pero no hubo acuerdo, al contrario, se escaló el conflicto deteniendo a varios líderes shuar y decretando estado de emergencia en la provincia.

Acción Ecológica es la organización ecologista más conocida y activa del país, con una larga trayectoria de defensa de los derechos de la naturaleza y de los pueblos, trabajando en conjunto con numerosas organizaciones comunitarias, barriales y de pueblos indígenas. El 18 de diciembre, en referencia al conflicto en Morona Santiago, llamó a crear una Comisión de Paz y Verdad. Explicaba los ecuatorianos y ecuatorianas apostamos por la paz en armonía con la naturaleza. Pero para alcanzar la paz, y que sea duradera, requerimos un baño de verdad. Necesitamos conocer ¿qué ha pasado en la Cordillera del Cóndor y en tantos otros territorios dónde se han impuesto proyectos mineros y de otra índole?

El 20 de diciembre el gobierno respondió notificando el inicio del proceso de disolución de la organización, por difundir los graves impactos ambientales y al ecosistema que resultarían de la actividad extractivista en la Cordillera del Cóndor y por alertar sobre la violación de derechos humanos de las comunidades que viven en esta zona. Acusación absurda, porque eso es justamente la misión de Acción Ecológica, que además nunca promovió actos violentos y por eso llama a establecer una Comisión de Paz y Verdad.

Es la segunda vez que el gobierno intenta cerrar Acción Ecológica –en 2009 decretó su clausura pero tuvo que dar marcha atrás– además de que la organización ha sufrido acoso de medios oficiales, robos y otros abusos, incluso ataque sexual contra una integrante, para disuadirles de sus actividades de denuncia, documentación y solidaridad.

Cientos de organizaciones de todo el mundo se han manifestado contra el cierre de AE y por el respeto de los derechos y territorios indígenas. Cinco relatores de ONU enviaron una carta al gobierno solicitando el cese inmediato de estas acciones, que asfixian a la sociedad civil.

Es absurdo y cínico que un gobierno que se autodenomina revolución ciudadana apele a cerrar a las organizaciones cuyas críticas no quiere oír. Y aún más grave que a más de 524 años de Conquista, siga arrasando a sangre y fuego contra los pueblos originarios del continente. Para expresar solidaridad http://accionesbiodiversidad.org/ archivos/152

 Silvia Ribeiro

Silvia Ribeiro: Investigadora del grupo ETC.

La acusación de la inteligencia estadounidense contra Rusia por supuesta interferencia en el sistema político norteamericano parece situar hoy al límite la hipocresía e impotencia de la administración saliente en la Casa Blanca.

Un informe conjunto desclasificado de la Agencia Central de Inteligencia, la Agencia Nacional de Seguridad y el Buró Federal de Investigaciones sitúan a Rusia como culpable del fracaso electoral de la demócrata Hillary Clinton frente al republicano Donald Trump.

Con apenas unos días para hacer algo en la Casa Blanca, el equipo de Barack Obama parece dejar el camino bien empedrado a Trump en el supuesto de que quiera relanzar las relaciones de Washington y Moscú.

De hecho, la nueva oleada de la campaña antirrusa parece contar con un doble propósito: justificar ante un electorado divido la derrota de Clinton y de paso continuar con los propósitos de demonizar la figura del presidente Vladimir Putin.

Los referidos órganos de inteligencia situaron a Putin como el organizador directo de las acciones para una presunta intromisión en el proceso electoral estadounidense.

Putin llamó el pasado 23 de diciembre a ver el contenido de las revelaciones hechas por Wikileaks, y no por Rusia, en Internet, de las irregularidades dentro del Partido Demócrata que dejaron a Bernard Sanders fuera de la carrera electoral. De eso nadie habla, recordó.

El propio informe reconoce que las acciones de Rusia tampoco llegaron a influir definitivamente en el resultado de los comicios.

Ante las acusaciones de que Rusia denigró el sistema democrático estadounidense al participar con sus órganos de inteligencia, hackers para realizar ataques cibernéticos, la prensa y blogueros pagados, Moscú considera que no inventó las reglas electorales norteamericanas.

La prensa rusa recuerda aquí que Clinton obtuvo más de dos millones de boletas en la votación directa frente a Trump, pero fueron los delegados electorales los que le dieron la victoria al multimillonario, como estipula su actual sistema.

De su lado, la página de denuncias Wikileaks se burló del informe al destacar que carece de fuentes y pruebas para ser acusaciones serias. Lo hicieron viendo la tele y leyendo las redes sociales, comentó la referida página que niega alguna relación con Rusia.

Respecto a los intentos de los medios de prensa rusos de perjudicar la figura de Clinton, observadores locales recuerdan que una intensa campaña contra Rusia y sus principales dirigentes tiene lugar en la prensa estadounidense en los últimos dos años.

En 2011, Occidente orquestó una campaña, a través de una amplia red de organizaciones no gubernamentales, para azuzar protestas masivas antigubernamentales en Moscú, mientras todavía mantiene un suministro de millones de dólares dirigidos a desestabilizar este país.

Sin embargo, en los últimos tiempos, la fracasada operación de Estados Unidos para derrocar el gobierno del presidente sirio, Bashar Al Assad, y su reflejo en medios de prensa rusos llevan ahora a la Casa Blanca a frenar su influencia en la audiencia occidental.

Ya lo hizo recientemente el Reino Unido con la versión en inglés de Russia Today (RT) al casi prohibir su salida en esa nación.

La razón fue su supuesta intromisión en la política interna británica, algo que siempre ha hecho la cadena BBC y otros medios de ese país en otras naciones, un papel que ahora se ve amenazado por el aumento de la audiencia de RT como medio alternativo.

De hecho, el mismo informe reconoce que en Youtube RT se sitúa como el canal más visitado, con casi 900 millones, por encima de los 700 millones de BBC World, de los 300 millones de la qatarí Al Jazeera en inglés y los 100 millones de la cadena estadounidense CNN.

Además, la RT supera a esos medios en número de suscriptores en Youtube, con 450 millones, contra 425 millones de BBC World, 300 millones de Al Jazeera y 125 millones de la CNN.

Por ello resultaría poco extraño que la Eurocámara haya solicitado censurar la publicación de lo emitido por RT y la agencia rusa Sputnik, cuando por esa vía se denuncia el apoyo de Occidente a los terroristas en Siria y la paupérrima situación económica de la zona.

El propio Trump consideró que la acusación contra Rusia de estar detrás de supuestos ataques cibernéticos contra Estados Unidos es una cacería de bruja que intenta quitar responsabilidades a los culpables de la derrota demócrata en las presidenciales.

Pero las acusaciones de Estados Unidos contra Rusia denotan una hipocresía sin límites de Estados Unidos, el país con la mayor red de espionaje y escucha en el orbe, mientras aún ahora aprueba millonarias sumas para influir o desestabilizar la política rusa.

En 2016, Estados Unidos y varias potencias occidentales lanzaron una campaña mediática como si constituyera un delito hablar de forma favorable sobre Rusia o de la política interior o externa de Putin, quien dio pasos exitosos e inesperados para Occidente en Siria.

Pero, a diferencia de Washington o Europa, Moscú nunca llamó a suspender la transmisión aquí de los medios de prensa occidentales. La paciencia rusa continúa, mientras aumenta el desespero en Occidente.

Antonio Rondón García

Tras la firma de la paz con las FARC-EP, verdadero suceso de 2016, el reto ahora es implementar todo lo concertado con esa guerrilla que comienza su desplazamiento hacia los puntos y zonas transitorias donde dejarán las armas.

Adecuar los nuevos campamentos de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP) en más de una veintena de escenarios es prioridad a comienzos de 2017, proceso con retraso y que requiere de un esfuerzo adicional.

En las gestiones para acondicionar dichos sitios participan brigadas de trabajadores civiles contratados para reforzar esas faenas, confirmaron voceros gubernamentales y de las FARC-EP.

Además de preparar condiciones dignas para que los miembros de ese movimiento en proceso de desmovilización puedan vivir durante unos seis meses, garantizar la seguridad de esos hombres y mujeres es otro de los imperativos en momentos cuando aumentan las alertas sobre un incremento de la presencia paramilitar en varios departamentos.

Pese al altercado con la Fuerza Pública en el que murieron dos integrantes de las FARC-EP y recientes denuncias sobre hostigamientos militares enfilados contra uno de los lugares donde permanecen preagrupados los guerrilleros, los beneficios del cese el fuego bilateral decretado por ambas partes son inocultables.

El Centro de Recursos para el Análisis de Conflictos certificó el cumplimiento casi total de esa medida durante los cuatro meses que ha estado en vigor, también aseguró que en el período no hubo muertos ni heridos entre la población civil; tampoco de efectivos castrenses.

Por primera vez en más de 50 años los colombianos disfrutaron de las fiestas decembrinas en un ambiente de tranquilidad por el silencio de los fusiles y el cese de las hostilidades entre el Ejecutivo y la mayor organización rebelde de la nación.

No obstante, el proceso que recién comienza no está exento de desafíos por la premura que implica habilitar de una vez las zonas transitorias, paso del que depende el desarme de las FARC-EP y la reincorporación de sus miembros a la vida civil.

Esta semana el presidente Juan Manuel Santos anunció medidas como la entrega de materiales de construcción a los insurgentes para agilizar esas tareas en 14 de los 32 departamentos.

Nuestra voluntad es acelerar al máximo esas misiones a fin de cumplir con el cronograma de dejación de armas, manifestó el jefe de Estado luego de un recorrido por Mesetas, perteneciente al Meta.

Simultáneamente políticos, líderes sociales y activistas insisten en la necesidad de desmontar efectivamente el paramilitarismo, considerado el mayor peligro para una paz estable y duradera.

Fuentes oficiales afirman que el pasado año resultaron blanco de homicidios unos 52 defensores de derechos humanos, panorama al que su suman las amenazas y atentados contra militantes de la plataforma Marcha Patriótica.

Tales hechos violentos ensombrecen los esfuerzos a favor de la distensión, advierten analistas.

En busca de una paz completa resta comenzar diálogos formales con el también guerrillero Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), contactos que podrían perfilarse en Quito, Ecuador, el martes próximo.

Adalys Pilar Mireles

The old years went – in as little a time as it takes to turn around and see who is tapping you on your shoulder. And it is the new, the next year.

Ahora es en Pascua Lama, también en San Juan, que destruyó un inmenso ambiente periglacial y está afectando un arroyo y un río con agua ácida. La denuncia fue publicada por el portal web Infobae, que accedió a los documentos que lo prueban.

Apenas dos meses pasaron desde el día en que activistas de Greenpeace, caracterizados como ejecutivos de la empresa Barrick Gold, empujaron carros de minería con calaveras doradas hasta la puerta de la Casa Rosada. Simulaban estar haciendo actividades mineras sobre un glaciar. En aquella oportunidad, los manifestantes protestaban contra las políticas del gobierno de Mauricio Macri en el sector minero, denunciaron puntualmente la connivencia del Estado con la empresa en las actividades que esta realiza en la mina Veladero, en la provincia de San Juan, en la cual ya hubo al menos dos derrames de cianuro y otros metales pesados: fueron más de un millón de litros de agua cianurada en noviembre de 2015 y otro episodio de flagrante contaminación ambiental en septiembre de 2016.

Veladero es una mina a cielo abierto ubicada sobre un ambiente periglacial, por lo que su explotación minera viola la Ley 26.639, de protección de glaciares. Por eso las asociaciones ambientalistas piden el cierre de la mina Veladero.

Vale recordar que cuando ocurrió el derrame de 2016, la Cámara de Diputados de la Nación citó al ministro de Ambiente, Sergio Bergman, y al secretario de Minería, Daniel Meilán, para que dieran explicaciones a los legisladores sobre el suceso, ante la falta de controles que pudieran prevenirlo.

En días en donde la Región Pampeana sufre la calcinación de 800 mil hectáreas por diferentes incendios, y ante una tardía respuesta del gobierno nacional para socorrer a los damnificados de la zonas afectadas por el fuego, una nuevo dolor de cabeza aqueja al funcionario a cargo de la cartera de ambiental: un nuevo caso de contaminación de Barrick Gold, ahora en Pascua Lama, que destruyó un inmenso ambiente periglacial y está afectando un arroyo y un río con agua ácida. La denuncia fue publicada por el portal web Infobae, que accedió a los documentos que lo prueban.

Según cita el medio, archivos de la propia empresa minera demuestran un nuevo caso de daño ambiental en San Juan, más precisamente en el proyecto Pascua Lama, y si bien afirman que su explotación está frenada por la Justicia chilena por dañar dos glaciares, aún así provocó estragos en un río y un arroyo, y destruyó vegas.

En el marco del proyecto, la empresa multinacional con sede en Canadá, construyó un túnel de unos cuatro kilómetros con un diámetro de 6,5 metros de alto por 5,5 metros de ancho, para instalar una cinta transportadora que pudiera trasladar minerales desde Pascua hasta Lama. Pero el proyecto tiene localización geográfica en una zona periglacial, protegida por la ley de glaciares. La apertura de túnel facilitó el drenaje de entre 32 y 170 litros de agua por segundo, un flujo de agua con un grado de acidez 3, lo que provocó destrozos en la zona. Estos desastres ambientales constan en diferentes informes de la propia Barrick Gold, y de una consultora (Knight Piésold) que trabaja para la minera, como análisis de vegetación que evidencian una intoxicación con metales tales como cobre, hierro, manganeso, molibdeno y zinc.

Según el documento, la vegetación presenta “concentraciones tóxicas muy elevadas”, lo que “genera efectos fisiológicos letales en las plantas”, al tiempo que confiesan en el agua “una acidificación que se traduce en un aumento en la disponibilidad de algunos metales, tales como el Mn, Zn, Cu, Fe y Al”, que “se encuentran disponibles para ser absorbidos por las plantas”. Además, en relación a los padecimientos del suelo de las zonas afectadas, se concluyó que “el pH ácido afecta negativamente el desarrollo de la vegetación”. En resumen, los informes determinan que el impacto de estas actividades es de “intensidad alta”.

Consultados por Infobae, desde Barrick Golg dijeron que “las aguas que drenan del túnel Marcelo, en el proyecto Lama, son naturalmente ácidas, con un pH en torno de 2 a 3” y que “Barrick realiza el tratamiento de esas aguas, de manera tal que al momento de su descarga -en el río Turbio- las aguas cuentan con un pH ubicado en el rango de 5 a 8 -es decir, un nivel de acidez notablemente inferior” lo que “cumple con lo solicitado por las autoridades provinciales, que realizan inspecciones regularmente”.

Pero, pese a esta respuesta, los propios estudios de impacto ambiental de Barrick Gold afirman que el proyecto Pascua Lama viola la ley de glaciares.

Tiempo Argentino

For many weeks we have witnessed the extraordinary attack by the CIA and its assets in Congress and the media on Donald Trump’s election. In an unprecedented effort to delegitimize Trump’s election as the product of Russian interference in the election, the CIA, media, senators and representatives have consistently made wild accusations for which they have no evidence. The CIA’s message to Trump is clear: Get in line with our agenda, or we are going to mess you over.

It is clear that the CIA is warring against Trump. But the CIA’s media assets have turned the facts on their head and are blaming Trump for having a negative view of the CIA.

Consider the January 4 Wall Street Journal article by Damian Paletta and Julian E. Barnes, which begins: “President-elect Donald Trump, a harsh critic of U.S. intelligence agencies . . .” The two presstitutes set up their false news story by putting the shoe on the other foot. It is Trump who is the harsh critic rather than the victim of the CIA’s harsh accusations. Set up this way, the story continues:

White House officials have been increasingly frustrated by Mr. Trump’s confrontations with intelligence officials. ‘It’s appalling,” the official said. “No president has ever taken on the CIA and come out looking good.’

Now that the story is Trump taking on the CIA and not the CIA taking on Trump, the case can be built against Trump:

Analysts accustomed to more cohesion with the White House are “jarred” by Trump’s skepticism of the CIA’s assessment that Putin got him elected. Trump is supposed to respond to the allegation by saying: I am not legitimate. Here take back the presidency.

WikiLeaks’ Assange has stated unequivocally that there was no hack. The information came to WikiLeaks as a leak, which suggests that it came from inside the Democratic National Committee. That Trump sees it this way means, according to one unidentified official that “It’s pretty horrifying to me that he’s siding with Assange over the intelligence agencies.” You see, Trump is supposed to side with the CIA which is trying to destroy him.

Has the CIA shot itself in both feet? How can the agency control policy by manipulating the information fed to the President when the President does not trust the agency?

Well, there is the media which can be used to control explanations and to box in the President. In his just published book, The CIA As Organized Crime, Douglas Valentine reports that by the early 1950s the success of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird delivered into CIA hands respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS, other communication organizations plus stringers, coming to four to six hundred human media assets. And it didn’t end there.

The CIA established a strategic intelligence network of magazines and publishing houses, as well as student and cultural organizations, and used them as front organizations for covert operations, including political and psychological warfare operations directed against American citizens. In other nations, the program was aimed at what Cord Meyer called the Compatible Left, which in America translates into liberals and pseudo-intellectual status seekers who are easily influenced.

All of that is ongoing, despite being exposed in the late 1960s. Various technological advances, including the internet, have spread the network around the world, and many people don’t even realize they are part of it, and they’re promoting the CIA line. ‘Assad’s a butcher,’ they say, or ‘Putin kills journalists,’ or ‘China is repressive.’ They have no idea what they’re talking about, but they spout all this propaganda.

And there is Udo Ulfkotte, who drawing on his experience as an editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote a book in which he reports that the CIA has a hand on every significant journalist in Europe.

Some who champion truth hope that the shrinking influence of the CIA controlled print and TV media will impair the Deep State’s ability to control explanations. However, the CIA, State Department, and apparently the Pentagon as well, are already operating in social media, and they use trolls in comment sections to discredit truth-tellers.

The New York Times’ editors have revealed themselves as complete tools of the CIA, endorsing every absurd claim about Russian hacking despite the total absence of any proof or indeed of any evidence of hacking, and denouncing Trump for not believing the unsupported allegations of US intelligence agencies. In the face of John Brennan and James Clapper’s efforts to delegitimize the presidency of Donald Trump, the NYTimes asks: “What plausible reason could Donald Trump have for trying so hard to discredit America’s intelligence agencies and their finding that Russia interfered in the presidential election?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/opinion/donald-trump-casts-intelligence-aside.html?_r=0

That question prompts a question of its own: “What plausible reason could the NYTimes have for trying so hard to discredit the presidency of Donald Trump on the basis of wild unsupported allegations?”

The fake news is proliferating. Today (January 6) Reuters reported: “The CIA has identified Russian officials who fed material hacked from the Democratic National Committee and party leaders to WikiLeaks at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin through third parties, according to a new US intelligence report, (unnamed) senior US officials said on Thursday.”

 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-cyber-celebrate-idUSKBN14P2NI

Perhaps what Reuters meant to say but did not is this: “Officials who spoke on condition of anonymity claimed that the CIA has identified the Russian officials who fed the hacked emails to WikiLeaks, but the official did not tell Reuters who the Russian officials are or how they identified them.”

In other words, the Reuters story is just another CIA planted story—a favor from a media asset. As Udo Ulfkotte told us, this is how it works.

Next Reuters tells us that the report is Top Secret, which, of course, means that we will never see any evidence in behalf of the CIA’s allegation. We are supposed to trust that the CIA has the information but can’t tell us. The Reuters report doesn’t see anything unusual in this. Another favor by an asset.

In Reuters’ favor-laden news report, Reuters tell us that the hacked material reached WikiLeaks from Russia’s military intelligence agency via “a circuitous route” so that Assange did not know the origin of the material and thus could say that it was not given to him by a state agency.

What could be going on here? Several things come to mind. Perhaps there is an effort to force Assange to reveal his source (which could be that DNC staffer who was mysteriously shot down in the street) as this would be a surefire way of getting rid of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has never revealed a source. Once it does, no further leaks will flow to WikiLeaks.

Another possibility is that by persistently making wild unsupported accusations that Trump was elected by Putin, the CIA is making it clear to Trump that they are playing for keeps. Trump is a strong man, but don’t be surprised if he comes out of the briefing with the CIA accepting their story as he might be brought to the realization that the alternative to compliance with the CIA could be death.

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.

Will Donald Trump similarly reward his political patrons?

The fight of the Native American Indian tribes, environmentalists and the water protectors (protestors) is not over. Although the Army Corps of Engineers announced on Sunday December 4th, 2016, that it would not be granting the DAPL easement access, there is nothing to stop the oil company from disobeying that and moving forward anyway. After all, the amount they would have to pay in fines in insignificant next to the lost revenue they are experiencing from the delay of the project. The announcement offered temporary relief, but the battle is not over. Some at the camps have stated that the announcement was propaganda to lull people into a false sense of security. You can expect Standing Rock 2017 to be just as newsworthy as Standing Rock 2016. Before going further, however, it is worth revisiting the legal facts of the Standing Rock / DAPL issue, since there was so much emotion, disinformation and confusion surrounding it.

Historical Context of DAPL: Treatment of the American Indians in the Past

First we need to understand the background. In 1851, the Laramie Treaty was struck which outlined the territorial claims of 8 American Indian tribes including the Sioux. However 11 years later in 1862, after many years of broken promises by the US Government (treaty land not honored, food and supplies not delivered as promised), a war raged between members of the Dakota nation and the US military in southern Minnesota. In fact, December 26th marked the 154th anniversary of the largest mass execution in US government history, when 38 Dakota men were publicly hanged in Mankato, Minnesota. Around this time gold and other minerals were discovered on Treaty reservation land, so the US Government took back the land, dug for uranium and poisoned the aquifer and thus the drinking water of the people there (now incidentally the Sioux must pump the Missouri River to make their water drinkable). In 1890, a horrible massacre took place. At the Battle of the Wounded Knee (not a battle but a massacre), white man shot Lakota Sioux women and children and killed their buffalo. History.com describes it as follows:

The conflict at Wounded Knee was originally referred to as a battle, but in reality it was a tragic and avoidable massacre … a brutal massacre … in which it’s estimated 150 Indians were killed (some historians put this number at twice as high), nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men.

Standing Rock 2017 will continue to be an issue. Get the facts about DAPL.
Learn how the DAPL used a fast track method to avoid doing a full EIS.

Clearly there has been a lot of mistrust, broken promises, theft, violence and murder in the past. From the American Indian point of view, the DAPL is the black snake they have prophesized about which threatens their livelihood and lives. Those supporting the DAPL have made several claims substantiating why they believe it’s right, fair and legal. Let’s take a closer look at their claims.

Claim: DAPL Does Not Go Through Sioux Treaty Land

This is technically true, but overall very misleading. Yes, the DAPL runs adjacent and parallel to an older 1982 pipeline in the same place. The pipeline passes by a point about 500 feet from Sioux land. Obviously, if some kind of oil spill were to occur, the probability is almost 100% that it would affect American Indian land. How could it not being that close? The Lakota Sioux on pine Ridge used to depend upon the Ogallala Aquifer for their drinking water. But since the uranium contamination, they now pump water from the Missouri River. They have had their drinking water permanently poisoned from resource extraction in the past. Clearly, it’s fair for them to protest a pipeline right next to them with such a potential of disruption and danger to their lives. And if you think that pipelines are “safe”, look at the next claim.

Anther North Dakota spill (not DAPL) that happened near
Standing Rock in December 2016. Is any oil safe? Credit: RT.

Claim: Pipelines are Safer to Transfer Oil than Trains and Other Overland Methods

Another technically true but misleading point. Pipelines may be safer than other methods, but they still break and spill. Just in case you think that a domestic American oil spill is an unlikely event, consider this: only around 4 weeks ago another oil pipeline in North Dakota (not the DAPL, but a different one around 150 miles from Standing Rock) spilled into a creek. This happened at Ash Coulee Creek in North Dakota. 176,000 gallons of oil were spilled which contaminated around 5.4 miles of the creek. Oil is a dirty fuel; these kind of accidents are bound to happen. The more a country relies on oil, the more accidents it can expect to have. Did you know the Keystone XL pipeline leaked 12 times in its 1st year of operation?

In fact, there have been thousands of documented oil spills and pipeline breaks (averaging 31,500 barrels per year according to this source) in the USA alone in the last 15 years! That is an astonishing figure and truly goes to show that there is no way “safe” way to transport oil. This doesn’t even include the 100s of undocumented spills that we were not told about …

Claim: The Sioux were Given a Chance to Voice Claims but Didn’t Negotiate

Both the DAPL and the Army Corps of Engineers have been claiming that the Sioux tribe didn’t respond in timely way to their requests for negotiation and consultation. Clearly there was a huge communication breakdown. Whose fault was it? It’s very difficult to determine. The article Everything You Need to Know About Standing Rock summarizes the situation:

When it all comes down, through, the tribe was not involved in the process. Whose fault that is . . . well, depends on how you look at the world, really. The Corps and DAPL made significant effort, but the tribe also doesn’t have the money, means or special training that the organization’s have. This causes some pretty significant imbalance. One example: After several months of requests for meetings and input, the Tribe asks for clarification on the process all together – keep in mind they had already been getting notifications from DAPL prior to this. When Chairman Archambault got involved – almost a year into the process – he claims that form letters and public meetings don’t meet the obligation of the Corps to consult with tribes. In the final months, there is confusion over the Army Corps of Engineers jurisdiction and their completion of necessary research and inclusion. During this time Chairman Archambault also asserted that the Army Corp of Engineers “violated its own policy” by not holding an “active and respectful dialogue before decisions are made and actions are taken.”

Claim: No Archeological Evidence DAPL is Going Through Burial Grounds

There are more disputes in this area too, with the DAPL claiming the pipeline doesn’t go through burial grounds. Does this stand up? Unlikely. Right after the tribe submitted burial evidence to the court, the DAPL jumped 25 miles and starting ploughing a new area with bulldozers. Why? To eliminate evidence. Waterkeeper Alliance lawyer Daniel E. Estrie was outraged at Dakota Access LLC for these actions:

Based upon reports from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s lawyers, on Friday, September 2, the tribe provided to the federal court in Washington, D.C. specific locations along the planned pipeline route where evidence of sacred burial and other culturally important sites had been identified by experts. The tribe’s intent was obviously to protect these irreplaceable sacred sites by requesting that the court consider them in connection with a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, on which a ruling is expected by this Friday. Shockingly, the day after the tribe notified the court of the specific locations of the sacred sites — and knowing the tribe would not be able to get into court over Labor Day weekend — Dakota Access LLC sent work crews with bulldozers and other heavy equipment out to the very locations that had been identified by the tribe and physically destroyed them. If these allegations against the pipeline company are true, in the 23 years that I have practiced and taught environmental law, I have never seen such an outrageous, unconscionable, and bad faith abuse of the legal process. It also plainly demonstrates that contrary to the pipeline company’s spin, it is the company, not the tribe, that is the aggressor here.

DAPL Was Deliberately Fast-Tracked to Avoid Environmental Impact Statement

The DAPL is certainly making a lot of dubious claims, but let’s turn away from its claims and onto its actions. The fact is that the DAPL broke the law in numerous ways in the lead up to this project. The main way they skirted the law was by engaging in segmentation (breaking up the project into lots of shorter projects in order to get more favorable legal treatment). They conspired to push the project through without doing an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) as required by law. DAPL tried to do a shortform EIS, but their proposed line is 7 miles longer than another similar project which did complete an EIS. They used a fast track method (Army Corps Permit 12) to avoid an EIS:

The permits for the Dakota Access Pipeline project (DAPL) were granted using the Army Corps Nationwide Permit 12, a fast track permitting process that has allowed the oil and gas industry to build numerous fossil fuel pipelines across the country, even on private property, without any project ­specific environmental review or public input process.

The theme of large corporations trying to avoid the EIS is a common one. This is exactly what happened when a joint consortium including the US Navy tried to force the military SuperFerry onto the island of Kauai, Hawaii, against the wishes of the local people and without an EIS. The consortium was headed by John Lehman, a member of the neocon PNAC group that agitated for 9/11 before it happened. Due to direct action and the bravery of many surfers who jumped in the water and blocked the ship from docking, the SuperFerry was never able to make it to Kauai.

The common theme is undeniable: large corporations have a habit of avoiding the responsibility of conducting a thorough environmental impact assessment regarding their plans – obviously because they don’t want scrutiny of their actions and for the public to realize just how much the corporations’ activities will affect the land, air, water, etc.

Another question worth asking is this: why was the pipeline moved from going through Bismarck (where it was originally planned) to going through Native land? Is it because Bismarck residents are whiter and have more political power, and thus a government that is less likely to cross them than a more disadvantaged and less politically powerful section of society?

Water Protectors Hit with Police Brutality and Chemtrails

Even if you believe the DAPL is in the right, how can the Government justify the police brutality dished out? The police used water cannons in already freezing conditions, which was widely  and sharply denounced as inhumane. The police also used rubber bullets and conducted illegal strip searches on the protectors. In one video a woman claims some water protectors were being sprayed with chemtrails. There have also been unverified reports of cell phone jamming.

Standing Rock 2017 Will Continue

Standing Rock may have temporarily disappeared from the headlines, but the fight is not over. You can be sure that the oil company is either continuing anyway (and paying the relatively low fines) or considering doing so. There are 3 different camps at Standing Rock: Oceti Oyate (the main camp north of the Cannonball), and Rosebud and Sacredstone (on the south of the Cannonball). They have not always been in good communication with each other, so it has been hard to verify information. Ever since the Dec. 4th announcement, the elders (such as Chairman David Archambault in this video) have asked supporting people to go home because of the bitter cold and to make the camps more sustainable. The Standing Rock battle in 2017 will still be about access to correct information. Meanwhile, the people there are still in need of basic supplies such as firewood, propane and food. If you feel called to donate, the best way is via these 2 links – this for the legal fund, and this for food.

Thanks so much to Mark Morey for assistance in providing information for this article.

*****

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Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com, writing on many aspects of truth and freedom, from exposing aspects of the worldwide conspiracy to suggesting solutions for how humanity can create a new system of peace and abundance.

Sources:

*http://www.activistpost.com/2016/12/dakota-38-154-years-ago-today-govt-carried-largest-mass-execution-us-history.html

*http://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/wounded-knee

*https://www.rt.com/usa/370331-over-5-miles-creek-polluted/

*http://grist.org/article/2011-09-01-the-last-keystone-pipeline-had-a-record-number-of-leaks/

*http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/americas_dangerous_pipelines/

*http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/25/north-dakota-oil-spill/3189101/

*https://thelittlelondonshow.com/2016/11/01/everything-you-need-to-know-about-standing-rock/

*https://www.desmogblog.com/2016/09/06/dakota-access-pipeline-sacred-sites-federal-judge

*https://www.kcet.org/shows/democracy-now/did-the-dakota-access-pipeline-company-deliberately-destroy-sacred-sioux-burial

*http://www.ienearth.org/open-letter-to-president-obama-halt-construction-and-repeal-permits-for-the-dakota-access-pipeline-project/

*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/who-is-jeb-bush-really-part-2/

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRbWaTXqWkg

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z6rFRn2VTk

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv9q4ksio5I

*http://sacredstonecamp.org

*http://waterprotectorlegal.org/

*https://fundrazr.com/PleaseSupportWinonasKitchen

The main U.S. intelligence official pushing claims that Russia hacked the Democratic party is James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence.

But Clapper was responsible for a lot of the bogus intelligence which led to the Iraq war.  Newsweek reported in 2010:

President Obama’s nomination of Pentagon intelligence chief James Clapper as intelligence czar could reignite the Bush-era debate over how and why agencies overstated Saddam Hussein’s weapons-of-mass-destruction arsenal before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Clapper played an important role in that estimate; from 2001 to 2006 he headed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon unit responsible for interpreting spy-satellite photos and other technically gathered intelligence like air particles and soil samples. And now the conservative Washington Times is reviving the argument, reporting that in Clapper’s judgment the Iraqi dictator evaded the post-invasion WMD search by hiding at least part of the arsenal across the border in shortly before the invasion.

Clapper himself told Congress yesterday that his “fingerprints” were all over the Iraq intelligence estimate.

The architect of the NSA’s global surveillance system (Bill Binney) and a 27-year CIA veteran who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to both Democratic and Republican presidents and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Ray McGovern) wrote yesterday:

Mr. Clapper has admitted giving Congress on March 12, 2013, false testimony regarding the extent of NSA collection of data on Americans. Four months later, after the Edward Snowden revelations, Mr. Clapper apologized to the Senate for testimony he admitted was “clearly erroneous.” That he is a survivor was already apparent by the way he landed on his feet after the intelligence debacle on Iraq.

Mr. Clapper was a key player in facilitating the fraudulent intelligence. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put Mr. Clapper in charge of the analysis of satellite imagery, the best source for pinpointing the location of weapons of mass destruction — if any.

When Pentagon favorites like Iraqi émigré Ahmed Chalabi plied U.S. intelligence with spurious “evidence” on WMD in Iraq, Mr. Clapper was in position to suppress the findings of any imagery analyst who might have the temerity to report, for example, that the Iraqi “chemical weapons facility” for which Mr. Chalabi provided the geographic coordinates was nothing of the kind. Mr. Clapper preferred to go by the Rumsfeldian dictum: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

***

A year after the war began, Mr. Chalabi told the media, “We are heroes in error. As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful.” By that time it was clear there were no WMD in Iraq. When Mr. Clapper was asked to explain, he opined, without adducing any evidence, that they probably were moved into Syria.

Similarly, Newsweek called Lindsey Graham:

One of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq War ….

John McCain was another of the main Iraq war boosters.

Now Graham is calling for throwing “rocks, not pebbles” at Russia.

And McCain is alleging that Russia hacked the U.S. … and that it constitutes an act of war.

The same thing is true of the mainstream media: the same numbskulls who championed the Iraq war are now stirring up anti-Russian hysteria.

The end of the unipolar, U.S.-led global order is most dramatically signified by the U.S. loss of its proxy war with Russia in Syria, despite dropping bombs faster than U.S. weapons industries could manufacture them. For the past year and a half, a much quieter struggle has been playing out in the tiny East African nation of Burundi.

The US and EU nations have repeatedly demanded that Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza step down, but Russia and China have stood up for Burundi, as for Syria, on the UN Security Council.

Despite its small size, Burundi is, like Syria, very geostrategically situated. To the east, it borders the scandalously resource rich Democratic Republic of the Congo. To the north, it borders longstanding U.S. ally and military proxy Rwanda. To the East, it borders Tanzania, which also favors Russia and China and borders the Indian Ocean. Russian and Chinese firms have won Burundi’s major mining contracts, and Russia and China have repeatedly blocked UN Security Council resolutions to condemn, sanction or send armed force to Burundi. The US and EU nations have punished Burundi by cutting aid, imposing sanctions, and turning a blind eye to Rwanda’s cross border aggression.

Western press and officials, including UN Ambassador Samantha Power, have also waged a relentless propaganda war against Burundi. This week the Washington Post published an attack on Burundi with no more evidence than its PropOrNot denunciation of independent news sites or its claims about Russians hacking DNC computers and even the U.S. power grid in Burlington, Vermont. The story was first titled “They served an abusive regime. The UN made them peacekeepers anyway” but was later changed to “UN discovers that some peacekeepers have disturbing pasts.” This referred to the 1,130 Burundians serving as UN peacekeepers, primarily in Somalia and the Central African Republic, making it the 23rd greatest contributor to United Nations peacekeeping operations as of July 31, 2016.

Thursday’s Senate hearing on phony accusations of Russian hacking (allegedly sponsored by Vladimir Putin) trotted out the usual suspects – DNI head James Clapper, NSA director admiral Mike Rogers and defense undersecretary for intelligence Marcel Rogers.

CIA chief John Brennan was away, addressing the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, using the occasion to blast Trump’s unfamiliarity with US intelligence.

Testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee amounted to much ado about nothing – though NYT-led media claimed otherwise.

As expected, testimony by the three US intelligence officials omitted what’s most important – hard evidence supporting their claims about alleged Russian US election hacking.

Nothing new was presented, just the same warmed-over Big Lies presented to delegitimize Trump’s triumph – perhaps prelude to undermining his agenda, maybe followed by removing him from office by impeachment or something more sinister.

For months, Russia was blamed for interfering in America’s election process despite no credible evidence proving it. Accusations without it are groundless.

Intelligence officials didn’t buy committee chairman John McCain’s hyperbole, calling nonexistent Russian hacking an “act of war.”

Clapper was clear and unequivocal, saying alleged Russian hacking (sic) didn’t “change any vote tallies or anything of that sort. We have no way of gauging any impact it had on the choices the electorate made.”

Trump tweeted the following:

So how and why are they so sure about hacking if they never even requested an examination of the computer servers? What is going on?

The Democratic National Committee would not allow the FBI to study or see its computer info after it was supposedly hacked by Russia…..

Note: The FBI didn’t seek access to DNC servers. It let a private firm serve as its agent of deception.

Trump:

How did NBC get ‘an exclusive look into the top secret report he (Obama) was presented?’ Who gave them this report and why? Politics!

to make up their own minds as to the truth. The media lies to make it look like I am against ‘Intelligence’ when in fact I am a big fan!

The dishonest media likes saying that I am in Agreement with Julian Assange – wrong. I simply state what he states, it is for the people….

On Friday, University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs Professor Ronald Deibert blasted the Obama administration’s scheme to demonize Russia and Trump in one fell swoop, saying:

(T)he White House was unable to produce the most critical part for the credibility of their action: that to be politically effective in today’s Internet age, such a response also needs to be backed up with solid evidence.

“Here, the administration failed miserably, but also predictably.” The FBI/DHS report released last week laid an egg, proving nothing.

The problems with the report are numerous and have been well documented by professionals in the computer security area,” Diebert explained. It contained no evidence of alleged Russian US election hacking, rendering it worthless.

Mocking the phony Russian hacking accusation, an image circulated online of a school-age girl telling her teacher “Russian hackers deleted my homework!

Prior to America’s election, Putin’s press secretary blasted Hillary Clinton’s Big Lie about nonexistent Russian hacking, calling it “absurd,” groundless hyperbole, not fact-based reality.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Between July and Sept. 2016, the German government gave up to $5M to the Clinton Foundation

Back in September when the travelling press corps asked Hillary Clinton who her favourite world leader was, she was quick to name German Chancellor Angela Merkel as her top choice — for good reasons. As Clinton was praising Merkel, the German government was busy syphoning millions to the Clintons.

Between July and September 2016, unwitting German taxpayers gave as much as $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, Germany newspaper Die Welt reveals. Die Welt asked if Chancellor Merkel was trying to influence the outcome of U.S. presidential election.

Screen shot

According to a newly surfaced donor list, the Clinton charity received around $5 million from Germany’s Ministry for Environment. Ministry’s spokesperson said that they had “very positive experience” with the Clinton Foundation and the millions of dollars diverted to the Clintons were going to planting trees in countries like India, Mexico, and Vietnam.

The total amount of German taxpayer contribution to Clinton Foundation is not yet known. It is unclear if the Merkel government made further payments to the Clinton charity through other ministries or state-run agencies. German newspaper Die Welt details the government transaction:

The newly released list of donors show that Federal [German] Ministry for Environment transferred millions to the [Clinton] Foundation. In the third quarter of 2016, at the height of [Clinton’s] campaign, German taxpayers gave up to five million dollars to the family foundation.

Some observers believe that German government has some explaining to do for the donation that appears under the heading “Donors and Grantors”. “Why does a Ministry supports the election campaign of a U.S. presidential candidate?” asked Vera Lengsfeld — former civil rights activist and German parliamentarian — in her blog. “It seems German taxpayers unwittingly financed Hillary Clinton’s election campaign.”

Environment Ministry however told DIE WELT that it “categorically doesn’t give any donations.” The said amount relates to “financing under the framework of [Germany’s] International Climate Initiative (IKI)” [Author’s translation]

After Republican candidate Donal Trump won the White House, Merkel’s investments went south.

Members of Merkel’s government have made no effort to hide their disgust for the new President-elect. Right before the U.S. election, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called Republican candidate a “hate preacher.” Merkel’s second-in-command, Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel warned U.S. voters of impending doom if they were to elect Trump. Following Trump’s win, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas wrote on Twitter that the world was about to “get crazier.”

In her very first message to President-elect Trump, Merkel lectured him on gender, racial, and religious equality.

Since 1997, the Clinton Foundation has been able to collect and estimated $2 billion from corporations, rich donors, and foreign governments. State and non-state actors from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and China were among foundation’s big donors.

Foreign donations — or as the Clintons affectionately calls them, “gifts” —  have taken a nose dive since Clinton lost her presidential bid. Why this sudden dip in interest for “tree planting” activity in India and Mexico? One does wonder.

VIDEO: Hillary Clinton’s says Angela Merkel is her favourite world leader:

[Cover image courtesy CBS News, Youtube]

Airstrikes by the United States and its allies against two Syrian army positions Sept. 17 killed at least 62 Syrian troops and wounded dozens more. The attack was quickly treated as a non-story by the U.S. news media; U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) claimed the strikes were carried out in the mistaken belief that Islamic State forces were being targeted, and the story disappeared.

The circumstances surrounding the attack, however, suggested it may have been deliberate, its purpose being to sabotage President Obama’s policy of coordinating with Russia against Islamic State and Nusra Front forces in Syria as part of a U.S.-Russian cease-fire agreement.

Normally the U.S. military can cover up illegal operations and mistakes with a pro forma military investigation that publicly clears those responsible. But the air attack on Syrian troops also involved three foreign allies in the anti-Islamic State campaign named Operation Inherent Resolve: the United Kingdom, Denmark and Australia. So, the Pentagon had to agree to bring a general from one of those allies into the investigation as a co-author of the report. Consequently, the summary of the investigation released by CENTCOM on Nov. 29 reveals far more than the Pentagon and CENTCOM brass would have desired.

Thanks to that heavily redacted report, we now have detailed evidence that the commander of CENTCOM’s Air Force component attacked the Syrian army deliberately.

The Motives Behind a Pentagon Scheme

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and the military establishment had a compelling motive in the attack of Sept. 17—namely, interest in maintaining the narrative of a “new Cold War” with Russia, which is crucial to supporting and expanding the budgets of their institutions. When negotiations on a comprehensive cease-fire agreement with Russia, including provisions for U.S.-Russian cooperation on air operations against Islamic State and Nusra Front, appeared to gain traction last spring, the Pentagon began making leaks to the news media about its opposition to the Obama policy. Those receiving the leaks included neoconservative hawk Josh Rogin, who had just become a columnist at The Washington Post.

After Secretary of State John Kerry struck an agreement Sept. 9 that contained a provision to set up a “Joint Integration Center” (JIC) for U.S.-Russian cooperation in targeting, the Pentagon sought to reverse it. Carter grilled Kerry for hours in an effort to force him to retreat from that provision, according to The New York Times.

Lobbying against the JIC continued the following week after Obama approved the full agreement. When the commander of the Central Command’s Air Force component, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigan, was asked about the JIC at a press briefing Sept. 13, he seemed to suggest that opponents of the provision were still hoping to avoid cooperating with the Russians on targeting. He told reporters that his readiness to join such a joint operation was “going to depend on what the plan ends up being.”

But the Pentagon also had another motive for hitting Syrian troops in Deir Ezzor. On June 16, Russian planes attacked a remote outpost of a CIA-supported armed group, called the New Syrian Army, in Deir Ezzor province near the confluence of Iraq, Syria and Jordan. The Pentagon demanded an explanation for the attack but never got it.

For senior leaders of the Pentagon and others in the military, a strike against Syrian army positions in Deir Ezzor would not only offer the prospect of avoiding the threat of cooperating with Russia militarily, it would also be payback for what many believed was a Russian poke in the U.S. eye.

The Evidence in the Investigation Report

On Sept. 16, Gen. Harrigan, who also headed the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) at al-Udeid airbase in Qatar, set in motion the planning for the attack on the two Syrian army positions. The process began, according to the investigation report, on Sept. 16, when Harrigan’s command identified two fighting positions near the Deir Ezzor airport as belonging to Islamic State, based on drone images showing that the personnel there were not wearing uniform military garb and, supposedly, displayed no flags.

But, as a former intelligence analyst told me, that was not a legitimate basis for a positive identification of the sites as Islamic State-controlled because Syrian army troops in the field frequently wear a wide range of uniforms and civilian clothing.

The report contains the incriminating revelation that the authorities at CAOC had plenty of intelligence warning that its identification was flat wrong. Before the strike, the regional station of the Distributed Common Ground System, which is the Air Force’s primary intelligence organ for interpreting data from aerial surveillance, contested the original identification of the units, sending its own assessment that they could not possibly be Islamic State. Another pre-strike intelligence report, moreover, pointed to what appeared to be a flag at one of the two sites. And a map of the area that was available to intelligence analysts at CAOC clearly showed that the sites were occupied by the Syrian army. Harrigan and his command apparently claimed, implausibly, that they were unaware of any of this information.

Donald Trump has a plan for dealing with the stock market bubble. Make it bigger.

This article was first published by GR on December 16, 2016

A month has passed since Donald Trump was declared president-elect soon to be the 45^th president of the United States.    Since his win, pundits, analysts, and experts continue to debate the victory – a surprise to most.   While the reason/s for this victory depend on one’s perspective, most agree on one thing: Trump is unpredictable.

But is he really?

There is clear indication that US foreign policy will not change course under a Trump administration – it will simply change tactic.   Those who continue to believe that the relations with Russia are headed for a reset are more optimistic than analytical.   US may deviate from the path previously trodden, but it is still headed for the same goal/s.

Trump resembles Loki – a colorful character in Norse mythology.   Similar to Loki, what is thought and said about Trump depends on the source.   And similar to Loki, Trump is a trickster, a shape shifter (policy shifter).  So to understand him better, we should concentrate on what we do know – his team.

Judging from his picks, Trump considers Islam as the number one enemy, followed by Iran, China, and Russia.  The ideology of those he has picked to serve in his administration are supporters of this continuity in US foreign policy, and, contradicts his campaign slogan of ‘non-interference’. Numerous articles analyzing Trump’s choices point to the mindset of his team (click on names to read relevant articles) including Mike Pence , General Flynn, James Mattis,  and John Bolton,  (see footnote for additional links)

Additionally, Israel’s domination of US policy has never been more apparent.  Decades earlier many considered other than occupied Palestine  “….the White House occupied territory”.  Donald Trump proved them right.  His son-in-law Jared Kushner will have an office in the West Wing of the White House.  Kushner has financed illegal, Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.

The above stated information is the obvious – what meets the eye.  What is more crucial is obfuscated.  While Trump has made his position vis-à-vis China, Iran, and “radical Islam” abundantly clear, the media has led us on a different path where Russia is concerned.   As such, one could be forgiven for thinking that Trump will reset the button with Russia.  In fact, in the scheme of things, Trump is attempting to wean Russia away from China, Iran, and Syria  in order to continue and accomplish US goals:  Total domination, prevent Russia from re-emerging, contain China, contain Iran, Israel expansion.

It is important to Trump team to weaken both Russia and China by creating a divide between them –  favoring one over the other.  Trump defends Russia against allegations of hacking.  To the unsuspecting eye, he has appointed a seemingly “Russia friendly” Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson (though undoubtedly the hawkish under-secretary of state John Bolton will be behind the wheel).   Though under close scrutiny, Tillerson as Secretary of State is certainly not an ‘offering’ to Putin, although but he may well be a Trojan Horse.

What we are told of him is the fact that he is the CEO of Exxon Mobil Corporation.   That he knows Putin; and that he opposed sanctions against Russia.   What we are not told is that he is also a Trustee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) – a neoconservative think tank.  (Click HERE for full description of CSIS).   Henry Kissinger, Richard Armitage, and Zbigniew Brzezinski are some of his trustee colleagues at CSIS.

Further, while Tillerson/Exxon has ties to Russia, it also has ties to Ukraine.   In 2010, CIA/State Department propaganda voice, Radio Free Europe, announced that

“Ukraine has been the target of democracy-promoting Western foundations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), for a quarter of a century”.

NED’s counterpart in England, the UK funded Westminster Foundation for Democracy was an active partner in the endeavor.  It was the Westminster Foundation that coopted the “Ukrainian Foundation for Democracy” – The People’s First Foundation that later same year would become a member of the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC).

Senior advisors to the USUBC came from pro-Israel think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and Brookings, and Board of Directors executives selected from powerful players such as Raytheon and Boeing.  Exxon joined USUBC in 2010.

Why has the media left out this contentious fact?  And is this censorship directed at the West, or at Russia?

It is worthwhile mentioning that Exxon recently signed deals for oil exploration in Iraq and in defiance of the Iraqi government who asked President Obama to halt the exploration for fear that it would cause instability.   Of note, Turkey is a part of this deal!   Iraqi oil has been exported to Israel by the Kurds, and Israel considers oil from Iraq’s Erbil to be profitable for Israel.  Aware of the Israeli domination of Washington, the Iraqi Kurds are in league with Israel and have solicited their help in establishing independence.

As with every other administration before it, the Trump administration will serve Israel.  Serving Israel will come at the expense of the region, and Russia.  There has always been a conflict between Israel and Russian interests (see for example the Ukraine case HERE).  Netanyahu, exuberant with a Trump victory and Kushner in the White House, this week embarked on a visit to  two vitally imported states: Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.

These two countries have been on Israel’s radar for well over a decade.  Since Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are not OPEC members, and both produce high volume of oil, control of these would erode OPEC’s power.   US administration promotion of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline has been to bypass Iran and Russia.

Netanyahu aims to promote business with Kazakhstan – a founding member of Shanghai Corporation Organization (SCO).  The import of SCO in countering American-led ambitions cannot be adequately emphasized.    No doubt it is this significance that has renewed Israel’s interest and taken Netanyahu there  – to divide, corrupt, and weaken.  A similar undertaking was taken with regards to BRICS.

Azerbaijan has particular value for Israel.   Israel views Azerbaijan as an ally against Iran and Russia. As reported by JTA in 2002: There were many similarities between Israel and Azerbaijan. “Fear of Iran and radical Islam; suspicion of Russia; friendship with Turkey, and a desire to be part of the West.”   It is also hoped that Azerbijan would fan flames of hostility and stir up discontent among the Azari population in Iran.

As the incoming Administration continues to take shape, and we are being distracted with “news”, battle lines are being drawn up.   Perhaps the most important thing to remember and believe about Trump is his fondness of ‘surprises’.

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the role of lobby groups in influencing US foreign policy.  

This incisive article was first published on October 26, 2016, less than two weeks before the November 8 elections.

“Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system … a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state….

The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization… It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government…. This group … is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.”— Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech

Unaffected by elections. Unaltered by populist movements. Beyond the reach of the law.

Say hello to America’s shadow government.

A corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country, this shadow government represents the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.

No matter which candidate wins the presidential election, this shadow government is here to stay. Indeed, as recent documents by the FBI reveal, this shadow government—also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group”—may well have played a part in who will win the White House this year.

To be precise, however, the future president will actually inherit not one but two shadow governments.

The first shadow government, referred to as COG or Continuity of Government, is made up of unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.” COG is a phantom menace waiting for the right circumstances—a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, an economic meltdown—to bring it out of the shadows, where it operates even now. When and if COG takes over, the police state will transition to martial law.

Yet it is the second shadow government—also referred to as the Deep State—that poses the greater threat to freedom right now. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government is the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our government.

The Deep State, which “operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government.

So who or what is the Deep State?

It’s the militarized police, which have joined forces with state and federal law enforcement agencies in order to establish themselves as a standing army. It’s the fusion centers and spy agencies that have created a surveillance state and turned all of us into suspects. It’s the courthouses and prisons that have allowed corporate profits to take precedence over due process and justice.

It’s the military empire with its private contractors and defense industry that is bankrupting the nation. It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.” It’s what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies”: the Department of Defense, the State Department, Homeland Security, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a handful of vital federal trial courts, and members of the defense and intelligence committees.

It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.

These are the key players that drive the shadow government.

This is the hidden face of the American police state that will continue long past Election Day.

Just consider some of the key programs and policies advanced by the shadow government that will continue no matter who occupies the Oval Office.

Domestic surveillance. No matter who wins the presidential popularity contest, the National Security Agency (NSA), with its $10.8 billion black ops annual budget, will continue to spy on every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. Thus, on any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. Local police have been outfitted with a litany of surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices to biometric data recorders. Technology now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, etc. Full-body scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that peer into vehicles and buildings alike—including homes. Coupled with the nation’s growing network of real-time surveillance cameras and facial recognition software, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

Global spying. The NSA’s massive surveillance network, what the Washington Post refers to as a $500 billion “espionage empire,” will continue to span the globe and target every single person on the planet who uses a phone or a computer. The NSA’s Echelon program intercepts and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax and email message sent anywhere in the world. In addition to carrying out domestic surveillance on peaceful political groups such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and several religious groups, Echelon has also been a keystone in the government’s attempts at political and corporate espionage.

Roving TSA searches. The American taxpayer will continue to get ripped off by government agencies in the dubious name of national security. One of the greatest culprits when it comes to swindling taxpayers has been the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), with its questionable deployment of and complete mismanagement of millions of dollars’ worth of airport full-body X-ray scanners, punitive patdowns by TSA agents and thefts of travelers’ valuables. Considered essential to national security, TSA programs will continue in airports and at transportation hubs around the country.

USA Patriot Act, NDAA. America’s so-called war on terror, which it has relentlessly pursued since 9/11, will continue to chip away at our freedoms, unravel our Constitution and transform our nation into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act. These laws completely circumvent the rule of law and the rights of American citizens. In so doing, they re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the U.S. Constitution, is the map by which we navigate life in the United States. These laws will continue to be enforced no matter who gets elected.

Militarized police state. Thanks to federal grant programs allowing the Pentagon to transfer surplus military supplies and weapons to local law enforcement agencies without charge, police forces will continue to be transformed from peace officers into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones.

Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, will continue to keep the masses corralled, controlled, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.

SWAT team raids. With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans by local police for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties will continue to rise. Nationwide, SWAT teams will continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession.

Domestic drones. The domestic use of drones will continue unabated. As mandated by Congress, there will be 30,000 drones crisscrossing the skies of America by 2020, all part of an industry that could be worth as much as $30 billion per year. These machines, which will be equipped with weapons, will be able to record all activities, using video feeds, heat sensors and radar. An Inspector General report revealed that the Dept. of Justice has already spent nearly $4 million on drones domestically, largely for use by the FBI, with grants for another $1.26 million so police departments and nonprofits can acquire their own drones.

School-to-prison pipeline. The paradigm of abject compliance to the state will continue to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior. School districts will continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court.

Overcriminalization. The government bureaucracy will continue to churn out laws, statutes, codes and regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies, rendering the rest of us petty criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to this overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal. Consequently, small farmers who dare to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their community will continue to have their farms raided.

Privatized Prisons. States will continue to outsource prisons to private corporations, resulting in a cash cow whereby mega-corporations imprison Americans in private prisons in order to make a profit. In exchange for corporations buying and managing public prisons across the country at a supposed savings to the states, the states have to agree to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years.

Endless wars. America’s expanding military empire will continue to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.

Are you getting the message yet?

The next president, much like the current president and his predecessors, will be little more than a figurehead, a puppet to entertain and distract the populace from what’s really going on.

As Lofgren reveals, this state within a state, “concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue,” is a “hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”

The Deep State not only holds the nation’s capital in thrall, but it also controls Wall Street (“which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater”) and Silicon Valley.

This is fascism in its most covert form, hiding behind public agencies and private companies to carry out its dirty deeds.

It is a marriage between government bureaucrats and corporate fat cats.

As Lofgren concludes:

[T]he Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change… If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda.

In other words, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, as long as government officials—elected and unelected alike—are allowed to operate beyond the reach of the Constitution, the courts and the citizenry, the threat to our freedoms remains undiminished.

So the next time you find yourselves despondent over the 2016 presidential candidates, remember that it’s just a puppet show intended to distract you from the silent coup being carried out by America’s shadow government.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]. 

This article by Prof Rodrigue Tremblay was first published by GR in January 2011

“We are devoted to creating an America free from gun violence, where all Americans are safe at home, at school, at work, and in our communities. As the Brady Campaign, we work to enact and enforce sensible gun laws, regulations, and public policies through grassroots activism, electing public officials who support gun laws, and increasing public awareness of gun violence.” Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Mission statement 

Is the real American motto of the current American generation “In Guns We Trust”? This could surely be the impression one gets from the unfolding of recent events.

There exists currently in the United States an unhealthy obsession with guns, —a form of idolatry of the gun as a useful tool to settle differences between individuals. Increasingly, it seems, when someone feels slighted in any way, the reaction is often to rely on the gun to settle things. Instances of appalling gun-related incidents seem to multiply and to be occurring on a daily basis in the current American cultural climate.

A disgruntled employee is let go; the upset person goes home, takes a gun and comes back to the work site to set the score straight, killing many people in a shooting rampage. A deranged political extremist campaigns against a candidate who is nevertheless elected; the disappointed individual takes his easily available gun and shots at the politician and kills half a dozen other people. A devout religious fanatic feels that somehow his religion and its adepts are not well considered; he takes his gun and he assassinates at random everybody around. Frustrated students fail at school or are ostracized somewhat by classmates; they go home, take their parents’ gun and kill teachers and scores of fellow students.

Even some disturbed ten-year olds now resort to the gun and turn it against their mother or father when they have been scolded, the gun being conveniently stashed in their room. It’s a far cry from the commandment “Honor Thy Mother and Father”!

There would appear to be a firearms-related homocide crisis in the United States, but the idea that guns are required in the daily life of individuals is so well entrenched and propagated that a state of collective denial persists. Two hundred years ago, the vast majority of people lived on farms. Understandably, guns were then a necessity for hunting and for protection in a still wild and relatively lawless environment. Nowadays, the vast majority of people live in large urban areas where no hunting is allowed. What is then the need for large and small firearms, if not to shoot other people?

There is, of course, the persistent myth that Americans have the “right” to amass large quantity of firearms and to use them. Here again this seems to be a relic of bygone times when the young American republic was threatened by its former British masters and could lose its recently acquired independence through a British invasion. At that time, there was a perceived need to constitute rapidly a militia to defend the homeland, and armed farmers could provide such an instant army. That is the logical interpretation that can be given to the second amendment of the U.S Constitution of 1789 that says: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The most logical implication here is that some convenient precautions can be taken to defend the state with “well regulated” armed militias, at a time when the U.S. federal government was perceived to be weak and incapable of mounting a federal military response to an outside invasion or to a domestic armed uprising, and that it should not prevent the states from raising militias to maintain order. Such was the constitutional climate at the time. —This provision in the U.S. Constitution was hardly designed to be an open license for each and every individual to arm oneself, to use such arms at will, and to constitute a “non-regulated” one-man militia if he chooses to do so.

Such a wide and extravagant interpretation in a modern urban environment would seem to be a sure recipe for social and political anarchy. Moreover, nowadays, the U.S. federal government is in full control of a powerful U.S. military organization and has no need whatsoever of private militias to defend the territory. Also, today, the state national guards have de facto taken the place that quickly enrolled private militias could have occupied in the past. There is no need today for readily available private armed militias to defend the territory.

Nevertheless, some American judges have ruled, and some American politicians have agreed, that the centuries-old right to form “well regulated” militias and to carry arms to defend the homeland really means that anybody, in the current modern environment, has an absolute individual right to own dangerous firearms of the nature and quantity he chooses, including sophisticated assault weapons, and to use them, and that no elected government can interfere.

The most recent case on this issue has been the ruling on Parker v District of Columbia, in which the District of Columbia Circuit court of appeals ruled on March 9, 2007 that a D.C. ban on handgun ownership without a license violated individual rights under the U. S. Second Amendment. —And that’s where things stand today… and the killing continues.

How many tragedies will be needed before mentalities change?

Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at [email protected]. He is the author of the book “The Code for Global Ethics” at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/

The book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles”, by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, prefaced by Dr. Paul Kurtz, has just been released by Prometheus Books.

Please visit the book site at:

www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/

“The Russian Hacking”: How the “Leaks” From Clinton and the DNC Happened

By Eric Zuesse, January 06 2017

Julian Assange, who received the computer-data from what U.S. President Barack Obama alleges was ‘Russian hackers’, had an opportunity, in his 3 January 2017 interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, to deny the allegation by Craig Murray (a former British Ambassador and longtime friend of Assange) that no Russian or any other hackers were involved passing that information to Wikileaks; and, in reply, Assange declined the invitation to deny it, and he said, in short: Obama and his Administration are flat-out lying about this matter.

New Twist on Fake News Russian Hacking Story

By Stephen Lendman, January 06 2017

America’s intelligence community can’t get its act straight. Switching allegations shows its operatives can’t agree on what fake news to go with. Earlier accusations changed, Reuters saying three unnamed US officials now claim “Russia provided hacked material from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks through a third party.” The earlier version accused Russia of directly interfering in America’s election process, hacking the DNC, helping Trump defeat Hillary. No evidence suggests Moscow interfered in the election process of any country, or rigged its own to assure Putin’s triumph.

DNC Refused to Give FBI Access to Its Servers … Instead Gave Access to a DNC Consultant Tied to Organization Promoting Conflict with Russia

By Washington’s Blog, January 06 2017

As first reported by George Eliason, CrowdStrike’s Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Dimitri Alperovitch – who wrote the CrowdStrike reports allegedly linking Russia to the Democratic party emails published by Wikileaks – is a fellow at the Atlantic Council … an organization associated with Ukraine, and whose main policy goal seems to stir up a confrontation with Russia.

“Mind Manipulations” to Influence Election Results

By Peter Koenig, January 06 2017

The truth behind Donald Trump’s ‘surprise’ election may lay somewhere else. It’s called Psychometrics, a method based on massive behavioral data collection of people to be targeted by propaganda, or more accurately expressed by mind manipulation. This PR technology has been marketed and applied by a small London-based data analysis firm, called ‘Cambridge Analytica’.

The “Fake News” Saga: From Official Policy to Mainstream American Discourse, Propaganda in the Making

By Daniel Espinosa Winder, January 06 2017

The Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act (CDPA), passed last December 8th by Barack Obama, was first presented to the US Congress on March 16th. This effort in information warfare was in the making long before the mainstream media campaign against ‘fake news’ -or serious allegations of Russian meddling in US elections- started. This is an analysis of how foreign and domestic policy becomes ‘popular demand’ through mainstream media.

Syria: The Diplomatic Endgame

By Prof. Tim Anderson, January 06 2017

Wars are always concluded with political settlements. In the endgame over Syria, Russia has worked directly with Turkey, to agree on orderly evacuations of the NATO-backed terrorist groups from Aleppo and, with Iran, is now engaged in talks on a wider resolution to the failing war on Syria.

Instead of presenting evidence of Russian hacking, Western mainstream media outlets are continuing to peddle fiction, adding drama with every new story they publish.

CNN, which dubs itself as the “most trusted name in news,” has arguably topped the ranks of “fake news” outlets when it published yet another story on the subject of Russia hacking the US election. This time, alongside the baseless accusations, CNN decide to use an image from a popular video game Fallout 4 to help illustrate to its audience what Russian hacking actually looks like.

Shortly after the gaffe was caught by Reddit users, CNN changed the image to a stern looking Obama. This, however, did not prevent a screenshot of the previous image from going viral.

If before CNN was simply presenting fiction as fact, now it is also illustrating it using video game art. It’s difficult to imagine how a news story can get any more fake than this.

BRG reports:

In Fallout 4 — as well as Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas — the player can hack computers to gain information or unlock doors and safes. It’s performed like a word puzzle, where the player has to find a specific word in a huge mess of letters and random characters. It’s simple but fun, but it has absolutely nothing in common with actual hacking, which is what makes it perfect for mainstream news viewers.

Julian Assange, who received the computer-data from what U.S. President Barack Obama alleges was ‘Russian hackers’, had an opportunity, in his 3 January 2017 interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, to deny the allegation by Craig Murray (a former British Ambassador and longtime friend of Assange) that no Russian or any other hackers were involved passing that information to Wikileaks; and, in reply, Assange declined the invitation to deny it, and he said, in short: Obama and his Administration are flat-out lying about this matter.

Hannity then probed further, to find whom the source actually was:

(See 55:00- in this interview, especially at 56:50-)

Hannity: There was one report in the [UK newspaper] Daily Mail that suggested somebody that you are friendly with, actually was handed the documents at American University, in a wooded area, by a disgruntled Democrat, who felt betrayed because the revelations showed that Bernie Sanders had been betrayed and they didn’t like the corruption of the Clinton Foundation. Can you confirm or deny that?

ASSANGE: Well that statement came from Craig Murray, a friend of mine, but Wikileaks is a source-protection organization. We are famous for never having exposed one of our sources. That’s why sources trust us and they come to us. So, I can’t comment on other people’s statements about our sources, except what we have said, which is that our sources [in this] are not a state party [such as Russia or any other government].

No one — not even Obama — denies that the publisher of the information was Wikileaks. Furthermore, Assange said in this interview (56:50-), “There is one person in the world, and I think it’s actually only one, who knows exactly what is going on with our publications, and that’s me.”

He was saying there that (at least as regards the present matter) he — and perhaps only he in the entire Wikileaks organization — was the person who received and published this information from the individual who was supplying it. This doesn’t necessarily exclude Craig Murray from the possibility that he had passed it along to Wikileaks (i.e., to his friend Assange), but it says that only Assange knows whether or not Murray had supplied it to him. (And Assange refuses to answer that question.)

Craig Murray did, in fact speak at American University in Washington DC, at 10:15 AM on Saturday 24 September 2016, addressing a “World Without War” conference, in the Founders’ Room at the University’s School of International Studies. The video is here. Essential background on this heroic man, Murray, is here, explaining why the U.S. State Department under Obama had initially denied him entrance into the United States to speak at this event and to receive in Washington a whistleblower’s award.

Then on December 10th, buried in an article at Britain’s Guardian, was this blockbuster, which was mentioned there only in passing:

Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”

“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.

(Notice that the U.S. propaganda-system insists upon calling it a ‘hack’, so they can allege that ‘the Russians did it’ and thereby increase the probability of war with Russia, which Barack Obama has been hankering for ever since — at least — when he perpetrated a 2014 coup in Russia’s neighboring country Ukraine so as to get Ukraine into NATO and U.S. missiles five minutes to Moscow.)

The next day (the 11th), Murray headlined at his blog-site “The CIA’s Absence of Conviction”, where he described the Guardian’s efforts to bury that news, and he went on to say that the Democratic Party’s and Obama Administration’s and U.S. ‘news’media’s totally nutty theory, that Putin is somehow now controlling the FBI, is meant to answer my obvious objection that, if the CIA know who it is, why haven’t they arrested somebody. That bit of course would be the job of the FBI, who those desperate to annul the election [of Trump] now wish us to believe are the KGB. [NOTE: The KGB, of course, ended when the Soviet Union did, in 1991.]

It is terrible that the prime conduit for this paranoid nonsense is a once great newspaper, the Washington Post, which far from investigating executive power, now is a sounding board for totally evidence-free anonymous source briefing of utter bullshit from the executive [i.e., from Obama].

Here, then, is the (opening of the) true story, published in Britain’s Daily Mail, on December 14th, of how this information from the computers of the Democratic National Committee and of Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Chairman John Podesta managed to reach wikileaks and thereby the U.S. and global public.

Screen Shot, Daily Mail 

EXCLUSIVE: Ex-British ambassador who is now a WikiLeaks operative claims Russia did NOT provide Clinton emails — they were handed over to him at a D.C. park by an intermediary for ‘disgusted’ Democratic whistleblowers

• Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and associate of Julian Assange, told the Dailymail.com he flew to Washington, D.C. for emails

• He claims he had a clandestine hand-off in a wooded area near American University with one of the email sources

• The leakers’ motivation was ‘disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the  ’tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders’

• Murray says: ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks’

• ‘Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that,’ Murray insists

• Murray is a controversial figure who was relieved of his post as British ambassador amid allegations of misconduct but is close to Wikileaks

By Alana Goodman In Washington, Dc For Dailymail.com

PUBLISHED: 15:33 EST, 14 December 2016 | UPDATED: 18:01 EST, 14 December 2016

And here is the actual reason that the UK government fired him from UK’s diplomatic corps. But the reason was broader than that, as was also made clear by Murray, in another recent video of him. So: that’s why he’s a ‘controversial figure’, and it’s also why, after his assistance in getting this information out to the public in 2016, he’s even more of a ‘controversial figure’ (i.e, a dissident, a hero) than he had been before.

The Obama-Clinton operation cheated Bernie Sanders out of the Democratic nomination, and that’s why this information became leaked — not hacked — out of the Obama-Clinton-DNC conspiracy. Trump had nothing to do with it; Russia had nothing to do with it.

Here was the lawsuit against the Hillary campaign (and summarized here), that was filed by backers of Bernie, and blocked by the Democratic National Committee. The judge condemned the Hillary side’s ‘shenanigans’ delaying trial. Even after those ‘shenanigans’, the Democratic National Committee said on September 22nd that the case should be thrown out. Two days later, Craig Murray received the information which then became Wikileaked.

Murray received the Hillary-campaign information on September 24th. Little over a week later, on October 7th, Wikileaks published documents from the computer of Hillary’s Campaign Chairman John Podesta, and politico announced it headlining “The most revealing Clinton campaign emails in WikiLeaks release”. That same day, Politico also bannered “Podesta: ‘I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians’,” and the legend that ‘Russia hacked the Clinton campaign’ started immediately to compete in the day’s ‘news’ stories, and diminish focus on, the contents of that information which had been ‘hacked’.

However, the information from the DNC itself had been published much earlier, on July 22nd, and so this could not have come from the September 24th leak. Whether it came from the same person, or through the same courier (i.e., Murray), isn’t yet known. The Obama Administration has made no distinctions between those two data-dumps, but charges that all of the leaks from the Obama-Clinton-DNC conspiracy — both the anti-Sanders campaign during the primaries, and the anti-Trump campaign during the general-election contest — came from ‘Russian hacking’. The reason why the emphasis is upon the anti-Trump portion is that the conspirators now are trying to smear Trump, not Sanders, and so to make this a national issue, instead of only an internal Democratic-Party issue.

They are trying to de-legitimize Trump’s Presidency — and, at the same time, to advance Obama’s aim for the U.S. ultimately to conquer Russia. The mutual hostility between Obama and Trump is intense, but Obama’s hatred of Russia gives added impetus to his post-Presidential campaign here. This Nobel Peace Prize winner had Russia in his gunsights well before he, as a cunning politician, made political hay out of Mitt Romney’s statement that “Russia, this is, without question America’s number one geopolitical foe.”

Only a fool trusts the U.S. government (and the U.S. ‘news’media) after ‘Saddam’s WMD’ (which despite all the lies to the contrary, didn’t exist). Like Craig Murray said, “I used to be the head of the FCO unit that monitored Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and I know for certain, I can tell you, they knew there weren’t any.”

In a December 31st posting at his blog, Murray headlined, “Exit Obama in a Cloud of Disillusion, Delusion and Deceit”, and he opened:

“I had promised myself and my family that on this holiday I would do nothing but relax. However events have overtaken my good intentions. I find myself in the unusual position of having twice been in a position to know directly that governments were lying in globe-shaking events, firstly Iraqi WMD and now the ‘Russian hacks’.”

Being a whistleblower is dangerous, in a criminal regime. But some people have a conscience.

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

The Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act (CDPA), passed last December 8^th by Barack Obama, was first presented to the US Congress on March 16^th. This effort in information warfare was in the making long before the mainstream media campaign against ‘fake news’ -or serious allegations of Russian meddling in US elections- started. This is an analysis of how foreign and domestic policy becomes ‘popular demand’ through mainstream media. 

It was November 24^th when Craig Timberg from the Washington Post ran a piece about the ‘findings’ of an anonymous media analyst called Propornot, blacklisting nearly 200 alternative news sites as peddlers of ‘Russian Propaganda’. After a strong negative reaction by many journalists, the Post issued a correction stating that the newspaper didn’t endorse the findings made by Propornot. A week later and despite corrections, Timberg followed up his piece on ‘Russian propaganda’ with “Efforts to Combat Foreign Propaganda Advances in Congress”, where he states:

Congressional negotiators on Wednesday (November 30^th) approved an initiative to track and combat foreign propaganda amid growing concerns that Russian efforts to spread ‘fake news’ and disinformation threaten U.S. national security”, and further into the article: “The initiative grows out of a bill authored in March by (Sen. Robert) Portman (R-Ohio) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) called the ‘Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act.’ It initially sprang from a desire to help independent journalists and nongovernmental organizations in European nations such as Ukraine, Moldova and Serbia, which face a heavy tide of Russian propaganda. (Emphasis is mine)

This information is misleading. In reality, the initiative didn’t ‘grow out’ of a bill authored in March, instead, the initiative and the bill are one and the same. It was lightly modified in July to eliminate a small paragraph on Ukraine, included in the first place mostly as an example of the kind of situation it would address. The article is also based on information judged as doubtful by its own editor, to say the least. After the July 2016 version of the bill, there were no further modifications.

But by July, both ‘fake news’ and ‘Russian propaganda’ were only beginning to surface in mainstream media as a trending topics (and national security concerns). We cannot imagine a positive or welcoming reaction to Obama´s ‘sanctions’ against Russia -or the need to regulate Facebook- if they would have been presented to public opinion by July or even September. But for Sen. Rob Portman, the urgency of the problem was clear enough when the Act was introduced for the first time in March, as he stated in an Atlantic Council speech:

Structural deficiencies are preventing us from effectively countering foreign disinformation and propaganda and will continue to hinder future administrations—both Republican and Democrat—unless they are addressed…

The most sophisticated media engagement strategies in the world will not work if the adversary jams communications towers, censors media outlets, or pursues a comprehensive strategy of grassroots manipulation designed to shape perceptions on the ground… (Emphasis is mine)

The ‘agenda setting’ media, with the Washington Post leading the effort this time, was only preparing itself to start the propaganda campaign that then gained momentum with the presidential election itself, and basically repeated Portman’s view of foreign propaganda adding the already mentioned examples of the threat –Russian sponsored ‘fake news’ and propaganda- supported by intelligence “consensus” and supine, dishonest analysis.

This is the usual methodology when incorporating regressive policies or engaging in military aggression, only subtly dressing them as national security measures: the political establishment decides the policy, if popular support will be needed or the issue at hand is controversial, a few months before presenting it publicly a propaganda campaign will convince the audiences of the urgency and legitimacy of the law, sanctions or military measures taken.

We saw this pattern repeating itself time after time in the last decade and a half with Iraq, Libya or Syria, but it might be as old as propaganda itself. ‘Regime change’ during the Cold War was said to respond to the Communist ‘threat’, and alternative discourses were many times labelled ‘anti-American’, a mere form of censorship. Now it’s ‘fake news’.

To be clear, the CDPA itself could have passed without much noise, as it was inserted in the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017, and passed quietly at night, during holidays. The propaganda campaign discussed in this article was aimed mainly at convincing the public about a dangerous enemy country meddling in US democracy by malicious, covert means, which also served to divert attention from the contents of Hillary Clinton’s campaign leaks, with its embarrassing revelations of the campaign’s ties with journalists.

Finally, it was vital in substantiating further measures taken by Obama, as the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats. The outgoing administration is clearly stating that Russia, and particularly Putin, are enemies of the US and the President-elect should continue to consider them so, or be called a traitor ‘anti-American’.

“In his dalliance with Vladimir Putin, Trump’s actions are skirting treason… By undermining further investigation or sanctions against the Russian manipulation of the 2016 election, Trump as president would be giving aid and comfort to Russian interference with American Democracy”, said democrat Robert Kuttner. (Quoted here by David Swanson)

In other words, the propaganda campaign served both to pass the CDPA without opposition, establishing an information regulatory body aimed at the need to “shape perceptions on the ground”, as Portman pointed out to his elite colleagues in the Atlantic Council last March, and to legitimate Obama’s harsh ‘sanctions’ and vilification of the Russian government. The Propornot ‘fake news’ fiasco served to toss dozens of alternative media news outlets into the equation and create distrust for them and for social media’s recklessness when addressing the issue.

Is fundamental to note that any authoritative voices against the CDPA or the smearing of Putin were absent from mainstream media, which framed the supposed hacking, ‘fake news’ and Russian propaganda as a real, malicious and even blatant attempt by Russia to put a ‘stooge’ in the White House and manipulate the American democracy. Other voices and testimonies involved were not part of the ‘plurality’ of the world’s mainstream media, as Craig Murray, former UK ambassador, who declared that the supposed hacks were actually leaks given by a democrat insider after the Bernie Sanders boycott. As a member of WikiLeaks and directly involved in receiving the information, we would think he had something to say that would interest WP readers. Letting opposite voices have their say is elementary journalism.

We can now add a second ‘fake news’ fiasco by the Washington Post, alleging without proof that the Russians hacked and manipulated the US electric grid and then retracting a day later. Of course, the damage was already done and the ‘scoop’ went viral. In terms of propaganda that’s a mission accomplished. Again, there is nothing new to see here, if we remember the San Bernardino Shooting in December 2015, the New York Times declared ‘terrorist ties’ to the perpetrators without solid proof, to later acknowledge that a “Systemic Change is Needed After Faulty Times Article”. Again, the effect was already out there, going viral: the US was ‘under terrorist attack’, or ‘ISIS is not limited to the Middle East, it can kill you in any American neighborhood’.

Example: this is a tweet of the WaPo ‘fake news’ that was retweeted thousands of times, posted by New York Times editorial writer Brent Staples (quoted by Glenn Greenwald, link below).

Glenn Greenwald made an excellent point regarding the WP and fake news in a recent piece for The Intercept:

Whether the Post’s false stories here can be distinguished from what is commonly called ‘Fake News’ is, at this point, a semantic dispute, particularly since ‘Fake News’ has no cogent definition. Defenders of Fake News as a distinct category typically emphasize intent in order to differentiate it from bad journalism. That’s really just a way of defining Fake News so as to make it definitionally impossible for mainstream media outlets like the Post ever to be guilty of it (much the way terrorism is defined to ensure that the U.S. Government and its allies, by definition, ever commit it).

How Facebook Changed the Game for News Sources

Facebook, specifically, is another main concern in the ‘fake news’/ propaganda discourse, as it was becoming “…the most powerful force in the news industry”, according to Farhad Manjoo in a New York Times report, last June. Another, August 24^th piece by the Times, “Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine”, was probably one of the firsts to point out the supposed dangers of Facebook as a news outlet:

(Facebook’s) takeover of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup. Before social media, web publishers could draw an audience one of two ways: through a dedicated readership visiting its home page or through search engines. By 2009, this had started to change. Facebook had more than 300 million users… By late 2012, when Facebook passed a billion users, referrals from the social network were sending visitors to publishers’ websites at rates sometimes comparable to Google…

In other words, audiences’ attention was shifting from mainstream media and traditional news sources to independent sites and blogs, which amounts to a ‘coup’, as Facebook popularity was being abused by bastard, non-corporate news outlets to gain instant massive audiences. This means an obvious loss in advertising revenue. It’s all about where the attention of the masses is, in terms of revenue, but it is also who they listen, in terms of propaganda.

Certain political discourses are traditionally disseminated by the mainstream media because of its corporate nature and shared interests, and Facebook was opening the door to non-corporate and independent/ alternative news sources presenting different narratives. This alternative media weren’t new, but Facebook made them more accessible to a population that has become increasingly incredulous of traditional media.

Of course, this isn’t the perspective of liberal media like the Guardian, where Olivia Solon reveals one of the possible solutions in an article on November 10^th, adequately called: “Facebook failure: did ‘fake news’ and polarized politics get Trump elected?”:

“…Facebook could introduce a mechanism to allow fact checking organisations to report false stories to Facebook so they don’t continually circulate. ‘Of course, people will shout censorship, so maybe Facebook could choose to change the way it display certain stories instead,’ she (Claire Wardle,  research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism) said.

Understanding the Syrian conflict via Social Media

The Syrian conflict pictures this ‘coup’ rather clearly: mainstream media’s narrative had to compete with a very different perspective brought online by independent researchers and disseminated via social media to reach millions, who then started making questions, and demanding the same quality of coverage from mainstream sources that were basically repeating what the USAID-funded White Helmets (a ‘civil defense’ group working only in ‘rebel’-held zones) had to say, without journalists on the ground.

Let’s review some Facebook comments regarding Syria in mainstream media fan pages:

Russian ‘trolls’ seem to be getting a lot of ‘likes’ this days. The commenters appear to be somehow ‘polarized’, no doubt, but we are talking about a humanitarian disaster killing hundreds of thousands.

Before Internet, and before Facebook, access to the other versions of events, and history itself, were reserved to researchers with the resources and time to investigate and then publish essays, articles or books on any given subject, or to independent researchers willing to spend hours or days looking for alternative sources of information available on the web but, traditionally, mostly invisible.

Robert Portman’s partner presenting the CDPA at the Atlantic Council last March, Sen. Chris Murphy, said that the idea behind the bill was to not to propagandize (that would be wrong…) but only to offer people the ‘other side’, make information available so they can ‘decide for themselves’. A clear reversal of reality where the other is always the bad guy and we are only responding and ‘defending’ ourselves.

As Rick Sterling noted in Consortium News on January the 1^st: “Whether or not you wish to accept these (alternative media’s) depictions of the reality in Aleppo, at a minimum, they reflect another side of the story that you have been denied… The goal of the Global Engagement Center to counter ‘foreign propaganda’ is to ensure that you never get to hear this alternative narrative…”

The solution, as prophesized by Claire Wardle, would be ‘regulation’ (censorship?) of Facebook, which is taking place as Snopes, Politifact and Factcheck are teaming up to tackle whatever they consider ‘fake news’, after pressure from politicians and journalists directed at Mark Zuckerberg to take action on the issue. Although, more obscure means of censoring are starting to surface, as ‘ghost-banning’, where social media users share information that mysteriously fails to reach their followers, as Craig Murray noticed after posting sharing an article refuting that the source of the Democratic National Committee mails was Russia.

That’s what is planned regarding the biggest social media online, but the CPDA goes way further. Among its many functions, it will coordinate information sharing, planning and developing among government agencies to expose foreign propaganda, analyze relevant information, and disseminate thematic narratives to counter propaganda, coordinate with allied countries, and give support to third parties and privates as think tanks, NGOs and journalists.

In short, an Orwellian Ministry of Truth, or perhaps a legalization of the infamous CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, depending on how exactly this policies are implemented in the public and private spheres. After all, the idea of Op. Mockingbird was to push certain messages and discourse covertly through incorporating journalists and editors in the CIA’s payroll (and sometimes even creating its own media).

This would amount to a fully overt Mockingbird, claiming the right to use (and counter) propaganda extensively, on the grounds that the ‘enemy’ is doing the same already, in this case Russia openly funds RT and Sputnik news, but -allegedly- it also funds hundreds of alternative media promoting ‘fake news’ and uses any kind of covert means, as hacking, to manipulate information.

A Few Conclusions About a Deeply Corrupted Profession

If something is completely beyond the mainstream media’s framing of this subject is the fact that the US establishment owns the biggest and most sophisticated propaganda apparatus in the world and probably in history. A handful of mega-corporations own most of what Americans watch or read every day and its ties to official, State discourse and corporate interests are undeniable and widely studied (Link to Edward Herman’s The Propaganda Model Revisited). The fact that this criticism has been strictly kept out of the mainstream media is significant.

The rationale behind ‘fake news’ implicates that lies in traditional, mainstream media, are purely accidental and isolated events. In fact, mainstream media participates actively in selling corporate points of view about basically everything regarding human life, as well as pushing for wars by repeating, many times without questioning, State narrative, directly from government sources or even unidentified officials. When this narratives are debunked or challenged they fall back with an editor’s note, but the propagandistic effect remains.

The many wars destroying the Middle East in the last decades have substantial similarities and patterns that corporate journalism seems incapable of grasping, like ‘regime change’ being sold under the ‘humanitarian intervention’ scheme. The UK House of Commons report on Libya 2011 uses exactly those words.

The result of this ongoing propaganda campaign is the widely believed theory that the US is under cyber-attack by Russia and must retaliate. Putin is clever and resourceful enough to put a stooge in the Oval Office, destroying Hillary Clinton’s political carrier and the US democracy in the process, leaving none or little trace. Around the world, mainstream media aren´t necessarily reminding its public that the Russian hacking story is based on allegations, and its now being treated as received knowledge, they aren’t reminding its readers and viewers about the many inaccuracies and retractions issued by the ‘agenda setting’ media either. Those are treated as mere details around a central and strong idea that remains out of discussion: the Russians are coming (again).

The other idea being pushed into the collective mind is that alternative news sources are not trustworthy, you never know what’s true and what’s a lie, unless authoritative media says it.

Finally, the Washington Post was used to deliver an inherently defamatory and blatantly false accusation on a number of independent news outlets by the anonymous Propornot, some of those independent media were fairly reputed. The Post was also used as a prominent mouthpiece for intelligence sources without questioning or skepticism, establishing what hundreds of other sources would later repeat as news, quite diligently.

Daniel Espinosa Winder (35) lives in Lima, Peru. He graduated in Communication Sciences and started researching mainstream media and more specifically, propaganda. His writings are a critique of the role of mass media in our societies. He is currently editing the Spanish section of The Greanville Post.

What is ‘Financial Imperialism’?

How is it Functioning in Greece Today,

Is it a growing characteristic of 21st Century Global Capitalism. 

This text is based on selections from the Jack Rasmus’ recently published book entitled “Looting Greece. A New Financial Imperialism Emerges”. (click link to order directly from Clarity Press)

The recurring Greek debt crises represent a new emerging form of Financial Imperialism. What, then, is imperialism, and especially what, when described is financial imperialism?

How does what has been emerging in Greece under the Eurozone constitute a new form of Imperialism? How is the new Financial Imperialism emerging in Greece both similar and different from other forms of Imperialism?

And how does this represent a broader development, beyond Greece, of a new 21st century form of Imperialism in development?

The Many Meanings of Imperialism

Imperialism is a term that carries both political-military as well as economic meaning. It generally refers to one State, or pre-State set of political institutions and society, conquering and subjugating another. The conquest/subjugation may occur for largely geopolitical reasons—to obtain territories that are strategically located and/or to deny one’s competitors from acquiring the same. It may result as the consequence of the nationalist fervor or domestic instability in one State then being diverted by its elites who are under domestic threat, toward the conquest of an external State as a means to avoid challenges to their rule at home. Conquest and acquisition may be undertaken as well as a means to enable population overflow, from the old to the new territory. These political reasons for Imperialism have been driving it from time immemorial. Rome attacked Carthage in the third century BCE in part to drive it from its threatening strategic positions in Sicily and Sardinia, and also to prevent it from expanding northward in the Iberian Peninsula. Domestic nationalist fervor explains much of why in post-1789 revolutionary France the French bourgeois elites turned to Napoleon who then diverted domestic discontent and redirected it toward military conquest. Imperialism as an outlet for German eastward population settlement has been argued as the rationale behind Hitler’s ‘Lebensraum’ doctrine. And US ‘Manifest Destiny’ doctrine, to populate the western continent of North America, was used in the 19th century as a justification, in part, for US imperialist wars with Mexico and native American populations at the time.

But what may appear as purely political or social motives behind Imperialist expansion—even in pre-Capitalist or early Capitalist periods—has almost always had a more fundamental economic origin. It could be argued, for example, that Rome provoked and attacked Carthage to drive it from its colonies on the western coast of Sicily and thus deny it access to grain production there; to deny it strategic ports on the eastern Iberian coast from which to trade; and eventually to acquire the lucrative silver mines in the southernmost region of the peninsula at the time. Nazi Germany’s Lebensraum doctrine, it may be argued, was but a cover for acquiring agricultural lands of southern Russia and Ukraine and as a stepping stone to the oil fields of Azerbaijan, Persia and Iraq. And US western expansion was less to achieve a population outlet than to remove foreign (Mexico, Britain) and native American impediments to securing natural resources exclusively for US use. US acquisitions still further ‘west’—i.e. of Hawaii, the Philippines and other pacific islands were even less about population overflow and more about ensuring access to western pacific trade and markets in the face of European imperialists scrambling to wrap up the remaining Asian markets and resources.

Imperialism is often associated with military action, as one State subdues and then rules the other and its peoples. But imperialist expansion is not always associated with military conquest. The dominating State may so threaten a competitor state with war or de facto acquisition that the latter simply cedes control by treaty over the new territory it itself had conquered by force—as did Spain in the case of Florida or Britain with the US Pacific Northwest territories. Or the new territory may be inherited from the rulers of that territory. Historically, much of the Roman Empire’s territory in the eastern Mediterranean was acquired this way. Or the new territory may be purchased, one state from the other—as with France and the Louisiana Purchase, Spanish Florida accession, and Russia’s sale of Alaska to the US.

In other words, imperialism does not always require open warfare as the means to acquisition but it is virtually always associated with economic objectives, even when it appears to be geo-political maneuvering or due to social (i.e. nationalist ideology, domestic crises, population diversion, etc.) causes.

Wealth Extraction as Basic Imperialist Objective

Whether via a bona-fide colony, near-colony, economic protectorate, or dependency the basic economic purpose of imperialism is to extract wealth from the dominated state and society, to enrich the Imperialist state and its economic elites. But some forms of Imperialism and colonial arrangements are more ‘profitable’ than others. Imperialism extracts wealth via many forms—natural resources ‘harvesting’ and relocation back to the Imperial economy, favorable and exploitive terms of trade for exports/imports to and from the dominated state, low cost-low wage production of commodities and semi-finished goods, exclusive control of markets in the dominion country, and other ways of obtaining goods at lower than market price for resale at a higher market price.

Wealth extraction by such measures is exploitive—meaning the Imperial economy removes a greater share of the value of the wealth than it allows the dominated state and economy to retain. There are least five historical ways that classic forms of imperialism thus extract wealth. They include:

Natural Resource Exploitation

This is where the imperial economy simply takes the natural resources from the land and sends them back to its economy. The resource can be minerals, precious metals, scarce or highly demanded agricultural products, or even human beings—such as occurred with the slave trade.

Production Exploitation

Instead of relocating the resources and production in the home market at a higher cost, the production of the goods is arranged in the colony, and then shipped back to the host imperial country for resale domestically or abroad. The semi-finished or finished goods are more profitable due to the lower cost of production throughout the supply chain.

Landed Property Exploitation

The imperialist elites claim ownership of the land, then rent it out to the local population that once owned it to produce on it. In exchange, the imperialist elites extract a ‘rent’ for the use of the land.

Commercial Exploitation

Here the imperialist elites of the home country, in the form of merchants, ship owners, and bankers, arrange to trade and transport goods both to and from the dominated economy on terms favorable to their costs. By controlling the source of money, either as currency, credit, or precious metals, they are able to dictate the arrangements and terms of trade finance.

Direct Taxation Exploitation

More typical in former times, this is simple theft of a share of production and trade by the administration of the imperialist elite. The classic case, once again, was Imperial Rome and its economic relations with its provinces. It left the production and initial extraction of wealth up to the local population, while its imperial bureaucracy, imposed locally, was simply concerned with ensuring it received a majority percentage of goods produced or traded—either in money form or ‘in kind’ that it then shipped back to its home economy Italy for resale. A vestige of this in modern colonial times was the imposition of taxation on the local populace, to pay for the costs of the Imperial bureaucracy and especially the cost of the imperial military apparatus stationed in the dominated state to protect the bureaucracy and the wealth extraction.

The preceding five basic forms of exploitation and wealth extraction have been the subject of critical analyses of imperialism and colonialism for more than a century. What all the above share is a focus on the production and trade of real goods and on land as the source of the wealth transfer. However, the five classical types of exploitation and extraction disregard independent financial forms of wealth extraction. Both capitalist critics and anti-capitalist critics of imperialism, including Marxists, have based their analysis of imperialism on the production of real goods. This theoretical bias has resulted in a disregard of the forms of financial exploitation and imperialism, which have been growing as finance capital itself has been assuming a growing role relative to 21st century global capitalism.

British Imperialism 

Classical 19th century British Imperialism extracted wealth by means of production exploitation, commercial-trade, and all the five basic means noted above. It imposed political structures to ensure the continuation of the wealth extraction, including crown colonies, lesser colonies, protectorates, other dependency relationships, and even annexation in the case of Ireland and before that Scotland. The British organized low wage cost production of goods exported back to Britain and resold at higher prices there or re-exported. It manipulated its currency and terms of trade to ensure profit from goods imported to the colony as well. Its banks and currency became the institutions of the colony. Access to other currencies and banks was not allowed. Monopoly of credit sources allowed British banks to extract rentier profits from in-country investment lending and trade credits. They obtained direct ownership of the prime agricultural and mining lands of the colony. They preferred and promoted highly intensive and low cost labor production. Production and trade was structured to allow only those goods that allowed Britain investors the greatest profits, and prohibited production and trade that might compete with Britain’s home production. But the colonial system was inefficient, in the sense that was costly to administer. The cost of administration was imposed on the local country in part, but also on the British taxpayer.

Twentieth century US Imperialism proved a more efficient system. It avoided direct, and even indirect, political control. State legislatures, governments, and bureaucracies were locally elected or selected by local elites. There were few direct costs of administration. The local elites were given a bigger share of the exploitation pie, as joint production and investment partnerships in production and trade were established with local capitalists as ‘passive’ minority partners who enjoyed the economic returns without the management role. Only when their populace rebelled did the US provide military assistance, covertly or overtly, either from afar or from within as the US set up hundreds of military bases globally throughout its sphere of economic interests. The US and local militaries were tightly integrated, as the US trained local officer ranks, and even local police. Security intelligence was provided by the US at no cost. The offspring of the local elites were allowed to enter private US higher education establishments and thereby favorably socialized toward US interests and cooperation. Foreign aid from the US ended up in the hands of local elites as a form of windfall payment for cooperation. US sales and provision of military hardware to the local elites provided built-in ‘kickback’ payment schemes to the leading politicians and senior military ranks of the local elites. Local military forces became mere appendages of the US military, willing to engage in coups d’etat when necessary to tame local elites that might stray from the economic arrangements favoring more local economic independence beyond that permitted by US interests.

US multinational corporations were the primary institution of economic dominance. They provided critical tax revenues to the local government, employment to a share of the local workforce, and financial credits from US globally banking interests. The US also controlled the dominated states’ economies through a series of new international institutions established in the post-1945 period. These included the International Monetary Fund, established to address local management of currency and export-import flows when they became unbalanced; the World Bank, which provided funding for infrastructure project development; and the World Trade Organization and free trade agreements—bilateral or regional—which enabled selective access to US markets in exchange for unrestricted US corporate foreign direct investment into dominated state economies, financed by US financial interests. These investment and trade arrangements were tied together by the primacy of the US currency, the dollar, as the only acceptable trade currency in financial and goods exchanges between the US and the local economy.

This new ‘form’ of economic imperialism—a system of political dominance sometimes referred to as ‘neo-colonialism—was a far more efficient and profitable (for US capitalists and local capitalist elites as well) system of exploitation and wealth extraction than the 19th century British system of more direct imperial and colonial rule. And within it were the seeds of yet a new form of imperialism based on financial exploitation. As the US economy evolved toward a more financialized system after 1980, the system of imperial dominance associated with it began to evolve as well. Imperialism began to rely increasingly on forms of financial exploitation, while not completely abandoning the more traditional production and commerce forms of wealth extraction.

The question is: What are the new forms of imperialist financial exploitation developed in recent decades? Are new ways of extracting wealth on a national scale emerging in the 21st century? Are the new forms sufficiently widespread, and have they become sufficiently dominant as the primary method of exploitation and wealth extraction, to enable the argument that a new form of financial imperialism has been emerging? If so, what are the methods of finance-based wealth extraction, and the associated political structures enabling it? If what is occurring is not colonialization in the sense of a ‘crown colony’ or even dependent ‘neo-colony’, and if not a political protectorate or outright annexation, what is it, then?

These queries raise the point directly relevant to our current analysis: to what extent does Greece and its continuing debt crises represent a case example of a new financial imperialism emerging?

Greece as a Case Example of Financial Imperialism

There are five basic ways financial imperialism exploits an economy—i.e. functions to extract wealth from the exploited economy—in this case Greece.

• Private sector interest charges for financing private production or commerce
• State to State debt aggregation and ‘interest on interest’ wealth extraction
• Privatization and sale of public assets at fire sale prices plus subsequent income stream diversion from the private acquisition of the public assets
• Foreign investor speculative manipulation of government bonds
• Foreign investor speculation on stock, derivatives, and other financial securities’ as a result of price volatility precipitated by the debt crisis

The first example represents financial exploitation related to financing of private production and trade. It is associated with traditional enterprise-to-enterprise, private sector economic relations where interest is charged on credit extended for production or trade. This occurs under general economic conditions, however, unrelated to debt crises. The remaining four ways represent financial exploitation enable by State to State economic relations and unrelated to financing private production or trading of goods.

One such form of financial exploitation involves state-to-state institutions, public sector economic relations where interest is charged on government (sovereign) debt and compounded as additional debt is added to make payments on initial debt.

Another involves financial exploitation via the privatization and sale of public assets—i.e. ports, utilities, public transport systems, etc.—of the dominated State, often at firesale’ or below market prices. Privatization is mandated as part of austerity measures dictated by the imperialist state.as a precondition for refinancing government debt. This too involves State to State economic relations.

Yet a third example of financial exploitation also involving States occurs with private sector investor speculation on sovereign (Greek government) bonds that experience price volatility during debt crises. State involvement involvement occurs in the form of government bonds as the vehicle of financial speculation.

Even more indirect case, but nonetheless still involving State-State relations indirectly, is private investor speculation in private financial asset markets like stocks, futures and options on commodities, derivatives based on sovereign bonds, and so on, associated with the dominated State. This still involves State to State relations, in that the investor speculation is a consequence of the economic instability caused by the State-State debt negotiations.

Finance capitalists ‘capitalize’ on the debt crises that create price volatility of financial securities, making speculative bets on the financial securities’ volatility (and in the process contributing to that volatility) in order to reap a financial gain from changes in financial asset prices. And they do this not just with sovereign bonds, but with stocks, futures options, commodities, and other financial securities.

All the examples—i.e. interest on government debt, returns from firesale prices of public assets, investor speculative gains on sovereign bonds, as well as from financial securities’ price volatility caused by the crisis—represent pure financial wealth extraction. That is, financial exploitation separate from wealth extraction from financing private production. All represents ‘money made from money’, in contrast to money made from financing the production or trading of real assets.

The Pre-Boom Cycle years

During the pre-2008 boom cycle years, credit flowed to Greece and the periphery to enable the purchase of core exports of goods. When the core stopped the flow of credit after 2008, what was left was debt. But interest on debt was as lucrative to the core banker interests as was purchase of export goods. Repayment of loans and other credit extended by the Troika to Greece’s government and central bank were recycled back to Eurozone core private interests—95% of same, to be exact. Without true economic recovery after 2009 for the periphery, each time more debt had to be extended in order to repay old debt, and interest payments were added to interest payments and compounded. Financial imperialism increasingly assumed the form of state-to-state debt and interest flows, accruing eventually in the northern core banks and financial institutions. New means for financial exploitation were spun off and added in the process—financial gains from privatization and financial gains from government bonds and financial securities speculation. Greece was sucked into the debt machine where the fix itself became the cause of ongoing and ever worsening entanglement, with no release in sight.

For Eurozone bankers, it was just too good a ‘deal’ to terminate: perpetual debt interest money flows back to them, guaranteed by credit extended by the Troika institutions. Overlay on top of that, cycles of opportunity for financial speculation on bonds, stocks, derivatives, and other financial securities. It was even better than Greeks buying German and northern core exports of real goods to Greece. Exports might decline with economic conditions and competition. But debt repayments were guaranteed to continue—for as long as Greece remained in the Euro system at least. Financial imperialism may just prove more profitable than older forms of imperialism based on production and commerce of goods.

This shift to financial exploitation and therefore financial imperialism is a harbinger of things to come for smaller economies and states that allow themselves to be integrated into 21st century capitalism’s drive to concentrate and integrate economies into broader customs (goods trade) unions, currency unions, and banking unions in which the larger, more economically powerful states and economies will naturally dominate and exploit financially their weaker members. A new form of integrated financial imperialism is thus in the making. Greece is likely to be but the forerunner.

Iraqi forces, supported by US-led coalition warplanes, artillery units and military advisers, have made significant gains against the ISIS terrorist group in the eastern part of the Iraqi city of Mosul.

According to Iraqi Lieutenant General Talib Shaghati, Iraqi security forces (ISF), led by the Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), have taken control of about 70 percent of eastern Mosul from the terrorist group.

Iraqi forces are still need to secure the recently liberated areas in eastern Mosul.

Iraqi forces were able to develop the momentum due to better coordination of the operation. A high number of US military advisers on the ground contributed to this.

However, western Mosul and a large part of eastern Mosul remain under the control of ISIS.

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All the huffing and puffing and slandering and fear-mongering and lying for months about Russian hacking failed to make the case. 

Not a shred of evidence was presented supporting accusations made. A previous article cited polling data, showing most Americans disbelieve it.

In US trial proceedings, guilt depends on proof beyond a reasonable doubt, even if not absolutely certain – a high standard to meet, defendants presumed innocent otherwise.

America’s intelligence community can’t get its act straight. Switching allegations shows its operatives can’t agree on what fake news to go with.

Earlier accusations changed, Reuters saying three unnamed US officials now claim “Russia provided hacked material from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks through a third party.”

The earlier version accused Russia of directly interfering in America’s election process, hacking the DNC, helping Trump defeat Hillary.

No evidence suggests Moscow interfered in the election process of any country, or rigged its own to assure Putin’s triumph.

His overwhelming popularity speaks for itself. Russians want no one else leading them. If he runs again in 2018, he’ll be reelected easily, as things now stand.

According to Reuters, unnamed US officials “declined to describe the intelligence obtained about the involvement of a third-party in passing on leaked material to WikiLeaks, saying they did not want to reveal how the US government had obtained the information” – code language for nothing credible to release.

It’s fake news like virtually everything else denigrating Russia, ludicrously calling it “an existential threat,” hyping nonexistent “Russian aggression,” – disgraceful fear-mongering to justify bloated military sending at a time America’s only enemies are ones it invents.

Claiming Russian US election hacking is all about delegitimizing Trump’s triumph, making it hard, maybe impossible, for him to normalize bilateral ties.

If he tries, attempted congressional rebuff is certain, perhaps passing veto-proof legislation, criminalizing efforts to do it.

If he proceeds, he could be impeached and removed from office for treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors as the Constitution permits (Article II, Section 4).

Short of removal from office, any portion of his agenda conflicting with longstanding consensus could be undermined.

If all else fails, he could be eliminated the old-fashioned way – assassinated, ending his tenure and life in one fell swoop.

Four US presidents were assassinated in office: Lincoln, James Garfield, William Mckinley and Jack Kennedy. The deaths of Zachary Taylor and Warren Harding were rumored to be assassinations.

Numerous attempts on the lives of sitting presidents failed, notably against Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, his cousin Franklin, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.

The displeasure of pro-Hillary power brokers over Trump’s triumph leaves him vulnerable. His super-wealth and privilege can’t protect him.

He’s used to being chairman and president of a global conglomerate bearing his name. If he defiantly goes his own way, a bad ending may await him in one form or other.

Dark forces running America tolerate no one challenging longstanding policy. Attempts to diverge significantly don’t end well.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

In July 1974 the US-controlled Athens military junta organized a coup d’état in Cyprus and an assassination attempt against the President of Cyprus Archbishop Makarios. Everything was executed in exactly the same way as it had been a year before in Santiago Chile. (Cyprus is an island of great strategic importance, now a member of EU and Eurozone. 82% of his population are Greek by nationality and 18% Turkish Cypriots. The country obtained its independence from Britain in 1960, after one of the most successful national-liberation struggles after the 2nd World War)

Unlike Salvador Allende, Makarios escaped death and with him his state survived also, albeit mutilated by the Turkish invasion that followed suit. Kissinger had to admit that Cyprus had been the greatest failure of his career.

Why did he do all this? Because Kissinger was the early neocon prototype, albeit much more capable than what his epigones proved to be. In spite of using his intellectual skills to build his image, he could never be something like Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher king, nor even like the shrewd Rabin, who knew when the time had come to transform into a permanent peace, from a hegemonic position, what he had won in the war.

Kissinger wants to play God (even though he should know that sometimes hubris is followed by nemesis. But this is not the kind of argument to stop such a man).

He has enormous capacities, great charisma and a global strategic vision, even if not everybody would agree with it. He was by far the most astute of the great cold (and also hot) warriors. By achieving an otherwise impossible alliance with the leader of the Chinese Communist Revolution, by what he did in Europe, the Middle East, Japan and even Latin America, he was able to encircle Russia and lay the strategic foundations for the demise of the USSR. His influence upon US foreign policy and strategy has lasted much longer than the time of his service as Secretary of State and National Security advisor.

The Master of Deception

His unparalleled achievements were due to the combination of two weapons he knows how to use very well.

One, he never hesitates. Every time he thinks it necessary to use every possible method, he has no moral, or any other, scruples. The end justifies the means, as the Jesuits used to say (or probably their opponents claimed they said).

The second and even more fearful weapon is his capacity to understand, better than they themselves do, what all the various players in a given game are thinking: their mentality, their needs. He is thus able to send all of them, including his rivals, the signals that are right for his purposes, signals formulated in the language the most likely to persuade them and make them move in the direction he wants them to go. Even if they continue to harbour some doubts, he is the master of the game because he knows what he wants and he does not hesitate for a moment. That was the secret of his triumphs.

I think even now Kissinger is one of the very few people who can maintain very good relations with both camps in what seems very much like a civil war at the very top of the Empire, probably between globalizers and practitioners of chaos, something like the war between the emperors Antonius and Octavius in ancient Rome.

Cyprus: a masterpiece of deceptive diplomacy

In 1974 Kissinger was able to prepare his Cyprus coup first by deceiving everybody about his real intentions, including the Greek dictator Ioannides, Archbishop Makarios and Soviet FM Gromyko (when he met both of them in Nicosia weeks before the coup), the British government and even his own President Richard Nixon, probably exploiting his serious troubles with Watergate.

It was a masterpiece of deceptive diplomacy, even if this is something he cannot openly claim.

In March 1974 Major-General Ioannides the Greek dictator invited to his office the ship owner Aristotelis Onassis. He told him, according to one of the very close associates of Onassis, “Aristotelis, everything is fine with foreign policy. The Americans told me to get rid of the priest (Archbishop Makarios, President of Cyprus) and they will give us the island” (Cyprus to be united with Greece). Ioannides was a little bit mad and the only thing Onassis could think of saying to him was “And why they don’t do it themselves?”. Such a question was not enough to make Ioannides think, let alone deter him from what he was already planning.

When Ioannides realized after the coup that he had been deceived and that it was Turkey not Greece that was to be “united” with Cyprus, he ordered the Greek Armed Forces to defend the island by all means and attack Turkey on all fronts. Nobody did anything. The USA were controlling all the Greek military hierarchy. The Turkish troops invaded the island essentially without resistance, proceeding to ethnic cleansing of the Greek population from the zone they controlled. Cyprus lost 3% of its population during this operation, which is more than the Iraqi losses during the invasion of 2003.

Ioannides, a veteran of anticommunist struggles in Greece, died in prison, always refusing to explain what had happened. He said only “I don’t speak because if I speak all Greeks will become Communists”. Some time after the events the Greek Parliament itself adopted a special provision to stop any investigations about Cyprus, invoking the need not to disturb the foreign relations of Greece.

Kissinger meeting Makarios and Gromyko

Just before the coup Kissinger himself visited Cyprus and there met with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Archbishop Makarios. We don’t know much about what was said during their conversations except that Kissinger told the Archbishop as he was leaving the island: “Monseigneur, you are too great a leader for such a tiny place.” It was a flattering remark for this son of peasants to hear such words from one of the most powerful men on Earth.

If we don’t know what was said in those talks we do know what happened afterwards. Makarios began to act with increasing assertiveness in his relations with the junta, ignoring desperate messages from some people in Athens, that they were planning to kill him. He even wrote the junta a letter asking them to recall their officers from Cyprus. This served as the final pretext for the coup against him.

As for the USSR, it reacted only a posteriori to the chain of events and only by the usual diplomatic means. It was the opposite attitude to the one Nikita Khrushchev had adopted in 1964. Then, warned by Makarios’s envoy Vassos Lyssarides, the Cypriot socialist leader, who had met him personally at his southern resort, he had send a strong message to US President Lyndon Johnson explaining that a Turkish plan to invade the island would be unacceptable for the Soviet Union. Johnson sent a letter (published since) to the Turkish leader Inonu, telling him to cancel the invasion plans.

But all plans may have some problematic points. Not only did Makarios survive but the Socialists and other democrats resisted the coup on the ground. Kissinger’s chosen man in Cyprus, Clerides, who had in the meantime become the acting President, and Kissinger’s friends in Athens, could not do much finally but accept the return of the Archbishop to his island after some months abroad. He had saved his state, but nearly half of the island was already occupied and hundreds of thousands of refugees were living in tents. His heart broken, he died three years later.

Turkey enters the game

The Turkish forces invaded the island in July 1974 to “protect the Republic of Cyprus and Turkish Cypriots”. The constitutional order of the Republic had been restored on the island, nobody there was in any real danger, the Athens junta had collapsed. But one month later, while negotiations were being held in Geneva, the Turkish Army began its second phase of the invasion, occupying nearly half of the island, where it still stands. According to relevant UN documents the Northern occupied zone of Cyprus remains the most militarized region on Earth. The day before the second military operation Kissinger and the Turkish PM Ecevit had had 14 telephone conversations.

In November 1974 Kissinger met Denktash and explained to him what kind of solution he should demand for Cyprus. Later, US undersecretary of State Clifford explained to Makarios what kind of solution was fit for the island.

On the basis of a solution of this type, decades later, the “Annan Plan for the solution of the Cyprus conflict” was developed and presented to the Cypriot people in a 2004 referendum. Cypriots rejected the proposal.

From Kissinger to Nuland – from modernity to postmodernism (with Turkey invited to join EU)

Now Mrs Nuland wants exactly the same solution before she leaves the State Department. She wants to impose it on Cyprus through a new coup d’état, of a very different, less dramatic and more dangerous type. The coup d’état is to take place in Geneva, on 12th January.

She knows that she cannot win a referendum under the given circumstances. She will therefore try to take everything she can from the powers of the existing Cypriot state, on a legal and political level and at the level of international law, before holding probably two and not one referenda, which is logical as there will be not one but two states in Cyprus after January 12. She will hold the promised referendum she cannot win under the circumstances only when she has changed those circumstances. And she will hold two, not one.

All of this is illegal, but if Anastasiades and Tsipras or Kotzias sign the agreements under pressure from her, there will be not be many people around even to protest, as they did during the Iraq war. They will not survive such an act, politically, but I am not sure how they interpret the situation. The more so as most of the international players in fact prefer such a “solution”, and many of them, unbelievable as it may seem, just do not know the real details and provisions of the Annan plan. They know only that they have to support it! If all this planning does not falter somewhere in the next few days, it will soon be announced on the screens of CNN and world TV: Breaking News: Peace in Cyprus. The two sides announce the creation of a new partnership. Historic foes Greece and Turkey sign a Pact of Alliance.

At some point in the future Cyprus will be transformed into a Bosnia. But who will then remember what was on the CNN screen that day? Do you hear anything now about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? They will just say: “Oh, those Greeks and Turks, they are at it again. They never know how to behave. They are genetically or culturally disposed to violence.

The Cyprus settlement risks becoming, simultaneously, the last victory of the old “globalization” and a prelude to the new Order of Chaos!

One small detail: the Annan-Anastasiades-Nuland plan also provides for Turkey to become something like a full member of the EU, a decades-old project of US policy, which now seems all but unachievable through normal means.

One more reason for Mr. Obama and Mr. Erdogan to eye the cheese and ignore the trap. The only thing I don’t know is what Netanyahu thinks of all this.

Kissinger: The reasons I did it

Speaking to a closed seminar under Chatham House rules, Mr. Kissinger justified his policy by saying that whoever rules Cyprus, Crete and Malta “rules the world”. Given that he had already lost Malta, he could not afford also to lose Cyprus, ruled by this “red priest”, the “Mediterranean Castro”.

This is misrepresentation. Makarios was a very anticommunist, pro-American, conservative, right-wing politician. The only reason that he was flirting with the Soviet Union and that he became a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, was the threat of extinction of his state, which was always London’s and Washington’s policy aim for Cyprus. .

As the Colonial Secretary of the United Kingdom said of the Commonwealth Harry Hopkins said, answering a question about Cyprus from Labour’s ex-colonial secretary Griffiths in the House of Commons, “It has always been understood and agreed that there are certain territories in the Commonwealth which, owing to the particular circumstances, can never expect to be fully independent”. (28.7.1954)

Cyprus is an island like Britain and (strategically speaking) the USA. From there you can attack anybody in the Eastern Mediterranean, but nobody can easily attack you. When the British PM Disraeli acquired the island from the Ottoman Empire he said “we have got the link we were missing”. Imperial planners not only always thought it would be too risky to let the inhabitants of the island rule themselves (this used to be, and still is, the “Cyprus problem”). They often used the most destabilizing methods to attain their goal of taking the island from them.

Kissinger can say whatever he wants. He all but destroyed the South East wing of NATO. Monteagle Sterns, US Ambassador to Athens, said the only reason the Soviet Union was not able to make huge strategic gains out of the mess produced by Kissinger was its own unwillingness or incompetence.

From Kiev to Nicosia

The same is true of Mrs. Nuland. She could claim, for instance, that what she did in Kiev was necessary to stop Putin from recreating the Soviet Union. But it is not true. The West, if it wanted, could incorporate not only Ukraine, but also Russia into the Western system. They did it with Germany after the War. All that would be required would be to send money there, not IMF economists, and to avoid having NATO troops penetrate deep inside the ex-USSR. Now they don’t understand how it is possible that Putin should be ruling the Kremlin. They believe it is just a misunderstanding of history and they look for ways to remove him from his position. This attitude is not serious.

On the subject of Kiev, I really don’t know how to evaluate it. What happened in Kiev was the strongest possible motivation for Putin to decide to send his army to Syria. The West is already facing the consequences of the biggest strategic defeat it has suffered since the Vietnam War. Can you really call such an outcome a triumph?

Obama, Cyprus and two schools of imperial thinking

Some friends of mine will be shocked to discover that I greatly esteem the President of the United States, Barack Obama, for one thing he did , and I really do. He stopped the crazy neocon plan for a new Syria invasion (as in Iraq) and the even crazier idea of bombing Iran, probably with tactical nukes, as Seymour Hearsh was already warning us a decade ago. I consider the very existence of such plans as the most serious indication of a deep decline of our civilization

Of course Obama should be criticized for many other things. But one should not judge the presidents of the United States only by the policy of their country. Those seemingly all-powerful people are much more hostages of the mad machine they are running than we are! And for any judgment to be correct one should take into account the real situation in which one person acts.

Obama said something very serious, answering the critiques he had received of the “failures of his Middle Eastern policy”. He criticized the previous administrations for the legacy they had left him and for the method of “first shooting and then looking”.

But he also made the same mistake and he admitted it in the case of Libya, when he heard Sarkozy. He is a clever man and he probably understood finally that something had gone wrong with Kiev, but he will not admit it. He is familiar with Third World problems but not with Russia. He represents a generation that lacks the terrible education and experience that was the Cold War. About Russia, but not about Cyprus, he could gain a lot from talking with Kissinger and even more from reading Kennan or Cohen. As for Brzezinski, passions are usually misleading. His anti-Russian mania undermined the other aims of his interventions.

Of course nobody there in the White House has taken the time to read the Annan Plan (and the same is true for European bureaucracies and governments). They would easily understand, if they read it, that it creates a Bosnia in the Mediterranean. But this is how the world is run. By small minority groups inside the system which write the laws and push the decision makers to act accordingly, thinking they are deciding.

Dimitris Konstantakopoulos is a journalist and writer. He worked as an advisor on East-West Relations and Arms Control in the office of Greek PM Andreas Papapndreou (1985-88) and he was the chief correspondent of the Greek news agency ANA in Moscow (1989-99). He collaborated with Michel Pablo in launching the international review for self-management Utopie Critique. He has been a member of the Central Committee and the Secretariat and of the Committee on Foreign Policy of SYRIZA. He stopped having any relations with SYRIZA in July 2015.

In the past 24 hours, a string of new developments are potentially reshaping the Reina Nightclub Shooting incident on New Year’s Eve in Istanbul. Perhaps most shockingly, according to US intelligence reports, Reina nightclub’s security had been taken over ten days prior to the apparent terror tragedy. If that’s not enough – there’s also been a peculiar case of mistaken identity.

Let’s review some of the latest details in the Turkish nightclub shooting…

According to reports, a strange ‘selfie’ image and video allegedly featuring a ‘prime suspect’ was released. However, the apparent shooter is still at-large following an apparent case of “mistaken identity.” The UK’s Mirror reported the strange developments, as the person in the selfie shots did not match a person arrested by authorities at Istanbul’s airport over the past day:

“Twenty-eight year-old Iakhe Mashrapov, from Kyrgyzstan, said Turkish police arrested him but that he was released following a case of mistaken identity.

He made the claim during an interview with Kyrgyz TV after TRT, Turkey’s state broadcaster, named him as the chief suspect.

Mr Mashrapov claims he was taken into custody by the Turks when boarding a flight in Istanbul after mistaking him for the main suspect due to his apparent likeness.”

In addition, over a dozen individuals have been detained and questioned following the attack.

Here’s an image released by authorities and media that allegedly depicts  28 year-old Iakhe Mashrapov, from Kyrgyzstan, who was initially thought to be the selfie/nightclub attacker. Make note that Mashrapov appears to be much older in the picture presented by media below…

Political Shifts?

In 2016, after a wave of German terror-related incidents were blended with a seemingly engineered migrant crisis – a large amount of national political pressure was placed on CDP leader Angela Merkel following the highly suspicious Berlin Christmas market attack. This has set the tone for a major political upheaval prior to the upcoming electoral cycles in Germany. Similarly, Turkey has been embroiled in political controversy as its President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan‘s pro-Islamist perspective has come under fire along with Turkey’s increased role in Syria. Here’s apassage from a report by 21WIRE contributor Vanessa Beeley in 2016, that accurately describes the scenario that has unfolded in Turkey:

“The regime has come under international scrutiny for permitting the free flow of jihadis and weapons to rebel groups fighting the government in Syria (the ‘jihad highway’), which resulted in the rise of the brutal insurgent group, Islamic State, which is fast spreading its tentacles worldwide. The anti-Shia strategy of promoting regime change in Syria and cornering its Iranian ally through (Sunni) Islamic terror backfired when America forced Turkey to take an active role in the US-led coalition against the ISIS. A series of deadly bombings followed on Turkish soil, all attributed to ISIS.”

How these alleged ‘terror’ events push major political shifts must be seriously considered when dissecting a possible modus operandi of this and other similar high-profile media ‘national security’ events.

THE REAL TURKISH SHOOTER? – A selfie image seen alongside apparent CCTV camera footage allegedly outside Reina nightclub featuring the attacker. (Image Source: cbc)

Turkey’s nightclub shooter remains at large even though authorities have reportedly visually identified their suspect, in addition to already obtaining fingerprints from the crime scene.

QUESTION: Was the mistaken identity story a ‘red herring’ given that authorities have already ID’d their man – most likely a known wolf operator?

If that isn’t enough to consider, Turkey’s Hurriyet news disclosed that “Reina’s owner, Mehmet Kocarslan, as saying security measures had been taken over the past 10 days after U.S. intelligence reports suggested a possible attack.”

You have to wonder why this aspect of the story has barely been mentioned and why US intelligence has seemingly clung tightly to this key information, especially considering it appears to show evidence of a heavily coordinated attack.

Additionally, who exactly was heading security at the club in the days prior to the Istanbul attack?

Here at 21WIRE  we’ve already outlined the seemingly ready-made terror story that has been totally accepted wholesale by Western media outlets, including the possible mistaken identity red herring:

According to authorities, 39 people have been killed, with at least 69 wounded during the Reina nightclub.

The Telegraph reports the following:

“Armed with a long-barrelled weapon, the attacker shot a police officer before storming the elite Reina club in the Ortakoy area of the city at about 1.45am.

Describing the carnage as a “terror attack”, Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin said 35 people had died and 40 people were wounded.”

“Unfortunately [the shooter] rained bullets in a very cruel and merciless way on innocent people who were there to celebrate New Year’s and have fun,” Mr Sahin said.

There were believed to be more than 500 people in the club at the time. Many party-goers threw themselves into the Bosphorus in panic after the attack and efforts were underway to rescue them from the waters, NTV television said.”

ISIS ‘Takes Credit’

In the age of digital media and informational illusion, the potential for GLADIO-style manipulation through events like this has never been greater.

As is usually the routine, ‘ISIS’ eventually claimed “credit” for this unconventional attack, calling the still-at-large shooter  a ‘hero of the caliphate.’ This was reported with blind faith by the paper of record the New York Times:

“The Islamic State issued a rare claim of responsibility on Monday for the New Year’s Day attack on an Istanbul nightclub that killed at least 39 people, describing the gunman who carried out the assault — and who has not been identified or captured — as “a hero soldier of the caliphate.”

The attack was clearly designed to incite religious warfare, as the ‘ISIS’ statement (which could have been written by anyone) continues:

“A hero soldier of the caliphate attacked one of the most famous nightclubs, where Christians celebrated their pagan holiday,”

The NY Times continued relying on its ‘pro-terrorist’ limited hangout sources – with more ISIS propaganda designed to stir fears in the west:

“a pro-Islamic State group, the Nashir Media Foundation, published the latest in a series of messages calling for attacks on clubs, markets and movie theaters.”

Rather than a suicide bomb attack, or the shooter martyring himself in jihad glory, the Turkish nightclub attack was a carefully calculated mass murder which lacked the usual religious symbolism featured in every other attack – which further indicates that this may not have been a genuine religious terrorist attack as portrayed through mass media.

NOTE: Immediately after this ‘terrorist’ event, Turkey sent its military forces deeper into Syria, and with the full blessing of the US and NATO.

Early reports suggest that one suspected shooter may have been dressed as Santa Claus. However, Turkish PM Benali Yildirim, refutes this claim. The Daily Beast adds the following details:

One shows a man wearing dark clothes firing wildly in the street, with bullets ricocheting off of cars, as he moves toward the door of the club.

An image capture on CCTV, shows a man supposedly entering the well-known Club Reina among debris and shattered glass in the background.

As often is the case in these events, eye-witness accounts have suggested the attack was committed by multiple shooters:

“The whereabouts of the attacker was still unknown and some reports suggested there were multiple attackers. Police special forces and explosives experts were  searching the club, an NTV correspondent at the scene said.”

QUESTION: Will the Turkish nightclub attacker or attackers turn out to be yet another ‘known wolf’ scenario? Will 2017 also be the year of the known wolf terror?

UPDATE: CNN began promoting this bizarre selfie of the new prime suspect in this ‘terror’ event:

“Turkish state-run media say police provided this photo of the suspect in the Istanbul nightclub attack. CNN cannot confirm when or where the photo was taken.”

Strangely, authorities gave no real context as to the source of the new “shooter selfie” where the subject appears to be posing with a characterized menacing look in video shot with a selfie stick.

Turkish media have also released a selfie video of the purported selfie shooter…

In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating editor’s note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story were fiction: The first note was posted a full two weeks later to the top of the original article; the other was buried the following day at the bottom.

The second story on the electric grid turned out to be far worse than I realized when I wrote about it on Saturday, when it became clear that there was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid” as the Post had claimed. In addition to the editor’s note, the Russia-hacked-our-electric-grid story now has a full-scale retraction in the form of a separate article admitting that “the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility” and there may not even have been malware at all on this laptop.

But while these debacles are embarrassing for the paper, they are also richly rewarding. That’s because journalists — including those at the Post — aggressively hype and promote the original, sensationalistic false stories, ensuring that they go viral, generating massive traffic for the Post (the paper’s executive editor, Marty Baron, recently boasted about how profitable the paper has become).

After spreading the falsehoods far and wide, raising fear levels and manipulating U.S. political discourse in the process (both Russia stories were widely hyped on cable news), journalists who spread the false claims subsequently note the retraction or corrections only in the most muted way possible, and often not at all. As a result, only a tiny fraction of people who were exposed to the original false story end up learning of the retractions.

Baron himself, editorial leader of the Post, is a perfect case study in this irresponsible tactic. It was Baron who went to Twitter on the evening of November 24 to announce the Post’s exposé of the enormous reach of Russia’s fake news operation, based on what he heralded as the findings of “independent researchers.” Baron’s tweet went all over the place; to date, it has been re-tweeted more than 3,000 times, including by many journalists with their own large followings:

But after that story faced a barrage of intense criticism — from Adrian Chen in the New Yorker (“propaganda about Russia propaganda”), Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (“shameful, disgusting”), my own article, and many others — including legal threats from the sites smeared as Russian propaganda outlets by the Post’s “independent researchers” — the Post finally added its lengthy editor’s note distancing itself from the anonymous group that provided the key claims of its story (“The Post … does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings” and “since publication of the Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list”). What did Baron tell his followers about this editor’s note that gutted the key claims of the story he hyped? Nothing. Not a word. To date, he has been publicly silent about these revisions. Having spread the original claims to tens of thousands of people, if not more, he took no steps to ensure that any of them heard about the major walk back on the article’s most significant, inflammatory claims. He did, however, ironically find the time to promote a different Post story about how terrible and damaging Fake News is:

Whether the Post’s false stories here can be distinguished from what is commonly called “Fake News” is, at this point, a semantic dispute, particularly since “Fake News” has no cogent definition. Defenders of Fake News as a distinct category typically emphasize intent in order to differentiate it from bad journalism. That’s really just a way of defining Fake News so as to make it definitionally impossible for mainstream media outlets like the Post ever to be guilty of it (much the way terrorism is defined to ensure that the U.S. government and its allies cannot, by definition, ever commit it).

But what was the Post’s motive in publishing two false stories about Russia that, very predictably, generated massive attention, traffic, and political impact? Was it ideological and political — namely, devotion to the D.C. agenda of elevating Russia into a grave threat to U.S. security? Was it to please its audience — knowing that its readers, in the wake of Trump’s victory, want to be fed stories about Russian treachery? Was it access and source servitude — proving it will serve as a loyal and uncritical repository for any propaganda intelligence officials want disseminated? Was it profit — to generate revenue through sensationalistic click-bait headlines with a reckless disregard to whether its stories are true? In an institution as large as the Post, with numerous reporters and editors participating in these stories, it’s impossible to identify any one motive as definitive.

Whatever the motives, the effects of these false stories are exactly the same as those of whatever one regards as Fake News. The false claims travel all over the internet, deceiving huge numbers into believing them. The propagators of the falsehoods receive ample profit from their false, viral “news.” And there is no accountability of the kind that would disincentivize a repeat of the behavior. (That the Post ultimately corrects its false story does not distinguish it from classic Fake News sites, which also sometimes do the same.)

And while it’s true that all media outlets make mistakes, and that even the most careful journalism sometimes errs, those facts do not remotely mitigate the Post’s behavior here. In these cases, they did not make good faith mistakes after engaging in careful journalism. With both stories, they were reckless (at best) from the start, and the glaring deficiencies in the reporting were immediately self-evident (which is why both stories were widely attacked upon publication).

As this excellent timeline by Kalev Leetaru documents, the Post did not even bother to contact the utility companies in question — the most elementary step of journalistic responsibility — until after the story was published. Intelligence officials insisting on anonymity — so as to ensure no accountability — whispered to them that this happened, and despite how significant the consequences would be, they rushed to print it with no verification at all. This is not a case of good journalism producing inaccurate reporting; it is the case of a media outlet publishing a story that it knew would produce massive benefits and consequences without the slightest due diligence or care.

The most ironic aspect of all this is that it is mainstream journalists — the very people who have become obsessed with the crusade against Fake News — who play the key role in enabling and fueling this dissemination of false stories. They do so not only by uncritically spreading them, but also by taking little or no steps to notify the public of their falsity.

The Post’s epic debacle this weekend regarding its electric grid fiction vividly illustrates this dynamic. As I noted on Saturday, many journalists reacted to this story the same way they do every story about Russia: They instantly click and re-tweet and share the story without the slightest critical scrutiny. That these claims are constantly based on the whispers of anonymous officials and accompanied by no evidence whatsoever gives those journalists no pause at all; any official claim that Russia and Putin are behind some global evil is instantly treated as Truth. That’s a significant reason papers like the Post are incentivized to recklessly publish stories of this kind. They know they will be praised and rewarded no matter the accuracy or reliability because their Cause — the agenda — is the right one.

On Friday night, immediately after the Post’s story was published, one of the most dramatic pronouncements came from the New York Times’s editorial writer Brent Staples, who said this:

Now that this story has collapsed and been fully retracted, what has Staples done to note that this tweet was false? Just like Baron, absolutely nothing. Actually, that’s not quite accurate, as he did do something: At some point after Friday night, he quietly deleted his tweet without comment. He has not uttered a word about the fact that the story he promoted has collapsed, and that what he told his 16,000-plus followers — along with the countless number of people who re-tweeted the dramatic claim of this prominent journalist — turned out to be totally false in every respect.

Even more instructive is the case of MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin, a prolific and skilled social media user who has seen his following explode this year with a constant stream of anti-Trump content. On Friday night, when the Post story was published, Griffin hyped it with a series of tweets designed to make the story seem as menacing and consequential as possible. That included hysterical statements from Vermont officials — who believed the Post’s false claim — that in retrospect are unbelievably embarrassing.

That tweet from Griffin — convincing people that Putin was endangering the health and safety of Vermonters — was re-tweeted more than 1,000 times. His other similar tweets — such as this one featuring Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy’s warning that Putin was trying to “shut down [the grid] in the middle of winter” — were also widely spread.

But the next day, the crux of the story collapsed — the Post’s editor’s note acknowledged that “there is no indication” that “Russian hackers had penetrated the electricity grid” — and Griffin said nothing. Indeed, he said nothing further on any of this until yesterday — four days after his series of widely shared tweets — in which he simply re-tweeted a Post reporter noting an “update” that the story was false without providing any comment himself:

In contrast to Griffin’s original inflammatory tweets about the Russian menace, which were widely and enthusiastically spread, this after-the-fact correction has a paltry 289 re-tweets. Thus, a small fraction of those who were exposed to Griffin’s sensationalistic hyping of this story ended up learning that all of it was false.

I genuinely do not mean to single out these individual journalists for scorn. They are just illustrative of a very common dynamic: Any story that bolsters the prevailing D.C. orthodoxy on the Russia Threat, no matter how dubious, is spread far and wide. And then, as has happened so often, when the story turns out to be false or misleading, little or nothing is done to correct the deceitful effects. And, most amazingly of all, these are the same people constantly decrying the threat posed by Fake News.

A very common dynamic is driving all of this: media groupthink, greatly exacerbated (as I described on Saturday) by the incentive scheme of Twitter. As the grand media failure of 2002 demonstrated, American journalists are highly susceptible to fueling and leading the parade in demonizing a new Foreign Enemy rather than exerting restraint and skepticism in evaluating the true nature of that threat.

It is no coincidence that many of the most embarrassing journalistic debacles of this year involve the Russia Threat, and they all involve this same dynamic. Perhaps the worst one was the facially ridiculous, pre-election Slate story — which multiple outlets (including The Intercept) had been offered but passed on — alleging that Trump had created a secret server to communicate with a Russian bank; that story was so widely shared that even the Clinton campaign ended up hyping it — a tweet that, by itself, was re-tweeted almost 12,000 times.

But only a small percentage of those who heard of it ended up hearing of the major walk back and debunking from other outlets. The same is true of The Guardian story from last week on WikiLeaks and Putin that ended up going viral, only to have its retraction barely noticed because most of the journalists who spread the story did not bother to note it.

Beyond the journalistic tendency to echo anonymous officials on whatever Scary Foreign Threat they are hyping at the moment, there is an independent incentive scheme sustaining all of this. That Russia is a Grave Menace attacking the U.S. has — for obvious reasons — become a critical narrative for Democrats and other Trump opponents who dominate elite media circles on social media and elsewhere. They reward and herald anyone who bolsters that narrative, while viciously attacking anyone who questions it.

Indeed, in my 10-plus years of writing about politics on an endless number of polarizing issues — including the Snowden reporting — nothing remotely compares to the smear campaign that has been launched as a result of the work I’ve done questioning and challenging claims about Russian hacking and the threat posed by that country generally. This is being engineered not by random, fringe accounts, but by the most prominent Democratic pundits with the largest media followings.

I’ve been transformed, overnight, into an early adherent of alt-right ideology, an avid fan of Breitbart, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, and — needless to say  — a Kremlin operative. That’s literally the explicit script they’re now using, often with outright fabrications of what I say (see here for one particularly glaring example).

They, of course, know all of this is false. A primary focus of the last 10 years of my journalism has been a defense of the civil liberties of Muslims. I wrote an entire book on the racism and inequality inherent in the U.S. justice system. My legal career involved numerous representations of victims of racial discrimination. I was one of the first journalists to condemn the misleadingly “neutral” approach to reporting on Trump and to call for more explicit condemnations of his extremism and lies. I was one of the few to defend Jorge Ramos from widespread media attacks when he challenged Trump’s immigration extremism. Along with many others, I tried to warn Democrats that nominating a candidate as unpopular as Hillary Clinton risked a Trump victory. And as someone who is very publicly in a same-sex, inter-racial marriage — with someone just elected to public office as a socialist — I make for a very unlikely alt-right leader, to put that mildly.

The malice of this campaign is exceeded only by its blatant stupidity. Even having to dignify it with a defense is depressing, though once it becomes this widespread, one has little choice.

But this is the climate Democrats have successfully cultivated — where anyone dissenting or even expressing skepticism about their deeply self-serving Russia narrative is the target of coordinated and potent smears; where, as The Nation’s James Carden documented yesterday, skepticism is literally equated with treason. And the converse is equally true: Those who disseminate claims and stories that bolster this narrative — no matter how divorced from reason and evidence they are — receive an array of benefits and rewards.

That the story ends up being completely discredited matters little. The damage is done, and the benefits received. Fake News in the narrow sense of that term is certainly something worth worrying about. But whatever one wants to call this type of behavior from the Post, it is a much greater menace given how far the reach is of the institutions that engage in it.

Due to incredibly sloppy reporting by the mainstream media – constantly repeating the phrase “Russia hacked the election” – many Americans believed that Russia literally changed votes on election day.

A YouGov poll from last month found that half of all Democrats believe that Russia directly tampered with vote tallies:

But today, the head of all U.S. intelligence – James Clapper – told Congress (specifically the Armed Services Committee):

They did not change any vote tallies or anything of that sort.

So will the media apologize for scaring the stuffing out of the American people?

Police made up to 600 arrests throughout Mexico yesterday as protests continued against President Enrique Pena Nieto’s cut to gas subsidies, known colloquially as the gasolinazo. One police officer was killed during confrontations in an impoverished neighborhood of Mexico City, and the mayor deployed 9,000 police to guard commercial centers throughout the city.

Yesterday also saw indications that localized protests by workers may be developing into a broader strike movement. Fourteen thousand bus, truck and taxi drivers in the oil-producing state of Veracruz announced a statewide strike of indefinite length, with many leaving their trucks, cabs, and buses parked on the street.

Workers in Veracruz, located on the Atlantic coast, joined transportation workers in the Pacific coast city of Guadalajara, who also struck yesterday, though initial reports show the strike as only partial. Truck drivers and demonstrators continued to block several key highways and tollbooths linking major inland Mexican cities.

The protest continued as US President-elect Donald Trump threw further doubt into Mexico’s US-export-based manufacturing industry when he tweeted a threat to penalize Toyota for its plans to build an auto plant in Baja California.

In Morelia, 2,000 transportation workers marched demanding the resignation of President Pena Nieto and the revocation of the subsidy cut. El Financierowarned that there are “signs of a total strike of transport” in Michoacan. In Acapulco, Guerrero, taxi drivers are encircling Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) oil trucks, forcing them to stop and taking turns siphoning the gas from their tankers. When a group of soldiers attempted to stop one group of taxi drivers yesterday, the drivers said that if the soldiers intervened they would light the tanker on fire. The soldiers backed down.

The trade unions are stepping in to prevent the demonstrations from coalescing into a nationwide strike. Trade union bureaucrats who announced the recent strikes stated explicitly that they were forced to do so by workers, who in the words of one trade union official, are becoming “violent.”

Castelan Cruvelli, president of the Veracruz transport workers union ASTRAVER, denounced striking workers for threatening scab drivers and appealed to the government for help: “This has not gotten out of control, we are hoping that a government liaison will engage in dialogue with us, as always in a peaceful way.”

Alfredo Dam Ham, leader of the Mexican Transport Workers Alliance (AMOTAC), pledged to the government that the strike would remain peaceful and appealed to drivers to refrain from blocking any roads.

The entire ruling apparatus—including the trade unions, the corporate press, businesses and the capitalist parties—are fearful that the gasolinazo protests have the potential to ignite into a movement of millions of Mexican workers. Last night, police arrested up to 600 people as riots and looting spread throughout the country, including youth as young as 13 years old.

The main national association of gas stations, shop owners and department stores called for the government to send the armed forces to crush demonstrations. The group’s president, Manuel Cardona Zapata, told the television program Despierta yesterday, “We need federal intervention, and if necessary the army, because this situation is out of control.”

According to Cardona, rioters have looted 250 stores in recent days as protests spread throughout the state of Mexico, Michoacan, Hidalgo, Mexico City, Veracruz, Tabasco, Queretaro and Quintana Roo.

Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera, a member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), said the subsequent police deployment was “to guarantee the free expression of ideas.” Video circulated yesterday, however, showed police looting stores in the State of Mexico.

Though looting has undoubtedly occurred, it is minuscule compared to the Pena Nieto administration’s looting of the oil industry, which was nationalized in 1938 after a major strike by oil workers against British oil corporations. The oil subsidy cut is part of the Mexican ruling class’s efforts to privatize Pemex and to hand the country’s oil resources over to private corporations.

Protesters, led by transportation workers, have continued to block several oil processing centers, creating what Pemex described as a “critical situation” for oil production. Heavily armed riot police confronted demonstrators in at least one location and were able to “liberate” the Pemex facility when the workers peacefully retreated from the barricades after a tense standoff.

Transportation workers and demonstrators also reportedly established a new blockade around a facility near the border city of Mexicali. Elements of the federal and state police, as well as the army, are guarding other key facilities. Pemex also announced that the blockades are causing severe gas shortages in Baja California and Chihuahua.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, ex-candidate for president and leader of the Movement for National Regeneration (Morena), issued a video statement yesterday afternoon and warned of “chaos” caused by demonstrators who he said were following “fascist strategies.” “We want to put order in the chaos,” he said. Lopez Obrador told viewers to put their faith in a legislative resolution to overturn the gas hike, saying, “Congress represents the people.”

Morena and AMLO are expected to poll well in next year’s presidential elections, with many commentators anticipating a Morena victory. Morena is an ostensibly “left,” populist bourgeois party that plays a key role in Mexican politics by directing demonstrations back into the safe channels of the Mexican state and away from the class struggle. Morena helped suffocate opposition to the Pena Nieto government’s education reforms, paving the way for the government to cover up its role in murdering 43 student teachers in Guerrero in 2014.

The protests in Mexico have been blacked out by the corporate media in the US, despite the fact that millions of Mexican citizens currently reside north of the border. As of Thursday afternoon, the online front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, ABC, Fox, and CBS all failed to mention the demonstrations. This is not an oversight. The American ruling class fears that the development of a movement of the working class in Mexico will ignite a parallel struggle by workers of all nationalities in the United States.

The war against the people: fear and loathing in NY and DC

Thank you for your support. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Vladimir Putin is the secret president of the United States.

Yep. That’s it. The US is now the USSR. It’s all over. Trump is a Communist who took orders from Putin. Trump is a Red. That was his game all along. He’s a billionaire Commie.

Here is how this would play out in a reasonable court, in the judge’s chambers—

Prosecutor: Your Honor, we’re prepared to offer proof that Putin personally influenced the election in favor of Trump.

Trump’s Lawyer: Nonsense. This is a ruse.

Judge: Mr. Prosecutor, what is the nature your proof?

Prosecutor: We will bring several CIA people to the stand and they will say they have proof.

Judge: Will they back up those statements with evidence, so Mr. Trump’s attorney can cross-examine them?

Prosecutor: No. Secrets must be kept.

Judge: Not in my court.

End of story.

Think about this: what will the major media do when their latest fiction about the Russians and Trump sinks below the waves? They’re lying so hard and so often…is there any end to it?

The answer is no. They’re committed. They can’t turn back.

They’re committing slow suicide in full view of the public.

It almost feels like they want to go down.

“Stop me before I kill again.”

Men and women of the news, whose whole act depends on securing trust and admiration from the public, are squandering whatever is left of it in the space of a few months.

Well, they didn’t believe that outrageous lie. Let’s try one that’s even more ridiculous.

Now they want to censor news which fails to fit their picture. And if they don’t watch out, they’ll take down Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter—their enablers—with them, as people find new social-media outposts.

Trump—love him, hate him, whatever—is playing his role. He’s virtually winning a new election every time the major media slam him and he comes back with a tweet that simply announces, “You’re full of it.”

Influential papers like the NY Times and the Washington Post have gotten a free pass for as long as they’ve been in business. Their staffs have developed a massive sense of their own importance, their own infallibility. They’re like popes—who’ve suddenly been exposed, in leaked documents, for falsely claiming Jesus wanted the Catholic Church built in his name.

George Orwell: “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.”

Recognize we’re in a unique situation here. This has never happened before—certainly not in a highly sophisticated civilization where the official means of communicating information were limited to a few basic sources. Those sources have lost now faith with the people. Instead, huge numbers of new outlets have emerged.

The mainstream is beginning to realize how great the shift is.

A centralized reality splitting up equals a centralized and hypnotized perception of reality splitting up.

Centralized reality, by its very nature, presents a false picture. In the absence of that monopoly, many new true stories emerge that were previously hidden. Each of these stories is, in effect, a new reality holding a candle in the dark.

Virtually all major news sources agreeing on the substance of virtually all important stories, over the course of decades, is completely unnatural and absurd. That agreement must be engineered. Concocted. Invented.

The “consistent concoction” is dissolving in the minds of the public. It no longer holds sway.

Hillary Clinton and her supporters should be thanked for contributing to this break-up. The public is viewing their actions as those of a child who refuses to admit she herself is at fault, and instead throws blame in every possible direction: thousands of “fake news” sites; the Russians; Putin; pollsters who failed to warn of impending doom; the Electoral College system; the “deplorables”; WikiLeaks; the FBI.

“It’s not our fault. It’s everybody else’s fault.”

Thank you, thank you.

Keep finding new people to blame. How about the Chinese, the Brexit supporters, some guy who owns a gas station in Death Valley, a massive tribe who live on the dark side of the moon and illegally voted for Trump?

Don’t stop now.

Interestingly, the big donors to Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign, who are shocked and irate after forking over their money, aren’t eagerly drinking the Putin Kool-Aid. They’re hard-headed, and they want real-life answers. As Politico writes (12/15):

…the wealthy Democrats who helped pump over $1 billion into Clinton’s losing effort have been urging their local finance staffers, state party officials, and campaign aides to provide a more thorough explanation of what went wrong. With no dispassionate, centralized analysis of how Clinton failed so spectacularly, they insist, how can they be expected to keep contributing to the party?

’A lot of the bundlers and donors still are in shock and disbelief by what happened. They’re looking for some introspection and analysis about what really happened, what worked and what didn’t,’ said Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and a top campaign bundler himself. ‘It may take some time to do that, but people are still just scratching their heads’.

Or, in the words of a Midwestern fundraiser who’s kept in touch with fellow donors, ‘A lot of people are saying, “I’m not putting another fucking dime in until someone tells me what just happened”.’

The CIA-connected Washington Post can pump out as many “Putin-did-it” articles as they want to. But the big Clinton donors are unimpressed.

Don’t look for major media outlets to give those donors much face time. It would explode the blame-game narrative.

The NY Times is now calling Trump a threat to democracy. Translation: Trump is a threat to the NY Times, and by extension, all major media—because the Times is usually the first voice that sounds in the news echo chamber that bounces fake stories among hundreds of outlets from shore to shore.

I’m waiting for the term “Russian denialist” to pop up in the press, as a label for reporters who “ignore a mountain of evidence” that Putin hacked the election and handed it to Donald Trump.

Stay with us. Coming up after the break, a list of Russian denialists who refuse to believe what’s in front of their eyes, say government officials. Some of the names will shock you. But first, six commercials for medical drugs you don’t need that could put you in the hospital…

The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country. It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what’s going on. If The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It’s a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening.

—Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor

The major media’s depth of hatred for Donald Trump is beyond most people’s understanding. Most people can’t fathom it, because they believe they know who these media personages are. They see them on television or read their words every day. How bad could these reporters be?

Very, very bad. The media personages see themselves as 12th-generation feudal barons who are suddenly surrounded by the peasants stealing their land, crops, animals, homes, and royal titles.

Here is what Paul Krugman of the NY Times recently wrote about Trump:

Thought: There was (rightly) a cloud of illegitimacy over Bush, dispelled (wrongly) by 9/11. Creates some interesting incentives for Trump.” —As if Trump might secretly provoke another huge terror attack on US soil and, by his response, improve his status in the eyes of the public. Heavy, heavy malevolent conspiracy theory from a baron at the Times.

Back in February, WND reported on a tweet from another NY Times writer: “A columnist with the New York Times caused a social media stir with a tweet that joked of billionaire businessman and GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s assassination.

’Good news guys,’ wrote Ross Douthat in his tweet, as found by Infowars.com. ‘I’ve figure out how the Trump campaign ends.’ Douthat is a foreign-policy expert who supports Marco Rubio and John Kasich. He then included a link to a YouTube video of the 1983 movie, ‘The Dead Zone,’ a flick that features Christopher Walken as a character who tries to shoot to death a politician played by Martin Sheen. Sheen’s character uses a human baby to shield himself from the assassination attempt.

This is the media battling for survival.

Suppose, as rumored, Trump decides to re-cast the whole White House Press Office? Suppose, for example, he intends to deny many veteran reporters their press credentials, and instead welcomes independent journalists?

Suppose Trump decides to establish his own Web channel, and live- streams many fireside chats directly to a global audience, without even letting the press know his schedule?

Suppose the New York Times and the Washington Post fall to the bottom of the pile, left to scramble for crumbs?

Yes, things could get much worse for major media. And they should, because they have been lying to the public ever since the first brick was laid on their first office building.

Trump’s war on the media should become a centerpiece of his presidency. If not, they will shatter his term in office. I hope he understands that fully.

Suppose Trump’s inside man, Steve Bannon, puts his head together with a few deep-pocket investors and shows them how to create strong social-media alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, who are now trying to censor and bury independent online media operations?

Suppose Julian Assange and Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe vault to the top of the press hierarchy?

Suppose the American people laugh the Times and WaPo and CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and FOX out of court?

Suppose their echo chamber falls apart?

The major media’s fear and loathing of Trump knows no bounds. Their loyalty to Hillary Clinton, who played a central role in the inhuman decimation of Libya, and whose Foundation set up a parallel government stop-and shop for global greedheads, is without conscience.

If you think independent media need your support now, watch what is going to happen in the coming months and years. Big media will keep throwing nasty conspiracy theories like cakes of dreck at the wall, hoping something, anything sticks to “fake news” sites.

These “liberals” are so firmly in the Globalist camp, they wouldn’t know how to escape even if they wanted to. The very notion that America might reassert itself as a sovereign nation is a silver bullet aimed at their vampire hearts.

They’ve been sucking all the blood they can out of this country, with their “kind and gentle” “share and care” con job. It pays for their lifestyles, and they fully intend to maintain their status.

Not quite on the level of George Washington’s Farewell Address or Eisenhower’s last warning to America about the military-industrial complex, here is Obama at his final press conference—tortured logic, generalized garbled garbage, and veiled threats of censorship—looking for scapegoats after the election put a cap on his failed presidency:

If fake news that’s being released by some foreign government is almost identical to reports that are being issued through [domestic] partisan news venues, then it’s not surprising that that foreign propaganda will have a greater effect. It doesn’t seem that farfetched compared to some of the other stuff folks are hearing from domestic propagandists.

To the extent that our political dialogue is such that everything is under suspicion, everybody’s corrupt and everybody is doing things for partisan reasons and all of our institutions are, you know full of malevolent actors and if that’s the story that is being put out there, then when a foreign government introduces that same argument, the facts are made up, voters who have been listening to that stuff for years, who have been getting that stuff every day from talk radio or other venues, they’re going to believe it.

So, if we — if we want to really reduce foreign influence on our elections, then we better think about how to make sure that our — our political process, our political dialogue is stronger than it’s been.

Then Obama basically characterized the totality of the WikiLeaks emails as “gossip.” That was his overheated swan song.

He message for the media was: stick to the script; you know what it is; why did you cover material detrimental to The Plan?

“Mele Kalikimaka.”

—So, dear reader, you can choose to obtain your news from purveyors of the Plan, or you can explore and keep exploring independent sources.

What is The Plan? Aiding and abetting the descent of America into a nation swallowed up in a global management system, where the Constitution, freedom, and the individual are relics of a discarded past.

Donald Trump is not The Answer. He never was. A declaration of independence can take many forms, articulated by many individuals, and backed up in different ways.

What’s your way?

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Jon Rappoport’s mocking of the US presstitutes is superb: “Vladimir Putin is the secret president of the United States”.

“Yep. That’s it. The US is now the USSR. It’s all over. Trump is a Communist who took orders from Putin. Trump is a Red. That was his game all along. He’s a billionaire Commie.”

Ridicule is effective, and nothing deserves ridicule more than the Washington Post, New York, Times, CNN, and the rest of the presstitutes who pretend to be real journalists. But as I have emphasized, and other real journalists, such as Glenn Greenwald (see, for example ) imply, the fake news recklessly promoted by the presstitutes brings with it the threat of thermo-nuclear war.

For several years Russia and her president have experienced endless demonization. The Russians know that Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia (done while Putin was at the Beijing Olympics) was a Washington provocation.

The Russians know that Washington’s coup in Ukraine (done while Putin was at the Sochi Olympics) was a provocation aimed at seizing Russia’s Black Sea naval base in Crimea and cutting Russia off from the Mediterranean. The Russians know that Washington knows that the charges that Russia hacked Hillary’s emails and the US presidential election are lies. The Russians know that the “Russian threat” created by Washington is a lie along with all of its permutations, such as an impending Russian invasion of Poland and the Baltics. The Russians understand that US ABM bases on Russia’s borders are provocations, as are NATO military exercises on Russia’s borders and in the Black Sea. You can add to this list on your own.

The lies are ubiquitous, have grown more absurd, and are now institutionalized in the US government in the CIA, executive branch agencies, and among many US senators and representatives. That these lies are validated by endless media repetitions throughout the Western world are viewed by Russia as indications that Western populations are being prepared for a military attack on Russia. Putin has warned publicly on many occasions that the Western propaganda is dangerously destabilizing. Yet, as he also notes, no one hears his warnings.

Washington is so intent on its anti-Russian propaganda that Congress has passed, and Obama has signed, an intelligence bill that contains a section, Title V, that authorizes active measures to counter purveyors of false news. These purveyors are alternative media websites, such as this one, that challenge the official lies. The truthful alternative media is accused of being under Russian influence.

Last summer a website shrouded in secrecy was created that recently posted a list of 200 websites alleged to be under Russian influence, either directly or indirectly. The Washington Post irresponsibly published a long article endorsing the fake news of 200 websites working for the Russian government.

In other words, the suppression of the truth is the last defense of the corrupt American ruling establishment. During the last 24 years three Washington regimes have murdered millions of peoples in nine or more countries along with US civil liberty. To cover up these vast crimes, unparalleled in history, the presstitutes have lied, slandered, and libeled.

And the Washington criminal regime holds itself up to the world as the indispensable protector of democracy, human rights, truth, and justice. As the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said recently, what makes America exceptional is the use of might in the service of evil.

Washington brands not only its opponents but all who speak the truth “Russian agents,” hoping that the demonization of Russia has sufficiently frightened the population that Americans will turn their backs to those who speak the truth.

It would seem obvious even to the insouciant that an establishment that has gone so far out on a limb that the CIA director publicly attributes the election of Donald Trump to Russian interference but is unable to produce a shred of evidence—indeed in the face of totally conclusive evidence to the contrary—is determined to hold on to power at all costs.

The CIA’s open, blatant, and unprecedented propaganda attack against a president-elect has caused Trump to throw down the gauntlet to CIA director John Brennan. There are reports that Trump intends to revamp and reorganize the intelligence agency. The last president who said this, John F. Kennedy, was murdered by the CIA before he could strike against them. Kennedy believed that he could not take on the CIA until he was re-elected. The delay gave the CIA time to arrange his assassination.

Trump appears to understand his danger. He has announced that he intends to supplement his Secret Service protection (which was turned against JFK) with private security.

Isn’t it striking?

The president of Russia states publicly that Washington is driving the world to thermo-nuclear war and that his warnings are ignored. The president-elect of the United States is under full-scale attack from the CIA and knows that he cannot trust his official security force. One might think that these extraordinary topics would be the only ones under discussion. But you can find such discussion only on a few alternative media websites, such as this one, branded by PropOrNot and the Washington Post as “under Russian influence.”

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.

“Hacking” to influence election results? Ridiculous! That may have been a thing of the past.

Or not even. It’s an evil invention of the evil losers of the evil Hillary camp, supported by a criminal departing President Obama, who will be leaving office, of course, not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with a disgrace for his nation and for the truth loving people all around the world.

What a legacy the first African-american US President leaves behind – the architect of thousands of indiscriminate and illegal drone killings, by starting five new wars, being currently involved in seven unjustified and illegal armed conflicts around the globe, killing millions of people and, finally, as a miserable liar.

Already back in August 2016, NSA whistleblower William Binney stated on Aaron Klein Investigative Radio that

“the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) server was not hacked by Russia, but by a disgruntled US intelligence worker.” Binney went on to proclaim that “the NSA has all of Clinton’s deleted emails, and the FBI could gain access to them if they so wished.”

He concluded that there was no need for Trump to ask the Russians for the emails, he could just ask the FBI or NSA to hand them over.

So, one of President Obama’s last deeds in this illustrious office of the Presidency of the United States, is lying to the American people and lying to the world. – Bravo!

The truth behind Donald Trump’s ‘surprise’ election may lay somewhere else. It’s called Psychometrics, a method based on massive behavioral data collection of people to be targeted by propaganda, or more accurately expressed by mind manipulation. This PR technology has been marketed and applied by a small London-based data analysis firm, called ‘Cambridge Analytica’.

The research firm first worked for Republican Presidential Candidate Ted Cruz, U.S. Senator from Texas, who was little known by most Americans. Cambridge Analytica increased his popularity to 40%, but not enough to win the Republican nomination. The data analysis firm was then hired by Trump’s campaign team – successfully as it appears. In this 11-minute YouTube, Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, explains the method on the case of Ted Cruz

https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc .

As reported by the Swiss newspaper, ‘Tagesanzeiger’ (TA), Psychometrics, or Psychographics, as such is not new. It was developed in the 1980s, as a scientific tool to help determine people’s personalities.

Psychologists concluded that every trait of a person’s character can be categorized into five personality dimensions. The system is called OCEAN, for Openness, Consciousness, level of Extraversion, Amicability (compatibility) and Neuroticism.

In this regard, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO claims that based on about 70 Facebook-Likes, they can determine with 95% accuracy whether a person is black or white, with 88% accuracy whether he/she is homosexual and with 85% accuracy whether he /she is a Democrat or Republican.

With 150 ‘Likes’ he knows a person better than his / her parents, and with 300, better than his / her partner. These are impressive claims. But Are they correct? Many critics dispute them, mainly arguing there is no proof that targeted people (i) actually do vote, and (ii) that they vote according to their profile. In any case, it would be difficult to verify to what extent Cambridge Analytica helped Donald Trump to win the elections. Cambridge Analytica also claims credit for the BREXIT vote.

Facebook entries are not the only input to “Big Data”. In addition to tens of thousands of ‘likes’ collected, data on peoples’ google browsing, eating and consumer habits, what cosmetics and rock bands they like, whether they are drug, cigarettes and / or alcohol addicts, or just users, what type of alcohol, brand or type of car they prefer, their banking customs, even the speed with which they remove their cell phone from their pockets when it rings – and-so-on – are also entered into “Big Data”. We are indeed living in the age of no holds barred as far as disrespect for privacy and universal data collection is concerned. As long as we let it happen, it will only get worse.

Hundreds of thousands of people are literally being ‘profiled’ for targeted and personalized propaganda messages to convince segments of people and individuals of think-alikes to vote for or against a candidate. The TA concludes, that’s why Trump’s campaign messages were often contradictory and confusing, difficult to establish a clear picture of where he really stands. This is still the case today.

According to Cambridge Analytica,  in the ‘olden days’, social research firms had to get people filling-in cumbersome questionnaires, based on demographics. Today this approach is outdated. We have internet and Facebook. Not all women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, straights – vote alike. This false assumption was still used by Hillary’s campaign and demonstrated to be deceptive. Even though Hillary had about 2.7 million more popular votes, she lost the election by electorates. Cambridge Analytica worked on swing states. Within these States, they targeted specifically the ‘vulnerable’ or undecided, or motivated those with no intention to vote to get off their butts and cast their vote for Trump, or against Hillary, depending on their profile.

For example, Haitians in Florida, who had no intention to vote, but would have leaned Democratic, i.e. for Hillary, were targeted with propaganda describing the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and how the Clintons ruined Haiti’s economy. So – they went to vote for Trump as an anti-Clinton vote. At least this was the plan and apparently, it worked in sufficient cases to be effective.

Although we will never know for sure to what extent Cambridge Analytica has contributed to Trump’s election win, we can be certain that the method, inexpensive as compared to demographic profiling, will be used masively in the future, most certainly in the upcoming elections in France and the Netherlands (Spring 2017) and Germany (Fall 2017).

Thanks goodness for President Putin (I must have said this many times before) to give Mr. Obama and all the people around him, a lesson on how to behave like a statesman and not like a losing looney what he is.

President Putin did not retaliate Obama’s flagrant lie-based expelling of 35 Russian diplomats with families just before New Year’s Eve, in full preparation of year-end festivities. Instead he invited US diplomats in Moscow and their kids to celebrate the year-end festivities with their Russian colleagues. Obama’s act of cowardice was framed as ‘sanction’ for ‘Russian interference in US elections’ – a blatant lie. Mr. Obama, the master puppet of the deep state that pulls the strings on his lips and mind – he, (nominally) President Obama, knows it’s a sham.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The 4th Media, TeleSUR, TruePublica, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

Wars are always concluded with political settlements. In the endgame over Syria, Russia has worked directly with Turkey, to agree on orderly evacuations of the NATO-backed terrorist groups from Aleppo and, with Iran, is now engaged in talks on a wider resolution to the failing war on Syria.

The exclusion of Washington from these talks reflects new realities on the ground, with Syria’s key allies helping Turkey’s President Erdoğan look for a way out. The US practice of backing al Qaeda groups to overthrow the Syria Government has failed. Nevertheless, a door at the talks in Astana (Kazakhstan) has been left open for the new Trump administration, which claims commitment to withdrawal from Syria and better relations with Russia.

The Syrian Army’s liberation of Aleppo has forced all sides to reconsider their strategy.

Many question whether Turkish President Erdoğan can be trusted. That, in my view, is not the right question – even though the Turkish leader remains a key sponsor of terrorism in Syria. He is certainly not trustworthy, and has been reported as planning coordinated terrorist attacks through both Nusra and ISIS (while pretending to fight both), to strengthen his position against Russia at the talks. But he too has to face some hard realities. Syria has not been broken.

Syria’s President Assad has no relationship with Erdoğan, considering him ‘an abnormal and psychologically disturbed person’. However Assad still hopes that others, in particular Russia, may influence the Turkish leader to change his stance towards Syria.

Turkey is Syria’s largest neighbour, with 800 km of border and – with a new regime due in Washington on 20 January – the most intransigent obstacle to ending the war on Syria.

Even with Aleppo, Raqqa, Deir Ezzor and Douma retaken by the Syrian Army, the country could suffer terrorism for years to come, if Turkey continued to facilitate the entry of foreign jihadists into Syria. Sooner or later, with or without Erdoğan, Syria and Turkey must have some sort of agreement.

Naturally, whoever has the upper hand on the ground has the strongest position at peace talks. That is certainly Russia and Syria, at the moment. But it also raises concerns of further attacks before the 23 January talks, to strengthen Erdoğan’s hand.

Intrigues in the western and Israeli media constantly suggest splits between Russia, Syria, Hezbollah and Iran. For example US and Israeli sources (such as Stratfor, linked to Israeli intelligence) claim that Russia cannot afford to keep supporting Syria and that there are serious splits within the Syrian alliance. These seem to be mostly wishful thinking.

Iran remains firmly behind Syria. The Islamic Republic’s representative at the Astana talks, Ali Akbar Velayati, reinforces Syria’s consistent line that those Syrian fighters (not foreigners) who are willing to lay down their arms can take advantage of a peace process. However the internationally proscribed groups ISIS, al Nusra and the foreign fighters will play ‘no part in the negotiations’. Russia, similarly, has shown little variation from its stated position.

The two key themes at Astana are a ceasefire and a political settlement. There was little progress in either at Geneva, where the Obama administration remained determined to remove the Assad-led government and impose a Saudi Arabian-backed exile group.

Past ceasefires have also been controversial for Syrians, who saw al Qaeda groups seizing the opportunity to regroup. However, in an interview with al-Watan newspaper, the Syrian President pointed out that ceasefires held more advantages than disadvantages. He said the Syrian Government had always agreed to the principle of truces because (i) they allowed civilians to escape, (ii) they allowed humanitarian aid to enter and (iii) they gave the terrorist groups ‘an opportunity to rethink their position. Overall a ceasefire ‘provides an opportunity for less destruction.’

On the other side, President Assad said it was clear that the big powers ‘want to give terrorists an opportunity to breathe, strengthen their positions and send logistic supplies’. However he insists that ‘truces were useful to us in order to prove to all … that these states [that pretend to not back terrorism] are lying.’

Concerns have been expressed over the political settlement, that Syria’s allies might allow some sort of ‘soft coup’ against the government, or weakening of the nation through federalisation. Russian analyst Andrew Korybko, for example, says that there are ‘forces within the tripartite [Russia, Turkey and Iran] which truly believe that the ‘federalization’ (internal partition) of Syria and a soft regime change against President Assad are to Syria’s long term and sustainable benefit’.

Certainly there is a lot of western talk about federalisation (effectively Washington’s ‘Plan B’ for Syria) but it is hard to see substance in it from Syria’s allies. Iran has never suggested it and Turkey definitely does not want to see a Kurdish entity on its border.

Russia these days is itself a federation and there has been speculation that the Russia Government’s support for the Kurds might mean it is sympathetic to the idea. However we should observe that, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has mentioned the idea, he did not promote it. President Putin, at his marathon press conference on 23 December, ducked a similar question from an Iraqi Kurd. Both Putin and Lavrov have re-stated the principled position that the Syrian people must decide on any constitutional change.

From the Syrian side President Assad says federalism is unconstitutional, would require a referendum vote and that most Syrians (including most Kurds) would be against it. Further, he is emphatic that Russia has not tried to ‘lean on’ Syria: ‘not once have the Russians [or the Soviet Union] tried to impose anything on us, even when there were differences, including Syria’s role in Lebanon.’

When al Watan asked Assad about the problem of sects and community divisions he replied that he was concerned about this ‘before the war … [but] after one year and then two years the picture became clear. I believe that today the social structure of Syrian society has become purer than it was before the war … now it distinguishes between religion and fanaticism, between religion and sectarianism.’ That is, the Syrian President remains optimistic that the sectarianism provoked by the terrorist groups has been widely rejected by the Syrian people.

None of this excludes the possibility, as suggested by Korybko, that some form of concession such as ‘municipal autonomy’ might be given to the regions, in a political settlement. There were some important political and constitutional changes during the conflict, not least the inclusion of non-Baathist political players, and further changes seem likely.

The regional implications of the failing war are far reaching. Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone observes that the US has ‘spectacularly failed’ in its objectives, undermining its reputation in the entire region following the disasters of Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan, which have left a legacy of instability and large scale terrorism. That problem has to be addressed by the peoples of the region, in some coordinated way.

But what mechanisms exist for regional action? The Arab League has shrunk to little more than a forum for the Gulf monarchies (the GCC), after several of its members funded and armed the attacks on Libya and Syria. Some new regional grouping seem likely to displace it, and necessary to deal with any future threats.

The Syrian view these days is upbeat. Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad hopes the Astana talks will help eliminate terrorism and hold its supporters to account. Presidential adviser Dr Bouthaina Shaaban goes further, asserting that Syria, Iran and their Resistance allies ‘will lead the future of the region’, against terrorism and foreign intervention. She points to a changing and supportive global environment, with a shift in power away from the USA and towards Russia and China and their allies.

Sources

Andrew Korybko (2016) ‘Syria’s diplomatic ammo going into the Astana political fight’, 29 December, Oriental Review, online: http://orientalreview.org/2016/12/29/syrias-diplomatic-ammo-going-into-the-astana-political-fight/

Bashar al Assad (2016) ‘President Assad’s al Watan Daily Interview’, 7 December, President Assad, online: http://www.presidentassad.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1563:president-assad-s-al-watan-daily-interview-december-7-2016&catid=322:2016&Itemid=468

Mehr News Agency (2017) ‘No terrorists invited to Astana meeting on Syria’, 1 January, online: http://en.mehrnews.com/news/122419/No-terrorists-invited-to-Astana-meeting-on-Syria

PBS Newshour (2016) ‘What it means that the U.S. is not part of the Syria cease-fire’, 29 December, online: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/means-u-s-not-part-syria-cease-fire/

RT (2016) ‘US policy of backing terrorist elements in Syria came unstuck’, Russian television, 30 December, online: https://www.rt.com/op-edge/372299-ceasefire-syria-russia-obama/

SANA (2016) ‘Shaaban: Liberation of Aleppo from terrorism will change power balance regionally and internationally’, Syrian Arab News Agency, 16 December, online: http://sana.sy/en/?p=96389

CNN reports:

The Democratic National Committee “rebuffed” a request from the FBI to examine its computer services after it was allegedly hacked by Russia during the 2016 election, a senior law enforcement official told CNN Thursday.

“The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated,” a senior law enforcement official told CNN. “This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information.

***

The FBI instead relied on the assessment from a third-party security company called CrowdStrike.

As first reported by George Eliason, CrowdStrike’s Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Dimitri Alperovitch – who wrote the CrowdStrike reports allegedly linking Russia to the Democratic party emails published by Wikileaks – is a fellow at the Atlantic Council … an organization associated with Ukraine, and whose main policy goal seems to stir up a confrontation with Russia. [1].

The Nation writes:

In late December, Crowdstrike released a largely debunked report claiming that the same Russian malware that was used to hack the DNC has been used by Russian intelligence to target Ukrainian artillery positions. Crowdstrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, told PBS, “Ukraine’s artillery men were targeted by the same hackers…that targeted DNC, but this time they were targeting cellphones [belonging to the Ukrainian artillery men] to try to understand their location so that the Russian artillery forces can actually target them in the open battle.”

Dmitri Alperovitch is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

The connection between Alperovitch and the Atlantic Council has gone largely unremarked upon, but it is relevant given that the Atlantic Council—which is funded in part by the US State Department, NATO, the governments of Latvia and Lithuania, the Ukrainian World Congress, and the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk—has been among the loudest voices calling for a new Cold War with Russia. As I pointed out in the pages of The Nation in November, the Atlantic Council has spent the past several years producing some of the most virulent specimens of the new Cold War propaganda.

It would seem then that a healthy amount of skepticism toward a government report that relied, in part, on the findings of private-sector cyber security companies like Crowdstrike might be in order.

The Atlantic Council is also funded by the U.S. military and the largest defense contractors, including:

• United States Army
• United States Navy
• United States Air Force
• United States Marines
• Lockheed Martin
• Raytheon
• Northrop Grumman
• Boeing

[1]  Here’s an example of the Atlantic Council’s bellicose rhetoric from July 2016:

Poland should announce that it reserves the right to deploy offensive cyber operations (and not necessarily in response just to cyber attacks).  The authorities could also suggest potential targets, which could include the Moscow metro, the St. Petersburg power network, and Russian state-run media outlets such as RT.

The political firestorm over allegations of Russian hacking in the US presidential election campaign reached a new peak with the hearing Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where three top intelligence officials testified for several hours. The three officials refused to provide any evidence to support the claims that the Russian government directed hacking into the email of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

Nor is there any such evidence in the 50-page report the intelligence agencies delivered to President Obama Thursday, to be followed by briefings of congressional leaders and President-elect Donald Trump on Friday. According to the Washington Post, “U.S. officials said there are no major new bombshell disclosures even in the classified report,” let alone the declassified version that is to be made public on Monday.

This did not stop the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator John McCain, from describing the alleged hacking as “an act of war,” and repeatedly urging the intelligence officials to embrace that terminology—language with the most ominous implications given that the United States and Russia, between them, control more than 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.

McCain’s bellicose comments were echoed by committee Democrats, who attacked Trump for his Twitter comments citing the lack of evidence of any Russian involvement and noting that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has publicly denied that Russia was the source for Democratic Party emails his organization made public.

Given the incessant campaign to transform the alleged hacking into a pretext for war with nuclear-armed Russia, let us conduct a reality check. What was actually uncovered by the hacking into the DNC and the Clinton campaign?

The material released by WikiLeaks exposed two major facets of the 2016 presidential campaign: the deliberate sabotage of the Bernie Sanders campaign by the DNC leadership, which put its thumb on the scale in favor of Clinton; and the abject subordination of Clinton to the financial aristocracy, documented in the transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms.

The term “hacking the election” has been thrown about, although US intelligence agencies have said there is no evidence that a single ballot was miscast or miscounted as a result of electronic interference with the conduct of the vote. The sole consequence of the alleged hacking was the publication of true information about actions by Democratic Party officials and Clinton herself that discredited her campaign. It is this which the Democrats and their media supporters wish to suppress.

Press reports Thursday readily conceded that the “crime” in question was not the hacking of the material from the DNC and Podesta, but the delivery to WikiLeaks to make it public. The New York Times wrote that the alleged Russian hacking group “is blamed not just for taking emails from the D.N.C., the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Mr. Podesta, but also making them public,” an action which amounted to “turning a traditional espionage operation into an attempt to influence the election…”

A Washington Post columnist acknowledged, “We will stipulate that governments regularly spy on each other, and the United States also gathers intelligence on governments like Russia, China and India. The difference here is that intelligence operations allegedly led to the release of information to the public, via WikiLeaks and media coverage.”

Here, to put it plainly, is the real “crime,” as far as the US ruling elite is concerned: someone—the identity of the actual leaker or hacker is irrelevant—gave the American people access to material that documented the conspiracy of Democratic Party leaders against the democratic rights of the members of their own party who supported Sanders, and also demonstrated the class interests served by Hillary Clinton, the favorite of the party establishment.

It is remarkable that in the vast media furor over the alleged Russian hacking, there has been almost no reference to the content of the material revealed. The attitude of press organs of big business like the New York Times and the Washington Post suggests that if one of their reporters had received the DNC emails from an unknown source—as a Times reporter supposedly received Donald Trump’s tax return—the editors would have suppressed the information.

In fact, it is more than likely that this is exactly what happened. No one has asked the Times or the Post when they first learned of the DNC campaign against Sanders or received transcripts of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street. It is doubtful that WikiLeaks was the first media outlet to do so. But WikiLeaks conducted themselves as actual journalists, not stenographers for the CIA and Pentagon, and made the secret documents public, damaging the candidate who was the overwhelming favorite of the military-intelligence leadership. For that and other exposures, Julian Assange has earned the undying hatred of American imperialism and its servants—and the thanks of the international working class.

And what of Senator Sanders himself, and his liberal ally, Senator Elizabeth Warren? As the campaign over alleged Russian hacking has unfolded in the media, these political cowards have prostrated themselves before the intelligence agencies. This fact exposes yet again the absurdity of their pretense to represent an opposition. They share the basic class outlook of the entire political establishment, Democratic and Republican, which regards the military-intelligence apparatus as its last line of defense against the working class, at home and abroad.

At Thursday’s hearing, Republicans and Democrats took turns urging the spy chiefs to denounce Assange for the publication by WikiLeaks of US military and diplomatic communications that document war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and conspiracies against governments around the world—activities that make hacking the email of the DNC pale by comparison.

The New York Times wrote, “The gathering was extraordinary as much for its context as its content—a public, bipartisan display of support for the intelligence community that seemed aimed, at times, at an audience of one” (i.e., Trump).

Senators from the two parties—most of whom supported the Iraq war on the basis of lies about “weapons of mass destruction”—seemed to be in competition to demonstrate the most abject loyalty to the intelligence agencies. They were all speaking from talking points supplied by the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon. Senator Joseph Donnelly, an Indiana Democrat, was the most sycophantic, telling the spy chiefs that in a truth-telling competition with Assange and WikiLeaks, “We’re on your side every time.”

This theme was elaborated explicitly in an editorial in the Thursday edition of the Washington Post, which berated Trump for dismissing the claims of Russian hacking of the Democrats, which it described as an effort to “deny reality.” Declaring that Trump would soon have to rely on “intelligence pros” to help him conduct US foreign policy, the editorial asked, “Why does Mr. Trump give Mr. Assange more weight than the U.S. intelligence agencies?”

Trump seemed to retreat in the face of the media barrage, tweeting his disapproval of Assange and his love for the intelligence agencies. But the Post’s question should be turned back on the newspaper itself. Why should anyone believe Assange? Because WikiLeaks has conducted actual journalistic investigation, uncovering evidence of US government crimes and making it public.

The intelligence agencies, by contrast, are proven liars. No senator challenged the veracity of the panel of witnesses, who were headed by retired general James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence. By rights, Clapper should have been jailed for perjury after his sworn testimony before Congress in March 2013. Asked point-blank, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper responded with the flat denial, “No, sir.” Three months later, Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA has hundreds of programs to collect the telecommunications and Internet activities, not only of every American, but of every human being on the planet.

The public, bipartisan display of support for the “intelligence community” is aimed at delegitimizing any opposition to the numberless crimes committed by the US military-intelligence apparatus against the population of the world, including the American people, on a daily basis.

The CIA is an organization dripping with blood, detested by hundreds of millions around the world, including in the United States, as the instigator of countless coups, massacres, assassinations and wars. From Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, to Chile in 1973, to the bloodbaths in Central America in the 1980s, to today’s mass repression in Egypt and drone warfare in a dozen countries, the CIA is a byword for criminality.

On Thursday, dozens of US senators prostrated themselves before the intelligence agencies. Some 40 years before, in a similar committee room, senators took sworn testimony about how the CIA had been running a “Murder Incorporated” in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

That investigation was a byproduct of the Watergate crisis that forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon. At the time, it was revealed that CIA personnel had been employed at Nixon’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President, or CREEP, and were involved in organizing the burglary of the Watergate hotel. The congressional inquiry led to the exposure of illegal spying on the American people and the infiltration of government agents into antiwar, civil rights, labor and socialist organizations.

Four decades ago, it was possible for the US ruling elite to conduct a limited “reform” of the CIA, which amounted to removing a few discredited officials and setting some limits on the agency’s operations—limits that were quickly breached in practice. Today, even such a largely cosmetic exercise is impossible. Instead, the intelligence agencies demand unquestioning loyalty, and the Democrats and the media salute.

Algunos de los peores ataques de Donald Trump, presidente electo de Estados Unidos, han ido dirigidos a China. La ha acusado de “violar” a Estados Unidos con sus políticas de comercio y de crear el “engaño” del calentamiento global para socavar la competitividad estadounidense. Entonces, ¿por qué tantos asesores y comentaristas chinos tienen una actitud optimista acerca del futuro de las relaciones entre los dos países?

La razón parece ser el que Trump es un hombre de negocios y, parafraseando al Presidente estadounidense Calvin Coolidge, el negocio de China son los negocios. Se piensa que China puede manejarse mejor con un hábil y experimentado negociador como Trump que con una Hillary Clinton supuestamente más ideologizada.

A mucha gente le sorprendería ver que se categoriza a Clinton como una ideóloga. Y hay escasa evidencia que respalde la afirmación de que la gente de negocios encarna de alguna manera el pragmatismo, dado que tantos poderosos líderes de negocios estadounidenses muestran un alto nivel de ideologización. Por ejemplo, los hermanos Koch se aferraron tercamente a ideas libertarias inviables y claramente desacreditadas, y numerosos directores ejecutivos de las empresas de la lista Fortune 500 tienden instintivamente a alinearse con los republicanos, a pesar de que la economía estadounidense muestra mejores resultados en administraciones demócratas. Nadie debería olvidar el infame e imprudente consejo de Andrew William Mellon al Presidente Herbert Hoover en vísperas de la Gran Depresión: “liquidar la mano de obra, liquidar las existencias, liquidar a los agricultores, liquidar los bienes raíces”.

La revelación de que Trump y la Presidenta Tsai Ing-wen de Taiwán hablaron por teléfono probablemente ha acabado con todo resto de esperanza de que el próximo gobierno estadounidense no sea sino un toro en una tienda de porcelana china. Esa llamada violó un protocolo –evitar contactos directos entre Estados Unidos y Taiwán a nivel presidencial- que los presidentes estadounidenses de ambos partidos habían observado cuidadosamente a lo largo de cuatro décadas.

La violación del protocolo diplomático por parte de Trump generó ondas expansivas por toda Asia, que no hicieron más que agravarse cuando en una serie de tuits preguntó si China había consultado con Estados Unidos antes de devaluar su moneda o construir una enorme base militar en el Mar del Sur de China.

Trump juega con fuego al poner en cuestión la política de “una sola China”. La gestión hábil y cuidadosa por gobiernos tanto republicanos como demócratas ha ayudado a mantener la frágil paz entre China y Taiwán. El objetivo principal de Estados Unidos es mantener el statu quo al disuadir a Taiwán de buscar la independencia de manera activa y desalentar el impulso de China de obligar a Taiwán a una reunificación apresurada.

En otro tuit Trump preguntó por qué no podía relacionarse con Taiwán a nivel presidencial cuando Estados Unidos le vende miles de millones de dólares en armamento. Sea fingida o no esa consternación, es verdaderamente preocupante que el presidente electo de Estados Unidos la manifieste. EE.UU. vende a Taiwán equipos militares destinados principalmente a autodefensa y como una señal a China de que no tendrá una actitud impasible en caso de que emprenda acciones militares contra la isla. Pero atenúa deliberadamente este mensaje al evitar contactos de alto nivel con Taiwán, con la intención de evitar darle a entender que contará con apoyo estadounidense en caso de que la isla llegase a declarar la independencia.

Por más de 40 años, esta doctrina de “ambigüedad estratégica” ha funcionado brillantemente. La paz ha sobrevivido a múltiples cambios de dirigencia a ambos lados del estrecho de Taiwán, y el comercio y la inversión entre Taiwán y China han florecido.

Si Trump rompe esta arraigada política pueden producirse diversas consecuencias negativas. Para comenzar, podría envalentonar a Taiwán a ser más proactiva en sus intentos por romper el statu quo. De hecho, el propio Partido Progresista Democrático de Tsai tiene un compromiso oficial con la independencia de la isla y, si bien Tsai misma no ha intentado aún emprender objetivos revisionistas, la situación podría cambiar si siente que Trump simpatiza con su causa.

Trump podría causar daño al exacerbar al gobierno y los militares de línea dura de China, si confirma su creencia de que Estados Unidos desea socavar los “intereses centrales” de su país. En concreto, mantener las apariencias, si no la realidad, de que existe una sola China. Al principio, el ministerio chino de asuntos exteriores criticó tibiamente la llamada de Trump con Tsai, pero People’s Daily, el periódico oficial del Partido Comunista chino, ha manifestado desde entonces su rechazo de manera mucho más enfática, advirtiendo que “crear problemas en la relación entre China y Estados Unidos significa crear problemas para Estados Unidos mismo”. Poco después, la Armada china retuvo temporalmente un dron sumergible estadounidense en aguas internacionales. Claramente, China está dando señales de agitación.

No hay un método claro para hacer frente a la locura de Trump. En el mismo tuit en que justificaba su llamada con Tsai, repetía la falta acusación de que China está devaluando su moneda para lograr ventajas comerciales ante EE.UU. Su conocimiento de la economía internacional no existe, o bien está atrasado diez años. En realidad, hoy sale de China una enorme cantidad de reservas en moneda extranjera y el país necesita desesperadamente apuntalar el valor del renminbi ante la fuga de capitales.

Parece que Trump está suscitando el antagonismo con China sin ninguna razón válida. Peor aún, al anunciar que EE.UU. se retirará de la Asociación Transpacífico (diseñada, al menos en parte, para dar forma al comercio y las inversiones globales siguiendo más las reglas occidentales que la visión mercantilista de China), también está abandonando una política estadounidense que podría mantener a raya la influencia china en Asia. Desde el anuncio de Trump, muchos países asiáticos han prometido unirse a un bloque regional liderado por China. Con la ayuda de Trump. Puede que el “Siglo de China” comience antes de lo que se espera.

Yasheng Huang

Yasheng Huang: Profesor en la Escuela de Administración y Dirección de Empresas SLOAN del Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts (MIT).

En 1960, el sociólogo y académico norteamericano Daniel Bell (1919-2011) publicó “El final de la ideología”, obra que llegó a ser un clásico en las ciencias políticas oficiales. La publicación fue catalogada por el Times Literary Supplement como uno de los 100 libros más influyentes de la segunda mitad del siglo XX.

A pesar de que en los años 1950 e inicios de los 60 había otros partidarios del “Final de la ideología”, Bell es considerado como el más influyente. Aun cuando tuvieron lugar algunas variaciones, esta escuela de pensamiento tiene un común denominador. Tratando de no simplificar excesivamente esa importante tendencia, para el propósito de este artículo, es posible afirmar que surgió debido al fracaso percibido, tanto del socialismo en la antigua URSS como del capitalismo en Occidente. Es decir, nació en oposición al “extremismo”.

En noviembre de 1968, junto con otros estudiantes de ciencias políticas de la Universidad de McGill, en Montreal, fundamos la Asociación de Estudiantes de esa disciplina. Organizamos una huelga y presentamos dos reivindicaciones principales: la primera, exigir la participación estudiantil en los comités de contratación de la Facultad; la segunda -asociada a este potencial empoderamiento estudiantil- reclamar un profesorado y un currículo más incluyente.

Este último podría incluir publicaciones no sólo de Daniel Bell -por supuesto considerado obligatorio y una indiscutible referencia en ciencias políticas-, sino también de científicos sociales progresistas, así como los trabajos de Marx y Lenin. En aquella época eso último estaba excluido. Tras diez días de ocupación y huelga, la solicitud de los estudiantes fue aceptada por la universidad.

Bell no vio llegar la inevitable insurrección que se estaba fraguando en Estados Unidos entre los ciudadanos afrodescendientes, poco después de que su best-seller saliese de prensa. Esas luchas progresistas, así como la de los pueblos indígenas, tienen su origen al inicio de las Trece Colonias. En los años 1960, los estudiantes estadounidenses fueron atraídos por ideologías y políticas alternativas. De hecho, el movimiento de los jóvenes era omnipresente en toda Norteamérica y en gran parte de Europa.

Mientras en los años 60 esta tendencia se caracterizaba por diferentes aspectos de la izquierda política e ideológica y experimentaba sus propios altibajos, parecía la despedida de la tesis del final de la ideología. Sin embargo, el legado de Bell nos sigue acechando.

En el último año aproximadamente, en Cuba ha tenido lugar un aumento continuo de artículos en un lenguaje indirecto acerca de la idea del final de la ideología, escritos por algunos blogueros e intelectuales cubanos marginales. Al inicio eran tímidos, pero luego cada vez más audaces.

Hablaban de la “estéril dicotomía entre socialismo y capitalismo”, aconsejando a los revolucionarios cubanos ser “equilibrados y profundos en sus criterios” cuando se trata de criticar el imperialismo estadounidense, o de evitar el extremo de ser “fidelista o anticastrista”, etiquetando de “extremistas” o “fanáticos” a los marxistas-leninistas o a los fidelistas, escribiendo sobre dos grandes falacias acerca de lo revolucionario en Cuba, la derecha y la izquierda como un “dogma excluyente” y, por último, postulando que “la vida es más compleja incluso que las ideologías”.

Leyendo estos artículos regresaban continuamente a mi mente aquellos días universitarios de 1968. ¿Cómo pudo ser posible que nos opusiéramos al final de la ideología en el corazón del capitalismo, y que ahora ello vuelva a surgir -entre todos los lugares imaginables-, justamente en Cuba? Podría argumentarse que la oposición en Cuba está viniendo de la “izquierda”, es decir de quienes pretenden apoyar a la revolución. Pues bien, ¿de dónde más podría surgir sino de esa llamada izquierda?

No olvidemos que Bell se consideraba a sí mismo de izquierda y que su oposición a la ideología fue ostensiblemente desde una perspectiva de izquierda y no de derecha. Es así como logró construir su credibilidad. Bell se había desilusionado del socialismo y no veía otra alternativa, por lo que libró una batalla tanto contra el capitalismo como contra el socialismo. Su trabajo refleja su propio dilema personal y político. Sin embargo, objetivamente hablando, esta llamada neutralidad respecto a los extremos consistió en lanzar un salvavidas al capitalismo. No es un accidente que Bell sea tan apreciado por las élites gobernantes de Occidente.

Siempre he aseverado que la más peligrosa oposición a la Revolución cubana proviene de la llamada izquierda, y no de la derecha abiertamente plattista. Es un cáncer en la sociedad cubana que, si se deja crecer sin una fuerte resistencia ideológica, podría influir en algunos ingenuos, especialmente entre los jóvenes, los intelectuales y los artistas.

Al mismo tiempo, cuando Bell escribía sus ensayos a finales de los años 1950, compilados en su volumen de 1960, Cuba constituía el escenario de la más evidente refutación de su teoría: el ataque a Moncada de 1953, su programa resultante y el triunfo de la revolución el 1 de enero de 1959. Fidel Castro y el Movimiento 26 de julio constituyeron el camino embrionario hacia a una nueva ideología revolucionaria marxista-leninista en Cuba.

Lejos de ser un período caracterizado por el final de la ideología, Cuba dio al mundo el resurgimiento y la confianza en la necesidad de la ideología. Cuba representó el fin del final de la ideología. La revolución cubana surgió durante el auge de la Guerra fría, pero se erigió resueltamente en contra de cualquier intimidación por parte de la llamada izquierda o del imperialismo. Para la izquierda de aquella época, y más aún para la derecha, esta posición no se correspondía con lo políticamente correcto. De esta manera, Fidel tuvo la perspicacia de no revelar el escenario completo en el periodo inicial. Sin embargo, la ideología se encontraba en el centro del pensamiento y la acción.

Desde 1953 Cuba siempre ha sido -y lo sigue siendo- la quintaesencia del desarrollo de los principios ideológicos. Cada palabra escrita y pronunciada por Fidel está impregnada de ideología. Cuba no está anquilosada, por el contrario sigue evolucionando según la situación. De otra manera, no hubiese podido sobrevivir a sus enemigos durante todo este tiempo.

Estoy convencido de que uno de los principales objetivos implícitos de la campaña mediática corporativa internacional contra Fidel, justo después de su fallecimiento, consistió en una revancha del imperialismo contra él por negarse a capitular en el tema de la ideología.

Pero, ¿por qué -podrán preguntarse los medios interminablemente- la revolución cubana nunca suscribió el final de la ideología, como debía hacerse, según las ciencias políticas oficiales? En todos estos años, desde el 26 julio de 1953 hasta el 25 noviembre de 2016, Fidel vivió y murió tal como lo exigió a los demás: como un humilde revolucionario.

En el actual contexto histórico, tratar de impregnar a la cultura política cubana de “neutralidad” respecto a la ideología: oposición a los “extremos”, “equidistancia” entre socialismo y capitalismo, etc., no constituye un desafío al dogmatismo de la izquierda tal como tratan de presentarlo.

El verdadero desafío es contra el socialismo y la ideología marxista-leninista. En los años 1960, la teoría del Bell complacía a los círculos de gobernantes que deseaban preservar el statu quo. ¡Las élites estaban en el poder y no temían ser desalojadas por su propio capitalismo! El Final de la ideología y su crítica al capitalismo fue tan sólo un pretexto para criticar al socialismo. En 1968, en la Universidad McGill, esto constituyó el principal argumento de los profesores y administradores conservadores.

Aparentemente ellos no estaban ni a favor ni en contra de ninguna ideología. “Todas las opciones políticas son bienvenidas”, aseguraban. Sin embargo, Bell fue aún más aceptado. Él se oponía, decían ellos, tanto al capitalismo como al socialismo. Sin embargo, quienes favorecían el statu quo del capitalismo se apoyaron en el final de la ideología.

Quienes se oponen a la ideología “extrema” de la izquierda fueron totalmente integrados a la ideología capitalista y ayudaron a elaborarla y a difundirla. El propósito del “Final de la ideología”, en los años 1960, y ahora respecto a Cuba, es poner fin a las ideologías marxista-leninista y socialista.

Arnold August

Arnold August: Periodista y conferencista canadiense.

Como se preveía, tras los reveses sufridos por el Daesh en Siria a manos del Ejército Árabe Sirio y sus aliados Rusia, Irán y Hezbollah, muchos de los combatientes de la organización wahabita están volviendo a sus países de origen.

A mediados de noviembre último se detectó al líder de la rama del Daesh kosovar-albana en Siria, Lavdrim Muhaxheri, quién habría ha conseguido filtrase, nuevamente hacía Europa, con nada menos que 400 de sus hombres, disimulado entre las olas de refugiados.

Muhaxheri, cuyo “nombre de guerra” es Abu Abdullah al-Kosova, no sólo es uno de los jefes del Estado Islámico, sino uno de los más conocidos entre los extranjeros que llegaron para luchar contra el gobierno del presidente Bashar al-Assad.

A pesar que el fundamentalista fue detectado en su paso por Macedonia por agentes del italiano Sistema di Informaziones per la sicurezza della Repubblica (AISE), que avisaron de inmediato al Aki (Agencia de Inteligencia de Kosovo) y las unidades antiterroristas de Kosovo, Albania y Macedonia, la búsqueda de Muhaxheri, fracasó, seguramente cubierto por una alambicada e impenetrable red de protección para los terroristas que funciona en los Balcanes occidentales.

Lavdrim Muhaxheri, también conocido como “el carnicero Kacanik”, una pequeña ciudad en la frontera entre Kosovo y Macedonia conocida por ser un importante centro de reclutamiento de terroristas islámicos.

El retorno de Muhaxheri a los Balcanes, constituye una amenaza no solo para los países del área, sino para toda Europa ya que estas organizaciones tienen contactos a lo largo del continente y podrían producir ataques en cualquier lugar.

Muhaxheri, conoce particularmente bien la operatividad de las fuerzas de seguridad occidentales, ya que desde 2007, con 18 años, comenzó a recibir formación militar, en la base estadounidense de Bondsteel, tras enrolarse en las KFOR, las fuerzas militares de Kosovo.

Enrolado en una compañía militar privada, posiblemente la norteamericana Blackwater, subcontratada por la OTAN estuvo en Afganistán y en Camp Victory de Irak, hasta 2012.

A finales de ese año retornó a Kosovo, empezó a frecuentar asociaciones fundamentalistas musulmanas, como la red Parimi y la organización islámica juvenil de Kacanik. Participó en la creación de la ICK (Comunidad Islámica de Kosovo), que dio cobertura para la formación y organización de milicianos que luego se desplazaron a Siria e Irak, para integrarse al Daesh. Se cree que Muhaxheri, había sido reclutado en Kosovo por el imam Zekerija Qazimi, ahora condenado a 10 años de prisión.

La actitud y experiencia militar de Muhaxheri, fueron las condiciones fundamentales para lograr un rápido ascenso en la estructura del Estado Islámico para Irak y el Levante (EIIL), organización que daría lugar a la creación del Daesh, en julio del 2014.

Muhaxheri, figura en todas las listas de los terroristas más buscados del mundo, confeccionadas por sus antiguos mandantes como la Misión de Administración Provisional de las Naciones Unidas en Kosovo (MINUK), INTERPOL y el Departamento de Estado estadounidense, la Oficina Europea de Policía (Europol). El 24 de septiembre de 2014, el Departamento de Estado de los Estados Unidos designó a Muhaxheri como un terrorista global.

Las fuerzas de seguridad de Kosovo detuvieron en noviembre a una veintena de terroristas, se cree dirigidos por Muhaxheri, que preparaban una serie de ataques en Kosovo y Albania. El ataque más importante se ejecutaría en el Elbasan Arena Stadium, en la ciudad albanesa de Elbasan, el 12 de noviembre, cuándo por las eliminatorias del mundial de futbol 2018, jugarían las selecciones de Albania e Israel.

Muhaxheri, ya había realizado el viaje entre Siria y Kosovo en otras oportunidades, en 2013, durante Ramadán, se dejó fotografiar, desafiando a las autoridades que no pudieron dar con él antes que regresara de nuevo a Sira, llevando otro contingente de milicianos.

Se estima que unos 230 kosovares han viajado a Siria e Irak, para integrase o bien a las filas del Daesh o al al-Qaeda sirio conocido como frente al-Nusra. Según la Inteligencia kosovar, cerca de sesenta de ellos ya han muerto en combate. En noviembre de 2012, Naman Demoll, fue el primer kosovar muerto en la guerra siria.

Entre albaneses, macedonios y kosovares se estima que suman entre 500 y 600 hombres que han combatido en Siria.

Solo cuesta unos cien euros llegar desde Kosovo al frente de guerra en Siria, que incluye un vuelo a Estambul y un ticket de bus a la frontera con Siria. En Kosovo la policía ha detenido a decenas de personas incluso imanes y acusados de reclutar y brindar ayuda a los combatientes.

Los kosovares representan una mínima parte de los miles de combatientes extranjeros, que han llegado a Siria desde 2011, los contingentes de europeos más numerosos provienen de Bélgica, el Reino Unido y Francia. Se estima que la totalidad de terrorista que combatieron en Siria ronda los 200 mil hombres de ellos el 80% son extranjeros de culto wahabíes.

Los paseos del carnicero

Según los datos obtenidos por la inteligencia italiana, Lavdrim Muhaxheri, arribó a los Balcanes acompañado por su lugarteniente Ridvan Haqifi, que ya en julio por medio de un video había amenazado vengarse.

Ahora se temen ataques a instituciones internacionales y estatales, de iniciar una guerra para instalar un estado islámico, nada menos que en el centro de Europa.

Muhaxheri, se hizo conocido a través de varias apariciones en videos que circularon profusamente por las redes sociales, donde aparecía degollando a prisioneros. Su actuación más “memorable” se conoció el 21 de mayo de 2015, donde se lo ve fusilando a otro prisionero, al que le dispara, una granada propulsada por cohetes (RPG) que literalmente desintegra a la víctima. Entonces no se supo si el video era reciente o anterior a principios de 2015, ya que para la fecha que se hizo público, Muhaxheri aparecía como muerto en combate. Situación que el jefe kosovar aprovechó para pasar a un segundo plano militar y preparar su vuelta a los Balcanes.

Desde la intervención rusa a finales de 2015, unos 35 mil terroristas, de ellos unos 200 jefes, fueron exterminados, lo que ha provocado una estampida generalizada de los hombres del Califa Ibrahim y miembros del frente al-Nusra.

A pesar de la ya sabida relación entre moderados y fundamentalistas, occidente siguió apoyando a los grupos “moderados” como el Ejercito Libre Sirio (ELS) con armamentos de última generación como misiles anti-tanque TOW que destruyeron casi todos los blindados y tanques del Ejército Árabe Sirio. Más de 20 mil de estos misiles han sido enviados a Siria desde finales de año de 2014.

No se cree probable, pero nada se sabe manera cierta, si Muhaxheri, con sus hombres lograron introducir en Europa parte de este armamento. Lo que sí es prácticamente un hecho que el líder wahabita, ya estará en alguno de los campamentos de las montañas de Kosovo, cerca de Tropoje, en la frontera con Albania, activos desde la guerra de 1999.

En ese mismo sector se ha detectado un número importante de jóvenes argelinos y marroquíes, que en principio se alojan en centros de migración, para enseguida desaparecer en la montaña.

En mayo último las autoridades kosovares han condenado al imán Zekrjja Qazim, a 10 años de prisión, por su responsabilidad en la radicalización de ciento de jóvenes que acudían a su mezquita de al-Quddús en Gjilan.

El fundamentalismo musulmán en los Balcanes, se encuentra en una etapa de creciendo exponencial. Las organizaciones reciben de manera constante a jóvenes dispuestos a realizar su “yihad”.

Esta enmarañada red aglutina grupos de Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, la Federación de Bosnia y Herzegovina, bien entrenada y armada puede volver a convertir a los Balcanes en ese infierno tan conocido.

Guadi Calvo

Guadi Calvo: Escritor y periodista argentino, analista Internacional especializado en África, Medio Oriente y Asia Central.

A pocos años de completar las dos primeras décadas del siglo XXI, nos encontramos en un momento decisivo de la historia planetaria. La locomotora del capitalismo ha conducido a una situación de crisis civilizatoria radical, en que la misma sostenibilidad de la vida sobre la Tierra se encuentra amenazada.

Tenemos múltiples evidencias que nos alertan sobre la gravedad de esta crisis: el aumento de las sequías y las inundaciones; la recurrente amenaza de una crisis alimentaria global; los flujos migratorios de refugiados ambientales; el aumento de enfermedades inducidas por un medioambiente contaminado; la explotación cada vez más voraz de los recursos naturales; el despojo de tierras ancestrales a los pueblos indígenas para abrir camino a grandes megaproyectos de desarrollo y la violencia producida por todos estos procesos, son solo unas cuantas muestras de la creciente devastación de la cual somos testigos hoy en día. En la complejidad de la actual crisis, todos estos elementos están interrelacionados.

Desde la década de los setenta, diversos movimientos y organizaciones ecologistas emergieron tanto en el norte como en el sur global, advirtiendo y denunciando la situación límite en la que nos encontramos. De entre todas ellas, Acción Ecológica de Ecuador es sin lugar a dudas una de las más importantes. Durante sus treinta años de existencia, ha demostrado un profundo compromiso desde el ecologismo popular con innumerables procesos de defensa de la naturaleza y los derechos humanos de las comunidades que la habitan.

Desde esta posición de solidaridad con quienes son más afectados y marginalizados por esta crisis, Acción Ecológica ha promovido que aquellas voces que no son escuchadas -de indígenas, campesinos, mujeres y jóvenes-, irrumpan con fuerza en los debates nacionales, contribuyendo así a la construcción de una democracia más auténtica y a una sociedad más justa. Por esta razón, Acción Ecológica constituye no solamente un referente, sino también un ejemplo de insoslayable relevancia para otras luchas en distintos rincones del planeta.

Disolver una organización de la importancia de Acción Ecológica, constituiría un grave atropello, un mal precedente y una alarmante evidencia del deterioro de las libertades democráticas en el Ecuador. Por estas razones, deseo expresar mi solidaridad con Acción Ecológica y hago un llamado al Gobierno ecuatoriano para que reconozca el aporte imprescindible que realiza, respete sus derechos como organización de la sociedad civil y garantice su normal y libre funcionamiento.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Boaventura de Sousa Santos: Profesor de la Universidad de Coimbra, Portugal y de la Universidad de Wisconsin-Madison, EEUU.

China arrancó el 2017 con un llamamiento a intensificar las reformas enfocadas en la oferta, abriendo nuevas fuentes de crecimiento que ayuden a eludir las presiones a la baja existentes hoy en medio de una economía mundial debilitada.

China debe aumentar las reformas para permitir que el mercado desempeñe un papel decisivo en la economía y acelerar su cambio estructural en 2017, destacó el asesor del Banco Popular de China, Huang Yiping.

A pesar de los signos de estabilización en 2016, la economía china aún enfrenta una presión bajista, ya que su proceso de reestructuración aún no está terminado, según el miembro del comité de política monetaria del banco central y economista de la Universidad de Peking.

Enfatizó que mientras los viejos motores del crecimiento de la economía pierden fuerza, los nuevos no son lo suficientemente fuertes como para reemplazarlos, lo que supone el mayor problema para la economía china en la actualidad.

La segunda economía del mundo está tratando de basar su economía más en el consumo, los servicios y la innovación a medida que el crecimiento se ralentiza por la debilidad del comercio exterior y el exceso de capacidad industrial.

Sin embargo, Huang destacó que las nuevas industrias están creciendo rápidamente en muchas partes del país, especialmente en lugares donde el mercado desempeña un papel más importante y los empresarios son más activos.

A fin de crear más espacio para las reformas, sugirió que el Gobierno debería fijar un objetivo más flexible para el crecimiento económico en 2017 y apuntar a un objetivo de crecimiento del PIB de seis a siete por ciento, en comparación con 6,5 a siete por ciento en 2016.

Alertó el experto que el tipo de cambio del yuan se verá afectado en gran medida por las expectativas de los inversionistas sobre el crecimiento económico de China.

Reflexionó que a pesar de que China registra fundamentos económicos sólidos, un superávit por cuenta corriente y enormes reservas de divisas, ahora afronta algunas dificultades para apoyar el crecimiento.

Ante las continuas dificultades económicas y los ambiciosos objetivos de crecimiento, el gigante asiático ha convertido la reforma enfocada en la oferta en una prioridad para liberar nuevas formas de crecimiento e incrementar la eficiencia económica.

Incrementar el gasto en investigación y desarrollo, alentar la inversión privada, apoyar las industrias emergentes y modernizar los motores tradicionales figuran entre las medidas adoptadas por la Administración para impulsar la reforma.

De acuerdo con especialistas, tales iniciativas deben conducir a la mejora del capital humano, a elevar la productividad de todos los factores e incrementar la oferta en áreas sin exceso de capacidad donde exista demanda.

En su mensaje a la nación por Año Nuevo, el presidente chino Xi Jinping, calificó de extraordinario el cierre del 2016 y llamó a mayores esfuerzos para avanzar no solo como país sino como parte de la comunidad internacional.

Entre los avances, aplaudió que este territorio promovió de manera activa el crecimiento económico, profundizó plenamente la reforma, logró mejoras en reforma de defensa nacional y militar, suscitó el Estado de derecho, avanzó en la gobernanza estricta del Partido Comunista de China (PCCh) y combatió la corrupción a todos los niveles.

Asimismo llamó a continuar trabajando para que los resultados de la reforma y el desarrollo beneficien a más personas y sacar a más individuos de la pobreza.

Damy Vales

U.S. Foreign Policy and the Campaign to Destabilize the Trump Presidency

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, January 04 2017

The unspoken truth pertaining to Obama’s Executive Order is that the punishment was intended for Trump rather than Putin. The objective is not to “Box-In” the president-elect for his “unfamiliarity with the role of intelligence”. The strategy is to delegitimize Donald Trump by accusing him of high treason.

Political Insanity: Outgoing President Obama’s “Operation Atlantic Resolve” against Russia: US Sends 3,600 Tanks Against Russia – Massive NATO Deployment Underway

By Donbass International News Agency and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, January 05 2017

As we recall Obama on December 29th “ordered a series of retaliatory steps against Russia”. Is this a “fast-track” procedure on the part of the outgoing president, with the support of US intelligence to create chaos prior to the inception of the Trump administration on January 20th? According to Donbass International News Agency Service, “A Massive US military deployment should be ready by January 20.” Political Insanity prevails.

India, From the Destabilization of Agriculture to Demonetization, “Made in America”

By Colin Todhunter, January 05 2017

A version of the following piece was originally published in June 2016. However, since then, India’s PM Narendra Modi has embarked on a ‘demonetisation’ policy, which saw around 85 percent of India’s bank notes becoming invalid overnight. Emerging evidence indicates that demonetisation was not done to curb corruption, ‘black money’ or terrorism, the reasons originally given.

Fukushima Radiation Looms. No Nuclear Power Plant On Planet Earth! “The Incompatibility of Radiation with Human Life”

By Eiichiro Ochiai, January 05 2017

The Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in Japan six years ago has not been fixed.  It is becoming increasingly evident that it is difficult to fix it, as three reactors’ nuclear fuel rods were melted; there is no precedence for such a disaster in human history.  The health effects of radioactive material released are becoming significant day by day.  Un-fortunately, its reality has been covered up by the Japanese government.

Britain’s Role in Rwanda’s 1994 Genocide

By Mark Curtis, January 05 2017

An edited extract from Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World: In the hundreds of media articles on the 1994 Rwanda genocide, there is barely a mention of Britain being a permanent member of the UN security council and in any way responsible for what happened. I recounted Britain’s role in my previous book, The Great Deception, so I will not repeat everything here. Since then, however, another book, by Linda Melvern, an investigative journalist, confirms the quite terrible British, and US, role.

The History of the CIA

By Dr. P. Wilkinson, January 05 2017

Douglas Valentine’s latest book, The CIA as organised crime, is not new. Nor is it intended to be. This book attempts something very difficult: compressing the essentials of nearly 30 years of intensive research, insight and implicit social theory into a volume accessible to readers with rapidly deteriorating attention spans who have been conditioned to what I would call “journalism as pornography”.

Populism has a much needed place in political arrangements, the necessary, disruptive gust that keeps the complacent from losing touch. For one, it often threatens to destroy those arrangements altogether, or at the very least provide a blustery challenge.

This, however, comes with its costs, notably in the modern State. For one, it promises a mixture of bloodletting and indifference to the technocrats and advisors who claim various skills and expertise. Killing the priest class, the monopolists on expertise and ritual, leads to blood, confusion, and the need for a good deal of re-ordering.

In the turmoil that is modern Britain, the resignation of Sir Ivan Rogers offers a rather brutal example of this in action. As Britain’s former EU ambassador, he was meant to be the expert in formulating some plan of action regarding his country’s exit from the European Union. What he found instead were few plans in the offing, and a refusal to accept the complexity of the task at hand.

In resigning, he accused his employers of “muddled” thinking. “We do not yet know what the government will set as negotiating objectives for the UK’s relationship with the EU after exit.” There was also a grave shortage of “multilateral negotiating experience” in Whitehall, a fact not replicated “in the Commission or in the Council.”[1] In the battle of the experts, Britain was coming up short.

The government’s response was dull and domestic. In the words of a government spokesman, the resignation enabled “a successor to be appointed before the UK invokes Article 50 by the end of March. We are grateful for his work and commitment over the last three years.”[2]

What Sir Ivan was experiencing was a standard bureaucratic assassination, or, in this case, an assassination on one of the more expert figures on the business of European governance. His critics chose to focus on the fact that his views had become the subject of leaks (in the British civil service, the equivalent of contracting HIV).

“If the reports are true that he has been hounded out by hostile Brexiteers in government,” suggested Sir Ivan’s former employee Nick Clegg, also formerly leader of the Lib Dems, “it counts as a spectacular own goal.”

But what is being sought? Hardly complicated advice, a true sign of the times. Former conservative Tory cabinet minister John Redwood hoped for a replacement “who thinks it’s straightforward.” Sentiment and attitude counted over evidence and application. Sir Ivan had been one of those cerebral nuisances, a person who did “not really have his heart” in the Brexit process, castigating it as being “very difficult and long-winded.” Flat-earth theorists were far more preferable.

In such cases, the role of the expert is treated as handy scapegoat, the great obfuscator against feeling and sentiment. The experts are the modern variant of pre-Protestant Catholic priests. The populist revolution being witnessed in Europe and the United States resembles, in some way, a Protestant expectoration against Catholic establishment order, the savaging of the cult of the saints (in modern terms, neo-liberal market practices, trade deals, open borders), the concealing practices of the clerics. To know God, it is best to get rid of those who obscure pathways to his vision.

The United States has been no exception to such suspicions of the “expert”, ever perched between the radically innovative and the crudely atavistic. Ingenious political models of republicanism have been entangled with divination more rooted in primitive theocracy. God accompanies the workings of Lockheed Martin and Boeing; bustling punditry and political science exists alongside pure staple prejudices and hatreds, long nursed by frontier desires and racial division.

It was the sort of thing that worried Richard Hofstadter, who suggested that populism had its nasty analogues in the form of paranoia in politics.[3] Certainly, when it came to Senator Joe McCarthy, hunting the expert during the early phase of the Cold War was fair game.

It was a mission laced with anti-Communist fervour, while previous enemies of populism had been the Banker, the Jew, or Wall Street. As the “rogue elephant” of sorts, McCarthy, according to Daniel Bell, “formulated his appeal derived from something deep in the moralizing strain of the American temper, in the willingness to believe in conspiracy and that debunkers are usually more right than wrong.”[4]

In one way, McCarthy’s war on the experts (those in the US State Department bookishly versed with their portfolios) resembled the Stalinist purges without the number of fatalities, though the principle was the same: executing catharsis, a ceremonial stripping and ripping of the educated establishment in favour of visceral revenge for the natural voice.

Unfortunately, much of the modern populist purging has very much to argue against. It is not merely the issue of experts, but the broader managerial classes who have done their part in taking institutions out of their democratic, accountable orbit.

What we will mourn in passing is the killing of the genuinely informed citizen, providing unvarnished and unabashed advice to governments as they bumble through history. In the words of Sir Ivan, “I hope you will continue to challenge ill-founded arguments and muddled thinking and that you will never be afraid to speak the truth to those in power.”

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

Notes

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38503504
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38498839
[3] http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in- american-politics/
[4] https://www.commentarymagazine.com/ articles/mccarthy-and- populism/

In the aftermath of the November 8 US presidential election, sections of the Democratic Party, the intelligence services and the media have intensified unsubstantiated pre-election claims that the Russian government hacked into Democratic Party email servers to undermine the campaign of Hillary Clinton.

The immediate purpose was to distract from the content of the leaked emails, which exposed a conspiracy by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to undermine her challenger in the primaries, Bernie Sanders.

With Trump’s victory, it has become the focus for a ferocious struggle within the ruling elite over foreign policy centred on the issue of what order the US should first aggressively escalate its diplomatic, economic and military offensive—against Russia or China. More fundamentally, its aim is to brand anyone raising questions about foreign policy as the “dupe” of a foreign power and to justify further sweeping censorship, above all against social media.

The same applies to the manufacturing of the fake news scandal in Europe. The divisions within the US over foreign policy are mirrored within and between national ruling elites across the continent. What all agree on, however, is that, whatever side eventually wins out, the agenda of militarism and war requires police-state methods.

This is the content of the resolution passed by the European Parliament on November 23, on “EU strategic communication to counteract propaganda against it by third parties.” The declared aim of the extensive resolution is to combat “third-party actors aiming to discredit” the European Union (EU) that “do not share the same [European] values.”

The resolution then defines as the main “actors” Russia and Daesh (or ISIL) and it is Russia that occupies most of the resolution.

It equates Russia with “transnational terrorist and criminal organisations…” that have “repeatedly engaged in a strategy of deliberate deception and disinformation, especially in the ‘new media’, social networks and the digital sphere…”

Accusing Russia of “information warfare”, the resolution asserts that it “is employing a wide range of tools and instruments” to “challenge democratic values, divide Europe, gather domestic support and create the perception of failed states in the EU’s eastern neighbourhood…”

The resolution specifically cites think tanks such as Russkiy Mir, the RTchannel, Sputnik, alongside “internet trolls” and “cross-border social and religious groups…”

No evidence is presented to back up these claims. Nor is the content of the “disinformation” that it alleges ever specified. Rather “information warfare” is presented as any reportage, regardless of whether it is true or false, that undermines the interests of the European bourgeoisie.

While “not all criticism of the EU or its policies necessarily constitutes propaganda or disinformation”, the resolution states, “instances of manipulation or support linked to third countries and intended to fuel or exacerbate this criticism provide grounds to question the reliability of these messages…”

It is on the basis of such spurious equations that Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have been forced into hiding and exile, accused of treason and threatened with imprisonment and worse.

Just as sinisterly, the EU resolution decrees “information warfare” to be an undeclared act of war. Such methods form an “integral part of modern hybrid warfare, which is a combination of military and non-military measures of a covert and overt nature, deployed to destabilise the political, economic and social situation of a country under attack, without a formal declaration of war,” the resolution states, “targeting not only partners of the EU, but also the EU itself, its institutions and all Member States and citizens irrespective of their nationality and religion…”

The claim that Russia is engaged in a de facto war against the EU stands reality on its head. There is no doubt that Moscow engages in propaganda against aspects of EU policy, but its actions are only a pale reflection of the unending campaign conducted by the US and the EU over the last period.

Washington, in particular, serves as the largest manufacturer of fake news in the world, as evidenced by the criminal lying claims that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” to justify pre-emptive war in 2003. But not far behind it are the major European powers, who are supporting US disinformation regarding the Syrian civil war, which they helped to ignite, with the same aim.

The “fake news” scandal is part of active and far-advanced efforts, led by the US, to destabilise Russia and encircle it militarily. It was US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland who admitted, in 2014, that Washington had spent $5 billion to secure regime change in Ukraine, just after the so-called Euromaidan protests succeeded in forcing the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych out of office. Representatives from Germany, Poland and France performed the official benediction on his overthrow on behalf of the EU.

The resolution was passed just two weeks after the announcement of NATO’s largest troop deployment against Russia since the Cold War. Its “incumbent response force” is being tripled to 40,000 and hundreds of thousands of troops have been placed on higher alert levels. This month, an additional 4,000 NATO forces are being deployed along Russia’s border in breach of the 1997 Russia-NATO Founding Act.

Poland has been the most aggressive in demanding such deployments. It is no coincidence that the resolution to the European Parliament was prepared by Polish Deputy, Anna Fotyga, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and a member of the European Parliament Subcommittee on Security and Defense (SEDE), aligned with NATO.

By declaring Russia to be engaged in a de facto war against the EU, the resolution’s supporters are seeking to politically legitimise this massive escalation in NATO’s provocations against Moscow. Any criticism or campaign against European support for NATO’s warmongering is to be deemed the work of “Russian trolls” or terrorists.

The motion describes as “hostile propaganda” anything that has the effect of “provoking doubt, dividing Member States, engineering a strategic split between the European Union and its North American partners and paralysing the decision-making process, discrediting the EU institutions and transatlantic partnerships…”

The text indicates the social and political factors driving the resort to authoritarianism. It complains that the “financial crisis and the advance of new forms of digital media have posed serious challenges for quality journalism, leading to a decrease in critical thinking among audiences, thus making them more susceptible to disinformation and manipulation..”

In other words, the huge social gulf that exists between working people in Europe and the ruling elite as a result of the 2008 financial crisis and the EU’s unending policy of austerity means the overwhelming majority of people are hostile to the political establishment and its official media, which they correctly regard as nothing more than propaganda outlets for the interests of the super-rich. This insight, which the resolution slanders as a “decrease in critical thinking,” makes the population far less susceptible to the efforts to dragoon them behind militarism and war.

On this basis, the resolution calls for an intensification of EU and NATO efforts to combine forces, in particular to step up “counterintelligence efforts aimed at countering” so-called “fake news” operations. Daesh/ISIL is also introduced here from the standpoint of justifying a clampdown on social media and new measures against “hate speech”, which is never defined.

The resolution was passed by 304 to 179, with 208 abstentions. However, a minority opinion tabled against the resolution made no mention of the threat to democratic rights through the escalation of state censorship. Its objections centred on complaints that Russia should be regarded by the EU as an ally in the Middle East.

As the resolution was being debated, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the Bundestag that public opinion was being “manipulated” on the internet and that it would be necessary to “regulate it.” Simultaneously it was announced that Helsinki is to be the “hub” for a NATO/EU research centre into “hybrid warfare” directed against Russia and ISIL, while in the Czech Republic a new interior ministry department began operations January 1, known as the Centre Against Terrorism and Hybrid Threats. State Secretary for European affairs, Tomáš Prouza, said it was directed against “Russian propaganda” aimed at building “negative images of the European Union and NATO…”

Both the US and Turkey support ISIS-Daesh. And now they are accusing one another.

From the very outset the recruitment, training and financing of  the terrorists was a joint US-NATO-Turkey operation. According to Israeli intelligence (Debka, August14, 2011): 

NATO headquarters in Brussels and the Turkish high command are meanwhile drawing up plans for their first military step in Syria, which is to arm the rebels with weapons for combating the tanks and helicopters spearheading the Assad regime’s crackdown on dissent. … NATO strategists are thinking more in terms of pouring large quantities of anti-tank and anti-air rockets, mortars and heavy machine guns into the protest centers for beating back the government armored forces. (DEBKAfile, NATO to give rebels anti-tank weapons, August 14, 2011) 

This initiative, which was also supported by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, involved a process of organized recruitment of thousands of jihadist “freedom fighters”, reminiscent of  the enlistment of  Mujahideen to wage the CIA’s jihad (holy war) in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war: 

Also discussed in Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels. The Turkish army would house these volunteers, train them and secure their passage into Syria. (Ibid, emphasis added)

These mercenaries were subsequently integrated into US and allied sponsored terrorist organizations including Al Nusrah and ISIS. 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 5, 2016

*        *        *

While it may seem too much to say at this point of time that NATO, given the gravity of the situation triggered by the out-going US president’s nebulous foreign policy, is disintegrating, what is happening is that the Western military alliance is facing an unprecedented crisis. This crisis is certainly as unusual and dramatic as any Shakespearean tragedy. More than a strong military alliance, NATO is at its worst and looks like a house divided against itself. It looked like this when Turkey, second biggest military power in the western alliance, point-blank accused the Obama administration of covertly supporting ISIS and other terror outfits, which are bent upon destroying Iraq and Syria and are now likely to target Turkey too.

Turkish President Recep Erdogan alleged, giving the Obama administration a ‘new-year-surprise’, on last Wednesday, December 28 that Turkey is in possession of “confirmed evidence, with pictures, photos and videos” of the US’ support to ISIS.

While Erdogan had previously lambasted the US for supporting Gulen, Erdogan’s enemy number one and a potential terrorist according to Turkish officials, this time he took it to the next level and blamed the US, for the first time ever, for continuously supporting Daesh and Kurds.

We already know that the US has been officially supporting certain ‘moderate groups’ in Syria and that this support has directly contributed to the intensification of the conflict in Syria. What we know now is the support US has been providing to the most devastating terror groups the world has ever seen.

Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the US Defence Intelligence Agency (and National Security Advisor-designate in the Trump administration), had himself claimed last year in a TV interview that the rise of the IS was a “wilful decision” by the Obama administration in furtherance of its agenda to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The support, as such, does exist. As a matter of fact, the recently announced lifting of restrictions on the supply of heavy weapons to these so-called moderates is yet another irrefutable evidence of the support the US continues to provide to these groups who are directly threatening the lives of those fighting Daesh and other terror networks.

Just a day before Erdogan lambasted the US role, Maria Zakharova, a Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, said that the policy change – set out in the annual defence policy bill and signed into law by the US President Barack Obama on December 23 – would lead to weapons ending up “in the hands of jihadists with whom the sham ‘moderate’ opposition have long acted jointly.”

“Such a decision is a direct threat to the Russian air force, to other Russian military personnel, and to our embassy in Syria, which has come under fire more than once. We therefore view the step as a hostile one,” Zakharova said in the statement.

In this context, Turkey’s lash out against the US is a reflection of the growing frustration with the dual policies (read: rounds of negotiations with Russia were combined with supply of weapons to terrorists) the US has been following in the region. For Turkey, continuous US support for Kurds marks the red line that the ‘super power’ has violated many times and that it is unwilling to cut-off.

Whereas the allegation that a NATO member (the US) is trying to destabilize another NATO member (Turkey) is a reflection of a crisis brewing in the alliance, it also marks the strong urge in the region to oust the US (read: a number of other countries including Iran have tacitly claimed to have evidence of the support US has been providing to Daesh) and embrace Russia as an ally, truly capable of and willing enough to counter existential threats such as ISIS.

With Turkey taking a series of steps to re-write its relations with the West, including the EU (read: Turkey is planning to upgrade its Customs deal with the EU in the first half of 2017), and with Turkey distancing itself from playing a second fiddle to the US in Syria and Iraq, a potential exit of the US from the region is looking imminent.

It is this potential and probable ‘exit’ from the region that seems to have prompted Erdogan to set the trajectory of his new foreign policy in motion without waiting for the new US president to assume responsibilities. The new trajectory has excluded, interestingly enough, the US only as Turkey has invited both Saudi Arabia and Qatar to formally join the trilateral forum to discuss the Syrian endgame.

These two GCC states, which have been deeply involved in the Syrian conflict, would know that the US has rendered itself fairly irrelevant to the endgame in Syria. Therefore, the strong likelihood is that they will cooperate – tacitly at least – with the Russian-Turkish move to get the opposition to sit across the table with the Syrian government.

Significantly enough, at a meeting between Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed Al-Thani and the visiting Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Doha on last Monday, the Saudi-backed Chief Negotiator for the Syrian Opposition, Riyad Hijab was also present.

Again, Çavuşoğlu had arrived in Doha late Sunday from the Saudi city of Jeddah, where he had participated in an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s (OIC) executive committee. The emergency meeting in Jeddah was held to discuss recent developments in the war-torn Syria, especially in the northern city of Aleppo.

That Saudi Arabia and its allies are also supporting these developments is evident from the recent statement issued by Riyad Hijab. The Syrian opposition’s main political body on last Tuesday, December 27, urged rebel groups to cooperate with “sincere regional efforts” to reach a ceasefire, but said it had not been invited to any conference, referring to the Kazakhstan meeting.

“We support the shifts in positions of some international powers and the positive, sincere efforts that could represent a starting point for realising the Syrian people’s aspirations by reaching an agreement that brings security and stability,” Riyad Hijab said in a written statement distributed to the press.

While the ‘known-unknown’ here is the behind-the-scene bargain going on between Russia/Iran and Saudi Arabia via Turkey, the development itself indicates the growing sense in the region of the need to re-define the US’ traditional role in the Middle East. This redefinition, as the series of developments indicates, is about limiting the US involvement and increasing the role that these regional countries can themselves play.

Erdogan’s charge sheet against the US has accelerated the US exit and put other regional countries in the position to tap into this scenario—a scenario that countries like Saudi Arabia can use to get out of the financial, political and military crisis they are currently immersed in.

Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

A version of the following piece was originally published in June 2016. However, since then, India’s PM Narendra Modi has embarked on a ‘demonetisation’ policy, which saw around 85 percent of India’s bank notes becoming invalid overnight.

Emerging evidence indicates that demonetisation was not done to curb corruption, ‘black money’ or terrorism, the reasons originally given. That was a smokescreen. Modi was acting on behalf of powerful Wall Street financial interests. Demonetisation hascaused massive hardship, inconvenience and chaos. It has affected everyone and has impacted the poor and those who reside in rural areas (i.e. most of the population) significantly.

Who does Modi (along with other strategically placed figures) serve primarily: ordinary people and the ‘national interest’ or the interests of the US?

Convenient bedfellows

We don’t have to dig too deep to see where Modi feels at home. Describing itself as a major ‘global communications, stakeholder engagement and business strategy’ company, APCO Worldwide is a lobby agency with firm links to (part of) the Wall Street/US establishment and functions to serve its global agenda. Modi turned to APCO to help transform his image and turn him into electable pro-corporate PM material. It also helped Modi get the message out that what he achieved in Gujarat as Chief Minister was a miracle of economic neoliberalism, although the actual reality is really quite different.

In APCO’s India brochure, there is the claim that India’s resilience in weathering the global downturn and financial crisis has made governments, policy-makers, economists, corporate houses and fund managers believe that the country can play a significant role in the recovery of the global economy. APCO’s publicity blurb about itself claims that it stands “tall as the giant of the lobbying industry.”

The firm, in its own words, offers “professional and rare expertise” to governments, politicians and corporations, and is always ready to help clients to sail through troubled waters in the complex world of both international and domestic affairs.

Mark Halton, former head of Global Marketing and Communications for Monsanto, seemed to agree whenhe praisedAPCO for helping the GMO giant to:

… understand how Monsanto could better engage with societal stakeholders surrounding our business and how best to communicate the social value our company brings to the table.

If your name isseverely tarnishedand you need to get your dubious products on the market in countries that you haven’t managedto infiltratejust yet, why not bring in the “giant of the lobbying industry.”

As a former client of APCO, Modi now seems to be the go-to man for Washington. His government is doing the bidding of global biotech companies and is trying to push through herbicide-tolerant GM mustard based on fraudulent tests and ‘regulatory delinquency‘, which will not only open the door to further GM crops but will possibly eventually boost the sales of Monsanto-Bayer’s glufinosate herbicide. In addition, plans have been announced to introduce 100% foreign direct investment in certain sectors of the economy, including food processing.

Neoliberal dogma

This opening up of India to foreign capital is supported by rhetoric about increasing agricultural efficiency, creating jobs and boosting GDP growth. Such rhetoric mirrors that of the pro-business, neoliberal dogma we see in APCO’s brochure for India. From Greece to Spain and from the US to the UK, we are able to see this rhetoric for what it really is: record profits and massive increases in wealth (ie ‘growth) for elite interests and, for the rest, disempowerment, surveillance, austerity, job losses, the erosion of rights, weak unions, cuts to public services, bankrupt governments and opaque, corrupt trade deals.

APCO describes India as a trillion-dollar market. Note that the emphasis is not on redistributing the country’s wealth among its citizens but on exploiting markets. While hundreds of millions live in poverty and hundreds of millions of others hover above it, the combined wealth of India’s richest 296 individuals is $478 billion, some 22% of India’s GDP. According to the ‘World Wealth Report 2015’, there were 198,000 ‘high net worth’ individuals in India in 2014, while in 2013 the figure stood at 156,000.

APCO likes to talk about positioning international funds and facilitating corporations’ ability to exploit markets, sell products and secure profit. In other words, colonising key sectors, regions and nations to serve the needs of US-dominated international capital.

Paving the way for plunder

Modi recently stated that India is now one of the most business friendly countries in the world. The code for this being lowering labour, environmental, health and consumer protection standards, while reducing taxes and tariffs and facilitating the acquisition of public assets via privatisation and instituting policy frameworks that work to the advantage of foreign (US/Western) corporations.

When the World Bank rates countries on their level of ‘Ease of Doing Business’, it means nation states facilitating policies that force working people to take part in a race to the bottom based on free market fundamentalism. The more ‘compliant’ national governments make their populations and regulations, the more attractive foreign capital is tempted to invest.

The World Bank’s ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture’ – supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID – entails opening up markets to Western agribusiness and their fertilisers, pesticides, weedicides and patented seeds.

Anyone who is aware of the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture and the links with the Indo-US Nuclear Treaty will know who will be aware that those two projects form part of an overall plan to subjugate Indian agriculture to the needs of foreign corporations (see this article from 1999). As thebiggest recipientof loans from the World Bank in the history of that institution, India is proving to be very compliant.

The destruction of livelihoods under the guise of ‘job creation’

According to the neoliberal ideologues, foreign investment is good for jobs and good for business. Just how many actually get created is another matter. What is overlooked, however, are the jobs that were lost in the first place to ‘open up’ sectors to foreign capital. For example, Cargill may set up a food or seed processing plant that employs a few hundred people, but what about the agricultural jobs that were deliberately eradicated in the first place or the village-level processors who were cynically put out of business so Cargill could gain a financially lucrative foothold?

The Indian economy is being opened-up through the concurrent displacement of a pre-existing (highly) productive system for the benefit of foreign corporations.For farmers, the majority are not to be empowered but displaced from the land. Farming is being made financially non-viable for small farmers, seeds are to be privatised as intellectual property rights are redefined, land is to be acquired and an industrialised, foreign corporate-controlled food production, processing and retail system is to be implemented.

The long-term plan is tocontinue to starve agricultureof investment and have an urbanised India with a fraction of the population left in farming working on contracts for large suppliers and Wal-Mart-type supermarkets that offer highly processed, denutrified, genetically altered food contaminated with chemicals and grown in increasingly degraded soils according to an unsustainable model of agriculture that is less climate/drought resistant, less diverse and unable to achieve food security. This would be disastrous for farmers, public health and local livelihoods.

Low input, sustainable models of food production and notions of independence and local or regional self-reliance do not provide opportunities to global agribusiness or international funds to exploit markets, sell their products and cash in on APCO’s vision of a trillion-dollar corporate hijack; moreover, they have little in common with Bill Gates/USAID’s vision for an Africa dominated by global agribusiness.

And, finally, to demonetisation

Modi rode to power on a nationalist platform and talks about various ‘nation-building’ initiatives, not least the ‘make in India’ campaign. But he is not the only key figure in the story of India’s capitulation to Washington’s agenda for India. There is, for instance,Avrind Subramanian, the chief economic advisor to the government, and Raghuram Rajan who was until recently Governor of the Reserve Bank of India.He was chief economist at theInternational Monetary Fundfrom 2003 to 2007 and was a Distinguished Service Professor of Financeat theUniversity of Chicago Booth School of Businessfrom 1991 to 2013. He is now back at the University of Chicago.

Aside from Rajan acting asa mouthpiecefor Washington’s strategy to recast agriculture in a corporate image and get people out of agriculture in India, in arecent article, economist Norbert Haring implicates Rajan in the demonestisation policy. He indicates that the policy was carried out on behalf of USAID, MasterCard, Visa and the people behind eBay and Citi, among others, with support from the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Haring calls Rajan the Reserve Bank of India’s “IMF-Chicago boy” and based on his employment record, memberships (not least of the eliteGroup of Thirty which includes heads of central, investment and commercial banksand links, place him squarely at the centre of Washington’s financial cabal.

Haring says that Raghuram Rajan has good reason to expect to climb further to the highest rungs in international finance and thus play bow to Washington’s game plan:

He already wasa President of the American Finance Association and inaugural recipient of its Fisher-Black-Prize in financial research. He won the handsomely endowed prizes of Infosys for economic research and of Deutsche Bank for financial economics as well as the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Prize for best economics book. He was declared Indian of the year by NASSCOM and Central Banker of the year by Euromoneyand by The Banker. He is considered a possible successor of Christine Lagard at the helm of the IMF, but can certainly also expect to be considered for other top jobs in international finance.”

The move towards a cashless society would secure a further degree of control over India by the institutions who are pushing for it. Securing payments that accrue from each digital transaction would of course be very financially lucrative for them. These institutions are therefore pursuing a global ‘war on cash’.

Small, wealthy countries like Denmark and Sweden can bear the impact of a transition to a cashless economy, but for a country such as India, which runs on cash, the outcomes so far have been catastrophic for hundreds of millions of people, especially those who don’t have a bank account (almost half the population) or do not even have easy access to a bank.

But, regardless of the large-scale human suffering imposed as a result of demonetisation, it could kill two birds with one stone: 1) securing the interests of international capital, including the eventual displacement of the informal (i.e. self-organised) economy; and 2) acting as anotherdeliberate nail in the coffinof Indian farmers, driving even more of them out of the sector. The US’s game plan remains well and truly on course.

Not really a case of ‘make in India’. Some 50 years after independence, as a state India remains compromised, weak and hobbled. More a case of made in Washington.

A version of the following piece was originally published in June 2016. However, since then, India’s PM Narendra Modi has embarked on a ‘demonetisation’ policy, which saw around 85 percent of India’s bank notes becoming invalid overnight.

Emerging evidence indicates that demonetisation was not done to curb corruption, ‘black money’ or terrorism, the reasons originally given. That was a smokescreen. Modi was acting on behalf of powerful Wall Street financial interests. Demonetisation hascaused massive hardship, inconvenience and chaos. It has affected everyone and has impacted the poor and those who reside in rural areas (i.e. most of the population) significantly.

Who does Modi (along with other strategically placed figures) serve primarily: ordinary people and the ‘national interest’ or the interests of the US?

Convenient bedfellows

We don’t have to dig too deep to see where Modi feels at home. Describing itself as a major ‘global communications, stakeholder engagement and business strategy’ company, APCO Worldwide is a lobby agency with firm links to (part of) the Wall Street/US establishment and functions to serve its global agenda. Modi turned to APCO to help transform his image and turn him into electable pro-corporate PM material. It also helped Modi get the message out that what he achieved in Gujarat as Chief Minister was a miracle of economic neoliberalism, although the actual reality is really quite different.

In APCO’s India brochure, there is the claim that India’s resilience in weathering the global downturn and financial crisis has made governments, policy-makers, economists, corporate houses and fund managers believe that the country can play a significant role in the recovery of the global economy. APCO’s publicity blurb about itself claims that it stands “tall as the giant of the lobbying industry.”

The firm, in its own words, offers “professional and rare expertise” to governments, politicians and corporations, and is always ready to help clients to sail through troubled waters in the complex world of both international and domestic affairs.

Mark Halton, former head of Global Marketing and Communications for Monsanto, seemed to agree whenhe praisedAPCO for helping the GMO giant to:

… understand how Monsanto could better engage with societal stakeholders surrounding our business and how best to communicate the social value our company brings to the table.

If your name isseverely tarnishedand you need to get your dubious products on the market in countries that you haven’t managedto infiltratejust yet, why not bring in the “giant of the lobbying industry.”

As a former client of APCO, Modi now seems to be the go-to man for Washington. His government is doing the bidding of global biotech companies and is trying to push through herbicide-tolerant GM mustard based on fraudulent tests and ‘regulatory delinquency‘, which will not only open the door to further GM crops but will possibly eventually boost the sales of Monsanto-Bayer’s glufinosate herbicide. In addition, plans have been announced to introduce 100% foreign direct investment in certain sectors of the economy, including food processing.

Neoliberal dogma

This opening up of India to foreign capital is supported by rhetoric about increasing agricultural efficiency, creating jobs and boosting GDP growth. Such rhetoric mirrors that of the pro-business, neoliberal dogma we see in APCO’s brochure for India. From Greece to Spain and from the US to the UK, we are able to see this rhetoric for what it really is: record profits and massive increases in wealth (ie ‘growth) for elite interests and, for the rest, disempowerment, surveillance, austerity, job losses, the erosion of rights, weak unions, cuts to public services, bankrupt governments and opaque, corrupt trade deals.

APCO describes India as a trillion-dollar market. Note that the emphasis is not on redistributing the country’s wealth among its citizens but on exploiting markets. While hundreds of millions live in poverty and hundreds of millions of others hover above it, the combined wealth of India’s richest 296 individuals is $478 billion, some 22% of India’s GDP. According to the ‘World Wealth Report 2015’, there were 198,000 ‘high net worth’ individuals in India in 2014, while in 2013 the figure stood at 156,000.

APCO likes to talk about positioning international funds and facilitating corporations’ ability to exploit markets, sell products and secure profit. In other words, colonising key sectors, regions and nations to serve the needs of US-dominated international capital.

Paving the way for plunder

Modi recently stated that India is now one of the most business friendly countries in the world. The code for this being lowering labour, environmental, health and consumer protection standards, while reducing taxes and tariffs and facilitating the acquisition of public assets via privatisation and instituting policy frameworks that work to the advantage of foreign (US/Western) corporations.

When the World Bank rates countries on their level of ‘Ease of Doing Business’, it means nation states facilitating policies that force working people to take part in a race to the bottom based on free market fundamentalism. The more ‘compliant’ national governments make their populations and regulations, the more attractive foreign capital is tempted to invest.

The World Bank’s ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture’ – supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID – entails opening up markets to Western agribusiness and their fertilisers, pesticides, weedicides and patented seeds.

Anyone who is aware of the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture and the links with the Indo-US Nuclear Treaty will know who will be aware that those two projects form part of an overall plan to subjugate Indian agriculture to the needs of foreign corporations (see this article from 1999). As thebiggest recipientof loans from the World Bank in the history of that institution, India is proving to be very compliant.

The destruction of livelihoods under the guise of ‘job creation’

According to the neoliberal ideologues, foreign investment is good for jobs and good for business. Just how many actually get created is another matter. What is overlooked, however, are the jobs that were lost in the first place to ‘open up’ sectors to foreign capital. For example, Cargill may set up a food or seed processing plant that employs a few hundred people, but what about the agricultural jobs that were deliberately eradicated in the first place or the village-level processors who were cynically put out of business so Cargill could gain a financially lucrative foothold?

The Indian economy is being opened-up through the concurrent displacement of a pre-existing (highly) productive system for the benefit of foreign corporations.For farmers, the majority are not to be empowered but displaced from the land. Farming is being made financially non-viable for small farmers, seeds are to be privatised as intellectual property rights are redefined, land is to be acquired and an industrialised, foreign corporate-controlled food production, processing and retail system is to be implemented.

The long-term plan is tocontinue to starve agricultureof investment and have an urbanised India with a fraction of the population left in farming working on contracts for large suppliers and Wal-Mart-type supermarkets that offer highly processed, denutrified, genetically altered food contaminated with chemicals and grown in increasingly degraded soils according to an unsustainable model of agriculture that is less climate/drought resistant, less diverse and unable to achieve food security. This would be disastrous for farmers, public health and local livelihoods.

Low input, sustainable models of food production and notions of independence and local or regional self-reliance do not provide opportunities to global agribusiness or international funds to exploit markets, sell their products and cash in on APCO’s vision of a trillion-dollar corporate hijack; moreover, they have little in common with Bill Gates/USAID’s vision for an Africa dominated by global agribusiness.

And, finally, to demonetisation

Modi rode to power on a nationalist platform and talks about various ‘nation-building’ initiatives, not least the ‘make in India’ campaign. But he is not the only key figure in the story of India’s capitulation to Washington’s agenda for India. There is, for instance,Avrind Subramanian, the chief economic advisor to the government, and Raghuram Rajan who was until recently Governor of the Reserve Bank of India.He was chief economist at theInternational Monetary Fundfrom 2003 to 2007 and was a Distinguished Service Professor of Financeat theUniversity of Chicago Booth School of Businessfrom 1991 to 2013. He is now back at the University of Chicago.

Aside from Rajan acting asa mouthpiecefor Washington’s strategy to recast agriculture in a corporate image and get people out of agriculture in India, in arecent article, economist Norbert Haring implicates Rajan in the demonestisation policy. He indicates that the policy was carried out on behalf of USAID, MasterCard, Visa and the people behind eBay and Citi, among others, with support from the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Haring calls Rajan the Reserve Bank of India’s “IMF-Chicago boy” and based on his employment record, memberships (not least of the eliteGroup of Thirty which includes heads of central, investment and commercial banksand links, place him squarely at the centre of Washington’s financial cabal.

Haring says that Raghuram Rajan has good reason to expect to climb further to the highest rungs in international finance and thus play bow to Washington’s game plan:

He already wasa President of the American Finance Association and inaugural recipient of its Fisher-Black-Prize in financial research. He won the handsomely endowed prizes of Infosys for economic research and of Deutsche Bank for financial economics as well as the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Prize for best economics book. He was declared Indian of the year by NASSCOM and Central Banker of the year by Euromoneyand by The Banker. He is considered a possible successor of Christine Lagard at the helm of the IMF, but can certainly also expect to be considered for other top jobs in international finance.”

The move towards a cashless society would secure a further degree of control over India by the institutions who are pushing for it. Securing payments that accrue from each digital transaction would of course be very financially lucrative for them. These institutions are therefore pursuing a global ‘war on cash’.

Small, wealthy countries like Denmark and Sweden can bear the impact of a transition to a cashless economy, but for a country such as India, which runs on cash, the outcomes so far have been catastrophic for hundreds of millions of people, especially those who don’t have a bank account (almost half the population) or do not even have easy access to a bank.

But, regardless of the large-scale human suffering imposed as a result of demonetisation, it could kill two birds with one stone: 1) securing the interests of international capital, including the eventual displacement of the informal (i.e. self-organised) economy; and 2) acting as anotherdeliberate nail in the coffinof Indian farmers, driving even more of them out of the sector. The US’s game plan remains well and truly on course.

Not really a case of ‘make in India’. Some 50 years after independence, as a state India remains compromised, weak and hobbled. More a case of made in Washington.

Dangerous crossroads: Is Obama intent upon waging a military operation on Russia’s border prior to the end of his presidential mandate?

This military onslaught could potentially create a fait accompli.

Are these US deployments part of Obama’s “act of retribution” against Russia in response to Moscow’s alleged hacking of the US elections, which according to the director of National Intelligence James Clapper constitute an “Existential Threat” to the Security of the US. 

As we recall Obama on December 29th “ordered a series of retaliatory steps against Russia”.

Is this a “fast-track” procedure on the part of the outgoing president, with the support of US intelligence to create chaos prior to the inception of the Trump administration on January 20th?

According to Donbass International News Agency Service, “A Massive US military deployment should be ready by January 20.”

Political Insanity prevails. 

And insanity could potentially unleash World War III. 

Meanwhile none of this is front page news. The mainstream media is not covering it.

Below is the report of the Donbass International News Agency report.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 5, 2017

*       *       *

Correction. A previous version of this text by the Donbass News Agency (translated from Russian) misquoted the original RT source:  the figures refer to pieces of military hardware rather than tanks.

***

The NATO war preparation against Russia, ‘Operation Atlantic Resolve’, is in full swing. 2,000 pieces of military hardware will be sent in coming days from Germany to Eastern Europe, and 1,600 US military hardware are deployed to storage facilities in the Netherlands.

At the same time, NATO countries are sending thousands of soldiers in to Russian borders.

According to US Army Europe, 4,000 troops and 2,000 military hardware will arrive in three US transport ships to Germany next weekend. From Bremerhaven, US troops and huge amount of military material, will be transported to Poland and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

USA is sending to Russian borders 3rd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division. Overall, more than 2,500 pieces of cargo are shipped to Germany, where those will be unloaded in the period January 6-8. US military material and troops will continue to Poland by rail and military convoy’s. Massive US military deployment should be ready by January 20.

“Some 900 cars with military materiel will be transported by train from Bremerhaven to Poland. There are also about 600 pieces of freight that will be transported by train to Poland from the military training ground at Bergen-Hohne. Nearly 40 vehicles will travel directly by road from Bremerhaven to Poland,” told Bundeswehr press office.

“Three years after the last American tanks left the continent, we need to get them back,” said Lieutenant General Frederick “Ben” Hodges, commander of US forces in Europe.

He made the statement during a visit to the Logistics School of the Bundeswehr in Garlstedt, Lower Saxony. He told journalists that the measures were a “response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the illegal annexation of Crimea.”

While NATO is preparing for war against Russia, Hodges turned everything upside down and accused Russia of preparing for war. “This does not mean that there necessarily has to be a war, none of this is inevitable, but Moscow is preparing for the possibility,” Hodges said.

In the dangerous escalation against nuclear-armed Russia, which poses the danger of a third world war, the German Bundeswehr is playing a central role. “Without the support of the [German] Army, we can go nowhere,” Hodges said during an appearance at the Joint Support Service of the Bundeswehr.

Germany, which rolled over Eastern Europe in its war of extermination 75 years ago, is preparing to send combat troops to the Baltics. In January, 26 tanks, 100 other vehicles and 120 containers will be transported by train to Lithuania. Germany will send the 122nd Infantry Battalion.

At the same time total of 1,600 US fighting vehicles are due to be stored at a six-warehouse complex in the southeastern village of Eygelshoven, near the Belgian and German borders. The Eygelshoven facility was originally opened in 1985 during the Cold War, when it was used by US troops to practice drills in case of a possible Soviet attack, wrote RT News.

Abrams Tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Paladin artillery have already started arriving in what is part of a $3.4 billion Congress-approved scheme to increase NATO military capability in Europe. Storage sites are also planned to be reopened in Poland, Belgium and Germany.

Shortly after Christmas, and lost in the holiday shuffle, Turkish President and terrorist supporter Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made a statement accusing the U.S.-led coalition of supporting not only terrorists in Syria but ISIS itself. He also stated clearly that Turkey has proof that U.S.-led coalition is supporting the notorious terrorist organization it claims to be fighting.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, December 27, Erdogan stated that “They give support to terrorist groups including Daesh (ISIS).”

He added that “Now they give support to terrorist groups including Daesh, YPG, PYD. It’s very clear. We have confirmed evidence, with pictures, photos and videos.”

Erdogan also called on GCC members such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar to join Russia, Iran, and Syria in peace talks regarding the current crisis next month. He said these countries (the Russian coalition) have “shown goodwill and given support” to Syria. He stressed that Turkey would not take part in negotiations if “terrorist groups” like the Kurdish separatists were involved.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner responded to Erdogan’s statement by saying that it was “ludicrous” and that it has “no basis for truth.” Toner added that the U.S. is “100 percent behind the defeat and destruction of Daesh, even beyond Syria and Iraq.”

Erdogan’s statement is actually true as Mark Toner and anyone who can operate a keyboard knows full well. The United States and its coalition have long supported terrorists in Syria, and both have done so since day one. That being said, Turkey and Erdogan specifically have supported the same terrorists for just as long. For that reason, Erdogan’s statements may appear startling if taken alone.

Thus, the question now becomes – what is Erdogan’s purpose behind those statements? After all, Erdogan has remained stalwart in the NATO camp ever since the beginning of the crisis where he argued that Turkey only supported moderates, never acknowledging the fact that Turkey was buying ISIS’ stolen oil and providing jihadists with porous borders so that they could easily cross over into Syria. So why would Erdogan throw his NATO and GCC “allies” under the bus and actually spill the beans regarding Western/GCC support of terrorists?

The answer is actually a number of possibilities. Some researchers may suggest that Erdogan’s stance is changing and that he is moving Turkey more into the Russian orbit, abandoning the NATO position of destroying Syria and, thus, beginning the process of dropping the U.S., GCC, and NATO baggage and exposing imperialists at the behest of the Russians. Others attribute his statements to the mere ravings of a madman lashing out at the slightest sign of criticism or political trouble. While these explanations are possibilities, the reality is most likely that it is a complex web of intrigue that centers itself around Erdogan himself and the position of the Muslim Brotherhood that has caused Erdogan to make such a statement.

It appears that Erdogan is attempting to sit on the fence between two world powers and their alliances – the Western world hegemon and the Russian coalition – while, at the same time, trying to promote his neo-Ottoman vision for Turkey. While Erdogan was firmly within the NATO camp at the start of the Syrian crisis, it is quite likely that Erdogan has started to realize that chaos in Syria might very well equal chaos in Turkey and that U.S. support for the Kurdish fighters in Syria and Iraq might ignite Kurdish separatists in Turkey, throwing his own country into chaos and civil war yet again. Thus, Turkey has moved more toward the direction of Russia, despite having shot down a Russian jet and acting provocatively toward Russia in the past. Putin is, of course, using the carrot more so than the stick, a diplomatic strategy that tends to yield better results in the long run, particularly when the power bearing the carrot has a massive stick for backup. For that reason, Turkey is willing to at least provide token support to “peace talks” and other Russian-led initiatives.

However, to suggest that Erdogan has actually moved into the Russian orbit is naïve. Turkey continues to keep its borders open for ISIS fighters to cross into Syria and it continues to maintain its “safe zone” area which is nothing more than a forward operating base and supply line corridor (the Jarablus Corridor) for ISIS and its related terror organizations. As previously mentioned, Erdogan has been willing to risk direct war with Russia on a number of occasions and the Turkish government has even announced support for terror brigades to be used on Russian territory, the Crimea.

Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman dreams have become more and more obvious through his own statements, such as his vocal support for the Misak-Milli, a series of decisions by the Ottoman Turkish empire that saw Turkey claiming parts of Iraq, Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Greece, and Bulgaria. He has even suggested the possibility of doing away with the Treaty of Lausanne, which delineates the Turkish borders.

Erdogan’s willingness to throw his GCC allies under the bus most likely is compounded by his Muslim Brotherhood affiliations, a slightly more moderate form of Islamic extremism that calls for a referendum in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. It is for this reason that a rift exists between the Islamist Erdogan and the Wahhabist Saudis. For beginners, it is the equivalent of “Democratic” socialists versus communists.

As Erdogan’s own plan of playing both sides continues, the situation inside his own country will most likely continue to deteriorate, despite his clever handling (or masterminding) of the recent coup that saw him eliminate many of his political and institutional enemies. As the domestic situation in Turkey worsens, Erdogan will likely face losses both in Syria and Iraq and will most likely move closer to Russia. As a result, the West will attempt to rein him in, using both the carrot and the traditional American stick. Domestically, his troubles may overwhelm him or, at the very least, the stability of his country.

Erdogan is currently attempting a delicate balancing act between two world powers. Delicacy, however, is not what Erdogan is most skilled at.

Regardless, it is important to remember that Turkey is still very much a part of NATO and very much a part of the anti-Syria, pro-ISIS coalition. His recent statements regarding the coalition support of ISIS is merely an attempt to bargain with the United States and gain brownie points with Russia, both designed to enhance his position for his own foolhardy neo-Ottoman dreams.

With that being said, we should welcome Erdogan’s newfound honesty and encourage him, if he has the photos and videos he claims to possess, to release them to the media immediately.

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is the author of seven books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria,and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President. Turbeville has published over 850 articles on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s radio show Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. His website is BrandonTurbeville.com He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

Three US senators introduced a bill to congress on Wednesday that would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital and move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv, defying international stances on the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict resting on a two-state solution.

According to The Guardian, Republican senators Ted Cruz (Texas), Dean Heller (Nevada), and Marco Rubio (Florida), introduced the Jerusalem Embassy and Recognition Act at the 115th Congress in Washington on Wednesday, as Republicans control both the Senate and House of Representatives for the first time since 2007.

If implemented, the bill would give legitimacy to Israel’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem since 1967, disregard Palestinian claims to the city, and possibly terminate a longstanding White House policy to perpetually defer a 1995 Congressional decision to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and move the embassy there.

The bill has been introduced as President-Elect Donald Trump will be sworn in as the American President on Jan. 20. The soon-to-be president of the United States pledged during his campaign that, if elected, he would ensure that the US embassy in Israel was moved to Jerusalem, with Trump’s senior adviser Kellyanne Conway reiterating last month that the move would be a “very big priority” for the Trump administration.

Trump has also been a vocal supporter for the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory, which have been condemned by the international community as representing a clear violation of international law.

Earlier this month, outgoing US President Barack Obama renewed a presidential waiver that again delayed plans to relocate the embassy for another six months, citing “national security interests,” as every US president has done since Bill Clinton.

While many countries have consulates in Jerusalem that cater to citizens residing in the occupied Palestinian territory, the majority of embassies to Israel are located in the Tel Aviv area.

Meanwhile, Trump’s choice for US Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, has been described as a “pro-settler lawyer” who has openly announced his disdain for the two-state solution and his support for recognizing an undivided Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

He has positioned himself as a divisive and controversial figure in Israeli-Palestinian politics, accusing President Barack Obama of being an “anti-Semite” and comparing American Jews who oppose the half-century occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, to Nazi prisoners who served as guards in concentration camps.

Friedman also serves as president of the American Friends in Beit El Yeshiva — a group that supports the illegal settlement of Beit El near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank — and said he hoped to “strengthen the unbreakable bond between our two countries and advance the cause of peace within the region, and look forward to doing this from the US embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem,” just hours after being appointed to the post.

Last month, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Secretary-General Saeb Erekat warned that the PLO would revoke all previously signed agreements with Israel as well as the PLO’s 1993 recognition of Israel if Trump followed through on his pledge to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

During a conference call in Washington D.C. organized by the Wilson Center, Erekat reportedly said such a move would indicate the US’s acceptance of “Israel’s illegal annexation of East Jerusalem,” and further warned that “any hope of peace in the future will just vanish,” Times of Israel reported.

In November, in response to Trump’s initial comments on the issue, Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour threatened to “make life miserable” for the United States at the United Nations if the embassy was moved, pointing out that such a decision would represent a violation of UN General Assembly Resolution 181 regarding the status of Jerusalem, and constitute “belligerency” towards Palestinians.

Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush made similar promises to move the embassy during their presidential campaigns, but once in office they signed the waiver required to avoid following through with the move.

The American bill’s introduction also comes on the heels of a UN General Assembly resolution, which passed last month, reiterating the international community’s rejection of Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territory and restating its illegality under international law.

After strongly condemning the resolution’s passage, the Israeli government has openly expressed its anticipation for a Trump presidency when right-wing politicians believe they will more easily advance plans to expand Israeli settlements and consolidate Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank.

The fate of Jerusalem has been a focal point of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades, with numerous tensions arising over Israeli threats regarding the status of non-Jewish religious sites in the city, and the “Judaization” of East Jerusalem through settlement construction and mass demolitions of Palestinian homes.

While members of the international community have rested the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the discontinuation of illegal Israeli settlements and the establishment of a two-state solution, Israeli leaders have instead shifted further to the right as many Knesset members have called for an escalation of settlement building in the occupied West Bank, and with some having advocated for its complete annexation.

A number of Palestinian activists have criticized the two-state solution as unsustainable and unlikely to bring durable peace, proposing instead a binational state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians.

Divisions within the US state over allegations of Russian hacking of Democratic Party emails grew more embittered and public Wednesday following statements by Donald Trump that further distanced the president-elect from the CIA and other US intelligence agencies.

In a Twitter post late Tuesday, Trump questioned the veracity of a soon-to-be-released official report by the CIA, FBI and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the alleged Russian intervention into the 2016 US election. The intelligence officials are due to brief leaders of Congress on Thursday and Trump on Friday.

To date, no evidence has been presented to the public to substantiate the charges of Russian government hacking of the Democratic Party and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.

Trump alluded to this fact when he tweeted: “The ‘Intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!”

He followed this up with a tweet on Wednesday quoting approvingly from an interview conducted by Shawn Hannity of Fox News with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: “Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta’—why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!”

In the interview, Assange reaffirmed his earlier statements that the documents WikiLeaks published were not provided by the Russian government or “any state party.” He said that the email hacks of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta were likely the result of the Democratic Party’s amateurish security practices. “Podesta gave out that his password was the word ‘password,’” Assange said. “This is something a fourteen-year-old kid could have hacked.”

Trump’s comments left Democrats and the intelligence agencies aghast and outraged. The Wall Street Journal reported, “White House officials have been increasingly frustrated by Mr. Trump’s confrontations with intelligence officials,” quoting one official as saying, “It’s appalling… No president has ever taken on the CIA and come out looking good.”

The mood was summed up by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (Democrat of New York), who issued a thinly veiled threat against the president-elect. “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

Democrats combined their denunciations of Trump for not accepting the statements of intelligence agencies and for being too close to Russian President Vladimir Putin with an escalation of the witch-hunt against Assange. “Today, Trump sided with Julian Assange—an alleged sex offender who has hidden out in the Ecuadorian embassy for years and has dumped millions of classified State Department documents that put US persons at risk—rather than our country’s own intelligence professionals,” declared Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Republicans more closely aligned to the CIA also spoke out against Trump’s comments. “We have two choices: some guy living in an embassy on the run from the law… who has a history of undermining American democracy and releasing classified information to put our troops at risk, or the 17 intelligence agencies sworn to defend us,” said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.”

In an indication of the policy disputes behind the conflict, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday evening that Trump “is working with top advisers on a plan that would restructure and pare back the nation’s top spy agency… prompted by a belief that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has become bloated and politicized.”

The Journal reported that Trump’s advisers “are working on a plan to restructure the Central Intelligence Agency, cutting back on staffing at its Virginia headquarters and pushing more people out into field posts around the world.” A source close to the president-elect told the Journal, “Mr. Trump shares the view… that the intelligence community’s position that Russians tried to help his campaign is an attempt to undermine his victory or say he didn’t win.”

The highly public conflict only two weeks before the inauguration of Trump points to the depth of the divisions that have arisen in the American state.

There is no progressive side in this faction fight. On the part of the White House, the CIA and substantial sections of the Republican Party, together with the majority of the American media, the hacking charges are aimed at creating as much pressure as possible to prevent any shift away from the Obama administration’s highly provocative and confrontational economic, diplomatic and military campaign against Russia. The faction that has coalesced around Trump favors a more aggressive US policy first of all against China. Trump spokespeople have sought in comments and interviews to redirect the furor over alleged cyber-attacks away from Russia and toward China.

It is significant that the Democrats, while signaling their willingness to cooperate with Trump on pursuing aggressively protectionist policies and saying little about the ultra-right-wing cabinet he has assembled, make the defense of the intelligence agencies and the pursuit of a war-mongering policy against Russia the issues on which they remain intransigent.

“Why is radiation incompatible with life?  If this tenet is correct, nuclear power (both weapon and electricity-producing) should not be allowed to exist on this earth, as they produce radionuclides as their by-products. 

We will look into this issue from a scientific standpoint.”

I.  Introduction

Science has advanced since the beginning of 20^th century, and led to the current atomic age.  The discovery of nuclear fission reaction in 1938 led immediately to its use for a military purpose.  The atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, flattened the two cities and killed several hundred thousands people instantaneously.  Most of the cause of death was of non-radiation; extreme heat and the destructing shockwaves.  However, many died also from the strong radiation effects, without incurring barn or physical injury.  The nuclear fission reaction has since been applied to the “so-called” peaceful use, i.e., nuclear power to produce electricity.  Both usages produce inevitably huge amounts of radioactive material as the byproducts.  The radiation from these sources predominate now the radiation background of the earth.  The radioactive materials have so far released to the surface of the earth through the atomic bomb explosions, tests of nuclear weapons, accidents of nuclear facilities including those of Chernobyl in Ukraine, Three mile island in Pennsylvania in USA, Fukushima in Japan, and some nuclear submarines, and, also from the routine release from the nuclear facilities.

The Chernobyl accident in 1986 affected and killed many people, but the damaged reactor No.4 has not been fixed and has been in a sarcophagus to prevent further release of radioactive material.  The sarcophagus, however, has been deteriorated after thirty years, and now is covered with another huge dome.  The people affected are still suffering from many health problems thirty years later.

The Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in Japan six years ago has not been fixed.  It is becoming increasingly evident that it is difficult to fix it, as three reactors’ nuclear fuel rods were melted; there is no precedence for such a disaster in human history.  The health effects of radioactive material released are becoming significant day by day.  Un-fortunately, its reality has been covered up by the Japanese government.  What’s more, the government is eagerly trying to restart the nuclear power plants as many as possible, having done so three nuclear power reactors so far, despite the fact that no electricity shortage has been experienced when no single nuclear power plant was in operation for two years (2013-2015).  This implies that Japan does not need the nuclear energy.  Unfortunately even the largest opposition party (Minshin) seems to be in favor of restarting them.

The politicians’ concern is simply “economics”, which is seen only from the standpoint of the operating corporations.  In terms of the overall economic effects, the nuclear power plants are known to be ineffective or rather disastrous. The people who are in favor of nuclear power, i.e., the present government of Japan (and others), the majority of politicians, the corporations of operating and manufacturing nuclear power plants, the bureaucrats, and many “so-called” experts depending on the nuclear industry, are concerned only with their own livelihood.  They are unaware of or ignoring the fact that radiation coming from the unavoidable byproducts of the nuclear power operation is indeed incompatible with living organisms.

This fact, i.e., INCOMPATIBILITY OF RADIATION WITH LIFE, seems to be recognized by the nuclear industry.  Hence, the nuclear industry and its associates (termed often “nuclear mafia”) are desperately trying to cover up the evil health effects of radiation.  They have tried, and have so far been able to cover them up relatively successfully.  This has been possible, only because the evil effects are basically subtle, not felt by the person affected, and have so far been confined to relatively small areas and few people (compared with the vast area of the entire earth and the majority of the human race).

In the following short article we would like to show why radiation is incompatible with life, and hence that the “nuclear” power reactors as well as weapons which produce radioactive material should not be on the earth.

II.  Why is radiation incompatible with life?

1. The interaction of radiation particles with biomolecules

Then, the basic question is: Why is radiation incompatible with life?  If this tenet is correct, the nuclear power (both weapon and electricity-producing) should not be allowed to exist on this earth, as they produce radionuclides as the by-products.  We will look into this issue from scientific standpoint.

Let’s recognize that the earth is a rare body in the universe.  A few earth-like bodies have been found, but whether life exists on those bodies is unknown.  The vast majority of the bodies in the universe have no life on them anyway.  Why is the earth so blessed with life?  The basic reason (i) is that the majority of material (likely more than 99.99999%) is made of stable atoms.  Two other reasons are: (ii) cosmic ray, harmful to life, are relatively little to reach the earth’s surface, and (iii) the prevailing temperature on the surface of this planet allows the presence of liquid water.  This last issue has something to do with the currently debated “climate change”, and would not be discussed here.

First, an atom is made of a nucleus and surrounding electrons.  A nucleus consists of electrically neutral neutrons and positively charged protons.  They are confined in a very, very small area (nucleus) by “strong” (“nuclear”) force.  On the other hands, electrons are attracted by “electromagnetic” force to the nucleus, as electrons are negatively charged.  All material including those constituting human bodies on this earth are made of stable atoms.  It needs to be added in haste that a few unstable atoms do exist on the earth and the extent of their effects on life is quite limited, though real, but cannot be made visible unless carefully studied.

When we say “stable or unstable atom”, we mean “nucleus” rather than the whole atom consisting of a nucleus and surrounding electrons.  The energy state of nucleus is governed by the “strong” force (“nuclear” force).  “Unstable” implies “having extra energy”, that needs to be shed.  So an unstable nucleus (of an atom) undergoes a spontaneous change to a more stable state.  The process is termed as “nuclear decay”, in which the extra energy is released as “radiation”.  Hence such an stable nucleus is called “radioactive nucleus=radionuclide”.  There are a few radiation types: alpha (α), beta (β), gamma (γ) and neutron, and others.  The energies carried by these radiations are very large, as the processes of change are governed by the “strong” force.  Some examples of radiation energy are as follows: 20 KeV for β from T(tritium), 1.2 MeV for β and γ combined of Cs(cesium)-137, 546 KeV for β from Sr(strontium)-90, 5.245 MeV for α from Pu(plutonium)-239.  We will assume 1 MeV as a typical radiation particle energy in the argument below.  On the contrary, stable nuclei remain intact forever as such without emitting radiation.

Because the majority of atoms on the earth are stable, they do not emit radiation.  It needs to be pointed out, though, that a few radioactive nuclides do exist on the present earth.  They include uranium (U)-238, thorium (Th)-232 and potassium (K)-40.  The direct effects of these radioactive nuclei on the living organisms are relatively minor, except for K-40.  Hence the all the living organisms are hardly subject to the negative effects of naturally occurring radionuclides; an exception is K-40.

Reason (ii) mentioned above is how radiation from the outside of the earth, i.e., cosmic ray, approaches the earth.  Cosmic ray consists of electrically charged particles such as proton, α particle and electron (β), and of electrically neutral ones including γ-ray and neutrons.  The magnetic field encircling the earth changes the course of the electrically charged particles.  As a result, most of them would be reflected away off the earth, and would not significantly reach the surface of the earth.  Neutrons and γ-ray will lose its energy as they enter the earth’s atmosphere.  However, neutron causes the formation of e.g., the radioactive carbon C-14 from the atmospheric nitrogen.  Ultraviolet light is also harmful to living organisms, but it is being shielded off significantly by the ozone layer in the current atmosphere.  These special conditions surrounding the earth contribute to significant reduction of in-coming radiation, and helps living organisms to survive.  We are thus very fortunate, but unfortunately have brought instruments to produce a lot of radioactive material in the form of nuclear weapons and nuclear power reactors.

The effects of radiation on living organisms are based on their interactions with the molecules (compounds in general) in life.  The physical effect of radiation is of various nature, but are summarized as “ionization”, i.e., ejection of electron from a chemical compound.  In order to understand the likely magnitude of the radiation effects, we need to look at the material, i.e., chemical compounds; how they are constructed and the energy values involved in their changes, i.e., chemical reactions.

The materials on the earth are all made of chemical compounds/molecules; they consist of atoms connected by chemical bonds, which are made through the electromagnetic force.  For example, water molecule is made of two hydrogen (H) atoms and one oxygen (O) atom in the manner of H-O-H, where the line connecting H and O is a chemical bond, formed by placing two electrons between two atoms.  The negative two electrons attract two positively charged nuclei, i.e., (+ of the nucleus of H) (– two electrons)(+of the nucleus of O).  All chemical compounds are composed of atoms connected through chemical bonds.  Some of typical energy values for chemical reactions are as follow: 13.6 eV for removing an electron from a hydrogen atom; 4.3 eV for breaking H-C bond in CH₄(methane), 3.6 eV for breaking C-C bond in H₃C-CH₃ (ethane), 30.6 eV to remove an electron from Fe(2+).  The chemical reaction energy ranges from 1 eV to 100 eV.

Now we will try to figure out what effects a radiation particle will have on chemical materials.  We assume that a typical chemical energy to eject an electron from a molecule is about 30 eV and the ejected electron may travel with 20 eV.  That is, a single impact of a radiation particle on a single chemical compound would use energy of 50 eV to eject an electron.  If this is so, a single radiation particle of 1 MeV will eject electrons from approximately 20 thousand molecules.  This number varies with many variables (density of chemicals in the material, kind of compounds, etc), and likely ranges something like from 100 to 10,000 molecules affected.  Many of the molecules with lost electrons may break in chemical bonds and be destroyed.  Some of them turn into free radicals.  Some ejected electrons could have high enough kinetic energy and act as β-particles.  Anyway, a single radiation particle of typical energy will destroy something like 100 to 10,000 molecules.  In the subsequent argument, we will assume 2,000 as a typical number of molecules destroyed.

The effects mentioned in the segment above are of direct nature; i.e., “direct” effect of radiation.  The “indirect” effect is due to the chemical reactions caused by some entities formed by the direct effect.  The most important one is the effect of hydroxyl free radical (^.OH), which forms as the breakage of H-O bond in water molecule.  This free radical is extremely reactive, and removes a hydrogen atom from a molecule it encounters.  The results would be another free radical formation, and likely deformation on the affected molecule.  Hydroxyl free radical is one of the so-called “reactive oxygen” species (ROS), which include superoxide free radical, hydrogen peroxide, alkyl hydroperoxides, and oxygen molecule in a singlet state (¹O₂).  The ROS’s are all more reactive than the oxygen molecule present in the atmosphere, which is in a triplet state (³O₂).  ROS’s can form under ordinary physiological conditions, except for hydroxyl free radical, which is formed only by high-energy radiation.

2. Why is 10 Sv (Gy) lethal?

Radiation exposure dose is measured in terms of absorbed energy, Gy=J/kg.  Effects on living organisms are dependent on the nature of radiation.  α-Particle, being heavy (with two protons and two neutrons) and electrically charged, has stronger effects compared with β (an electron) or γ-particle.  γ is an electromagnetic wave, but behaves as a particle (photon) when it interacts with atoms and molecule.  Thus, equivalent exposure dose Sv (Sievert) is defined as Gy times weighing factor, which is 20 for α and 1 for β and γ.  We will see now what Gy or Sv imparts.  In the case of β and γ, Sv value is the same as Gy value.

From the careful studies on the atomic bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it has been determined that exposure of 10 Sv (or Gy) or higher causes an instant death of a human.  However, this energy raises the body temperature merely by 0.0024 degree, if given as heat energy.  Obviously this temperature change would not even be felt by the person, let alone killing him.  Yet it does kill a person instantly.  How come?  This question does lead to the basic reason why radiation is incompatible with life.

10 J was given by a radiation exposure to, say, the explosion of an atomic bomb.  In this case, radiation comes from outside of the body; this is termed as “EXTERNAL” exposure.  Suppose this radiation consists of the typical 1 MeV particles.  Since 10 J=6.26 x 10¹⁹ eV, this much of energy will be supplied by 6.26 x 10¹³ particles of 1 MeV.  1 kg of human body typically consists of 10¹² cells.  Therefore, each cell will receive 60 radiation particles on average, if they distribute evenly throughout the body.  Hence, 60 x 2,000=120,000 molecules in each cell will be destroyed.  Likely many cells would die, or cannot be reproduced, and hence the body will die soon.  It is more likely that they do not distribute evenly, and hence that the more highly exposed portions would have many more molecules destroyed.

This is a simple idea.  Is there any proof for it?   Two observations will be mentioned.

First, Dr. Shuntaro Hida witnessed the horror of the effects of the atomic bomb as a physician immediately after Hiroshima bomb:

“…A fever so high that even doctors of internal medicine had rarely seen it. … as we examined our patients and wondered why they were running such fever, they began to bleed from their eyes, nose and mouth.  Even we doctors had never seen such bleeding from the eyes….we attempted to examine the inside of their mouths, but could not.  It was not simply bad breath, it was the smell of decay.  A smell so bad, we could not put our faces near their mouths….even though these people were still alive, the insides of their mouths were decaying.  Such persons soon died.”

[1].  These observations imply that many organs inside the body were destroyed by the strong radiation.

A few workers were accidentally exposed to a strong radiation due to an accidental critical condition in JCO, a company dealing with the nuclear fuels, on 1999.09.30.  The person exposed to the highest dose of 17 Sv (mostly neutrons) was hospitalized immediately but died 83 days later despite utmost care given, including replacement of the bone marrow.  A doctor who took care of him said: “…the double strands of DNA were all broken….he died of multi-organ failure….” [2].  This implies that many biomolecules including DNA were broken and many organs were damaged by the radiation.

Dr. S. Hida gives another insight regarding radiation exposure [1].  He reported:

“A patient claimed: ‘I am not sick from the “pika“ (the A-bomb explosion)’ ‘What makes you say that?’ ‘Well, I did not come to Hiroshima until two days after the bombing.  You see one of my children did not return home…It wasn’t until after walking around the ruins for two days, I began to feel ill’…Soon after, he began to display a number of odd symptoms and passed away.”  It was very likely due to inhaling the floating radioactive debris (minute particles=fallout), which irradiated the body from inside.  This is termed “INTERNAL” exposure.  This aspect of exposure is more serious than the external exposure at the lower dose level, but has been ignored officially.

3. Defense mechanisms against radiation?

Another question would be: Can living organisms have defense mechanisms against the destructive effects of radiation?  It is impossible.  Chemical means can provide energy of utmost 100 eV (usually much lower) available to defend the radiation effects, which has million times as large energy.  This is the basis for the tenet that radiation is incompatible with life on the earth.

It needs to be mentioned that some damages done by radiation can somewhat be repaired by some mechanisms present in living organisms.  Particularly it is true with DNA, the basis of life.  There are several mechanisms to repair the damages on DNA.  They have been evolved for repairing damages done by non-radiation effects, as DNA is constantly subject to disturbing effects, chemical and biological.  The mechanisms evolved so far can repair some damages done by radiation if they are of the same nature as non-radiological ones.  Radiological damages are quite random, and some of them are beyond the existing repairing capacities.  No direct repairing mechanism is known for other biomolecules.

However, some existing chemicals and general physiology such as immunity, can reduce or alleviate the damaging effects by radiation or the damaged situation.  The free radicals formed by radiation, particularly on water molecule and oxygen molecule, can be deactivated by some chemical agents, such as glutathione, flavonoids and ascorbic acid.  For example, glutathione (abbreviated as G-S-H) can react with hydroxyl radical ^.OH radical:  2G-S-H + 2^.OH  G-S-S-G + 2H₂O.  Therefore, these molecules can somewhat reduce the indirect radiation effects.  Most of SOR’s except hydroxyl radical occur under normal conditions without radiation, and hence some living organisms including human have evolved mechanisms to reduce their effects.  Enzymes are known for hydrogen peroxide (catalase), superoxide (superoxide dismutase), and so on.

Anyway, no defense has evolved against the radiation effects, and not sufficient mechanisms have been devised for repairing the damages caused by radiation.  Radiation affects any chemical compounds, but its effects are most prominent on living organisms, particularly animals, as they are based on fairly fragile systems.

4.  Is there safe dose?

Could a sufficiently low exposure be safe?  Or is there any threshold of exposure level below which no ill health effect is expected?  The data obtained so far rejected the presence of threshold, and have demonstrated a linear relationship without threshold (termed “LNT” relationship) in the relationship between health risk and the exposure dose at low levels.

X-ray is equivalent to γ-ray, though weaker, and is used for diagnostic purposes and others in medicine.  The exposure is entirely external, and the dose can be determined accurately.  Several studies have demonstrated the LNT relationship regarding the cancer risk and the X-ray exposure dose [3,4].  These data deal with low level of exposure below 100 mSv.  Even the data on the atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki indicated LNT relationship for all kinds of cancer and many non-cancerous diseases [5].  51.3% of all the children in Ukraine who got thyroid cancers due to the Chernobyl accident received less than 100 mSv, and 16% even less than 10 mSv [6].  However, the Japanese government still insists that there is no danger for cancer at exposure dose lower than 100 mSv.

Another issue is the effect of internal exposure as against external dose.  The official data regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki [5] are based on the external exposure dose due to the bomb explosion.  They did not take account of possible “internal” exposure.  The exposure dose caused by external irradiation is defined per the body mass (Kg), as irradiation is supposed to spread throughout the body; i.e., Gy (or Sv)= energy absorbed by 1 kg of the body.  When a radioactive material enters a body and irradiates the immediate vicinity of the local the radionuclides settled in, it irradiates, let’s suppose, only the area that weighs 2 g, because α or β particles do not travel long distances.  Nominally D (Gy) value =D joule/kg.  In reality it irradiates the area of 2 g, and hence the actual dose should be D joule/2g = D joule/0.002 kg=500D joule/kg.  The actual dose values would depend on many factors, and not always 500 times of the nominal value.  Anyway, the internal dose would be much higher than the nominal dose value implies.

Often, an official argument is based on the nominal external dose rate, even if the actual radiation is “internal”, and therefore, it devalues the magnitude of effects.  This is particularly true in the case of accidents of the nuclear facilities, where the external exposure dose is typically relatively low, and the serious effect is mostly due to the internal exposure.  In this case, internal exposure dose cannot be estimated from the external dose value such as spatial dose, as radioactive material may enter through various routes, and such a chance to enter a body has little to do with the spatial dose.  The chance of inhalation of minute particles floating may be somewhat related to the spatial dose rate, though.

5.  Humankind has not found safe ways to dispose and store the radioactive material

The incompatibility of radiation with life implies that the radioactive material have to be disposed and stored safely, in the way they would not affect all the living organisms on the earth.  We have not yet found very effective ways to do so.  The radioactivity lasts long.  Pu-239, for example, last 480,000 years, which is twenty times of the half-life (24,000 years), by that time the radioactivity will diminish to about a million times smaller than the original.  Even the most widely distributed cesium (Cs-137) takes about 600 years (20 times of half-life 30 years) to become almost nil.  Meanwhile they keep emitting radiation, heating and damaging their surroundings.

The Chernobyl’s damaged nuclear reactor has been covered by a large sarcophagus to reduce the escape of radiation the last thirty years.  It has deteriorated significantly because of radiation from the debris and weather, so that another huge cover has recently been constructed and placed on top of the sarcophagus.  It is said that this cover may last a hundred years, and then it will have to be replaced or covered further.  This illustrates how difficult it is to store radioactive material.  This is a single example.  There are hundreds of sites where radioactive waste is now stored and some difficulties are experienced.  It is imperative for us to find safe ways to store the radioactive waste.  There may not be an absolutely safe solution on the earth.  Yet, the humankind is earnestly increasing the radioactive wastes in huge quantities.  This is insane.

III. Nuclear Power Plants need not and should not be on Earth

1.  Nuclear power reactors are NOT CLEAN

Approximately 450 nuclear power reactors are presently on this earth.  In the nuclear power production of electricity, only one third of the heat produced in a reactor is converted into electricity, and the remainder two third of heat is released into the surrounding.  A typical 1giga watt reactor will release 4.7 x 10¹⁶ joule of heat into the environment per year.  This much heat will bring 100 million tons of water at zero degree to boiling.  This is with a single nuclear reactor.  The nuclear power reactors are excellent environmental heaters.  Hundreds of such reactors are operating on this earth.  But this fact is ignored in the argument of the nuclear power being environmentally clean.  This is not the only reason for the nuclear reactors being unclean.

In addition, this typical reactor of 1 giga (thousand mega) watt of capacity (electricity) produces in a year radioactive material equivalent to about 1000 Hiroshima atomic bombs.  In 2015, the total amount of electricity produced by nuclear reactors was 2,441 BkWh (billion kilo watt hours: data [7]), which is 8.79 x 10¹⁸ joule.  It was produced by about 280 nuclear reactors of 1 giga watt capacity.  So they produced radioactive material approximately equivalent to 280,000 Hiroshima bombs.  In addition, they released 1.3 x 10¹⁹ joule of heat into the environment.  These are the values for just one year.  Nuclear power reactors have been operating the last forty years, though not always this many.

Anyway, an enormous amount of radioactive material has been made on the earth.  How much of it has been released into the environment is not easy to estimate.  They have come out into the environment through the tests of the nuclear weapons, use of depleted uranium bombs, the routine release of some radioactive material from the nuclear facilities under normal conditions and others, in addition to the accidents at nuclear facilities.  The effects of the released radioactive material have been amply observed and reported, and yet are not shared with the majority of humankind.  We mention here only a few cases, and refer them to a few major sources.  The nuclear weapon explosion tests in the atmosphere affected the people in the eastern side, Utah, of the test site in Nevada (1951-1960, ref [8]).  Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in the present Ukraine (1986) was one of the worst nuclear facility accidents, and people are still suffering  [9]. Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster (2011) cause by the huge earthquake along with tsunami is far from settled, and health effects are only now becoming manifest [10]. These incidents represent the notion that the nuclear power is “not clean” at all, rather it is the dirtiest.

The world on the whole depends on the nuclear power by about 11% for the electricity production in 2015 [7].  A number of countries still rely significantly on the nuclear power.  Some numbers are: 76% in France, 56% in Ukraine, 56% in Slovakia, 53% in Hungary, 38% in Slovenia, 38% in Belgium, 35% in Armenia, 35% in Sweden, 34% in Finland, 34% in Switzerland, 33% in Czech, 32% in S. Korea, and 31% in Bulgaria [7].  Fortunately no serious accidents of nuclear facilities has been experienced so far in these countries except for Ukraine (Chernobyl accident), though minor accidents are known to have taken place in many of these countries as well as others not listed here.  Nuclear facilities are prone to accidents anyway.

The level of dependency on the nuclear power seems to be reflected in the cancer incident rate in those nations.  The cancer rates of some countries listed above are plotted against the nuclear power dependency; it is shown in the figure below [11].  Except for France, there seems to be a correlation between them.  This does not necessarily imply that radiation from the nuclear facilities alone is somehow related to the cancer.  The more direct data relating the nuclear facilities and the cancer rate are illustrated by a study termed KiKK [12].  It investigated all German nuclear reactors and found that children living within 5 km from a nuclear reactor had higher risk of cancer (particularly, leukemia), more than twice compared to those living farther away.  A similar study has been conducted [13] with regard to leukemia among children living near nuclear facilities in other countries: UK, Canada, Japan and USA, and found the trend similar to that of KiKK.

2.  The nuclear power productions are NOT ECONOMICAL

Cleaning and disposing the damaged nuclear facilities require an enormous amount of money, as well as human sacrifice (workers exposed to the radiation).  Compensating the victims who lost lives and healthy ways of life and suffer from other difficulties also need a lot of money.  Decommissioning an old nuclear reactor, even if not damaged, takes decades, and yet the radioactive waste cannot be disposed safely as yet, because humankind has not found a good way to do that.  But, obviously, we have to find it out before too long.  All these processes require money as well as energy.  All told, the amount of money for disposing the nuclear facilities and bringing the sites to clean lots, and providing adequate compensation for the victims would be astronomical.  It could be beyond the ability of corporations, and hence consume a lot of money earned by the citizens.  Such a situation could destroy the financial basis of a nation.

3.  Nuclear power is NOT NECESSARY

Upon the Fukushima disaster due to the great earthquake and tsunami in 2011, all nuclear power plants in Japan were shut down.  After a while, the Japanese government restarted a single nuclear plant in 2012-13.  After this reactor was shut down in order to inspect the facility, no nuclear power plant operated for almost two years until the end of August of 2015 (2013-2015).  While all these things were happening, no electricity shortage was experienced in Japan, even though Japan had relied about 30% of electricity on the nuclear power before the Fukushima disaster.  This fact definitely implies that Japan does not need nuclear power.  Unfortunately, the current government is eager to restart the nuclear power plants, and indeed has done so with three nuclear power reactors as of Jan. 1st, 2017, despite of the strong opposition from the Japanese people.

As mentioned earlier, a number of countries in Europe still depend heavily on the nuclear energy.  Some of them have decided in the face of the Fukushima accident to abolish the nuclear power; Germany, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland.  Recently Taiwan government announced that they would abolish their nuclear power plants by 2025.  Other countries listed earlier have not made a move toward abolishment, but, hopefully, they will soon realize the danger of the nuclear facilities, and start decommissioning them.

We are fortunate to have inexhaustible energy sources available on this earth.  The total amount of energy humankind used in 2005 is estimated to be 4.9 x 10²⁰ joule.  The energy influx from the Sun on the entire surface of the earth is estimated to be 8.9 x 10¹⁶ joule/sec, and hence it will be 2.8 x 10²⁴ joule per year.  The solar energy alone could amply provide all the energy humankind needs.  Wind power (driven ultimately by solar energy) available on the entire earth is estimated to be 2.3 x 10²¹ joule per year, and so, theoretically wind power alone may be sufficient.  Humankind needs to technically overcome the practical problems associated with these freely available energy sources, and should resort to these energies as far as feasible, and as soon as possible.  Other inexhaustible energy sources including “geothermal” and “tidal” are also to be employed as much as feasible.  In other words, we could be energy-sufficient, without resorting to non-renewable carbon fossil fuels or nuclear power.

IV   Conclusion

No nuclear power plant should be allowed on the earth, because:

1. the radioactive material produced by the nuclear power reactors emit radiation which destroy living organisms;
2. there is no definitive safe way to store long-lasting nuclear wastes, so that no more radioactive material should be produced;
3. nuclear power reactors are contributing significantly to warming of the environment;
4. nuclear power plants are not economical, but rather could bring disasters to the operating companies and even the nation’s finances.

 References

[1] See for example: http://wcpeace.org/Hida_memoir.htm

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiYZSKtZb7k; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnRRWwbYPSI

[3] Eisenberg MJ, Afilalo J, Lawler PR, Abrahamowicz M, Richard H, Pilote L., “Cancer risk related to low-dose ionizing radiation from cardiac imaging in patients after acute myocardial infarction”, Can. Med. Assoc. J., 183 (2011), 430-436 

[4] Mathews, J. D., Forsythe, A. V., Brady, Z., Butler, M. W., Goergen, S. K., Bymes, G. B., Giles, G. G., Wallace, A. B., Anderson, P. R, Guiver, T. A., McGale, P., Cain, T. M., Dowoty, J. G., Bickerstaffe, A. C., Darby, S. C.,  “Cancer Risk in 680000 people exposed to computed tomography scans in childhood or adolescence: data linkage study of 11 million Australians”, Brit. Med. J., 2013.05.22

[5] Ozasa, K., Shimizu, Y., Suyama, A., Kasagi, F., Soda, M., Grant, E. J., Sakata, R., Sugiyama, H., Kodama, K., “Studies of the mortality of atomic bomb survivors, Report 14, 1950-2003: An overview of cancer and noncancer Diseases” (LSS-14), Rad. Res., 177 (2012), 229-243

[6] Tronko, M., Bogdanova, T., Komissarenko, I. V., Epstein, O. V., Kovalenko, A., Lichtarev, I. A., Kairo, I., Peters, S. B., LiVolsi, V. A., “Thyroid carcinoma in children and adolescents in Ukraine after the Chernobyl nuclear accident”, Cancer, 86 (1999) 149-156

[7] http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/World-Statistics  

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders

[9] Yablokov, A. V., Nesterenko, V. B., Nesterenko, A. V., “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment”, Ann. New York Acad., 1181 (2009)

[10] http://apjjf.org/-Eiichiro-Ochiai/4382; http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-human-consequences-of-the-fukushima-dai-ichi-nuclear-power-plant-accidents/5478670

[11] The data of nuclear dependence are from ref [7], and the cancer death rates (2014) are from http://www.globalnote.jp/post-10211.html

[12] Nussbaum, R. H., “Childhood leukemia and cancers near German nuclear reactors: Significance, context and ramifications of recent studies”, Int. Occup/ Environ. Health, 15 (2009), 318-323

[13] Baker, P. J., Hoel, D. G., “Meta-analysis of standardized incidence and mortality rates of childhood leukemia in proximity to nuclear facilities”, Eur. J. Cancer Care, 16 (2007), 355-363 

Eiichiro Ochiai: retired chemistry professor; has become seriously concerned with the radiation effects since the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in 2011 and has published four books on the theme of “Radiation is Incompatible with Life”, including “Hiroshima to Fukushima: Biohazards of Radiation” (Springer Verlag (Heidelberg), 2013).

“Why is radiation incompatible with life?  If this tenet is correct, nuclear power (both weapon and electricity-producing) should not be allowed to exist on this earth, as they produce radionuclides as their by-products. 

We will look into this issue from a scientific standpoint.”

I.  Introduction

Science has advanced since the beginning of 20^th century, and led to the current atomic age.  The discovery of nuclear fission reaction in 1938 led immediately to its use for a military purpose.  The atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, flattened the two cities and killed several hundred thousands people instantaneously.  Most of the cause of death was of non-radiation; extreme heat and the destructing shockwaves.  However, many died also from the strong radiation effects, without incurring barn or physical injury.  The nuclear fission reaction has since been applied to the “so-called” peaceful use, i.e., nuclear power to produce electricity.  Both usages produce inevitably huge amounts of radioactive material as the byproducts.  The radiation from these sources predominate now the radiation background of the earth.  The radioactive materials have so far released to the surface of the earth through the atomic bomb explosions, tests of nuclear weapons, accidents of nuclear facilities including those of Chernobyl in Ukraine, Three mile island in Pennsylvania in USA, Fukushima in Japan, and some nuclear submarines, and, also from the routine release from the nuclear facilities.

The Chernobyl accident in 1986 affected and killed many people, but the damaged reactor No.4 has not been fixed and has been in a sarcophagus to prevent further release of radioactive material.  The sarcophagus, however, has been deteriorated after thirty years, and now is covered with another huge dome.  The people affected are still suffering from many health problems thirty years later.

The Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in Japan six years ago has not been fixed.  It is becoming increasingly evident that it is difficult to fix it, as three reactors’ nuclear fuel rods were melted; there is no precedence for such a disaster in human history.  The health effects of radioactive material released are becoming significant day by day.  Un-fortunately, its reality has been covered up by the Japanese government.  What’s more, the government is eagerly trying to restart the nuclear power plants as many as possible, having done so three nuclear power reactors so far, despite the fact that no electricity shortage has been experienced when no single nuclear power plant was in operation for two years (2013-2015).  This implies that Japan does not need the nuclear energy.  Unfortunately even the largest opposition party (Minshin) seems to be in favor of restarting them.

The politicians’ concern is simply “economics”, which is seen only from the standpoint of the operating corporations.  In terms of the overall economic effects, the nuclear power plants are known to be ineffective or rather disastrous. The people who are in favor of nuclear power, i.e., the present government of Japan (and others), the majority of politicians, the corporations of operating and manufacturing nuclear power plants, the bureaucrats, and many “so-called” experts depending on the nuclear industry, are concerned only with their own livelihood.  They are unaware of or ignoring the fact that radiation coming from the unavoidable byproducts of the nuclear power operation is indeed incompatible with living organisms.

This fact, i.e., INCOMPATIBILITY OF RADIATION WITH LIFE, seems to be recognized by the nuclear industry.  Hence, the nuclear industry and its associates (termed often “nuclear mafia”) are desperately trying to cover up the evil health effects of radiation.  They have tried, and have so far been able to cover them up relatively successfully.  This has been possible, only because the evil effects are basically subtle, not felt by the person affected, and have so far been confined to relatively small areas and few people (compared with the vast area of the entire earth and the majority of the human race).

In the following short article we would like to show why radiation is incompatible with life, and hence that the “nuclear” power reactors as well as weapons which produce radioactive material should not be on the earth.

II.  Why is radiation incompatible with life?

1. The interaction of radiation particles with biomolecules

Then, the basic question is: Why is radiation incompatible with life?  If this tenet is correct, the nuclear power (both weapon and electricity-producing) should not be allowed to exist on this earth, as they produce radionuclides as the by-products.  We will look into this issue from scientific standpoint.

Let’s recognize that the earth is a rare body in the universe.  A few earth-like bodies have been found, but whether life exists on those bodies is unknown.  The vast majority of the bodies in the universe have no life on them anyway.  Why is the earth so blessed with life?  The basic reason (i) is that the majority of material (likely more than 99.99999%) is made of stable atoms.  Two other reasons are: (ii) cosmic ray, harmful to life, are relatively little to reach the earth’s surface, and (iii) the prevailing temperature on the surface of this planet allows the presence of liquid water.  This last issue has something to do with the currently debated “climate change”, and would not be discussed here.

First, an atom is made of a nucleus and surrounding electrons.  A nucleus consists of electrically neutral neutrons and positively charged protons.  They are confined in a very, very small area (nucleus) by “strong” (“nuclear”) force.  On the other hands, electrons are attracted by “electromagnetic” force to the nucleus, as electrons are negatively charged.  All material including those constituting human bodies on this earth are made of stable atoms.  It needs to be added in haste that a few unstable atoms do exist on the earth and the extent of their effects on life is quite limited, though real, but cannot be made visible unless carefully studied.

When we say “stable or unstable atom”, we mean “nucleus” rather than the whole atom consisting of a nucleus and surrounding electrons.  The energy state of nucleus is governed by the “strong” force (“nuclear” force).  “Unstable” implies “having extra energy”, that needs to be shed.  So an unstable nucleus (of an atom) undergoes a spontaneous change to a more stable state.  The process is termed as “nuclear decay”, in which the extra energy is released as “radiation”.  Hence such an stable nucleus is called “radioactive nucleus=radionuclide”.  There are a few radiation types: alpha (α), beta (β), gamma (γ) and neutron, and others.  The energies carried by these radiations are very large, as the processes of change are governed by the “strong” force.  Some examples of radiation energy are as follows: 20 KeV for β from T(tritium), 1.2 MeV for β and γ combined of Cs(cesium)-137, 546 KeV for β from Sr(strontium)-90, 5.245 MeV for α from Pu(plutonium)-239.  We will assume 1 MeV as a typical radiation particle energy in the argument below.  On the contrary, stable nuclei remain intact forever as such without emitting radiation.

Because the majority of atoms on the earth are stable, they do not emit radiation.  It needs to be pointed out, though, that a few radioactive nuclides do exist on the present earth.  They include uranium (U)-238, thorium (Th)-232 and potassium (K)-40.  The direct effects of these radioactive nuclei on the living organisms are relatively minor, except for K-40.  Hence the all the living organisms are hardly subject to the negative effects of naturally occurring radionuclides; an exception is K-40.

Reason (ii) mentioned above is how radiation from the outside of the earth, i.e., cosmic ray, approaches the earth.  Cosmic ray consists of electrically charged particles such as proton, α particle and electron (β), and of electrically neutral ones including γ-ray and neutrons.  The magnetic field encircling the earth changes the course of the electrically charged particles.  As a result, most of them would be reflected away off the earth, and would not significantly reach the surface of the earth.  Neutrons and γ-ray will lose its energy as they enter the earth’s atmosphere.  However, neutron causes the formation of e.g., the radioactive carbon C-14 from the atmospheric nitrogen.  Ultraviolet light is also harmful to living organisms, but it is being shielded off significantly by the ozone layer in the current atmosphere.  These special conditions surrounding the earth contribute to significant reduction of in-coming radiation, and helps living organisms to survive.  We are thus very fortunate, but unfortunately have brought instruments to produce a lot of radioactive material in the form of nuclear weapons and nuclear power reactors.

The effects of radiation on living organisms are based on their interactions with the molecules (compounds in general) in life.  The physical effect of radiation is of various nature, but are summarized as “ionization”, i.e., ejection of electron from a chemical compound.  In order to understand the likely magnitude of the radiation effects, we need to look at the material, i.e., chemical compounds; how they are constructed and the energy values involved in their changes, i.e., chemical reactions.

The materials on the earth are all made of chemical compounds/molecules; they consist of atoms connected by chemical bonds, which are made through the electromagnetic force.  For example, water molecule is made of two hydrogen (H) atoms and one oxygen (O) atom in the manner of H-O-H, where the line connecting H and O is a chemical bond, formed by placing two electrons between two atoms.  The negative two electrons attract two positively charged nuclei, i.e., (+ of the nucleus of H) (– two electrons)(+of the nucleus of O).  All chemical compounds are composed of atoms connected through chemical bonds.  Some of typical energy values for chemical reactions are as follow: 13.6 eV for removing an electron from a hydrogen atom; 4.3 eV for breaking H-C bond in CH₄(methane), 3.6 eV for breaking C-C bond in H₃C-CH₃ (ethane), 30.6 eV to remove an electron from Fe(2+).  The chemical reaction energy ranges from 1 eV to 100 eV.

Now we will try to figure out what effects a radiation particle will have on chemical materials.  We assume that a typical chemical energy to eject an electron from a molecule is about 30 eV and the ejected electron may travel with 20 eV.  That is, a single impact of a radiation particle on a single chemical compound would use energy of 50 eV to eject an electron.  If this is so, a single radiation particle of 1 MeV will eject electrons from approximately 20 thousand molecules.  This number varies with many variables (density of chemicals in the material, kind of compounds, etc), and likely ranges something like from 100 to 10,000 molecules affected.  Many of the molecules with lost electrons may break in chemical bonds and be destroyed.  Some of them turn into free radicals.  Some ejected electrons could have high enough kinetic energy and act as β-particles.  Anyway, a single radiation particle of typical energy will destroy something like 100 to 10,000 molecules.  In the subsequent argument, we will assume 2,000 as a typical number of molecules destroyed.

The effects mentioned in the segment above are of direct nature; i.e., “direct” effect of radiation.  The “indirect” effect is due to the chemical reactions caused by some entities formed by the direct effect.  The most important one is the effect of hydroxyl free radical (^.OH), which forms as the breakage of H-O bond in water molecule.  This free radical is extremely reactive, and removes a hydrogen atom from a molecule it encounters.  The results would be another free radical formation, and likely deformation on the affected molecule.  Hydroxyl free radical is one of the so-called “reactive oxygen” species (ROS), which include superoxide free radical, hydrogen peroxide, alkyl hydroperoxides, and oxygen molecule in a singlet state (¹O₂).  The ROS’s are all more reactive than the oxygen molecule present in the atmosphere, which is in a triplet state (³O₂).  ROS’s can form under ordinary physiological conditions, except for hydroxyl free radical, which is formed only by high-energy radiation.

2. Why is 10 Sv (Gy) lethal?

Radiation exposure dose is measured in terms of absorbed energy, Gy=J/kg.  Effects on living organisms are dependent on the nature of radiation.  α-Particle, being heavy (with two protons and two neutrons) and electrically charged, has stronger effects compared with β (an electron) or γ-particle.  γ is an electromagnetic wave, but behaves as a particle (photon) when it interacts with atoms and molecule.  Thus, equivalent exposure dose Sv (Sievert) is defined as Gy times weighing factor, which is 20 for α and 1 for β and γ.  We will see now what Gy or Sv imparts.  In the case of β and γ, Sv value is the same as Gy value.

From the careful studies on the atomic bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it has been determined that exposure of 10 Sv (or Gy) or higher causes an instant death of a human.  However, this energy raises the body temperature merely by 0.0024 degree, if given as heat energy.  Obviously this temperature change would not even be felt by the person, let alone killing him.  Yet it does kill a person instantly.  How come?  This question does lead to the basic reason why radiation is incompatible with life.

10 J was given by a radiation exposure to, say, the explosion of an atomic bomb.  In this case, radiation comes from outside of the body; this is termed as “EXTERNAL” exposure.  Suppose this radiation consists of the typical 1 MeV particles.  Since 10 J=6.26 x 10¹⁹ eV, this much of energy will be supplied by 6.26 x 10¹³ particles of 1 MeV.  1 kg of human body typically consists of 10¹² cells.  Therefore, each cell will receive 60 radiation particles on average, if they distribute evenly throughout the body.  Hence, 60 x 2,000=120,000 molecules in each cell will be destroyed.  Likely many cells would die, or cannot be reproduced, and hence the body will die soon.  It is more likely that they do not distribute evenly, and hence that the more highly exposed portions would have many more molecules destroyed.

This is a simple idea.  Is there any proof for it?   Two observations will be mentioned.

First, Dr. Shuntaro Hida witnessed the horror of the effects of the atomic bomb as a physician immediately after Hiroshima bomb:

“…A fever so high that even doctors of internal medicine had rarely seen it. … as we examined our patients and wondered why they were running such fever, they began to bleed from their eyes, nose and mouth.  Even we doctors had never seen such bleeding from the eyes….we attempted to examine the inside of their mouths, but could not.  It was not simply bad breath, it was the smell of decay.  A smell so bad, we could not put our faces near their mouths….even though these people were still alive, the insides of their mouths were decaying.  Such persons soon died.”

[1].  These observations imply that many organs inside the body were destroyed by the strong radiation.

A few workers were accidentally exposed to a strong radiation due to an accidental critical condition in JCO, a company dealing with the nuclear fuels, on 1999.09.30.  The person exposed to the highest dose of 17 Sv (mostly neutrons) was hospitalized immediately but died 83 days later despite utmost care given, including replacement of the bone marrow.  A doctor who took care of him said: “…the double strands of DNA were all broken….he died of multi-organ failure….” [2].  This implies that many biomolecules including DNA were broken and many organs were damaged by the radiation.

Dr. S. Hida gives another insight regarding radiation exposure [1].  He reported:

“A patient claimed: ‘I am not sick from the “pika“ (the A-bomb explosion)’ ‘What makes you say that?’ ‘Well, I did not come to Hiroshima until two days after the bombing.  You see one of my children did not return home…It wasn’t until after walking around the ruins for two days, I began to feel ill’…Soon after, he began to display a number of odd symptoms and passed away.”  It was very likely due to inhaling the floating radioactive debris (minute particles=fallout), which irradiated the body from inside.  This is termed “INTERNAL” exposure.  This aspect of exposure is more serious than the external exposure at the lower dose level, but has been ignored officially.

3. Defense mechanisms against radiation?

Another question would be: Can living organisms have defense mechanisms against the destructive effects of radiation?  It is impossible.  Chemical means can provide energy of utmost 100 eV (usually much lower) available to defend the radiation effects, which has million times as large energy.  This is the basis for the tenet that radiation is incompatible with life on the earth.

It needs to be mentioned that some damages done by radiation can somewhat be repaired by some mechanisms present in living organisms.  Particularly it is true with DNA, the basis of life.  There are several mechanisms to repair the damages on DNA.  They have been evolved for repairing damages done by non-radiation effects, as DNA is constantly subject to disturbing effects, chemical and biological.  The mechanisms evolved so far can repair some damages done by radiation if they are of the same nature as non-radiological ones.  Radiological damages are quite random, and some of them are beyond the existing repairing capacities.  No direct repairing mechanism is known for other biomolecules.

However, some existing chemicals and general physiology such as immunity, can reduce or alleviate the damaging effects by radiation or the damaged situation.  The free radicals formed by radiation, particularly on water molecule and oxygen molecule, can be deactivated by some chemical agents, such as glutathione, flavonoids and ascorbic acid.  For example, glutathione (abbreviated as G-S-H) can react with hydroxyl radical ^.OH radical:  2G-S-H + 2^.OH  G-S-S-G + 2H₂O.  Therefore, these molecules can somewhat reduce the indirect radiation effects.  Most of SOR’s except hydroxyl radical occur under normal conditions without radiation, and hence some living organisms including human have evolved mechanisms to reduce their effects.  Enzymes are known for hydrogen peroxide (catalase), superoxide (superoxide dismutase), and so on.

Anyway, no defense has evolved against the radiation effects, and not sufficient mechanisms have been devised for repairing the damages caused by radiation.  Radiation affects any chemical compounds, but its effects are most prominent on living organisms, particularly animals, as they are based on fairly fragile systems.

4.  Is there safe dose?

Could a sufficiently low exposure be safe?  Or is there any threshold of exposure level below which no ill health effect is expected?  The data obtained so far rejected the presence of threshold, and have demonstrated a linear relationship without threshold (termed “LNT” relationship) in the relationship between health risk and the exposure dose at low levels.

X-ray is equivalent to γ-ray, though weaker, and is used for diagnostic purposes and others in medicine.  The exposure is entirely external, and the dose can be determined accurately.  Several studies have demonstrated the LNT relationship regarding the cancer risk and the X-ray exposure dose [3,4].  These data deal with low level of exposure below 100 mSv.  Even the data on the atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki indicated LNT relationship for all kinds of cancer and many non-cancerous diseases [5].  51.3% of all the children in Ukraine who got thyroid cancers due to the Chernobyl accident received less than 100 mSv, and 16% even less than 10 mSv [6].  However, the Japanese government still insists that there is no danger for cancer at exposure dose lower than 100 mSv.

Another issue is the effect of internal exposure as against external dose.  The official data regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki [5] are based on the external exposure dose due to the bomb explosion.  They did not take account of possible “internal” exposure.  The exposure dose caused by external irradiation is defined per the body mass (Kg), as irradiation is supposed to spread throughout the body; i.e., Gy (or Sv)= energy absorbed by 1 kg of the body.  When a radioactive material enters a body and irradiates the immediate vicinity of the local the radionuclides settled in, it irradiates, let’s suppose, only the area that weighs 2 g, because α or β particles do not travel long distances.  Nominally D (Gy) value =D joule/kg.  In reality it irradiates the area of 2 g, and hence the actual dose should be D joule/2g = D joule/0.002 kg=500D joule/kg.  The actual dose values would depend on many factors, and not always 500 times of the nominal value.  Anyway, the internal dose would be much higher than the nominal dose value implies.

Often, an official argument is based on the nominal external dose rate, even if the actual radiation is “internal”, and therefore, it devalues the magnitude of effects.  This is particularly true in the case of accidents of the nuclear facilities, where the external exposure dose is typically relatively low, and the serious effect is mostly due to the internal exposure.  In this case, internal exposure dose cannot be estimated from the external dose value such as spatial dose, as radioactive material may enter through various routes, and such a chance to enter a body has little to do with the spatial dose.  The chance of inhalation of minute particles floating may be somewhat related to the spatial dose rate, though.

5.  Humankind has not found safe ways to dispose and store the radioactive material

The incompatibility of radiation with life implies that the radioactive material have to be disposed and stored safely, in the way they would not affect all the living organisms on the earth.  We have not yet found very effective ways to do so.  The radioactivity lasts long.  Pu-239, for example, last 480,000 years, which is twenty times of the half-life (24,000 years), by that time the radioactivity will diminish to about a million times smaller than the original.  Even the most widely distributed cesium (Cs-137) takes about 600 years (20 times of half-life 30 years) to become almost nil.  Meanwhile they keep emitting radiation, heating and damaging their surroundings.

The Chernobyl’s damaged nuclear reactor has been covered by a large sarcophagus to reduce the escape of radiation the last thirty years.  It has deteriorated significantly because of radiation from the debris and weather, so that another huge cover has recently been constructed and placed on top of the sarcophagus.  It is said that this cover may last a hundred years, and then it will have to be replaced or covered further.  This illustrates how difficult it is to store radioactive material.  This is a single example.  There are hundreds of sites where radioactive waste is now stored and some difficulties are experienced.  It is imperative for us to find safe ways to store the radioactive waste.  There may not be an absolutely safe solution on the earth.  Yet, the humankind is earnestly increasing the radioactive wastes in huge quantities.  This is insane.

III. Nuclear Power Plants need not and should not be on Earth

1.  Nuclear power reactors are NOT CLEAN

Approximately 450 nuclear power reactors are presently on this earth.  In the nuclear power production of electricity, only one third of the heat produced in a reactor is converted into electricity, and the remainder two third of heat is released into the surrounding.  A typical 1giga watt reactor will release 4.7 x 10¹⁶ joule of heat into the environment per year.  This much heat will bring 100 million tons of water at zero degree to boiling.  This is with a single nuclear reactor.  The nuclear power reactors are excellent environmental heaters.  Hundreds of such reactors are operating on this earth.  But this fact is ignored in the argument of the nuclear power being environmentally clean.  This is not the only reason for the nuclear reactors being unclean.

In addition, this typical reactor of 1 giga (thousand mega) watt of capacity (electricity) produces in a year radioactive material equivalent to about 1000 Hiroshima atomic bombs.  In 2015, the total amount of electricity produced by nuclear reactors was 2,441 BkWh (billion kilo watt hours: data [7]), which is 8.79 x 10¹⁸ joule.  It was produced by about 280 nuclear reactors of 1 giga watt capacity.  So they produced radioactive material approximately equivalent to 280,000 Hiroshima bombs.  In addition, they released 1.3 x 10¹⁹ joule of heat into the environment.  These are the values for just one year.  Nuclear power reactors have been operating the last forty years, though not always this many.

Anyway, an enormous amount of radioactive material has been made on the earth.  How much of it has been released into the environment is not easy to estimate.  They have come out into the environment through the tests of the nuclear weapons, use of depleted uranium bombs, the routine release of some radioactive material from the nuclear facilities under normal conditions and others, in addition to the accidents at nuclear facilities.  The effects of the released radioactive material have been amply observed and reported, and yet are not shared with the majority of humankind.  We mention here only a few cases, and refer them to a few major sources.  The nuclear weapon explosion tests in the atmosphere affected the people in the eastern side, Utah, of the test site in Nevada (1951-1960, ref [8]).  Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in the present Ukraine (1986) was one of the worst nuclear facility accidents, and people are still suffering  [9]. Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster (2011) cause by the huge earthquake along with tsunami is far from settled, and health effects are only now becoming manifest [10]. These incidents represent the notion that the nuclear power is “not clean” at all, rather it is the dirtiest.

The world on the whole depends on the nuclear power by about 11% for the electricity production in 2015 [7].  A number of countries still rely significantly on the nuclear power.  Some numbers are: 76% in France, 56% in Ukraine, 56% in Slovakia, 53% in Hungary, 38% in Slovenia, 38% in Belgium, 35% in Armenia, 35% in Sweden, 34% in Finland, 34% in Switzerland, 33% in Czech, 32% in S. Korea, and 31% in Bulgaria [7].  Fortunately no serious accidents of nuclear facilities has been experienced so far in these countries except for Ukraine (Chernobyl accident), though minor accidents are known to have taken place in many of these countries as well as others not listed here.  Nuclear facilities are prone to accidents anyway.

The level of dependency on the nuclear power seems to be reflected in the cancer incident rate in those nations.  The cancer rates of some countries listed above are plotted against the nuclear power dependency; it is shown in the figure below [11].  Except for France, there seems to be a correlation between them.  This does not necessarily imply that radiation from the nuclear facilities alone is somehow related to the cancer.  The more direct data relating the nuclear facilities and the cancer rate are illustrated by a study termed KiKK [12].  It investigated all German nuclear reactors and found that children living within 5 km from a nuclear reactor had higher risk of cancer (particularly, leukemia), more than twice compared to those living farther away.  A similar study has been conducted [13] with regard to leukemia among children living near nuclear facilities in other countries: UK, Canada, Japan and USA, and found the trend similar to that of KiKK.

2.  The nuclear power productions are NOT ECONOMICAL

Cleaning and disposing the damaged nuclear facilities require an enormous amount of money, as well as human sacrifice (workers exposed to the radiation).  Compensating the victims who lost lives and healthy ways of life and suffer from other difficulties also need a lot of money.  Decommissioning an old nuclear reactor, even if not damaged, takes decades, and yet the radioactive waste cannot be disposed safely as yet, because humankind has not found a good way to do that.  But, obviously, we have to find it out before too long.  All these processes require money as well as energy.  All told, the amount of money for disposing the nuclear facilities and bringing the sites to clean lots, and providing adequate compensation for the victims would be astronomical.  It could be beyond the ability of corporations, and hence consume a lot of money earned by the citizens.  Such a situation could destroy the financial basis of a nation.

3.  Nuclear power is NOT NECESSARY

Upon the Fukushima disaster due to the great earthquake and tsunami in 2011, all nuclear power plants in Japan were shut down.  After a while, the Japanese government restarted a single nuclear plant in 2012-13.  After this reactor was shut down in order to inspect the facility, no nuclear power plant operated for almost two years until the end of August of 2015 (2013-2015).  While all these things were happening, no electricity shortage was experienced in Japan, even though Japan had relied about 30% of electricity on the nuclear power before the Fukushima disaster.  This fact definitely implies that Japan does not need nuclear power.  Unfortunately, the current government is eager to restart the nuclear power plants, and indeed has done so with three nuclear power reactors as of Jan. 1st, 2017, despite of the strong opposition from the Japanese people.

As mentioned earlier, a number of countries in Europe still depend heavily on the nuclear energy.  Some of them have decided in the face of the Fukushima accident to abolish the nuclear power; Germany, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland.  Recently Taiwan government announced that they would abolish their nuclear power plants by 2025.  Other countries listed earlier have not made a move toward abolishment, but, hopefully, they will soon realize the danger of the nuclear facilities, and start decommissioning them.

We are fortunate to have inexhaustible energy sources available on this earth.  The total amount of energy humankind used in 2005 is estimated to be 4.9 x 10²⁰ joule.  The energy influx from the Sun on the entire surface of the earth is estimated to be 8.9 x 10¹⁶ joule/sec, and hence it will be 2.8 x 10²⁴ joule per year.  The solar energy alone could amply provide all the energy humankind needs.  Wind power (driven ultimately by solar energy) available on the entire earth is estimated to be 2.3 x 10²¹ joule per year, and so, theoretically wind power alone may be sufficient.  Humankind needs to technically overcome the practical problems associated with these freely available energy sources, and should resort to these energies as far as feasible, and as soon as possible.  Other inexhaustible energy sources including “geothermal” and “tidal” are also to be employed as much as feasible.  In other words, we could be energy-sufficient, without resorting to non-renewable carbon fossil fuels or nuclear power.

IV   Conclusion

No nuclear power plant should be allowed on the earth, because:

1. the radioactive material produced by the nuclear power reactors emit radiation which destroy living organisms;
2. there is no definitive safe way to store long-lasting nuclear wastes, so that no more radioactive material should be produced;
3. nuclear power reactors are contributing significantly to warming of the environment;
4. nuclear power plants are not economical, but rather could bring disasters to the operating companies and even the nation’s finances.

 References

[1] See for example: http://wcpeace.org/Hida_memoir.htm

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiYZSKtZb7k; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnRRWwbYPSI

[3] Eisenberg MJ, Afilalo J, Lawler PR, Abrahamowicz M, Richard H, Pilote L., “Cancer risk related to low-dose ionizing radiation from cardiac imaging in patients after acute myocardial infarction”, Can. Med. Assoc. J., 183 (2011), 430-436 

[4] Mathews, J. D., Forsythe, A. V., Brady, Z., Butler, M. W., Goergen, S. K., Bymes, G. B., Giles, G. G., Wallace, A. B., Anderson, P. R, Guiver, T. A., McGale, P., Cain, T. M., Dowoty, J. G., Bickerstaffe, A. C., Darby, S. C.,  “Cancer Risk in 680000 people exposed to computed tomography scans in childhood or adolescence: data linkage study of 11 million Australians”, Brit. Med. J., 2013.05.22

[5] Ozasa, K., Shimizu, Y., Suyama, A., Kasagi, F., Soda, M., Grant, E. J., Sakata, R., Sugiyama, H., Kodama, K., “Studies of the mortality of atomic bomb survivors, Report 14, 1950-2003: An overview of cancer and noncancer Diseases” (LSS-14), Rad. Res., 177 (2012), 229-243

[6] Tronko, M., Bogdanova, T., Komissarenko, I. V., Epstein, O. V., Kovalenko, A., Lichtarev, I. A., Kairo, I., Peters, S. B., LiVolsi, V. A., “Thyroid carcinoma in children and adolescents in Ukraine after the Chernobyl nuclear accident”, Cancer, 86 (1999) 149-156

[7] http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/World-Statistics  

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders

[9] Yablokov, A. V., Nesterenko, V. B., Nesterenko, A. V., “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment”, Ann. New York Acad., 1181 (2009)

[10] http://apjjf.org/-Eiichiro-Ochiai/4382; http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-human-consequences-of-the-fukushima-dai-ichi-nuclear-power-plant-accidents/5478670

[11] The data of nuclear dependence are from ref [7], and the cancer death rates (2014) are from http://www.globalnote.jp/post-10211.html

[12] Nussbaum, R. H., “Childhood leukemia and cancers near German nuclear reactors: Significance, context and ramifications of recent studies”, Int. Occup/ Environ. Health, 15 (2009), 318-323

[13] Baker, P. J., Hoel, D. G., “Meta-analysis of standardized incidence and mortality rates of childhood leukemia in proximity to nuclear facilities”, Eur. J. Cancer Care, 16 (2007), 355-363 

Eiichiro Ochiai: retired chemistry professor; has become seriously concerned with the radiation effects since the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in 2011 and has published four books on the theme of “Radiation is Incompatible with Life”, including “Hiroshima to Fukushima: Biohazards of Radiation” (Springer Verlag (Heidelberg), 2013).

Talk is growing in the United States of the possibility of using military strikes to take out North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities after the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, threatened he’s close to testing a long-range missile apparently capable of hitting the U.S.

Kim said in his New Year’s Day address that the communist nation has reached the final stage of preparations to test-launch an intercontinental ballistic missile. The remark was seen as a thinly veiled threat that Pyongyang is close to developing a nuclear-tipped missile capable of striking the continental U.S.

The threat appears to have stoked genuine fears of security among Americans, with reporters bombarding the Defense Department with questions of what the U.S. is going to do about the North’s missile, including whether it’s going to shoot it down or even launch a preemptive strike before it’s fired.

It also prompted President-elect Donald Trump to send a tweet: “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!”

On Wednesday, a private intelligence analysis firm, Stratfor, even laid out a list of potential targets in North Korea, including the Yongbyon nuclear complex, home to the North’s plutonium-producing reactor and reprocessing facility.

“When considering an attack on North Korea, there are two broad categories of strikes to deliberate. The first is a minimalist strike, specifically focused on dismantling the North’s nuclear weapons program. In this scenario, the United States would engage North Korean nuclear objectives only,” Stratfor said in an analysis piece carried by MarketWatch and, titled, “How the U.S. could derail North Korea’s nuclear program by force.”

“By not launching strikes on other North Korean targets, Washington leaves the door open, if only slightly, for de-escalation if Pyongyang can be convinced that the strike is not part of a regime change operation. What benefits Pentagon planners in this scenario is that a limited strike requires less resources and preparation, enhancing the element of surprise,”

Potential targets in the minimalist strike include the Yongbyon complex, including the 5-megawatt nuclear reactor and the reprocessing plant, as well as the Pyongsan uranium mine that provides fuel for the reactor, and the Pyongsong nuclear research and development facility, known as the North’s “Silicon Valley,” Stratfor said.

“These facilities form the heart of North Korean nuclear production infrastructure. If they were destroyed or disabled, the North Korean nuclear production network would be crippled, set back years at least,” it said.

U.S. defense officials were quoted by Reuters as saying that if ordered, the U.S. military has three options to respond to a North Korean missile test: a pre-emptive strike before it is launched, intercepting the missile in flight, or allowing a launch to take place unhindered.

Still, many arms and defense experts agree that a military strike is too risky to consider, especially in consideration of the proximity of Seoul to the border with North Korea and the possibility of the North showering artillery shells on the bustling capital area.

Military strikes “would be a wild gamble, especially with the Seoul-Inchon region — South Korea’s commercial, political and population heart — so close to the border. Although the DPRK would lose any war, it could cause horrendous casualties before succumbing,” said Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan.

“Yet the great achievement of America’s military presence for the past six decades has been to prevent precisely such a conflict from occurring,” he said in a recent piece carried by the National Interest.

Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korea’s military, was also quoted by Reuters as questioning whether U.S. missile defenses could shoot down a test missile, saying destroying North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs would be a huge and risky undertaking.

Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), was also quoted as saying that the North’s main nuclear and missile test sites were on different sides of the country, and an ICBM can be launched from anywhere in the country because it’s mobile.

Robert Manning, a senior Atlantic Council analyst, said U.S. options are limited on the North.

“While everyone says North Korea is at the top of the U.S. foreign policy agenda, other than strengthening deterrence, imposing tough sanctions that remove North Korea from the international financial system, there is little the U.S. can do in the near-term that does not risk a war, thousands of U.S. and hundreds of thousands of South Korean deaths,” he said.

By Chang Jae-soon