Global Research

Just when you thought the takeover of the global food supply couldn’t get a whole lot worse, it did.

Monsanto recently announced it has accepted Bayer AG’s $56 billion takeover offer (a deal totaling $66 billion if you take into account Monsanto’s debt),1,2,3 which will make the new entity the largest seed and pesticide company in the world.

The merger is expected to be finalized by the end of 2017. Should the deal end up being blocked by regulators, Bayer will pay Monsanto $2 billion.

“As we look at the future, we think the combination of taking the Monsanto stable: biotechnology, seeds and data science, and combining that with chemistry, we unlock future innovations growers desperately need at the moment,” Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant said.4

Warning: Troubled Times Ahead

The news has generated deep concerns, and Global Justice Now is calling on anti-competition regulators to investigate the takeover bid.

Bernie Sanders has also gone on record saying the takeover is “a threat to all Americans” and needs to be blocked.5 He also wants the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to “reopen its investigation of Monsanto’s monopoly over the seed and chemical market.”

If the merger goes through, we’ll be left with just four companies providing 59 percent of the global seeds and 64 percent of the world’s pesticides.6,7 Aisha Dodwell with Global Justice Now summarized it well when, on September 14, she said:8

Today’s announcement of Bayer’s takeover of Monsanto is a disaster for the world’s food system.

The creation of this mega-agribusiness would mean that a single terrifying corporate behemoth is now the world’s biggest company for both seeds and pesticides, putting them firmly in control of the world’s farming inputs.

In an industry that was already dominated by only six big agribusinesses, this latest news will lead to even further market concentration as more mergers and takeovers will now become inevitable.

We’re speeding towards a situation where our global food system is controlled by a very few giant corporate entities who will have complete control of our food — what we eat and how it is grown.

Farmers Worry Bayer-Monsanto Behemoth May Ruin Them

In a recent New York Times article,9 Kentucky farmer Don Halcomb reveals he fully expects his profits to disappear by year’s end due to the combination of rising costs and dwindling crop prices. Halcomb, who grows corn, soy, wheat and barley on 7,000 acres, is already producing these commodities at a loss.

Over the past 10 years, the price of a bag of seed corn has risen from $80 to $300 — a price hike he attributes to the consolidation of seed companies, which reduces competition.

The latest merger between Bayer and Monsanto is only likely to make matters worse, no matter how Bayer and Monsanto executives try to frame it as a boon for famers.

Bayer AG’s CEO, Werner Baumann, claims “it is not our plan or our ambition or our intent to prevent farmers from having choice.”10 But the history of Monsanto and Bayer both suggest it would be naïve in the extreme to believe him.

Additionally, several other major seed companies are also in takeover or merger negotiations, including ChemChina and Syngenta, and DuPont and Dow Chemical. If either of those go through, the market will be even more consolidated.

Many Farmers Now Reconsider Use of GE Seeds

On a positive note, the ever-increasing costs are causing many farmers to reconsider their use of genetically engineered (GE) seeds. It has become increasingly difficult to justify the higher prices for seeds, while crop prices diminish.

Part of the problem is that farmers are simply growing too much GE corn and soy, which makes it difficult to recoup their investment. The threat of even higher prices for GE seeds and chemicals makes their future even more uncertain. As noted by The Wall Street Journal:11

The dominance of genetically modified crops is under threat.
Since their introduction to U.S. farms 20 years ago, genetically engineered seeds have become like mobile phones — multifunctional and ubiquitous … 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates this year that 94 percent of soybean acres were planted with biotech varieties, and 92 percent of corn acres. Today, farmers are finding it harder to justify the high and often rising prices for modified, or GMO, seed, given the measly returns …

Spending on crop seeds has nearly quadrupled since 1996, when Monsanto Co. became the first of the companies to launch biotech varieties. Yet major crop prices have skidded lower for three years, and this year, many farmers stand to lose money.

GE Seeds Fail to Live Up to Promises

The development of “superweeds” resistant to the herbicides so generously doused on GE crops are another factor giving farmers pause. As farmers must work harder to combat the weeds and spend more money on chemicals, many see their profits vanishing at an ever faster pace.

Ohio farmer Joe Logan echoes Halcomb’s sentiments, saying the price of biotech seeds prevents him from making a profit. Today, the soybean seed Logan uses costs him nearly five times more than what he paid 20 years ago.

To save money, he plans on sowing mostly non-GE soybeans next year. Kyle Stackhouse, who grows corn and soybeans in Indiana, quit planting GE crops and is now making a profit.

After turning his soybean fields and nearly three-quarters of his corn fields to biotech varieties, Stackhouse decided about 10 years ago that biotech seeds weren’t delivering harvests big enough to justify their price.

‘The [genetic] traits weren’t putting dollars in our pocket,’ he said,” The Wall Street Journal reports.12

Stackhouse estimates he typically spends about $53 per acre on soybean seeds and $40 on pesticides, versus $83 he would have spent on biotech soybean seeds [and] an additional … $24 on related crop chemicals. That puts him ahead about $14 per acre on costs.

Monsanto — A Destroyer of the World

In addition to GE seeds and its flagship product, the herbicide Roundup, Monsanto has also been a leading producer of Agent Orange, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), DDT, recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) and aspartame — the history of which is summarized in “The Complete History of Monsanto, ‘The World’s Most Evil Corporation,’”13 originally published by Waking Times in 2014.14

Monsanto also made its mark on history by participating in the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, thereby becoming a “war horse” ally to the United States government — an alliance that still holds today. As noted in “The Complete History,” article:

To add insult to world injury, Monsanto and their partners in crime Archer Daniels Midland, Sodexo and Tyson Foods write and sponsor The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009: HR 875.15 This ‘act’ gives the corporate factory farms a virtual monopoly to police and control all foods grown anywhere, including one’s own backyard, and provides harsh penalties and jail sentences for those who do not use chemicals and fertilizers. President Obama … gave his approval.

With this Act, Monsanto claims that only GM [genetically modified] foods are safe and organic or homegrown foods potentially spread disease, therefore must be regulated out of existence for the safety of the world … As further revelations have broken open regarding this evil giant’s true intentions, Monsanto crafted the ridiculous HR 933 Continuing Resolution,16aka Monsanto Protection Act, which Obama robo-signed into law as well.

This law states that no matter how harmful Monsanto’s GMO crops are and no matter how much devastation they wreak upon the country, U.S. federal courts cannot stop them from continuing to plant them anywhere they choose. Yes, Obama signed a provision that makes Monsanto above any laws and makes them more powerful than the government itself.

Bayer Also Has a Long, Dark, Destructive History of Genocide

Bayer AG is no different. Founded in Germany in 1863 by Friedrich Bayer and Johann Wescott, the company is perhaps most well-known for being the largest producer of aspirin and other commonly used drugs. But it too has a long, sordid history of creating poisons and mass destruction.17 During World War II, Bayer (then I.G. Farben) produced Zyklon B gas, used in the Nazi gas chambers to eradicate 11 million people whose only crime was to be born a Jew.

According to AHRP.org, the company was also “intimately involved with the human experimental atrocities committed by Mengele at Auschwitz.”18 In one case, Bayer purchased 150 healthy female prisoners from the camp commander of Auschwitz for use as test subjects for a new sleep drug. All the test subjects died, and another order for prisoners was promptly placed.

While some of its board members ended up being arrested and tried for their crimes against humanity, others escaped and helped create the Federal Reserve.19 If you think the passing of time might have made this corporate entity kinder, safer and gentler, think again.

In 2003, it was revealed Bayer sold blood-clotting medicine tainted with the HIV virus to Asian, Latin American and Europe in the mid-1980s.20 The drug, Factor VIII concentrate, was worth millions of dollars, and the company continued to sell the tainted drug for a year after the contamination was discovered. In Hong Kong and Taiwan alone, more than 100 hemophiliacs contracted HIV and died after using the medicine.

More Bayer Atrocities and Malfeasance

Bayer’s drug Trasylol — used to control bleeding during surgery — was eventually found to be responsible for at least a thousand deaths each month for the 14 years it was on the market.21 In 2006, documents proved Bayer hid evidence showing unfavorable results from the drug in order to continue selling it. Lawsuits have also been filed against Bayer for the untimely death of 190 young women taking their birth control pill Yaz, which raises your risk of blood clots by 300 percent.

Its top-selling Flintstones Vitamins for kids is another piece of evidence suggesting the company has no clue or concern about health, as it contains a number of questionable if not outright toxic ingredients, including aspartame, cupric oxide, aluminum, coal tar, hydrogenated soybean oil (trans fat; associated with heart disease), zinc oxide, ferrous fumarate and GE corn starch.

Between 2006 and 2007, Bayer was also responsible for contaminating U.S. rice imports with three unapproved varieties of GE rice under development by Bayer CropScience. Bayer also makes neonicotinoid pesticides, suspected of being responsible for mass die-offs of bees around the world, thereby threatening the global food supply, and made the plastic chemical bisphenol-A (BPA), now known to have a dangerous impact on the human endocrine system.

In short, Bayer’s history is just as dark and unethical as Monsanto’s, if not more, and some are rightfully referring to the merger of these two destructive behemoths as a “marriage made in hell.”22

Billions Against Bayer

The Bayer-Monsanto merger will make the subsequent entity all the more powerful to bully farmers into paying more and pressuring and manipulating governments into accepting the unacceptable risks involved. In response, the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) is calling for consumers everywhere to boycott Bayer in a new campaign called “Billions Against Bayer” — the continuation of the successful “Millions Against Monsanto” campaign. In a recent press release, OCA says:23

Two of the world’s most foul corporate criminals will be one. Monsanto will pack up its headquarters and head overseas. The much-maligned Monsanto name will be retired. But a corporate criminal by any other name — or size — is still a corporate criminal.

This merger only heightens the urgency, and strengthens our resolve, to hunt down the corporations that are poisoning everything in sight. We will follow them to the ends of the earth, if need be. We will expose their crimes. We will end the toxic tyranny. We will become the Billions Against Bayer. And we will need your help. Monsanto (and Bayer) are on trial. You be the judge.

It is tough to fight any real war. And it takes true guts, discipline and determination to win it.

For years and decades, the so-called ‘left’ in the West has been moderately critical of North American (and sometimes even of European) imperialism and neo-colonialism. But whenever some individual or country rose up and began openly challenging the Empire, most of the Western left-wing intellectuals simply closed their eyes, and refused to offer their full, unconditional support to those who were putting their lives (and often even the existence of their countries) on the line.

I will never forget all those derogatory punches directed at Hugo Chavez, punches coming from members of the ‘anti-Communist left’, after he dared to insult George W. Bush at the United Nations in 2006, calling him a “devil” and choking, theatrically, from the sulfur that was still ‘hanging in the air’ after the US President’s appearance at the General Assembly.

I will not be dropping names here, but readers would be surprised if they knew how many of those iconic leaders of the US left described Chavez and his speech as ‘impolite’, ‘counter-productive’, and even ‘insulting’.

Tens of millions of people have died because of Western imperialism, after WWII. Under the horrid leadership of George W Bush, Afghanistan and Iraq have been reduced to ruins… But one has to remain ‘polite’, ‘objective’ and cool headed?

Well, that is not how real revolutions have been ignited. This is not how the successful anti-colonialist wars are fought. When the real battle begins, ‘politeness’ is actually mostly unacceptable, simply because the oppressed masses are endlessly pissed off, and they want their feelings to be registered and expressed by the leaders. Even the search for ‘objectivity’ is often out of place, when still fragile revolutions have to face the entire monumental hostile propaganda of the regime – of the Empire.

But the question is: do most of the Western leftists really support revolutions and anti-colonialist struggles of the oppressed world?

I believe they don’t. And this is clearly visible from reading most of the so-called alternative media in both North America and Europe.

Whoever stands up, whoever leads his nation into battle against the Western global dictatorship, is almost immediately defined as a demagogue. He or she is most likely christened ‘undemocratic’, and not just by the mass and ‘liberal’ media, but also on the pages of the so-called ‘alternative’ and ‘progressive’ Western press. Not all, but some, and frankly: most of it!

Chavez actually received very little support from Western ‘left-wing’ intellectuals. And now when Venezuela is bleeding, the ‘Bolivarian Republic’ can only count on a handful of revolutionary Latin American nations, as well as on China, Iran and Russia; definitely not on the robust, organized and militant solidarity from Western countries.

Cuba received even less support than Venezuela. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, no attempt was actually made by Western leftists to bail the heroic nation out. It was China, in the end, which ran to its rescue and saved Cuban socialism. (When I wrote about it, I got hundreds of Western leftists at my throat, and in the end it took Fidel to confirm, in his ‘Reflections’, what I was saying, to get them off my back). Then, when the Obama administration began making dangerous advances on Havana, almost everyone in the West began screwing those cynical grimaces: ‘you see; now everything will collapse! They will buy Cuba!’ They didn’t. I travelled to the beloved green island, and it was so clear from the first moment there, that the ‘revolution is not for sale’. But you will not read it often in the Western ‘progressive’ media.

*

It is of course not just Latin America that is ‘disliked’ by the progressives in the West. Actually, Latin America is still at least getting some nominal support there.

China and Russia, two powerful nations, which are now standing openly against Western imperialism, are despised by virtually all ‘liberals’ and by most of the Western ‘left’. In those circles, there is total ignorance about the Chinese type of democracy, about its ancient culture, and about it’s complex but extremely successful form of Communism (or calls it ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’). Like parrots, the Western leftists repeat ‘liberal’ propaganda that ‘China is being capitalist’, or that it is being ruled by ‘state capitalism’. The internationalism of Chinese foreign policy is constantly played down, even mocked.

The hostility of the Western ‘left’ towards China has disgusted many Chinese leaders and intellectuals. I only realized the extent of this revulsion, when I spoke, last year, at the First World Cultural Forum in Beijing, and mingled with the thinkers at the China Academy of Social Sciences, the right (intellectual) arm of the government and the Party.

China can count on its allies in Russia, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere, but definitely not in the West.

It is pointless to even mention Russia or South Africa.

Russia, ‘the victim’ during the horrid Yeltsin years was ‘embraced’ by the Western left. Russia the warrior, Russia the adversary to Western imperialism, is, once again, loathed.

It appears that the ‘progressives’ in the United States and Europe really prefer ‘victims’. They can, somehow, feel pity and even write a few lines about the ‘suffering of defenseless women and children’ in the countries that the West is plundering and raping. That does not extend to all countries that are being brutalized, but at least to some…

What they don’t like at all, are strong men and women that have decided to fight: to defend their rights, to face the Empire.

The Syrian government is hated. The North Korean government is despised. The President of the Philippines is judged by Western liberal media measures: as a vulgar freak who is killing thousands of ‘innocent’ drug pushers and consumers (definitely not as a possibly new Sukarno who is willing to send the entire West to hell).

Whatever the Western ‘left’ thinks about North Korea and its government (and in fact, I think, it cannot really think much, as it is fully ignorant about it), the main reason why the DPRK is hated so much by the West regime, is because it, together with Cuba, basically liberated Africa. It fought for the freedom of Angola and Namibia, it flew Egyptian MIGs against Israel, it struggled in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as well as in many other countries, and it sent aid, teachers and doctors to the entire continent devastated by the Western colonialist barbarity.

Much good it received in return! At best, indifference, at worse, total spite!

*

Some say that the Western ‘left’ doesn’t want to take power, anymore. It lost all of its important battles. It became toothless, impotent, and angry about the world and itself.

When in January 2016 I spoke at the Italian Parliament (ending up insulting the West for its global plunder, hypocrisy), I mingled a lot with the 5 Star Movement, which had actually invited me to Rome. I spent time with its radical left wing. There are some great people there, but overall, it soon became clear that this potentially the biggest political movement in the country is actually horrified of coming to power! It does not really want to govern.

But then, why call those weak bizarre selfish Western entities – the ‘left wing’? Why confuse terms, and by that, why discredit those true revolutionaries, those true fighters, who are risking, sacrificing their lives, right now, all over the world?

*

Wars are all extremely ugly. I have covered many of them, and I know… But some of them, those that are fought for the survival of humanity, or for survival of the particular countries, are inevitable. One either fights, or the entire Planet ends up being colonized and oppressed, in shackles.

If one decides to fight, then there has to be discipline and single-mindedness; total determination. Or the battle is lost from the very beginning!

When the freedom and survival of one’s motherland is at stake, things get very serious, ‘dead-serious’. Battle is not a discussion club. It is not some chat.

If we, as ‘leftists’, have already once decided that imperialism and colonialism (or ‘neo-colonialism’) are the greatest evils destroying our humanity, then we have to show discipline and join ranks, and support those who are at the frontline.

Otherwise we will become an irrelevant laughingstock, and history will and should judge us harshly!

*

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and  “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.  Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

A new review of the safety of France’s nuclear power stations has found that at least 18 of EDF’s units are are “operating at risk of major accident due to carbon anomalies.”

The review was carried out at the request of Greenpeace France following the discovery of serious metallurgical flaws by French regulators in a reactor vessel at Flamanville, where an EPR plant is under construction.

The problem is that parts of the vessel and its cap contain high levels of carbon, making the metal brittle and potentially subject to catastrophic failure. These key components were provided by French nuclear engineering firm Areva, and forged at its Le Creusot.

“The nature of the flaw in the steel, an excess of carbon, reduces steel toughness and renders the components vulnerable to fast fracture and catastrophic failure putting the NPP at risk of a major radioactive release to the environment”, says nuclear safety expert John Large, whose consultancy Large Associates (LA) carried out the Review.

His report examines how the defects in the Flamanville EPR reactor pressure vessel came about during the manufacturing process, and escaped detection for years after forging. It then goes on to investigate what other safety-critical nuclear components might be suffering from the same defects.

Steam generators at 28 EDF nuclear sites at risk

After several months of investigation LA found that critical components of a further 28 nuclear plants were forged by Le Creusot using the same process. These are found in the steam generators – large, pod-like boilers – that have been installed at operational EDF nuclear power stations across France.

The conclusion is based on documents provided by IRSN (the independent French Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire) that reject assurances given by both EDF and Areva that there is no safety risk from steam generators containing the excess carbon flaw.

In August 2016, IRSN warned the French nuclear safety regulator Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire (ASN) that:

• EdF’s submission was incomplete;
• there is a risk of abrupt rupture which could lead to a reactor core fuel melt; and
• immediate “compensatory” measures need to be put in place to safeguard the operational NPPs involved.

“As a result of Areva’s failures, a significant share of the French nuclear reactor fleet is at increased risk of severe radiological accident, including fuel core meltdown”, said Large. “However, there is no simple or quick fix to this problem.

“The testing and inspection regime currently underway by Areva and EDF is incapable of detecting the extent and severity of the carbon problem and, moreover, it cannot ensure against the risk of rapid component failure. It is most certain that the IRSN finding will equally applies to replacement steam generators exported by Areva to overseas nuclear power plants around the world.”

EDF reactors face protracted closure, credit rating falls

EDF stated yesterday that it will carry out further tests on 12 nuclear reactors during their planned outages in the coming months – and that extended periods of outage are to be expected. “There are outages that could take longer than planned”, an EDF spokesman told Reuters.

“In 2015, we discovered the phenomenon of carbon segregation in the Flammanville EPR reactor. We decided to verify other equipments in the French nuclear park to make sure that other components are not impacted by the phenomenon.”

In anticipation of the nuclear closures, year-ahead electricity prices rose in the French wholesale power market, forcing power rises across Europe up to a one-year high.

Meanwhile Moody’s has downgraded EDF credit ratings across a spectrum of credit instruments. EDF’s long-term issuer and senior unsecured ratings fell from A2 to A3 while perpetual junior subordinated debt ratings fell to Baa3 from Baa2. Moody’s also  downgraded the group’s short-term ratings to Prime-2 from Prime-1.

According to Moody’s,

“the rating downgrade reflects its view that the action plan announced by EDF in April 2016, which includes government support, will not be sufficient to fully offset the adverse impact of the incremental risks associated the Hinkley Point C (HPC) project on the group’s credit profile.

“Moody’s believes that the significant scale and complexity of the HPC project will affect the group’s business and financial risk profiles. This is because the HPC project will expose EDF and its partner China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGN, A3 negative) to significant construction risk as the plant will use the same European Pressurised reactor (EPR) technology that has been linked with material cost overruns and delays at Flamanville in France and Olkiluoto 3 in Finland. In addition, none of the four plants using the EPR technology currently constructed globally is operational yet.”

Once rating agencies have had time to evaluate the seriousness of EDF’s current problems with reactors packed with unsafe crirical components, further downgrades may follow. “The ratings could be downgraded if (1) credit metrics fall below Moody’s guidance for the A3 rating; or (2) EDF were to be significantly exposed to AREVA NP’s liabilities”, the agency warns.

Flamanville EPR heading for the scrapheap

The Review also shows that the reactor pressure vessel of the Flamanville EPR, which is already installed, does not have a Certificate of Conformity issued by ASN. This means that it does not comply with the European Directive on Pressure Equipment, nor does it meet the mandatory requirement of the ASN, which since 2008, stipulates that any new nuclear reactor coolant circuit component has to have a Certificate of Conformity before its production commences.

“Without a Certificate of Conformity the reactor pressure vessel and steam generators currently installed in Flamanville 3 will almost certainly have to be scrapped”, said Roger Spautz, responsible for nuclear campaign at Greenpeace France.

The review, he added, “reveals evidence that at the Creusot Forge plant, Areva did not have the technical qualifications required to meet exacting nuclear safety standards. The plant was not under effective control and therefore had not mastered the necessary procedures for maintaining the exacting standards for quality control in the manufacture of safety-critical nuclear components.”

Areva has now acknowledged that ineffective quality controls at le Creusot Forge were mainly responsible not only for the flaws in the Flamanvile 3 EPR, but across other operational nuclear power plans – and that the technical failures date back to 1965.

Moreover, ASN has indicated that in the nuclear components supply chain three examples of Counterfeit, Fraudulent and Substandard Items (CFSI) have occurred in the year ending 2015.

The recent ASN publication (24th September 2016) of a list of the NPPs affected by the AREVA anomalies and irregularities demonstrates that the phenomenon not only has reached alarming proportions but is continuing to grow under scrutiny.

The number of components affected by irregularities and installed in NPPs in operation increased by 50 in April 2016 from 33 to 83 by 24th September this year. Irregularities affecting the Flamanville EPR increased from two to 20 over the same period.

Also at risk: Sizewell B, Hinkley C finance, Taishan EPRs

LA’s Review also relates these developments in France to the UK, specifically: the currently operating Sizewell B NPP in Suffolk; and the now contracted construction programme for the Hinkley Point C NPP.

Sizewell B which includes a number of components sourced from Le Creusot which need urgent examination and / or replacement in order to prevent unsafe operation. The fact that this could escape the UK’s nuclear regulators also indicates, says Large, that “the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) did not delve deep enough into the situation as now revealed by ASN.”

As for For Hinkley Point C, it now appears inevitable that the Flamanville reactor will not be completeted by its target date of the end of 2020, indeed it may very well never be completed at all. Under the terms of agreement for the plant’s construction accepted by the European Commission, this would render the UK government unable to extend promised credit guarantees to HPC’s financial backers.

“Now that ASN has deprioritized efforts on the under-construction Flamanville 3 NPP because of its pressing urgency to evaluate the risk situation for the operating NPPs”, says Large, “there is a greater likelihood that Flamanville 3 will not reach the deadline for operation and validation of its technology by the UK Credit Guarantee cut-off date of December 2020.”

Also at risk are the two EPRs that Areva and EDF are currently constructing at Taishan in China. These are now at the most advanced stage of any EPR projects in the world, however there are increasing fears that they contain faulty components.

The vessels and domes at Taishan were also supplied by Areva, and manufactured by the same process as that utilised by Le Creusot. It is suspected that Chinese nuclear regulators may have decided to overlook this problem and hope for the best. However if they discover that the steam generators, which along with the reactor vessels have already been installed, are also at risk of catastrophic failure, that might prove a risk too far – even for China.

The danger for EDF and Areva is that the massive commercial liabilities they may be accruing for faulty reactors supplied to third parties, together with the tens of billions of euros of capital write-downs for projects they have to abandon, and the loss of generation revenues due to plant outages, could easily exceed their entire market capitalisation.

In other words: for EDF, Areva, their shareholders and the entire French nuclear industry, the end really could be nigh.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor at The Ecologist.

And why the military censors don’t want you to know about it.

Published in partnership with Tikun Olam תיקון עולם..

You will read much hagiography in the Peres obituaries published in Israeli and world media. Here is a perfect example in the NY Times of the half-truths and undeserved admiration that is being heaped upon his memory:

He was consistent in his search for an accommodation with the Arab world, a search that in recent years left him orphaned as Israeli society lost interest, especially after the upheavals of the 2011 Arab Spring led to tumult on its borders.

In an especially vain moment, Shimon Peres is pictured mimicking the pose of his political mentor, David Ben Gurion.

This is at best only partially true.  Peres was intermittent in his search for peace with the Arabs.  True, in 1993, he led the effort that culminated in the Oslo Accords.  But subsequent Israeli governments abandoned them and they eventually came to be discredited entirely both on the left and right.

After the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Peres had an opportunity to call a snap election which would’ve confirmed his mandate to solidify the gains from those Accords.  Instead, he temporized and waited until it was too late.  By the time he called elections a year later, Palestinian militants had engineered a series of savage terror attacks inside Israel which discredited Peres’ leadership and brought Bibi Netanyahu to power for his first term as prime minister.  Though there were subsequent opportunities for Israeli governments to negotiate peace deals, especially with Ehud Barak, another Labor prime minister, all of them were squandered.  Regardless, Peres’ accession to the position in 1995 and the cataclysm that followed, was a pivotal moment that led to the political stagnation which has lasted ever since.

Much of what you will read about Peres is either outright false or only partially true. A certain portion of what you read may even be true. But Shimon Peres is one of those Israeli leaders like Ben Gurion, his mentor, and Ariel Sharon, who built a myth around themselves. Part political hype, part astute branding, and part a need in Israelis and the rest of the world to believe the myth they were sold of Israel as the miracle in the desert, the people which made a barren land bloom, which drained swamps and turned them into thriving kibbutzim. The little State that could.

So in assessing Peres’ legacy it’s important to keep this in mind; to separate fact from fiction; myth from reality.

Prime Minister David Ben Gurion with his chief aide, Shimon Peres. In background: defense minister Moshe Dayan and Ben Gurion aide, Teddy Kollek.

Shimon Peres had a severe stroke two days ago and while his health has improved since he entered the hospital, at age 93, he is in the twilight of his years.  It’s appropriate to take stock of his legacy as an epochal figure who spans the founding of the State to the present day.  I can’t think of another active Israeli politician with that length of service or span of history.

When Peres dies, an entire nation will mourn him as a founding father of the state.  Someone who served it faithfully and diligently for nearly seven decades.  The accolades will pour forth.  Newscasters will show historic footage of him with his political mentor, David Ben Gurion, and intone solemnly about the deeds of the Great Man.

But, as is often the case in these matters, the truth lies elsewhere.  Peres began his career as Ben Gurion’s errand boy.  He was diligent and inventive.  What the boss needed done, he always figured out a way to accomplish.  Eventually became his chief fixer.  That’s how he was assigned the monumental task of getting Israel the Bomb.  Such a task is no small feat and it required immense amounts of grit, determination, invention, and even outright thievery.  Peres was more than up to the task.

Uncensored version of Wall story which describes Peres’ bluff which enabled French to circumvent international nuclear prohibition against selling uranium to Israel.

From almost the first moment after the State was founded Ben Gurion aspired to create a nuclear weapon.  He saw it as his Doomsday device.  The ace he could draw from the deck if all the cards were stacked against him.  Though Israel’s actual strategic strength was quite robust, Ben Gurion suggested otherwise.  In a famous episode of that era, he’s reputed to have looked at a map of the Middle East spread upon the wall of his study and exclaimed to those around him: “I didn’t sleep a wink last night because of this map.  What is Israel?  A single tiny speck.  How can it survive amidst this Arab world?!”

This was part and parcel of the Israeli strategy of portraying itself as the eternal victim, the weaker party to every conflict, who required moral and military support to prevent its destruction.  None of it was true.  But in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the world felt it couldn’t to take a chance that it might happen again.  That’s how Israel became little David to the Arab Goliath in the eyes of much of the world after 1948.

Though the conventional Israeli belief is that Israel’s  WMD was meant to protect Israel from imminent destruction should  it suffer a catastrophic defeat, that theory is wrong either in whole or in part.  In actuality, Israel never faced such a threat.  It always maintained military superiority over its enemies in every war from 1948 through 1967 (and after).

Ben  Gurion’s real goal in obtaining nukes was political.  He wanted to ensure Israel would never have to negotiate away the gains it made on the battlefield.  He wanted a weapon he could hold over the heads of any enemy, that would ensure he never had to renounce anything that was rightfully Israel’s (in his mind at least).  So Israel’s Bomb has enabled it to reject virtually every peace initiative offered going all the way back to 1967.  Israel’s leaders knew that the U.S. would never gamble that it wouldn’t use WMD if it had to.  So American presidents already had one hand tied behind their backs in such negotiations.  In a card game, when one party holds the ace of spades in his pocket and everyone else playing knows this, it’s not much of a game, is  it?

Israeli Opponents of the Bomb

It would be a misnomer to believe that Ben Gurion and Peres were lionized by their peers for their visionary project.  Opposition to an Israeli Bomb was strong and crossed party lines.   Among those who were against were future prime minister Levi Eshkol, Pinchas Sapir, Yigal Alon, Golda Meir, and Israel’s leading weapons developer, Yisrael Galili.  Even then IDF chief of staff Chaim Leskov opposed the Bomb.  Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, in his typically prophetic fashion created an NGO that called for making the Middle East a nuclear-free zone (it was called in Hebrew “the Public Committee to Demilitarize the Middle East of Nuclear Weapons”).  It was probably the first such call anywhere in the world.  In one matter, he turned out to be wrong.  He predicted that by building the nuclear reactor Israel would tempt its enemies to bomb and destroy it.  Afterward, Lebowitz predicted, they would call Dimona: “Shimon’s Folly.”

The sheer chutzpah that Peres employed to get what he wanted was astonishing.  He played on the heartstrings of German guilt to obtain funding for the  nuclear arms project.  He recruited Arnon Milchanas a covert operative to organize a conspiracy to steal highly enriched uranium from the U.S. depository where it was stored.  Peres negotiated with the French a complex deal to build the Dimona plant, which to this day produces the plutonium for Israel’s WMD arsenal.

Shimon Peres visits an Israeli police counter-terrorism unit, 2011.

The defense ministry director general traveled extensively to France in those days and cultivated the entire political leadership in pursuit of the necessary agreements to build the Dimona plant.  On the very day he flew to France to sign the final deal, the government in Paris fell.  Though Ben Gurion saw Peres’ trip as wasted, the latter refused to give up.  He went to the resigning prime minister and suggested that they back-date the agreement to make it appear as if it had been signed before the resignation.  The French leader agreed.  And so, Israel’s Bomb was saved by an audacious bluff.  When someone asked Peres afterward how he thought he could get away with such a stratagem, he joked: “What’s 24 hours among friends?”

Peres facilitated outright theft as well.  If Israel waited to produce the highly enriched uranium it would need to create a Bomb on its own, it would’ve taken years longer than it did.  If it could procure the uranium by other means it would immensely speed the process.  That’s how the father of the Israeli Bomb recruited future Hollywood film producer Milchan to steal hundreds of kilos of nuclear materials from a warehouse in Pennsylvania with the connivance of American officials who were pro-Israel Jews recruited to the task.

Roger Mattson recently published a book on the subject, Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel.  This article summarizes his findings. Among them, are that a group of American Jewish scientists and engineers founded the company which likely embezzled and transferred to Israel enough material to make six nuclear bombs. Several officers of this company later became national officers in the Zionist Organization of America. A founder of the company fought in the Haganah during the 1948 War and was a protege of future Israeli intelligence chief, Meir Amit. Key figures in U.S. intelligence even suggested that the company itself was established by Israeli intelligence in order to steal U.S. materials and technological expertise in the service of Israel’s nuclear weapons project. All of this means that leaders of one of the key organizations in the Israel Lobby aided and abetted a huge national security breach which gave Israel the bomb.

If you’re a pro-Israel advocate you likely see such figures as heroes. If so, consider this: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1956 for doing far less harm to America’s nuclear program than these individuals did.

Israel Lobby’s Covert Fundraising Program

The WMD project was extraordinarily expensive.  The new State, saddled with huge expenses to feed and house millions of  new immigrants, had no budget to fund it.  That’s where Peres turned to wealthy Diaspora Jews like Abe Feinberg to covertly raise funds for the Israeli bomb.  Feinberg spearheaded a fundraising campaign which raised $40-million, equivalent to $260-million in today’s dollars.  Feinberg also conspired through his Democratic Party connections to secure from Pres. Johnson Israel’s right to refuse to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation pact.

The Israeli news portal Walla describes the brilliant stratagem Ben Gurion and Peres concocted that drew France to Israel’s side in the effort to make a Bomb.  It began in 1956 with a secret meeting at a French villa outside Paris with a high-level British and French contingent.  The goals of the French and British were aligned with those of Israel, but not completely so.  The British and French wanted to give Egypt’s new firebrand leader, Gamal Nasser a black eye for nationalizing the Suez Canal and offering aid to the Algerian resistance.  They hatched a plan to attack Nasser and carve up Egypt’s strategic assets for themselves.  Israel was happy to go along for the ride.  But it had a separate goal–to garner European support for its nuclear effort.

After getting the go-ahead sign from Ben Gurion, Peres approached his French counterparts and announced Israeli agreement to join in the attack which later came to be known as Operation Kadesh.  But Israel, he told them, faced far more danger in the venture than either the British or French.  If Israel lost, its very existence could be threatened.  That’s why it needed a strategic weapon that could prevent its annihilation in the event of a disastrous defeat.

As negotiations proceeded with the French, they warned the Israelis that there were prohibited from selling them uranium under international agreements.  Peres came up with a typically brilliant and devious solution: “Don’t sell it to us, lend it to us,” he said.  “We will return it to you after our mission is completed.”  So began the real effort to build an Israeli Bomb.  The reactor was completed in 1960 and by 1967 Israel had its first primitive nuclear weapon to use in case it lost the 1967 War.

For some strange reason, the Israeli military censor disapproved of Walla talking about Peres’ “bluff” regarding back-dating the French-Israeli nuclear agreement. In the censored version, you won’t find any reference to it. Nor will you find the story about Peres’ suggestion that the French “lend” the uranium to Israel, since it was illegal to sell it.  My guess is that with Peres’ demise likely, they preferred not to tarnish the Old Man’s reputation any more than necessary. Which raises the question: why is a censor stooping to protect Israeli politicians’ reputations rather than protecting the security of the state, which is its putative mission?”

Richard Silverstein is a MintPress analyst who has written the Tikun Olam blog since 2003, specializing in Israeli politics and US foreign affairs. He earned a BA from Columbia University, a BHL from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and MA in Comparative Literature from UCLA. Follow Richard on Twitter: @Richards1052 

Here we go again. In yet another Pentagon precision strike, a residential building in Achin district of Nangarhar province was hit as a crowd welcomed home a tribal leader returning from the Hajj. 

At least 13 civilians were turned into «collateral damage». The Pentagon of course does not «discuss the details of counter-terror operations», but it’s «currently reviewing all materials related to this strike».

Nothing obviously will come out of it – adding the civilian dead to the non-stop mounting toll of Operation Enduring Freedom (Forever).

Someone that actually is bound to endure his freedom in full splendor is former warlord, head of Hezb-i-Islami and «Butcher of Kabul» Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

The Pentagon does not detain the monopoly of shelling civilians in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar also did it with relish in the early 1990s – besides running an underground torture prison in neighboring Pakistan.

In Kabul during Taliban rule in the late 1990s, I talked to many residents during the civil war who were allied with Tajik commander and «Lion of the Panjshir» Ahmad Shah Massoud – assassinated two days before 9/11 – as they recalled Hekmatyar’s forces relentlessly shelling civilian neighborhoods.

Hekmatyar has been in hiding for almost two decades now – since 1997. He has not yet returned to Kabul. In 2002, in Kunar province in Afghanistan, I was trying to track him – as well as Osama bin Laden – with my Peshawar fixer, and we kept running into US Marines asking us for information. After Osama disappeared, Hekmatyar quickly became the number one «dead or alive» Bush II target in Afghanistan, branded as a «global terrorist» by Washington and blacklisted by the UN in 2003.

Now he’s up to amass political power, after being pardoned by the government of president Ashraf Ghani. His outfit, Hezb-i-Islami, is a spent military force for years now. Politically it’s another story. With the deal, Hezb militants will now be able to run for office.

It was a hard nut to crack. Hekmatyar has always refused to sign any deal as long as US- / NATO troops de facto occupy Afghanistan. The final deal establishes Hezb and US / NATO agree to disagree – as long as Hekmatyar refuses to support terrorism. And Ghani’s people have to do the paperwork to remove Hezb-i-Islami from the UN’s list of terrorist organizations.

Whether incorporating Hezb into the fragile government in Kabul will intimidate the Taliban remains an open question.

CIA rat line in effect

Afghanistan for all practical purposes continues to be occupied by foreigners; in this aspect Hekmatyar’s logic happens to mirror the Taliban’s logic – even though the successors of Mullah Omar won’t be admitted to the power table in Kabul.

A Western covert intel operative with knowledge of how Afghanistan was handled at the highest levels in Washington lays down the case:

Osama bin Laden was a failed CIA asset that was used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan to restart the heroin trade, which is a trillion-dollar business. Mullah Omar was our ally against the Soviets, and a most honorable man, who shut down all the heroin plantations in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over as they considered the over 300,000 dead who died from heroin overdoses per year immoral. We turned on him and betrayed him. Osama was a guest of Mullah Omar, and he merely asked for evidence of Osama’s involvement in 9/11. Since there was none, as he was not involved, none could be furnished. Bush II ridiculed on television even the thought that he would be required to give evidence to a bow and arrow Mullah Omar.

It gets much juicier when the operative details what few have had the courage to spell out; the CIA’s real agenda in Afghanistan:

The CIA used the heroin proceeds for external operations and so their revenue had been cut off when the Taliban were in power. This way they could always circumvent the US Congress. Heroin; that is why we are still there. Terrorism is engineered through Operation Gladios as this is being used to justify these interventions. Most Western intel agencies are connected to this trade. 93 % of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan. After the US invasion heroin growing was immediately restarted. The military convoys from the Pakistan ports to Afghanistan carried back as backhaul the heroin for world distribution. The Taliban and Osama had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11.

Hekmatyar by the way was never connected to the heroin trade.

Kabul as it stands remains in control of the large population centers and roughly 70% of the country. The rest is Talibanistan. There’s no chance of Kabul winning the war. According to the numbers deployed by Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon and its allies have 14,000 troops in Afghanistan. The US contingent – 9,800 – will drop to 8,400 by the end of 2016.

Everyone remembers NATO «handing over control» – as in being ignominiously defeated by the Taliban – in 2014. Those remaining US troops on the ground euphemistically provide «training» and «air support» to the Afghan Army, and are themselves supported by hordes of military contractors. In parallel, deep in the shades, contractors keep moving the CIA heroin to the West.

The US-NATO combo has just pledged «to help fund Afghan security forces to the tune of around $1 billion annually over the next three years». Few will be aware that offers splendorous extra incentive to CIA-run heroin traders plying their wares across the EU.

Here we go again. In yet another Pentagon precision strike, a residential building in Achin district of Nangarhar province was hit as a crowd welcomed home a tribal leader returning from the Hajj.

At least 13 civilians were turned into «collateral damage». The Pentagon of course does not «discuss the details of counter-terror operations», but it’s «currently reviewing all materials related to this strike».

Nothing obviously will come out of it – adding the civilian dead to the non-stop mounting toll of Operation Enduring Freedom (Forever).

Someone that actually is bound to endure his freedom in full splendor is former warlord, head of Hezb-i-Islami and «Butcher of Kabul» Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

The Pentagon does not detain the monopoly of shelling civilians in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar also did it with relish in the early 1990s – besides running an underground torture prison in neighboring Pakistan.

In Kabul during Taliban rule in the late 1990s, I talked to many residents during the civil war who were allied with Tajik commander and «Lion of the Panjshir» Ahmad Shah Massoud – assassinated two days before 9/11 – as they recalled Hekmatyar’s forces relentlessly shelling civilian neighborhoods.

Hekmatyar has been in hiding for almost two decades now – since 1997. He has not yet returned to Kabul. In 2002, in Kunar province in Afghanistan, I was trying to track him – as well as Osama bin Laden – with my Peshawar fixer, and we kept running into US Marines asking us for information. After Osama disappeared, Hekmatyar quickly became the number one «dead or alive» Bush II target in Afghanistan, branded as a «global terrorist» by Washington and blacklisted by the UN in 2003.

Now he’s up to amass political power, after being pardoned by the government of president Ashraf Ghani. His outfit, Hezb-i-Islami, is a spent military force for years now. Politically it’s another story. With the deal, Hezb militants will now be able to run for office.

It was a hard nut to crack. Hekmatyar has always refused to sign any deal as long as US- / NATO troops de facto occupy Afghanistan. The final deal establishes Hezb and US / NATO agree to disagree – as long as Hekmatyar refuses to support terrorism. And Ghani’s people have to do the paperwork to remove Hezb-i-Islami from the UN’s list of terrorist organizations.

Whether incorporating Hezb into the fragile government in Kabul will intimidate the Taliban remains an open question.

CIA rat line in effect

Afghanistan for all practical purposes continues to be occupied by foreigners; in this aspect Hekmatyar’s logic happens to mirror the Taliban’s logic – even though the successors of Mullah Omar won’t be admitted to the power table in Kabul.

A Western covert intel operative with knowledge of how Afghanistan was handled at the highest levels in Washington lays down the case:

Osama bin Laden was a failed CIA asset that was used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan to restart the heroin trade, which is a trillion-dollar business. Mullah Omar was our ally against the Soviets, and a most honorable man, who shut down all the heroin plantations in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over as they considered the over 300,000 dead who died from heroin overdoses per year immoral. We turned on him and betrayed him. Osama was a guest of Mullah Omar, and he merely asked for evidence of Osama’s involvement in 9/11. Since there was none, as he was not involved, none could be furnished. Bush II ridiculed on television even the thought that he would be required to give evidence to a bow and arrow Mullah Omar.

It gets much juicier when the operative details what few have had the courage to spell out; the CIA’s real agenda in Afghanistan:

The CIA used the heroin proceeds for external operations and so their revenue had been cut off when the Taliban were in power. This way they could always circumvent the US Congress. Heroin; that is why we are still there. Terrorism is engineered through Operation Gladios as this is being used to justify these interventions. Most Western intel agencies are connected to this trade. 93 % of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan. After the US invasion heroin growing was immediately restarted. The military convoys from the Pakistan ports to Afghanistan carried back as backhaul the heroin for world distribution. The Taliban and Osama had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11.

Hekmatyar by the way was never connected to the heroin trade.

Kabul as it stands remains in control of the large population centers and roughly 70% of the country. The rest is Talibanistan. There’s no chance of Kabul winning the war. According to the numbers deployed by Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon and its allies have 14,000 troops in Afghanistan. The US contingent – 9,800 – will drop to 8,400 by the end of 2016.

Everyone remembers NATO «handing over control» – as in being ignominiously defeated by the Taliban – in 2014. Those remaining US troops on the ground euphemistically provide «training» and «air support» to the Afghan Army, and are themselves supported by hordes of military contractors. In parallel, deep in the shades, contractors keep moving the CIA heroin to the West.

The US-NATO combo has just pledged «to help fund Afghan security forces to the tune of around $1 billion annually over the next three years». Few will be aware that offers splendorous extra incentive to CIA-run heroin traders plying their wares across the EU.

Righteousness is rarely endearing, and when concocted in a brew of hypocrisy, it becomes noxious. US political campaigning tends to overflow in it, a mixture of rights, noisily championed liberties and supposed exceptionalism.

To that end, Donald Trump is enigmatic. He does, to a large extent fit that bill, only in so far as he assumes making money is a patriotic duty. But in being macho and prone to the business side of things, he shows how capitalism lacks a country.

That sentiment has its advantages.  A world where Russia’s Vladimir Putin would be shaking the hands of a US president warmly is a hard one to contemplate, though it might be better for peace.  Trump has promised that, were he to snatch victory come November, that would happen.

This point has meant that Putin is figuring more than he generally would in a US election.

Editorials regularly feature Cold War re-runs, pointing the finger at business interests that would place Trump at odds with the dictates of US foreign policy were he to charge into the White House.“It is unclear,” suggested University of New Haven professor Matthew Schmidt, “there wouldn’t be a continuing stream of conflict of interest either directly from his own holdings or his advisers if he had to deal with Russia in a place like Syria, for instance.”[1]

Given that US politicians have, during the course of the republic’s history, linked money interests to those of serving the US people, the point is hardly worth mentioning.

Casting a warm glance the way of the Kremlin has tickled the entire Hillary Clinton campaign.  “We’re trying elect a president,” proclaimed Clinton at a rally in California, “not a dictator.”  Advisors have busied themselves meeting various leaders in swing states of “Eastern European descent” in an effort to stir the pot of anti-Russian resentment.[2]

As Katie Glueck, writing for Politico, explains, the Clinton effort is part of a ploy to get deep into traditional Republican territory, one historically sympathetic to GOP causes and suspicious of the Russian Bear.  Trump’s pro-Putin talk, accompanied by lukewarm backing for NATO had “alarmed voters with close ties to Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia and other Eastern European countries”.

With a misplaced sense of purity, the Clintons insist on the idea that Trump’s lust for business, notably with the unwashed, makes him somewhat less that patriotic, following the money when he should be following the Stars and Stripes.

One would have thought that a voracious appetite for the bank account made him quintessentially American.

The Clinton critique does not get away from the obvious issue that every age, every period, finds its authoritarian figure to do business with.  For decades, US international interests were, and continue to be, aligned with the ruthless and anti-democratic.  The only question worth asking there is which dictator was preferred over another.The world of money, the eternal drive of transactions, continues with unmitigated enthusiasm, indifferent to the vices of strong men, the authoritarian bugbears.

Chile’s ruthless Augusto Pinochet and Milton Friedman are forever linked in a discourse of monetary bliss, the former thrilled by the economic advice dished out by the Chicago School, with Washington’s blessing.What does matter for the Clinton side of the argument is that democrats must at least put up some pretence for respecting human rights, as long as they worship before the crudely crafted effigy of Realpolitik.

The Clintons were never been immune to the world of the shady deal and backing characters of ill-repute. Goldman Sachs is hardly a saintly corporation, but is very much part of the Clinton fan club, having paid her ample sums for a string of speeches.  Does that put her at odds with making decent regulatory policy on rapacious banking practices?  Not in Clinton’s moral universe, where corruption takes place in open sight.The now deposed Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, along with his wife, were openly described as “friends of my family” despite a ruthless military rule that collapsed before the flood of the Arab Spring.  The current strong man, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has been doing his best to butter relations with the Clintons, despite a spate of forced disappearances and instances of torture.[3]

Then there is the nasty matter of Saudi Arabia, going about its good business of bombing Yemen with US supplied fighter jets. During Clinton’s time as Secretary of State, weapons transfers worth billions found their way to the kingdom.  The favour has been repaid in the form of donations to the Clinton Foundation.  One person’s authoritarian is another person’s calculating donor.

While Trump is hardly cherubic on this score, he is distinctly aware that any glass house in this matter is broken.  All is shattering, and it is time to shatter more. Making deals with dictators, if they be called that, took place before, as it will in future. Moral sanctimony from any side in US politics will hardly hide that point.

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

Notes

[1] http://www.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/2016/09/expert_trump_does_himself_no_favors_complimenting_putin

[2] http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/donald-trump-russia-vladimir-putin-swing-states-228930

[3] https://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/egypt-officially-you-do-not-exist-disappeared-and-tortured-in-the-name-of-counter-terrorism

‘We have to knock the hell out of ISIS, and we have to do it fast,’ Donald Trump urged in the first presidential debate, but after almost 55,000 bombs it might be time for a new strategy.

Despite dropping 54,611 bombs and missiles in 15,362 airstrikes across the Middle East, the U.S.-backed coalition seems no closer to stamping out terrorism than when it began.

That figure comes from Airwars, a nonprofit that keeps track of the aerial campaign against Daesh (an Arabic acronym for the terrorist group commonly known in the West as ISIS or ISIL) and other groups in Iraq, Syria and Libya.

Since the air war on Daesh began on Aug. 8, 2014, the U.S.-backed coalition has carried out 9,996 airstrikes in Iraq and 5,366 airstrikes in Syria.

Thick smoke and flames erupt from an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in Kobani, Syria, as seen from a hilltop on the outskirts of Suruc, at the Turkey-Syria border.

Airwars also attempts to track all civilian casualties caused by the U.S.-backed coalition and Russian bombs. These figures are unreliable, as official government sources routinely underestimate the number of civilians killed while generously inflating the numbers of combatants killed. To combat this bias, the NGO uses eyewitness accounts and local media to more accurately report on the civilian death toll.

According to the most recent report on the site, between three and seven civilians were killed, and 47 were injured in airstrikes carried out by the coalition on Mosul in northern Iraq during the early morning hours of Sept. 21. In a translation from a video published by NRN, a local Arabic-language news source, one eyewitness suggests the high body count from the airstrikes makes the coalition look even more brutal than Daesh:

When you see this bombing no one can blame Islamic State when they kill a spy with a bullet to his head. Innocent family members were killed by this bombing.

Airwars estimates that at least 1,612 civilians have been killed by the U.S.-backed coalition since 2014, though that figure could be as high as 2,437.

An aircraft lands after missions targeting the ISIS in Iraq from the deck of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush in the Persian Gulf. For weapons manufacturers, the nonstop pace of airstrikes targeting ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, as well as Saudi-led bombing of Yemen’s Shiite rebels and their allies, means billions of dollars more in sales.

Despite the loss of Fallujah, which was declared “liberated” from the terrorists in June, Daesh maintains a strong presence in Syria and Iraq, and continues to take credit for terrorist attacks abroad.

Mosul, currently under heavy bombardment by the coalition, is forecast to be the next target for Iraqi forces. In a Sept. 17 report from Politico, retired U.S. Army Col. Daniel L. Davis quoted a Kurdish commander who estimated there are still some 20,000 Daesh troops in and around Mosul, suggesting that even a victory in Mosul could be short-lived. Military experts Davis interviewed speculated that retaking the city from Daesh could trigger a new Iraqi civil war similar to the current conflict in Syria.

The air war began over two years ago under President Barack Obama, but both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have indicated that they intend to intensify the conflict against Daesh.

During Monday’s presidential debate Clinton said:

We’re working with NATO, the longest military alliance in the history of the world, to really turn our attention to terrorism. We’re working with our friends in the Middle East, many of which, as you know, are Muslim-majority nations.

In his response, Trump noted:

I think we have to get NATO to go into the Middle East with us, in addition to surrounding nations, and we have to knock the hell out of ISIS, and we have to do it fast, when ISIS formed in this vacuum created by Barack Obama and Secretary Clinton.

Responding to the candidates on Tuesday, Robert Fisk, an award-winning journalist who covers the Middle East for the Independent, expressed frustration at both candidates’ eagerness to continue the same, failing strategies. He wrote:

[H]aven’t we all been knocking the hell out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, even Lebanon (a few years ago), and achieving the constant rebirth of ever more vicious warriors, of which Isis – heaven spare us the thought – may soon generate another, even worse progeny?

Fisk, who is based in Beirut, also noted that Washington’s so-called “friends” in the Middle East include “[t]hose fantastic Saudis who gave us 15 of the 9/11 hijackers,” and suggested it will be America’s fault when the air war on Daesh inevitably creates more terrorism through blowback.

He concluded:

About the only nonsense left unuttered by Trump and Clinton was that Isis was born outside the United States. There they would have been on safe ground. Or would they? For I suspect there may be a growing number of Arabs who believe that Isis is indeed a child born in America.

State Department spokesman John Kirby warned Russia on Wednesday its radical Salafist terrorists in Syria may soon attack Russian cities.

“Extremist groups will continue to exploit the vacuums that are there in Syria to expand their operations, which could include attacks against Russian interests, perhaps even Russian cities. Russia will continue to send troops home in body bags, and will continue to lose resources, perhaps even aircraft,” Kirby said.

Because the “extremist groups” in Syria are supported by the United States and its Gulf Emirate partners, this remark can only be interpreted as a threat against Russia by the State Department.

Russia said as much.

“We can’t assess those statements as anything else but a call, a directive for action,” said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov added the statement by Kirby amounted to “the most frank confession by the U.S. side so far that the whole ‘opposition’ ostensibly fighting a ‘civil war’ in Syria is a U.S.-controlled international terrorist alliance.”

“What makes Kirby’s statement particularly shocking is that the scale of direct U.S. influence on terrorists’ activity is global and reaches as far as Russia,” he said.

CBS News tried to downplay the comments by Zakharova and Konashenkov:

The remarks by Russian officials have shown a degree of mistrust and strain between Moscow and Washington after the collapse of the U.S.-Russia-brokered truce and the Syrian army onslaught on Aleppo backed by Russian warplanes. The growing friction makes it increasingly unlikely that the cease-fire could be revived.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday that Washington is “on the verge” of ending Syria talks with Moscow because of days of deadly bombings of Aleppo by Russian and Syrian planes.

In other words, Kerry is threatening to shut down the truce in response to Syria’s effort to fight against US and Saudi-backed terrorists destroying its country.

Konashenkov’s remarks are prescient. The Russians are well aware this “international terrorist alliance” (created by the CIA, Pakistani intelligence, and the Saudis) was imported into the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union following the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan. “Despite its anti-American ideology, Islamic fundamentalism was largely serving Washington’s strategic interests in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and the Middle East,” writes Michel Chossudovsky.

Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab, rebel leaders fighting in the renegade Chechen autonomous region of the Russian Federation, were trained and indoctrinated in CIA-sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The CIA has exploited Islam to destroy secular institutions in the Russian Federation. “The enforcement of Islamic law in the largely secular Muslim societies of the former Soviet Union has served America’s strategic interests in the region. Previously, a strong secular tradition based on a rejection of Islamic law prevailed throughout the Central Asian republics and the Caucasus, including Chechnya and Dagestan (which are part of the Russian Federation),” Chossudovsky adds.

The Saudis imported their radical Wahhabist creed into Chechnya, Dagestan, and Tajikistan in the late 1980s following the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Islamic Djamaat of Dagestan and Chechen separatists established an independent Islamist state in the Caucasus. The CIA asset Ibn Al-Khattab organized raids against the Russian army.

The establishment media portrays the Russian response to Kirby’s statement as intransigence and unwillingness to participate in a proposed truce calling for an end to attacks on jihadists attempting to overthrow al-Assad and establish a Wahhabist principality in Syria.

The Russians have a direct interest in stopping terrorism in Syria and Kirby provided an additional rationale with his remark.

It is one year since the beginning of a Palestinian youth-driven, anti-colonial revolt characterised by protests and attacks on Israeli forces and settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), along with brutal violence and punitive measures by Israeli authorities.

The timeline is not precise; by October 1, 2015, anti-occupation violence by Palestinians had been gradually on the rise, with ebbs and flows, for a few years. Some have dubbed it the ‘Jerusalem Intifada’. Others have described it as “less than an Intifada and more than a popular blow-up.”

According to a Quds News Network article published this week, 246 Palestinians have been killed over the last year, and a further 18,500 injured. Other sources cite 230 fatalities (Ma’an News Agency) or “more than 225” (Amnesty International).

The majority of Palestinians were killed while conducting attacks, or alleged attacks; in July, for example, the Palestine Red Crescent said that 139 of the then-total 218 fatalities were assailants or alleged assailants (just under two-thirds).

However, as Associated Press noted earlier this month, “Palestinians have frequently accused Israelis of using excessive force against assailants and said in many cases, alleged assailants were not even attackers.” Such vital information is, regrettably, rarely included in many news agencies’ articles.

Certainly, a number of Palestinians – typically young adults – have carried out attacks over the last year, the overwhelming majority of which have targeted uniformed Israeli occupation forces or settlers in the OPT. Some of these assailants were executed after they no longer posed a threat.

But Israeli forces – including in incidents where the military changed its version of events a number of times – have also killed Palestinians falsely labelled as assailants, as well as Palestinians shot in the context of arrest raids or during the suppression of demonstrations.

It is instructive to note that, even according to the Israeli authorities, the number of Palestinians killed purely in the context of protests and raids over the last year (71) isdouble the total number of Israelis killed by Palestinians (33, plus two foreign nationals).

Palestinians killed by Israeli armed forces are rarely humanised in the West. In the media, their deaths merit – at best – a couple of paragraphs that always includes the Israeli military spokesperson’s version of events (and often only their version). And then everyone moves on.

Here then, is a snapshot of the human cost of Israel’s apartheid regime, and a few of the stories of those Palestinians who lost their lives over the past year.

Obeidallah was shot dead by an Israeli soldier in Aida refugee camp, northern Bethlehem. He was standing, observing clashes between residents and occupation forces some 70 metres away, when he was struck with one live bullet to the chest. Obeidallah was one of five children, and his 17-year-old brother Muhammad described him as his “closest friend.” According to his mother Dalal, the young teen had “always dreamed of visiting” an aunt in Jerusalem, but, she added, “we are deprived of visiting Jerusalem.” The Israeli army subsequently claimed that the killing of Obeidallah was “unintentional.” A criminal investigation has been opened by the Israeli Military Advocate General (MAG) into the shooting, but a year on, there is no indication of any conclusion.

Shadi was killed when Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinian demonstrators throwing stones at army watchtowers along the border fence east of Gaza City. Six Palestinians werekilled that day, and 145 injured, as well-protected Israeli soldiers cut down unarmed protesters with live ammunition.  Shadi worked with his father as an electrician, and according to his younger brother, was planning to get married. “[Shadi] wasn’t just my brother”, he said, “he was a good friend. We were always together. We always talked to each other and asked each other for advice.” More than 20 Palestinians, including a child aged 10, have been killed by the Israeli army in Gaza fence protests over the last year. No Israeli investigations have been opened into any of their deaths.

Nur Hassan, five months pregnant at the time, was killed alongside her three-year-old daughter Rahaf, in an Israeli airstrike on their family home in the a-Zeitun neighbourhood of the Gaza Strip. The house suffered a direct hit, and was completely destroyed. The bombing, which took place in the middle of the night as the family slept, was described by the Israeli military as an attack on “weapon production sites.” The Hassan home was located in a farming area, surrounded by olive and fruit orchards, with which the family made their living. In a widely-viewed video, the surviving father, Yihya, held Rahaf’s body, saying repeatedly, “Wake up, my daughter.” The second child, five-year-old Muhammad, also survived the bombing. There has been no Israeli investigation.

Ershied was killed at a checkpoint in front of Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, in what was reported by Israeli authorities to have been an attempted stabbing by a “terrorist.” Eyewitness accounts reported by human rights groups contradict this, however. During a second inspection, Border Police officers began shouting at her to show her knife. According to Amnesty International, “warning shots were fired at her feet, prompting her to step back and raise her hands in the air. She was shouting at the police that she did not have a knife and still had her arms raised when police again opened fire, shooting her six or seven times.” Dania was a pupil at Al-Rayyan Girls’ High in Hebron, and was killed in her school uniform. There is no investigation into her death.

Jaradat was killed after attacking Israeli occupation forces outside Beit Einun village near Hebron. He stabbed one soldier before being repeatedly shot, including after he was lying motionless on the ground. Jaradat was an accounting student at Al-Quds University, and hailed from Sair, another Hebron area village. After the killing of Dania Ershied (see above), Jaradat wrote on Facebook: “Imagine if this were your sister!” His bereaved father toldjournalists: “We live well; my son needed nothing. But the only thing missing in the lives of these youths is freedom.”

Al-Sharawi was shot dead by Israeli occupation forces as she approached a petrol station in Hebron. The Israeli military claimed that the mother of six had attempted a car-ramming attack. Yet a video of the incident reveals that the car was going slow enough for soldiers to easily move out of the way – before they opened heavy fire on the vehicle as it entered the station forecourt. The gunfire, which continued well after she had passed the soldiers, alsoinjured a petrol station employee. Al-Sharawi’s son said his mother was on her way to lunch at her sister’s house. According to Amnesty International, the Israeli forces’ use of lethal violence was illegal even if the grandmother had been carrying out an attack. However, Israel’s MAG decided that no criminal investigation will be opened.

Abdullah Shalaldah was killed in a hospital room by Israeli occupation forces disguised as Palestinian civilians (including one pretending to be a pregnant woman in a wheelchair). The soldiers entered a room on the hospital’s third floor, with the intent of arresting a patient, Azzam Shalaldah. As they burst into the room, they shot the patient’s cousin, Abdullah, three times in the head and upper body. The Israeli army claimed he had attacked soldiers, but witnesses said he had been unarmed, and was killed as he came out of the bathroom where he had been washing for prayers. Thousands attended Shalaldah’sfuneral in Sair. There is no Israeli military investigation into his death.

Awad was killed during a demonstration at the Separation Wall in Budrus. After Friday prayers, residents marched towards the Wall, built on village land, where Israeli forces awaited them. After a few hours of clashes, a smaller group of youths approached the Wall, only to be ambushed by soldiers. Awad was grabbed and assaulted, but managed to free himself. As he ran away, an Israeli soldier shot him in the back. Other Israeli soldiers prevented his friends taking him the quickest route to hospital. The Israeli army claimedthat a “rioter” tried to grab a soldier’s weapon.  Lafi was one of eight children. In 2013, he was arrested and detained for 17 months for helping to destroy surveillance cameras in the hated Wall. No criminal investigation is being opened into his killing.

Abu Khalaf, from Kafr Aqab in Occupied East Jerusalem, was shot and killed by Israeli forces outside Damascus Gate, after stabbing and wounding two Border Police officers. In videofootage captured by an Al Jazeera camera crew who happened to be on the scene at the time, Israeli forces opened heavy fire on Abu Khalaf even once he was lying motionless on the ground. The Israeli authorities held Mohammad’s body for 200 days, only returning him to his family for burial on September 6, 2016. “Today, the pain from the unhealed wound was renewed when we received his body and buried it”, his mother Rula told journalists. Israeli authorities subsequently decided that no charges would be filed against the officers involved.

Al-Salaymeh was shot to death by Israeli occupation forces as he drove with his friends in a-Ram in the West Bank. The Israeli military claimed that soldiers only opened fire in order to thwart an attempted car-ramming. The surviving passengers, however, said that they had been heading to a bakery and were unaware of the presence of Israeli forces in the area, a version of events supported by evidence gathered by human rights group B’Tselem. Al-Salaymeh, who had got married three months before his death, was on his way to get cookies for his pregnant wife when he was killed. According to his father, Al-Salaymeh “really helped with supporting the family – this is why he left high school and went to work.” There is no investigation being conducted into his killing.

Tabakhi was struck by a so-called black sponge round, fired by Israeli Border Police officers in a-Ram, Occupied East Jerusalem. He died shortly afterwards in hospital. Confrontations between local youths and Israeli forces in the area are common, owing to work being done on the Separation Wall. Shortly before Tabakhi was shot, some youths were throwing stones at a Border Police jeep, prompting an officer to exit the vehicle and give chase. The 10-year-old was shot in the chest from a distance of around 30 metres. An adult who went to his aid was also shot in the hand. An Israeli police spokesperson merely noted that no ‘live fire’ had been used.

Abu Hashhash was killed by Israeli occupation forces during a brutal, day-long raid of al-Fawwar refugee camp, near Hebron. He was shot in the back the moment he stepped out of his front door, by an Israeli sniper concealed in a Palestinian home about 30-40 metres away. Israeli soldiers had made a small hole in the wall of the house, through which the teenager was shot. Abu Hashhash was a keen football player, in a camp of some 9,500 residents. During that same raid, Israeli forces injured a further 52 other residents, including with live ammunition. At the time of writing, there is no news of an Israeli military investigation into his death.

The Obama administration has signaled its support for India’s “surgical” cross-border military strikes carried out Wednesday night in Pakistan-held Kashmir.

India’s attack was patently illegal and highly provocative. US strategic think tanks frequently refer to disputed Kashmir as the most dangerous “nuclear flashpoint” in the world. Yet American officials have studiously avoided making any criticism of India, a “global strategic partner” of US imperialism and pillar of its military-strategic offensive against China.

A chorus of former Obama and Bush administration officials now employed by various military-strategic think tanks are lauding the Indian action and even praising New Delhi for its “restraint,” even as the Hindu supremacist BJP government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi pushes South Asia closer to the precipice of all-out war.

India claims it sent ground forces, paratroops and attack helicopters to more than a half-dozen places up to three kilometers inside Azad, or Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. It boasts that it inflicted “heavy,” “double-digit” casualties on “terrorists and those trying to shield them.”

Pakistan, while contesting the Indian version of events, concedes that two of its soldiers were killed and nine wounded Wednesday night.

The strikes represent a dangerous new turn in India’s strategy toward Pakistan. This is underscored by the fact that they are being celebrated not only by India’s virulently right-wing BJP government, but by the entire political establishment and corporate media. The attacks are being hailed as proof of a stronger, bolder India, which has thrown off the shackles of “strategic restraint.”

For more than four decades, India had not conducted military operations inside Pakistan. Or, to be more precise, any actions it did carry out were kept secret, with the aim of avoiding escalating strikes and counterstrikes that could quickly lead to war and even nuclear conflict.

Washington’s readiness to endorse India’s new aggressive posture is utterly reckless. It will only encourage New Delhi to take still greater military-strategic risks. It exemplifies the highly destabilizing role being played in South Asia by US imperialism and its “pivot to Asia.” Particularly incendiary is Washington’s drive to make India a “frontline” state in its offensive to encircle and prepare for war against China.

When questioned Thursday about Washington’s attitude toward the Indian strikes, Obama administration officials repeatedly evaded giving a straight answer. Instead, they issued general, pro-forma calls for both sides to show restraint and engage in dialogue, while insisting that Pakistan had to do more to prevent cross-border “terrorism.”

So anxious was US State Department spokesman John Kirby to shift attention from the Indian military strikes that at one point during his press briefing he apparently became flustered. He misinterpreted a question about whether the Indian strikes constituted the type of “escalation” that “Secretary Kerry had cautioned against,” and took it to be a reference to the September 18 terrorist attack on the Uri military base in India-held Kashmir.

Pressed as to whether the Indian strikes constituted an “escalation,” Kirby again ducked the question, while suggesting, as New Delhi does, that “terrorism” is the central cause of India-Pakistan tensions. “Our message to both sides has been the same,” declared Kirby, “in terms of encouraging them to increase communication to deal with [the terrorist] threat and to avoid steps that escalate the tensions. And I’m…not going to get into characterizing each and every step along the way there.”

It is likely that Washington had advance warning India was going to attack Pakistan and gave New Delhi a green light. In the run-up to Wednesday night’s attack, there was a flurry of phone calls between top US and Indian officials, including conversations between US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Indian counterpart, Sushma Swaraj, and between US National Security Adviser Susan Rice and her Indian counterpart, Ajit Doval.

What is incontrovertible is that in the aftermath of India throwing off “strategic restraint” to attack Pakistan, the Obama administration has signaled its support, although it finds it politic—under conditions where the Pentagon remains dependent on Pakistan’s logistical support to maintain the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan—not to go on record as publicly endorsing Indian strikes in Pakistan.

Ex-US government officials are under no such constraints and they have been lining up to voice support for India’s new and more aggressive military-strategic posture.

Bruce Riedel, a longtime CIA analyst and former AfPak War adviser to the Obama administration, told the Hindustan Times that India was within its rights to attack Pakistan, citing as a precedent Washington’s illegal Predator drone strikes and other violations of Pakistan sovereignty. “India,” said Riedel, “can note that the United States has been carrying out attacks in Pakistan for over a decade to kill terrorists, including Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mansour (the Afghan Taliban chief summarily executed last May).”

Ashley Tellis, who in the administration of George W. Bush played a key role in negotiating the 2008 Indo-US civil nuclear accord, was no less emphatic in support of India’s attack. Indian Prime Minister Modi, he told the Press Trust of India, “could not let the outrage at Uri go unanswered.”

Tellis praised the Indian action as “carefully measured.” Invoking New Delhi’s transparent, trumped-up pretext for the attack, that Pakistan was about to launch terrorist squads across the border, Tellis added, “Striking at terrorist launch pads was meant to signal that India has not lost its freedom to retaliate, but puts the onus of further escalation on Pakistan.”

John Blank, a former South Asian policy adviser to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and currently a Rand Corporation analyst,” said “any (US) criticism of India for a cross-border action would have seemed hypocritical,” given its own “surgical strike against Obama bin Laden in Abbottabad (Pakistan).”

Blank pointed to the significance of the Wednesday evening phone call between the Indian and US national security advisers. “The phone call between Ajit Doval and Susan Rice…enlisted the US to help prevent a Pakistani counter-strike.”

During the Cold War, Pakistan was a key US ally. Washington armed its military and encouraged it in its reactionary military-strategic rivalry with India, which, after 1971, was formally allied with the Soviet Union by a “Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation.”

The US subcontracted to Pakistani intelligence the training of the Afghan mujahedeen and allied Arab fundamentalist forces it used in the 1980s to bleed the Soviet Union in a proxy war in Afghanistan, while backing to the hilt Pakistan’s Islamist dictator Zia ul-Haq.

But since the turn of this century, Washington has been seeking to build up India as a counterweight to China, and since Obama launched the “pivot to Asia” in 2011, the US has sought to make India the fourth pillar of an anti-China alliance alongside its key Asian-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia.

Building on the Indo-US “global strategic partnership” forged by the previous Congress Party-led government, the 28-month-old BJP regime has, to Washington’s delight, dramatically expanded India’s integration into the “pivot.” This has included adopting the Obama administration’s provocative stance on the South China Sea, expanding bilateral and trilateral ties with Japan and Australia, and agreeing to allow US warplanes and battleships to make routine use of Indian bases for resupply and repair and the forward deployment of war materiel.

In conjunction with this shift, the Modi government has pursued a more aggressive policy against Pakistan and China, which has developed extensive economic ties in South Asia. Under Modi, India is asserting itself as the regional hegemon. This has involved diplomatic and political thrusts as well as major new arms purchases and aggressive military deployments on its borders.

In the face of the burgeoning threat from the Indo-US alliance, Beijing and Islamabad have strengthened their own longstanding strategic ties.

Already on the first anniversary of the Modi government’s coming to office, the aforementioned Riedel noted that “the bipolar alliance system in South Asia has hardened… the United States and India are closer to each other, and China and Pakistan have come much closer together.”

A key element in this is the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a $46 billion network of rail, road, pipeline and power projects linking western China to Pakistan’s Arabian Sea port of Gwadar.

India is mounting a very public campaign against the CPEC because it will provide a huge and desperately needed economic shot in the arm to Pakistan and because it fears Gwadar could ultimately serve as an Indian Ocean base for the Chinese Navy.

The US has left it to India to publicly campaign against the CPEC, on the grounds that it will pass through parts of the former British Empire princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which India claims is rightfully hers. But there is no question that Washington also views the CPEC as a strategic threat, as it would enable Beijing to circumvent US plans to impose an economic blockade on China using Indian Ocean and South China Sea chokepoints in the event of a war or war crisis.

Washington’s support for Wednesday’s Indian strikes on Pakistan involves more than a desire to cement its alliance with India. Its relations with Pakistan are badly frayed and increasingly characterized by bitterness and suspicion, in part because of Islamabad’s attempt to ensure itself a major say in any political settlement of the Afghan war by retaining ties to sections of the Taliban, especially the Haqqani network. But even more fundamental are Pakistan’s close ties to China, the power Washington has identified as the principal obstacle to US domination of Eurasia.

The USA declared war on Spain in the middle of 1898, and sent their navy and troops to “liberate” Cuba from the Spanish yoke. Spain was defeated and negotiations between the two countries began in Paris in order to reach a peace agreement, finally signed in December 1898. |1|

During these negotiations, the Spanish authorities defended the following position: since the United States had taken their colony, they were obliged to honour Cuba’s debts to Spain. Such were the rules of the game. And indeed the rules cited by Spain did constitute common practice in the 19th century. A State which annexed another state must assume its debts.

The United States refused, saying it was not their intention to annex Cuba. In substance, they declared: “We liberated Cuba and gave assistance to independentists who had been fighting you for several years.”

The Spanish answered that if Cuba became independent, it must repay the debt, as had all the other Spanish colonies that had become independent during the 19th century.

The United States categorically rejected Spain’s demand of payment from Cuba. Finally, Spain signed the peace treaty with the United States and gave up on recovering the debt.

The most common version of the narrative of what took place tends to suggest that the United States rejected Spain’s debt claims against Cuba because that debt had served to maintain Cuba and the Cuban people under the Spanish yoke. But when we analyse the content of the negotiations, the explanation is very different. Admittedly, the United States advanced this argument, but it was only one among many others they used to justify their position.

What were the arguments advanced by the United States?

• 1) Spain had issued Spanish securities in Europe with French and British bankers in the name of Cuba. Spain was guarantor of the issuance of these securities and they were backed by revenue from the Cuban customs and other taxes. The majority, if not all, of the bonds issued by Spain in Cuba’s name and the wealth they generated remained in Spain.

• 2) Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as a Cuban debt because Cuba, as a colony, did not have the right to issue securities on its own initiative or in its own name. The island’s finances were controlled exclusively by the Spanish government.

• 3) There was no proof that the Spanish bonds secured by Cuba’s revenues were actually used for projects that were beneficial to Cuba. Quite to the contrary, the history of Cuba’s finances as a colony showed that revenue from the island was absorbed by Spain’s national budget. In fact, until 1861, Cuba produced revenues well above the expenditures made by the Cuban government put in place by Spain. The revenue in excess of those expenditures was transferred in large part to Spain. Then, when Spain mounted costly military expeditions in Mexico, in Santo Domingo and against the independentists in Cuba, Cuba’s finances began to go into the red. In other words, Cuba had begun to run a budget deficit because Spain was using Cuba’s revenues to finance colonial wars both outside Cuba and within Cuba itself. The Spanish military expeditions into Mexico and Santo Domingo used Cuba as their base.

• 4) Based on arguments 1 and 3, the United States’ position was that Cuba’s debtor status was a fiction since the so-called Cuban debts were in reality Spain’s. The United States argued that Spain’s budget absorbed the surplus produced by the island while saddling it with loans which in fact served its own interests and not Cuba’s.

Frank Martini. Cartographer. – The Department of History, United States Military Academy (CC – Wikimedia)

Only after having used the preceding arguments did the United States add the well-known moral argument: “From the moral point of view, the proposal to impose these debts upon Cuba is equally untenable. If, as is sometimes asserted, the struggles for Cuban independence have been carried on and supported by a minority of the people of the island, to impose upon the inhabitants as a whole the cost of suppressing the insurrections would be to punish the many for the deeds of the few. If, on the other hand, those struggles have, as the American Commissioners maintain, represented the hopes and aspirations of the body of the Cuban people, to crush the inhabitants by a burden created by Spain in the effort to oppose their independence would be even more unjust.[…] [The instances of state practice adduced by Spain] are conceived to be inapplicable, legally and morally, to the so called ‘Cuban debt’, the burden of which, imposed upon the people of Cuba without their consent and by force of arms, was one of the principal wrongs for the termination of which the struggles for Cuban independence were undertaken.” |2|

In light of these arguments by the United States, Spain changed its tactics in the negotiations. It proposed that the Cuban debts be submitted for international arbitration in order to determine whatshare had actually been used in Cuba’s interest. Spain offered to bear the burden of that share of the debts which had not served Cuba and asked the United States to take responsibility for the other part or transfer it to the new independent Cuban State. The American negotiators telegraphed President McKinley to ask his opinion. He responded by making it clear that the United States would not agree to take on any Cuban debt and would not encourage Cuba to agree to do so.

In conclusion, the United States purely and simply repudiated the debt claimed by Spain from Cuba.

In 1909, after the United States had withdrawn its troops from Cuba, Spain demanded that the “independent” government of Cuba repay a portion of the debt. Unsurprisingly, Cuba refused, arguing that the Treaty of Paris of December 1898, which ended the conflict between Spain and the United States, had cancelled all debts. From that point, Spain was forced to negotiate with her French and British creditors.

Further, it needs to be stressed, on the one hand, that at no time did the United States invite the Cubans to send delegates to participate in the negotiations held in Paris; and on the other hand that the United States made use of the argument relating to the despotic nature of the colonial regime only secondarily. They concentrated on the use that Spain had made of the so-called Cuban loans to demonstrate that it was Spain first and foremost that benefited from them. They also showed that Spain, and not Cuba, was the actual borrower.

I can’t resist drawing a parallel with the current situation in Europe. The comparison with the Washington-Madrid-Havana conflict in 1898 is of capital importance if we study the situation of Greece and other countries such as Cyprus or Portugal in the 2010s.

After 2010, many recent studies demonstrate that the amounts Greece is being held responsible for were never transferred to the Greek authorities. They served mainly to repay private foreign banks, in particular French and German ones. Since 2010, credits have been granted to Greece by 14 States of the Eurozone, by the IMF and by the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which took over from the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), because Greece no longer has access to the financial markets (in another context, like Cuba under Spanish domination). Thus the loans are in fact borrowed by third parties and then imposed on Greece under extremely harsh conditions. Less than 10% of the debt amounts imposed on Greece since 2010 have actually transited via Greece’s budget, and those sums have been used to finance counter-reforms and privatisations. The borrowers mentioned above get financing from private European banks and then use their credit to repay them without the borrowed amounts ever actually going to the Greek treasury. It can be demonstrated that these loans have been of no benefit to the Greek people. They have not improved the country’s economic and financial situation. Quite to the contrary.

It should be added that, initially, the 14 countries of the Eurozone who granted credits to Greece made profits at the country’s expense by practising abusive interest rates (between 4 and 5.5%) between 2010 and 2012. The IMF also profited at Greece’s expense, as did the ECB. |3|

That Greece is a borrower nation has been a fiction since 2010. That fiction serves the interests of the principal powers of the Eurozone, beginning with Germany and France. These major powers themselves defend the interests their major corporations, be they banking, industrial (and in particular arms makers) or commercial firms. The major powers have convinced 12 other Eurozone member countries and the IMF to maintain the fiction, with the complicity of the Greek authorities. The European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and the ECB participate in furthering the narrative. Big capital in Greece (banking, commercial – e.g. shipping – etc.) itself profits from the situation.

In the cases of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, and other countries, there will be no major power like the United States in 1898 ready to intervene to repudiate their debts. However the arguments used by Washington are applicable to many indebted countries, and since there will be no supreme saviour, it is up to the people (of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal and all other peoples) to take the situation in hand and free themselves from the yoke of debt and other mechanisms of extortion and subordination. The international struggle for the abolition of illegitimate debt is more vital than it has ever been.

Translated by Snake Arbusto and Vicki Briault Manus

Notes

|1| The account which follows is based in part on Sarah Ludington, G. Mitu Gulati, Alfred L. Brophy, “Applied Legal History: Demystifying the Doctrine of Odious Debts,” 2009, http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi…. Their explanation differs from the one given by Alexander Sack.

|2| Source of citation: J. B. Moore, Digest of International Law, vol. I, pp. 358-359.

|3| See details in Chapter 3 of the Preliminary Report of the Greek Debt Truth Commission,http://www.cadtm.org/Preliminary-Re…. The IMF demanded an interest rate of around 5% of Greece. The ECB had Greece repay it in securities at 100% of their face value when it had purchased them at 60 or 70% of their value on the secondary market. And it demanded a rate of over 6% on those securities while at the same time it was lending to the private banks of the Euro Zone at 0%!

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France. He is the author of Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014);Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012 (see here), etc. See his bibliography:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Toussaint 

He co-authored World debt figures 2015 with Pierre Gottiniaux, Daniel Munevar and Antonio Sanabria (2015); and with Damien Millet Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers, Monthly Review Books, New York, 2010. Since the 4^th April 2015 he is the scientific coordinator of the Greek Truth Commission on Public Debt.

Deutsche Bank’s shares plunged to record lows this week, sparking talk of a government bailout to avert a new financial crash. The turmoil surrounding Germany’s biggest bank demonstrates that all of the contradictions of the global financial system that led to the meltdown of 2008 are once again erupting. Now, however, these contradictions are fuelling and intersecting with economic and political tensions between the major powers. These geo-political conflicts are, in turn, intensifying the financial crisis.

The financial position of Deutsche Bank has been of concern for a number of years, with the International Monetary Fund saying last June that it appeared to be “the most important net contributor to systemic risks in the global financial system.” But the immediate cause of the present crisis was political.

After a protracted investigation, the US Department of Justice moved last month to impose a $14 billion penalty on Deutsche Bank for fraudulent practices in relation to the US sub-prime mortgage market in the lead-up to the 2008 crisis. Both the substance of this decision and the circumstances surrounding it indicate that it was a calculated move to hit Germany’s only major international bank.

The decision was leaked to the Wall Street Journal, rather than being discussed behind closed doors so that a private settlement could be reached. It emerged in the midst of rising tensions between the US and the European Union, particularly with Germany.

Following the EU decision to hit Apple with a €13 billion back tax bill—a step that met with trenchant criticism from US government and corporate circles—the Justice Department move in relation to Deutsche Bank was widely regarded in European circles as payback. Tensions over the Apple penalty and its implications for US investment and profit-making in Europe had been compounded by the virtual scuttling of the US-sponsored Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership by Germany and France.

The Deutsche Bank share plunge was halted on Friday, at least for now, on the back of news that the US was prepared to lower its fine to $5.4 billion. This, however, will prove at most to be a short-lived ceasefire in an ongoing economic and financial war.

The conflicts are not temporary phenomena, but are rooted in two interconnected objective developments: the ongoing stagnation in the world economy, marked by low growth levels, declining trade, lower investment and falling productivity, and the development of a massive financial bubble reflected in the rise of stock and bond markets.

The contradiction between booming financial markets and intractable slump in the underlying economy is assuming an ever more explosive form. Notwithstanding the illusion that money can simply beget more money through speculation and central bank stimulus, financial assets represent, in the final analysis, a claim on the wealth produced in the real economy.

For decades, financial assets were roughly equivalent in size to global gross domestic product. But the rise of financialisation, starting in the 1980s, led to a situation where, by the time of the 2008 crisis, these assets were more than 360 percent of global GDP. This ratio has only increased since then as a result of the extraordinary monetary policies—the pumping of trillions of dollars into the financial system and ultra-low and even negative interest rates—adopted by the world’s major central banks.

Commenting on the Deutsche Bank crisis, one financial analyst told theFinancial Times: “Investors are now worried that sooner or later there will be a heavy price to pay for the current market distortions.” The market distortions, however, are only the immediate expression of profound contradictions in the very foundations of the global financial system.

Under conditions where financial asset claims vastly outweigh real wealth, each section of finance capital must turn ever more viciously against its rivals in an attempt to eliminate them.

These tendencies find particular expression in Deutsche Bank. For decades, it worked in close collaboration with key sections of German large-scale industry. But with the growth of global finance capital, this business model became increasingly unviable, and at the end of the 1980s Deutsche Bank sought to turn itself into a global investment bank and aggressively targeted its rivals, particularly US banks. Its criminal activities in the US sub-prime market, mirroring those of US competitors such as Goldman Sachs, were part of this process.

While American banks were strengthened by the bailouts organised by the US government, the financial position of Deutsche Bank has been steadily eroded.

Without a bailout, it needs to raise more capital from the market in order to compete. But the ultra-low and negative interest rate regime, set in place by the major central banks, means that its basic business model has been adversely affected and profit expectations have been lowered. Under conditions where Deutsche Bank continues to hold on its balance sheet high levels of toxic derivative assets and the prospects for a serious revival of world trade and economic growth become increasingly remote, its counterparties demand ever higher rates of return on credit.

As the Wall Street Journal noted: “Deutsche Bank’s biggest problem isn’t just that it needs capital, but that it will find it very hard to raise any,” since it will “struggle to convince investors that it can make a return that beats its cost of capital in the years ahead.”

Just as rival gangs conduct a turf war of each against all in a bid to strengthen their own position, so Deutsche Bank has been targeted. Hedge funds and speculators have had a field day betting against the bank.

In a statement to employees on Friday, Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan alluded to the forces at work, declaring that in banking, trust was everything, and that “there are currently forces at play in the market that want to weaken this trust in us.”

Deutsche Bank is not the only target. The wider dimensions of the conflict were given voice in a statement this week by Valdis Dombrovskis, a vice-president of the European Commission. He declared that reforms to global banking being pushed by the United States, which would lead to “significant increases in capital requirements shouldered by Europe’s banking sector,” would not be accepted.

While not directly naming the US, he said: “We want a solution that works for Europe and does not put our banks at a disadvantage compared to our global competitors.”

The way in which the insoluble contradictions of the global capitalist economy are fuelling geo-political tensions, and vice versa, as revealed in the Deutsche Bank crisis, is of profound significance. As the tormented history of the 20th Century shows, it is an indubitable expression of a global breakdown of the capitalist system that leads inexorably, unless prevented by the international working class, to world war.

In a must-watch interview with the BBC, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says the Obama Administration has protected and supported Al-Nusra in Syria

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov granted the BBC an exclusive 20 minute interview, probably in an attempt to reach out to not-completely brain dead western television viewers.

The questions asked by the sniveling BBC anchor were predictable:

1. Will you stop murdering babies in Aleppo with cluster munitions and bunker busters?
2. Will you apologize for bombing the aid convoy?
3. Will you apologize for shooting down MH-17?
4. How will Russia survive more sanctions?

True to form, Lavrov very succinctly laid out Russia’s positions on all these “issues”. Oh, and he added a few zingers, like the Obama administration “gave rise and support to Al-Nusra”.

Actually, throughout the interview Lavrov repeatedly points out how the United States has steadfastly refused to distinguish between Al-Nusra and the “moderate rebels”, insisting that they’re all moderate and therefore should not be bombed or hurt in any way.

Imagine, that just a week ago the U.S. agreed to weed out the “baddies”; now that the cease-fire has failed, the Pentagon is arming the same groups they vowed to destroy along with Russia. Incredible.

Oh, and here’s the takeaway: Moscow is tired of Washington’s games. Aleppo will be cleansed of Al-Nusra, with or without Washington’s “help”.

The decision whether to allow the commercialisation of the first genetically modified (GM) food crop (mustard) in India is close. Serious conflicts of interest, sleight of hand and regulatory delinquency – not to mention outright fraud – could mean the decision coming down in favour of commercialisation.

The bottom line is government collusion with transnational agribusiness, which is trying to hide in the background, despite much talk of Professor Pental and his team at Delhi University being independent developers of the GM mustard (DMH 11) in question The real story behind GM mustard in India seems to be that it presents the opportunity to make various herbicide tolerant (HT) mustard hybrids using India’s best germ plasm, which would be an irresistible money spinner for the developers and chemical manufacturers (Bayer-Monsanto).

Campaigner Aruna Rodrigues is petitioning India’s Supreme Court (view the petition), seeking a moratorium on the release of any genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into the environment pending a comprehensive, transparent and rigorous biosafety protocol in the public domain conducted by agencies of independent expert bodies, the results of which are made public.

If at first you fail… try collusion and fraud?

In order to understand the GM mustard issue in India, it is important to appreciate the history behind it, as outlined in the writ petition:

In 2002, Proagro Seed Company (now Bayer), applied for commercial approval for exactly the same construct that Prof Pental and his team are now promoting as HT Mustard DMH 11. The reason today matches Bayer’s claim then of 20% better yield increase (than conventional mustard). Bayer was turned down because the ICAR [Indian Council of Agricultural Research] said that their field trials did not give evidence of superior yield.

The petition says that, some 14 years later, invalid field trials and unremittingly fraudulent data now supposedly provide evidence of a superior yield of 25%. It continues:

HT DMH 11 is the same Bayer HT GMO construct – an herbicide tolerant GMO of three alien genes. It employs, like the Bayer construct, pollen sterilisation technology BARNASE, with the fertility restorer gene BARSTAR (B & B system) (modified from the original genes sourced from a soil bacterium) and the herbicidal bar gene in each GMO parental line. The employment of the B & B system is to facilitate the making of hybrids as mustard is largely a self-pollinating crop (but outcrosses at rates of up to 20%). THERE IS NO TRAIT FOR YIELD. HT DMH 11 is straightforwardly an herbicide tolerant (HT) crop, though this aspect has been consistently marginalised by the developers over the last several years.

In basic terms, as mustard tends to be self-pollinating, in order to produce a hybrid, two parent lines had to be genetically modified. Barnase and barstar technology were used in the parent lines. And the outcome is three GMOs: the two parents and the offspring, DMH 11, which will be ideal for working with glufosinate (Bayer’s ‘Liberty’ and ‘Basta’).

… the plan is that the OFFICIAL ROUTE FOR THE FIRST-TIME RELEASE OF AN HT CROP AND A FOOD CROP, WILL BE THROUGH HT DMH 11 AND/OR its TWO HT PARENTAL LINES by STEALTH. Since the claimed YIELD superiority of HT DMH 11 through the B & B system over Non-GMO varieties and hybrids is quite simply NOT TRUE…

In other words, GM mustard is both a Trojan horse and based on a hoax.

Whatever happened to science and proper procedure?

Various high-level reports (listed here) have advised against introducing GM food crops to India. In a press release (ar-mustard-press-release-sept-26-2016-2), Aruna Rodrigues notes the abysmal state of GMO regulatory oversight in the country and the need for the precautionary principle to be applied without delay.

GM mustard (DMH 11) is a HT GMO with three alien genes. DMH 11 and its two GM parental lines, which have suddenly emerged in the line-up for commercial approval as part of the DMH 11 ‘package’, are HT crops designed to be used with glufosinate (notably Bayer’s market brands), a neurotoxin that will be banned in the EU from 2017.ar-mustard-press-release-sept-26-2016-2

Rodrigues asserts that the two parent lines and the hybrid DMH-11 require full independent testing, which has not occurred. And it has not occurred because of a conflict of interest and regulatory delinquency. The Department of Biotechnology is an active partner with Prof Pental (and his team at Delhi University, who have been developing GM mustard). The institutions of GMO governance in India see no problem in regulating DMH11, which they are also invested in and promote.

Allowing for not one but three GMOs is a serious case of regulatory ‘sleight-of-hand’, permissible due to diluted rules to ensure easy compliance. According to Rodrigues, it effectively means that the system allowing for GMOs in India has been deregulated. From a biosafety perspective, both maternal lines of DMH 11 must trigger the need for new rigorous safety testing.

Rodrigues explains that the testing/regulatory system that has been used allows for three GMOs to be defined as a single ‘event’ under cover of a single safety dossier:

They have slipped under the regulatory radar on a technicality, through a lacuna in the rules of an ‘event-based system’, which allows these three GMOs to come up for commercial approval without safety testing… India is suddenly faced with the deregulation of GMOs. This is disastrous and alarming, without ethics and a scientific rationale.

She goes on to highlight in some detail how the tests for GM mustard have been based on fraud. GM mustard is said to out-yield India’s best cultivars by 25-30%. The choice of the correct ‘comparators’ is an absolute requirement for the testing of any GMO to establish whether it is required in the first place. But Rodrigues argues that the choice of deliberately poor ‘comparators’ is at the heart of the fraud of HT DMH 11.

In the absence of adequate and proper testing and sufficient data, no statistically valid conclusions of mean seed yield (MSY) of DMH 11 could be drawn anyhow. Yet they were drawn by both the regulators and developers who furthermore self-conducted and supervised the trials. Without valid data to justify it, DMH 11 was allowed in pre-commercial large scale field trials in 2014-15.

For an adequate basis for a comparative assessment of MSY, Rodrigues argues it was absolutely necessary for the comparison to include the cross (hybrid) between the non-modified parental lines (nearest isogenic line), at the very start of the risk assessment process and throughout the subsequent stages of field testing, in addition to other recommended ‘comparators’. None of this was done.

Deliberately poor non-GMO mustard varieties were chosen to promote prospects for DMH 11 as a superior yielding GMO hybrid, which then passed through ‘the system’ and was allowed by the regulators, a classic non-sequitur by both the regulators and Dr Pental.

The fraud continued, according to Rodrigues, by actively fudging yield data of DMH 11 by 15.2% to show higher MSY. Again, she offers a good deal of evidence to show how it was done and why it was done: to justify the request for commercial approval.

A combination of fudged data and regulatory delinquency mean that DMH 11 and its two GMO parental lines are effectively forcing open the backdoor entry into India of herbicide tolerant GMOs based on non-GM traits.

Rodrigues concludes:

It matters not a jot if HT DMH 11 is not approved. What does matter is that its two HT (GMO) parental lines are: HT Varuna-barnase and HT EH 2-barstar will be used “for introgressing the bar-barnase and bar- barstar genes into new set of parental line to develop next generation of hybrids with higher yields –” (Developer and Regulator). This extraordinary admission confirms that the route to any number of ‘versions’ of HT mustard DMH 11 IS INVESTED IN THESE TWO GMOs as parents. India will have hundreds of low-yielding HT mustard hybrids (as was contrived for failed Bt cotton, with a present count above 1500 Bt hybrids), using India’s best mustard cultivars at great harm to our farmers and contaminating our seeds and mustard germ plasm irreversibly.

India will be forced to accept a highly toxic and unsustainable technology suited to monocropping. Herbicide tolerant GM crops would be particularly unsuitable for its agriculture given the large number of small farms growing a diverse range of crops alongside mustard that contribute towards agricultural biodiversity and, in turn, diverse, healthy diets.

This unremitting fraud and unremitting regulatory delinquency is being protected by a subterranean process of regulation that has also broken India’s constitutional safeguards by keeping the biosafety data hidden from the nation.

India faces a three in one regulatory jugglery in a brazen display of collusion to fraud the Nation, by our regulatory institutions of governance… There is an on-going and accelerating down-sizing of precautionary regulation and rigorous and sceptical oversight of GMOs, even unremitting and clear fraud.

Rodrigues says:

These matters require criminal prosecution. The Petitioners’ Prayer to the Hon’ble Supreme Court is for HT crops to be barred and specifically HT (GMO) Mustard to be barred, and for an enquiry to be instituted into the regulatory process followed for DMH 11, amongst other Prayers.

It raises the question why are top officials seemingly hell-bent on driving GMOs into India. That, of course, is an issue in itself, one that is again related to collusion and deception.

“An ambassador is a … gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” (Attributed to Sir Henry Wotton, 1568-1639.)

When Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations (“We the people of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations form the scourge of war …”) rose to speak at the UN to address Syria’s ongoing tragedy, on Sunday 25^th September, US Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, François Delattre, Permanent Representative for France and British Permanent Representative, Matthew Rycroft, metaphorically threw their toys out of the pram and walked out. Anything more infantile and further away from the UN’s founding aspirations would be hard to find.

They would have done well to hear Mr Churkin’s full address (1) it lays out home truths and the reality of international State sponsored terrorism – resulting in Syria’s living nightmare – in succinct detail. He began:

“It is the sixth year that the Syrian people have been suffering a grave tragedy. In 2011, Washington and some other Western capitals decided to continue the reshaping of the geopolitical space of the Middle East and North Africa, which started with the US and UK criminal invasion in Iraq in 2003. Besides, both in Libya and Syria they continued to ‘use an axe’ without any disdain for the support of terrorist groups … consequences of countries’ break-ups and flows of millions of refugees were qualified as an unforeseen ‘irritant’.”

Samantha Power, however, has never seemingly found a conflict she would not embrace (safely, from afar, of course.) The Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Syria, “liberation” by annihilation seemingly ever her preferred option. The UN welcomes some unlikely Representatives to uphold its founding aspirations.

“What Russia is sponsoring and doing in Aleppo is not counter terrorism, it is barbarism”, railed Ms Power. Clearly she has forgotten the US led, multi-country barbarisms above and further that Russia has been invited to work with Syria to attempt to resolve the country’s terrorist crisis. The US and their “allies” – in the air and on the ground – are illegals, in contravention of a swathe of international law.

She appears to also have forgotten the numerous substantiations of the US (and allies) funding and arming the head chopping, organ eating, child murdering other illegal immigrants from over one hundred foreign countries, according to varying analysts. Another irony is America appointing itself the “world’s policeman” – as the world is seeing what its policemen are doing at home.

Also dropped through Ms Powell and her fellow UN absconders memory hole seems to be General Wesley Clark’s near immediate post 9/11 revelation from a Pentagon colleague that:

“ … we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” Moreover, not to be forgotten is that the plans for Syria’s destruction were plotted in detail from within the then US Embassy in Damascus. (2)

Interesting is also the UK walkout Representative’s background, recalling that the UK is ever willing killer-in-arms with the US. Matthew Rycroft has trailed around varying war zones or war enablers in a “diplomatic” capacity since graduation from Oxford University in 1989.

An early placement was at the NATO desk in the British government’s bailiwick, Whitehall. After various Foreign Office placements he joined the British Embassy in Washington in 1998, from where he was seconded to both the US State Department and US Congress. On returning to the UK he became, in February 2002, Private Secretary Foreign Affairs, to the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, according to his evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq. (3 pdf.)

February 2002 was of course the time the planning in the Foreign Office was concentrating on Tony Blair’s now infamous meeting with George W. Bush in Crawford Texas in the coming April. Rycroft denied having any involvement in those plans, however he had integral involvement in the infamous Downing Street memo of 23^rd July 2002. (4)

The memo related to the plans to overthrow Saddam Hussein, discussed at a meeting held by Tony Blair at which Rycroft was one of the attendees. His memo began:

“SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL – UK EYES ONLY 

“DAVID MANNING

From: Matthew Rycroft

Date: 23 July 2002

S 195 /02

“cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

“IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER’S MEETING, 23 JULY

“Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

“John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest (Joint Intelligence Committee) assessment. Saddam’s regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action …

“C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” (Emphasis added.)

In the memo’s “Conclusions” Rycroft’s first is:

“(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action … “

The rest is Nuremberg’s “supreme international crime …” and bloody, genocidal history. Ongoing.

Rycroft has now turned his attentions to Syria. On walk out day, the 25^th September in a speech to the UN (5) which includes too many inaccurate and misleading statements (many might say mistruths) to address here, he includes:

“ … the death and destruction that the sectarian Assad regime has unleashed upon them. Nor will they forget that Russia aided and abetted this ruthless sectarian dictator in waging war against his own people.”

Goodness, word for word out of the US-UK Saddam Hussein hand book – “waging a war against his own people”, “sectarian dictator.” As Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Syria is secular and the government is fighting a war to rid the country of the terrorists who flooded in as a result of the fruition of the US plans formulated in 2006

Rycroft also alleged the use by the government of chlorine bombs – he had clearly not read, or chosen to ignore the various Reports, including by the UN, categorically disproving this.

Iraq had the US inspired “Iraq Liberation Act” of 1998 held over the nation’s head until destroyed by the US and UK in 2003. Syria has the “Syria Accountability and Liberation Act” (6) of July 2009. Apart from imposing draconian sanctions of the sort that resulted in the deaths of half a million children between 6^th August 1990 and 12^th May 1996 in Iraq, the Act:

“Sets forth diplomatic measures intended to isolate the government of Syria.”

And:

“Authorizes the (US) President to provide assistance to support a democratic transition in Syria.”

In another re-run of the Iraq lies, Rycroft adapts the “Saddam starves his own people” line – when in fact the US-UK driven embargo even denied baby formula – and accuses President Assad of “failing to stop starvation.”

Incidentally, in 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, Matthew Rycroft was awarded the CBE: “ … an honour awarded to an individual by the Queen for a leading role at a regional level or a prominent … role at a national level in any activity. The definition of CBE is Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.” The cynic might speculate that his part in “Empire’s” Iraq slaughter might have been a contributory factor.

But he has not lost talent for plotting and economy with the truth, it would seem. But then, between experience in the Foreign Office, the State Department and Congress would be a peerless education. An example:

On 12 September, the eve of the ill-fated ceasefire: “President Dr. Bashar Al-Assad vowed to regain every inch of Syria from the terrorist forces.

“The Syrian President made this promise during his visit to the rural Damascus town of Darayya on Monday.

“In addition to his promise to recover every inch of the country, the Syrian President stated that his government will rebuild Darayya after the four year long battle left the town in ruins.” (7)

On 15^th September, Matthew Rycroft translated this statement in a address to the UN as: “Earlier this week, Assad said it was his objective to regain the entire country by force …” (8) He surely learned well from his part in Iraq plotting.

Meanwhile, on 25^th September (clearly a very busy plotting day) the UK’s new Foreign Secretary (it is hard to think of anyone less suitable to be a diplomat) was in Turkey. He tweeted:

Boris Johnson

@BorisJohnson

Follow
 #Turkey is a vital partner to the UK. Pleased to visit for first time as Foreign Sec for talks with Govt, civil society & #SyrianOpposition
9:34 AM – 25 Sep 2016

Meeting “opposition” head choppers, eh?

Another shocking international conspiracy against a small, proud nation, which threatens no one. The onslaught against Syria, the betrayal of a fellow Member of the United Nations will be added to the list of crimes of enormity laid at the feet of the “Special relationship” – the barbarism of the US-UK alliance.

Incidentally, diplomacy: “The art of dealing with people in a sensitive and tactful way.”

 Notes

1.     http://russiaun.ru/en/news/sc_ salp

2.     http://www.globalresearch.ca/ syria-and-conspiracy-theories- it-is-a-conspiracy/29596

3.    http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/ media/234076/2010-09-10- transcript-rycroft-s1- declassified.pdf

4.    http://warisacrime.org/node/1

5.    https://www.gov.uk/government/ speeches/it-is-difficult-to- deny-that-russia-is- partnering-with-the-syrian- regime-to-carry-out-war-crimes

6.    https://www.congress.gov/bill/ 111th-congress/house-bill/1206

7.    https://www.almasdarnews.com/ article/video-assad-vows- regain-every-inch-syria/

8.    https://www.gov.uk/government/ speeches/we-cannot-afford-to- repeat-history

Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria. — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria, Politico

The conflict in Syria is not a war in the conventional sense of the word. It is a regime change operation, just like Libya and Iraq were regime change operations.

The main driver of the conflict is the country that’s toppled more than 50 sovereign governments since the end of World War 2.  (See: Bill Blum here.) We’re talking about the United States of course.

serkan senturk | Shutterstock.com

Washington is the hands-down regime change champion, no one else even comes close. That being the case, one might assume that the American people would notice the pattern of intervention, see through the propaganda and assign blame accordingly. But that never  seems to happen and it probably won’t happen here either. No matter how compelling the evidence may be, the brainwashed American people always believe their government is doing the right thing.

But the United States is not doing the right thing in Syria. Arming, training and funding Islamic extremists — that have killed half a million people, displaced 7 million more and turned the country into an uninhabitable wastelands –is not the right thing. It is the wrong thing, the immoral thing. And the US is involved in this conflict for all the wrong reasons, the foremost of which is gas. The US wants to install a puppet regime in Damascus so it can secure pipeline corridors in the East, oversee the transport of vital energy reserves from Qatar to the EU, and make sure that those reserves continue to be denominated in US Dollars that are recycled into US Treasuries and US financial assets. This is the basic recipe for maintaining US dominance in the Middle East and for extending America’s imperial grip on global power into the future.

The war in Syria did not begin when the government of Bashar al Assad cracked down on protestors in the spring of 2011. That version of events is obfuscating hogwash.  The war began in 2009, when Assad rejected a Qatari plan to transport gas from Qatar to the EU via Syria. As Robert F Kennedy Jr. explains in his excellent article “Syria: Another pipeline War”:

The $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey….would have linked Qatar directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey… The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would have given the Sunni Kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America’s closest ally in the Arab world. ….

In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally….

Assad further enraged the Gulf’s Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic pipeline” running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shia Iran instead of Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran’s influence in the Mid-East and the world…

Naturally, the Saudis, Qataris, Turks and Americans were furious at Assad, but what could they do? How could they prevent him from choosing his own business partners and using his own sovereign territory to transport gas to market?

What they could do is what any good Mafia Don would do; break a few legs and steal whatever he wanted. In this particular situation, Washington and its scheming allies decided to launch a clandestine proxy-war against Damascus, kill or depose Assad, and make damn sure the western oil giants nabbed the future pipeline contracts and controlled the flow of energy to Europe. That was the plan at least. Here’s more from Kennedy:

Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.

Repeat: “the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline”, he signed his own death warrant. That single act was the catalyst for the US aggression that transformed a bustling, five thousand-year old civilization into a desolate Falluja-like moonscape overflowing with homicidal fanatics that were recruited, groomed and deployed by the various allied intelligence agencies.

But what’s particularly interesting about this story is that the US attempted a nearly-identical plan 60 years earlier during the Eisenhower administration. Here’s another clip from the Kennedy piece:

During the 1950′s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers … mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism — which CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communism — particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism….

The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949 — barely a year after the agency’s creation…. Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. (so)… the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime…..

(CIA agent Rocky) Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti’s democratically elected secularist regime….

But all that CIA money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers reported the CIA’s bribery attempts to the Ba’athist regime. In response, the Syrian army invaded the American Embassy taking Stone prisoner. Following harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised confession to his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA’s aborted attempt to overthrow Syria’s legitimate government….(Then) Syria purged all politicians sympathetic to the U.S. and executed them for treason.  (Politico)

See how history is repeating itself? It’s like the CIA was too lazy to even write a new script, they just dusted off the old one and hired new actors.

Fortunately, Assad –with the help of Iran, Hezbollah and the Russian Airforce– has fended off the effort to oust him and install a US-stooge. This should not be taken as a ringing endorsement of Assad as a leader, but of the principal that global security depends on basic protections of national sovereignty, and that the cornerstone of international law has to be a rejection of unprovoked aggression whether the hostilities are executed by one’s own military or by armed proxies that are used to achieve the same strategic objectives while invoking  plausible deniability. The fact is, there is no difference between Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Obama’s invasion of Syria. The moral, ethical and legal issues are the same, the only difference is that Obama has been more successful in confusing the American people about what is really going on.

And what’s going on is regime change: “Assad must go”. That’s been the administration’s mantra from the get go. Obama and Co are trying to overthrow a democratically-elected secular regime that refuses to bow to Washington’s demands to provide access to pipeline corridors that will further strengthen US dominance in the region.  That’s what’s really going on behind the ISIS distraction and the “Assad is a brutal dictator” distraction and the “war-weary civilians in Aleppo” distraction. Washington doesn’t care about any of those things. What Washington cares about is oil, power and money. How can anyone be confused about that by now?  Kennedy summed it up like this:

We must recognize the Syrian conflict is a war over control of resources indistinguishable from the myriad clandestine and undeclared oil wars we have been fighting in the Mid-East for 65 years. And only when we see this conflict as a proxy war over a pipeline do events become comprehensible.

That says it all, don’t you think?

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

The dangerous U.S. military escalation of its 5-year war to overturn Syria’s government can be seen in the Sept. 17 bombing, which killed 62 Syrian Army soldiers and aided the position of the Islamic State group. The attack sabotaged a U.S.-Russian brokered ceasefire and led Russia to call for an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting.

At the same time, there has been a heavy barrage of U.S. war propaganda. “White Helmets,” a new film, is part of the sophisticated disinformation campaign.

War propaganda is always more insidious on the home front, but it is an essential ingredient of imperialist wars. Charging the enemy with genocide, baby killing, mass rapes, mass graves and weapons of mass destruction have all been debunked after a U.S. war. But they saturate the media before a war and seem indisputable.

Samantha Powers, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., has denounced both Russia and Syria. She labels U.S. wars “humanitarian interventions,” and has used unsubstantiated war propaganda to justify wars in West Asia, North Africa and the Balkans that have decimated countries, killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions.

Social media hype

The film praising White Helmets, a U.S.-British-funded group embedded with U.S.-funded reactionary opposition forces, is trending on Netflix. The documentary’s well-publicized launch is calculated to help it win awards and convey the call for deeper U.S. military involvement in Syria. It premiered the Sept. 17-18 weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival.

NBC News praised the featured group as “Angels on the Front Line.” The Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal sang the movie’s praises and White Helmets’ “selfless, humanitarian role.”

The White Helmets defines itself as unpaid, unarmed first responders in Syria, claims 3,000 members and alleges it is a Syrian Civil Defense group. It claims to have saved 40,000, even 60,000 lives in Syria, by rescuing survivors from bombsites.

Most claims about the White Helmets are unverified self-promotion on social media. Interviews with and media coverage of the grouping show desperate appeals for an increase in U.S./NATO military action in Syria — not peace and reconciliation. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and other journalists have quoted its calls for a no-fly zone as a “humanitarian” option.

The much-hyped White Helmets is not a Syrian organization, nor was it created by Syrians, nor is it educational. It is a U.S.-British creation. Former British Army officer James Le Mesurier, self-described as a British “security” specialist, founded it. He previously worked for Blackwater, the mercenary organization universally condemned for its murderous brutality in Iraq.

U.S. AID funding

The White Helmets’ website declares the group is “unfunded, independent and neutral.” At an April 27 press conference, U.S. State Department Deputy Spokesperson Mark Toner acknowledged the organization has received $23 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development. That agency’s website explains, “Our work … advances U.S. foreign policy objectives.”

Additionally, the White Helmets receives millions of dollars from billionaire financier George Soros, the Netherlands and the British Foreign Office. Equipment and vehicles come through Turkey.

The White Helmets has never functioned as a neutral force. While attacking the Syrian government and calling for more U.S., British and NATO bombing, the group functions exclusively in Syrian areas held by the Nusra Front, a terrorist organization linked to al-Qaida. This well-funded group operates on the ground with U.S.-, British-, Israeli- and Saudi-funded militias committed to destroying Syria’s government.

While claiming to be “unarmed,” the White Helmets appears in videos with weapons, surrounded by armed militias.

The U.S. brought White Helmets’ leader Raed Saleh to the U.N. Security Council in 2014 to testify against the Syrian government and to lobby for a U.N. resolution approving a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone — meaning direct U.S. intervention. Saleh promotes bombing to “save” the people of Syria and is hardly “neutral.”

Washington later barred Saleh from the U.S. when he tried to attend a gala dinner honoring White Helmets with a keynote speech from USAID. The State Department deported him, citing his connections to “extremist organizations.”

The White Helmets is the latest of a series of front groups, designed to give a “humanitarian” gloss to Washington’s latest war of regime change in the Middle East.

White Helmets was established as a social media presence of the Syria Campaign, AVAAZ and Purpose — interlinked campaigns that push for U.S. destruction of Syria. They quote each others’ material and create the illusion of a democratic, independent opposition in Syria.

These forces are also pushing for a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for White Helmets to further legitimatize their calls for an expanded war. They also campaigned for Washington to bomb Libya under the guise of a “humanitarian” no-fly zone.

Resources that tell the truth

While the corporate media and TV entertainment channels seem to be taken in by this slick film, it takes little effort to expose who White Helmets is and reveal its role in the ugly U.S.-funded war in Syria. Information is available online in various formats. But this has not stopped the constant, orchestrated promotion of White Helmet.

“The White Helmets — al Qaeda with a Facelift” is a 4-minute video on Youtube which reveals the truth about the grouping. (tinyurl.com/zojokn3) The Syria Solidarity Movement, including Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Ken Stone and Hands Off Syria, which made the video, has extensively researched White Helmets’ funding and role.

Change.org’s petition opposes the Nobel Peace Prize nomination, concluding that the White Helmets is “terrorism and neocolonialism under the umbrella of Humanitarianism.” (tinyurl.com/z52cttu)

During the early phases of the post-Cold War “New World Order,” NGOs were touted as representing a new wave of international politics. Instead of allowing international issues to be settled in closed meetings, the people themselves, informed by intrepid citizen journalists, would from now on play the key role in setting the agenda.

Like most of the promises made in the 1990s, this one also failed to deliver. It became clear that many NGOs, far from representing the “grass roots” of politics, were more akin to the artificial grass-like stadium surface known in the US as “astroturf”. It may look and even, to a degree, feel like the genuine article, but it most certainly is not. Many NGOs, while presenting a public image of bottom-up activism, were funded by major corporations or governments, which had the effect of depriving them of their independence and objectivity.

Given the success of NGOs as promoters of corporate interests, it did not take very long for them to begin to position themselves as independent, objective, and trustworthy sources of political information. Their appeal was largely based, once again, on the perception that the average NGO, or even a blog dealing with international affairs, is being implemented as a collection of concerned citizens engaged in unbiased news collection, analysis, and reporting. In that respect, they filled quite a large niche vacated by government spokesmen, news organizations, and intelligence services, all of which have been losing the public’s trust and which were no longer seen as objective.

Today, such fake NGOs as Bellingcat, White Helmets, Syria Observatory for Human Rights, plus a whole range of less well known bloggers and self-styled “open-source information” analysts, are no longer playing a supporting role in the ongoing information war that is an important component of hybrid wars. They have become the tip of the spear. These fake NGOs are now playing a leading role in what US military doctrine refers to as “shaping the information battlefield” within the “Full Spectrum Dominance” agenda.

Hybrid War Propaganda Laundering

Naturally, these entities are not setting the agenda or calling the shots. They have been assigned a number of roles by the political elites.

First of all, they are supposed to engage in veritable “propaganda laundering.” Much as banks provide legitimacy to funds obtained through illegal or immoral means, Bellingcat, White Helmets, and others turn what would otherwise be recognized as propaganda into “breaking news”–style stories that are then run, with reference to the NGO in question rather than the true source of the disinformation, by the mainstream media.

Bellingcat’s so-called investigations into the MH17 tragedy represent an example of this process. Anyone who follows Ukrainian social media and government sites understands that Bellingcat has not performed much due diligence actual investigation and instead selectively chooses only certain events that fit western propaganda narratives while ignoring others that may exposed western backed proxy groups, such as the May 2014 Odessa Massacre. Every bit of what it calls “evidence” has been spoon-fed to it by Ukrainian intelligence services which in fact manufactured the videos, the photographs, the supposed intercepted communications, immediately in the aftermath of the MH17 shoot-down and uploaded them to Youtube and other social media outlets with the aid of Ukraine’s own “information warriors” posing as concerned citizens.  Bellingcat’s staff, by passing this disinformation as the product of its own open-source intelligence gathering, made it appear as if the conclusion that only Russian troops could be responsible for the MH17 tragedy was the product of independent research conducted by a team of citizen truth-seekers armed only with the Internet.

In Syria, the White Helmets function in a similar manner. While pretending to be an impartial humanitarian organization, they operate in strict collaboration with a variety of jihadists organizations, and their reports place the blame for civilian suffering solely on the shoulders of Syria’s legitimate government and its Russian allies. Once again, propaganda issued by al-Nusra and affiliated groups is being given a stamp of legitimacy by what appear to be selfless humanitarian workers.

The second function these NGOs fulfill is allowing interested governments to refrain from directly lying to the media and the public themselves, since doing so would inevitably have negative political consequences. Indeed, the practice has become so widespread that the discerning observer can readily tell whether information being presented by government representatives is true on the basis of whether the government cites and presents its own evidence, or refers the public to an NGO-run website. The NATO use of commercial imagery rather than its own satellite imagery as evidence that Russian forces were operating on the Donbass is a variation on this theme.

Thirdly, the use of propaganda-launderers allows government factions to pursue their own foreign policy agendas independently of the rest of the government. It is apparent that they are used as conduits for information leaks by the more aggressive factions in Western governments which seek to sabotage peace efforts in Ukraine, Syria, and other regions of the world. This is a dangerous trend, because these launderers serve as a megaphone for hardliners, to the point that the more reasonable voices are drowned out.

Fourthly, the propaganda-launderers allows a certain degree of plausible deniability, and even a reversal of policy if need be, with the NGO in question being quietly shunted aside when it ceases to be useful. Should Western interests demand a rapprochement with Russia, entities such as Bellingcat, the White Helmets, and all the rest would vanish overnight.

Is It Working?

The answer to that question depends on the target audience. Specialists, and even well informed journalists, are unlikely to be swayed. The pathetic scenes of US State Department spokesmen squirming under the pointed questioning of genuinely truth-seeking journalists such as Matt Lee or Gayane Chichakyan show that the reliance on propaganda-laundering NGOs has its limits. The general public is a different story, since cable news channels do not show such embarrassing moments to the public. Nevertheless, as the old saying goes, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. The weakness of all propaganda efforts is their heavy-handed, one-note message which in this instance amounts to “Everything is Russia’s Fault.” This approach can be effective for a while, but eventually it runs into a mounting wall of public skepticism which will consign propaganda laundering to obsolescence, to be replaced by another method of manufacturing public consent.

Coming back to the MH17 incident it’s clear that lots of question still remain 2 years after the tragedy. Who is responsible for downing of the plane? Who ordered to down it? Why the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was there? Who did point the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 to this corridor? Was it an accident or a planned provocation?

Recently, a newly appeared team of pro-Russian bloggers, ‘Anti-Fake’, blasted the open-source investigation into the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash over Ukraine in 2014 by Bellingcat. Anti-Fake issued a 44-page report, blaming Bellingcat for a pro-Kiev stance and relying on fake and falsified evidence. In turn, Bellingcat and its supporters in main stream media pointed out some mistakes in Anti-Fake’s report and blamed the group for alleged links with the Russian government. SouthFront suggests to all concerned to contribute some time to read reports from the both sides.

It appears that the reports by Bellingcat and Anti-Fake are an element of the current informational warfare. It’s pretty clear that such reports are aimed to shape informational battlefield in order to pursue foreign-policy or political and military objectives.

The both sides of the ongoing geopolitical conflict use various tools of informational warfare, the West’s states have much more resources than their opponents. So, the quality of pro-Western content is higher.

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There are a multitude of governance models across the world, but they can all be divided into one of two broad categories – “Western Democracy” or “National Democracy”. The first one is exemplified by the political systems in the US and most of the EU (with Hungary and increasingly Poland being notable exceptions), while the latter is manifested by countries such as Russia, China, and Iran which the West commonly smears as “dictatorships” because of the comparatively outsized role that their national leader typically has relative to the rest of the formal government. Some countries fall in the middle of these two models but generally lean closer to one or the other, hence why only two categories are relevant in this classification.

The US prefers for countries to follow “Western Democracy” not out of purely ideological reasons, but for the very pragmatic one of being able to more easily influence phased leadership transitions during predictable election cycles. “Western Democracy” also isn’t just a mechanical-technical template of simply holding regular elections, but a distinct political culture that includes “lobbyists” (legal bribers), “free media” (political indoctrinators typically controlled by a handful of state-connected entities), and “activists (Color Revolution vanguards), among other traits. “National Democracies”, on the other hand, may have each of these three “Western Democracy” indicators to varying degrees, but they don’t blindly follow a maximalist approach in copying-and-pasting each and every aspect of them and their existing iterations for no apparent reason.

If such characteristics are present in a “National Democracy”, then it’s because each of these have been fine-tuned to the country’s specific conditions and not imported as a weaponized systematic approach in periodically provoking ‘legitimate’ regime change. In other words, the foreign promotion and forced practice of “Western Democracy” enables Western states to more easily control what otherwise would have been “National Democracies” through the specific ‘political code’ written into their new governing systems, which explains the fervor with which the US has been ‘promoting (Western) democracy’ since the end of the Old Cold War and why it argues that such an effort is in the ‘national security’ interest of the country.

In many instances, however, the US was unsuccessful in turning independent “National Democracies” into subservient “Western Democracies”, which is why it’s had to resort to Color Revolutions, Unconventional Wars, and their amalgamation into Hybrid Wars as a means of forcing Regime Tweaking (concession), Regime Change (overthrow), and/or a Regime Reboot (constitutional revisionism) onto its rivals. “National Democracies” are usually structured in such a way that they’re exceptionally vulnerable during the inevitable leadership transitions that come with time, particularly when the National Leader needs to be replaced. Whether he or she passes away, resigns, or steps down at the end of their term, a new replacement must eventually be decided upon, and it’s here where “Western Democracy” gets to work in seeking to destabilize its “National” counterparts.

Hybrid Wars are the modus operandi for achieving this, and the ultimate determinant in whether or not a “National Democracy” survives the onslaught is the unity of its “deep state” apparatus. This concept refers to the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies that control the fundamental workings of both “Western” and “National” democracies alongside the “open state” academic-informational-administrative elite and their economic counterparts. Taken together, these 7 branches of power define the modern-day state no matter its governing disposition, but it’s just that “National Democracies” are more susceptible to being visibly impacted whenever the “deep” and “open” states go through a power struggle, one which more often than not has the highest likelihood of occurring during the leadership transition described above.

Relevant examples of “National Democracies” successfully weathering what many had thought would have been extremely challenging leadership transitions are Turkmenistan and most recently Uzbekistan, with other countries such as Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Algeria slated to go through this process soon enough, albeit to uncertain ends. When they and other states inevitably pass through this experience, the subsequent course of events will be dependent on the unity of the military and security services, and how quickly the elite can rally behind an agreed-upon replacement. If all goes according to plan and there are scant disruptions and a strong sense of “deep state”-“open state” unity, then a smooth transition can be assured like in the aforementioned two cases, but if personal or identity-based ambitions get the best of the ruling and/or security classes, then the consequences could be disastrous.

In almost every example of a “National Democracy”, the passing, resignation, or stepping down of the country’s leader serves as a potential Hybrid War trigger event in unleashing a series of preplanned destabilizations, with the variables surrounding this being both the previously discussed military-elite unity and the confidence that the anti-government organizers have in their plans. The best-case scenario is that the “deep state” remains unified and the provocateurs are caught off guard and unprepared by the structurally advantageous event, while the opposite one is that the “deep state” is fiercely divided amongst itself and the ‘revolutionaries’ are fully prepared for launching a Hybrid War. Sometimes, however, the reality is somewhere in the middle, with the “deep state” either being divided and the hostile organizers unprepared for exploiting this scenario, or the military and elite are unified in spite of the regime change proxies feeling confident enough to go forward with their initiatives anyhow.

It’s unclear at this moment how the course of events would progress in each and every case, since it’s challenging for researchers to find reliably objective information about either of the examined country’s two determinants (military-elite unity and the confidence of anti-government organizers), so it’ll remain to be seen how other “National Democracies” fit into this model. What is certain, however, is that the removal of their National Leader from the political equation serves as a trigger event for exacerbating the already existing Hybrid War vulnerabilities present in the state, and that the US and its NGO/Hybrid War foot soldiers will instantly move to exploit any real or perceived split within or between the “deep” and “open states” during this crucially sensitive time (if it hadn’t engendered such divisions already), as well as between these 7 pillars of state functionality and the general population.

Therefore, all members of the state – from its “deep” and “open” ones all the way down to the average citizen – must be prepared in advance for withstanding the US’ asymmetrical aggression during this time, recognizing that the collective good of society is best served by stably staying the course as much as possible during this indeterminate transitional period, and rejecting the US’ frenzied efforts to divide and rule the country by playing to identity politics and personal motivations. Proactive informational campaigns about the dangers of Hybrid War and the promotion of patriotism and its related state-supported NGOs could serve to educate the populace enough that they become largely inoculated against this threat, though there’s regrettably no such strategic model that could be applied by all “National Democracies” in ensuring their “deep state”-“open state” unity. Rather, the required solution will widely vary depending on the composition of the “deep” and “open” states and the nature of relations between its respective entities, which are understandably unique to each country and follow no set theoretical patterns.

Andrew Korybko is the American political commentator currently working for Sputnik agency. He is the author of “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change” (2015).

The Obama administration, and especially the CIA and the State Department, seem to be in trouble. They shout everything they can against Russia and allege that the cleansing of east-Aleppo of al-Qaeda terrorist is genocidal. Meanwhile no mention is ever made of the famine of the Houthis in Yemen which the U.S. and Saudi bombing and their blockade directly causes.

But more and more major news accounts support the Russian allegation that the “moderate rebels” the U.S. is coddling in Syria are actually in cahoots with al-Qaeda if not al-Qaeda itself.

Reuters reports (though only at the end of a longer story):

In Aleppo, rebels in the Free Syrian Army are sharing operational planning with Jaish al-Fatah, an alliance of Islamist groups that includes the former Syrian wing of al Qaeda.Meanwhile, in nearby Hama province, FSA groups armed with U.S.-made anti-tank missiles are taking part in a major offensive with the al Qaeda-inspired Jund al-Aqsa group.

by Carlos Latuff – bigger

The Wall Street Journal is more direct and headlining: Syria Rebels Draw Closer to al Qaeda-Linked Group

Some of Syria’s largest rebel factions are doubling down on their alliance with an al Qaeda-linked group, despite a U.S. warning to split from the extremists or risk being targeted in airstrikes.
…
Some rebel groups already aligned with Syria Conquest Front responded by renewing their alliance. But others, such as Nour al-Din al-Zinki, a former Central Intelligence Agency-backed group and one of the largest factions in Aleppo, pledged allegiance for the first time to the front in recent days.

Indeed the al.Qaeda affiliate Fateh al-Sham announced publicly that the CIA’s Nour el-Din Zinki and Suqour al-Sham joined its Jihad

As little back as August the State Department defended Zinki after some of its member abducted a Palestinian boy from a hospital near Aleppo and beheaded him in front of a video camera:

[I]n State Department briefings, [..] spokesman Mark Toner downplayed the incidents, or the possibility that the US would stop arming Nour al-Din al-Zinki just because they beheaded a child..
…
Toner insisted [..] “one incident here and there would not necessarily make you a terrorist group.”

The new news reports follow after an interview by the German former politician and journalist Jürgen Todenhöfer with an al-Qaeda commander published in English on this site. The commander said that Nusra (aka al-Qaeda) were directly supplied, via a subgroup, with U.S. TOW missiles. He added about such groups:

They are all with us. We are all the al-Nusra Front. A groups is created and calls itself “Islamic Army”, or “Fateh al-Sham”. Each group has its own name but their believe is homogeneous. The general name is al-Nusra Front. One person has, for example, 2,000 fighters. Then he creates from these a new group and calls it “Ahrar al-Sham”. Brothers, who’s believe, thoughts and aims are identical to those of al-Nusra Front.

Another interview recently published by the former military Jack Murphy was with a Green Beret soldier who served in Turkey and Syria. The Green Berets are special forces of the U.S. army. They are specialists in training and  fighting with indigenous guerrilla groups against governments the U.S. dislikes. The soldier interviewed was ordered to train “moderate Syrian rebels” in Turkey. Parts of the interview (paywalled) are quoted here:

“No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort”, a former Green Beret writes of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian insurgents, “they know we are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, ‘Fuck it, who cares?’”. “I don’t want to be responsible for Nusra guys saying they were trained by Americans,” the Green Beret added.
…
Murphy states bluntly: “distinguishing between the FSA and al-Nusra is impossible, because they are virtually the same organization. As early as 2013, FSA commanders were defecting with their entire units to join al-Nusra. There, they still retain the FSA monicker, but it is merely for show, to give the appearance of secularism so they can maintain access to weaponry provided by the CIA and Saudi intelligence services. The reality is that the FSA is little more than a cover for the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra. …

It is one thing when Russia says somesthing, but another when Reuters, WSJ, and independent German and U.S. subject experts report this as facts. The first can be shunned as “Putin lies” but the others are extremely hard to refute.

The Russians are right. The U.S. did not separate the “moderate rebels” from al Qaeda, as it had agreed to in the ceasefire agreement, because the “moderates” and al-Qaeda are the same. The “moderates” are al-Qaeda. This was not unknown. The 2012 Defense Intelligence Analysis said as much. The CIA of course knew this all along. But the Saudi tool heading the CIA, John Brennan, can not admit such as his masters in the Gulf are also the ones who finance al-Qaeda.

They buy the weapons Brennan’s people hadn over to al-Qaeda. The “end-user” according to this certificate for a weapon buy in Ukraine is Saudi Arabia. But who will believe that the Saudi dictators need for example 100 obsolete T-55 tanks? The weapons on the certificate, for an estimated $300-$500 million, are obviously for al-Qaeda in Yemen and in Syria. (Did Joe Biden or his son, both heavily engaged in Ukraine, get a provision from the deal?)

As the facts accumulate how long can the New York Times and Washington Post keep up with their propaganda claims. One has to admit, they really try their best. Unfortunately for them, their best is only mediocre. The NYT today found out that Vladimir Putin Relishes His Role as Disrupter. How does the NYT know what Putin “relishes”? The reporter did not ask Putin himself. But he did ask some knowledgeable experts with insight into Putin’s inner mind and those assured the author that this is indeed the case. They know exactly how Putin feels. They are Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director and Robert Kagan, leading voice of of the neocons and Clinton promoter. Some “experts”.

Add that to dozens of stories on how “Russia indiscriminately bombs civilians/hospitals/bakeries in east-Aleppo” but never hits any “rebels” because none occur in these stories at all. A recent NYT piece of that kind had 14 “voices” in it. Eight belonged to various propagandists associated with the “White Helmets”, four were “western” diplomats, one Syrian government official and a Russian spokesperson were quoted at the end. No Russian military and no one from west-Aleppo, where by far most people in the city live under government protection and daily rocket hail by the “rebels”, were even asked.

But all those tales we hear about the devilish Russians MUST be true! Even the 7 years old Bana Alabeb now tweets from east-Aleppo about her tragic fate under indiscriminate Russian assaults. This in perfect English and with an excellent WiFi and Internet connection as her many “White Helmets” photo attachments and her videos attest. But the whole city is devastated and in ruins she says, with phosphor bombs going off right in front of her house.

But Bana is a very responsible little lady:

Bana Alabed @AlabedBanaDear world, it’s better to start 3rd world war instead of letting Russia & assad commit #HolocaustAleppo

1:53 PM – 29 Sep 2016

Here “mother” phoned up the Daily Mail for an “exclusive” and assures us that this is all true. TheTelegraph has her in a slideshow with sad music and the Guardian promotes her too. Another Gay Girl in Damascus media fail. In 2011 the Guardian also was part of that scam. If that 7-year old girl is in east-Aleppo and not in Denmark or the UK, I must be on Mars. No sane reader will take such a stunt serious. What Public Relation company came up with this sorry flimflam?

Like the “moderate rebels” fantasy, such tales and the nonsense the “White Helmet” propaganda outlet distributes, are starting to fail. The UAE’s National, a well established international newspaper, recently dug a bit around the White Helmet’s creator, a “former” British military agent working for Gulf defense interests. That does not sound charitable. This is noticeable report, even as it still lacks any details, as it is the first in a major paper that shows some auspiciousness against that outlet.

The Obama administration’s lies about the “moderate rebels” are now openly discussed in major media. The propaganda of #HolocaustAleppo (isn’t abusing the holocaust meme anti-semitic?) is turning into a laughing stock.

Russia is upping its stake in Syria. Additional Russian SU-24, SU-25 and SU-34 jets are arriving. Nearly 6,000 Russian soldiers are on the ground. The CIA’s  al-Qaeda “rebels” are losing in east-Aleppo and are in stalemate and under pressure elsewhere. They will be bombed to smithereens. A few new BM-21 multiple missile launchers and heavier anti-air artillery was delivered to them. But those are just band-aids on lethally bleeding wounds. Even MANPADs will not change the situation one bit.

The U.S., the Saudis and especially Brennan’s CIA have lost that fight. Will Obama and Kerry admit it? Or will they throw another Hail Mary and do something crazy?

In a September 22 speech to an elite foreign policy group in New York City, Brazil’s legislatively installed president, Michel Temer, made the startling admission that President Dilma Rousseff was removed from office because of her position on economic policy, rather than any alleged wrongdoing on her part.

Speaking to the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, a group of “opinion leaders” and corporate executives with interests in Latin America, Temer said,  as translated by The Intercept  (9/23/16):

And many months ago, while I was still vice president, we released a document named “A Bridge to the Future” because we knew it would be impossible for the government to continue on that course. We suggested that the government should adopt the theses presented in that document called “A Bridge to the Future.” But, as that did not work out, the plan wasn’t adopted and a process was established which culminated with me being installed as president of the republic.

The Intercept‘s Inacio Vieira notes that the economic plan that Rousseff refused to implement called for widespread cuts to social programs and privatization, a radically different agenda from the one approved by the 54.5 million Brazilian voters who gave Rousseff’s Workers’ Party its fourth electoral victory in 2014.

But Temer’s remarkable confession was not seen as newsworthy by virtually anyone in US corporate media—though the New York Times (9/19/16) did report on the speech by Temer to the United Nations a few days earlier in which he insisted in reference to the impeachment, “Everything happened with absolute respect for the constitutional order.”

A search of the Nexis news database turns up no stories that mention his more forthright AS/COA speech in any US newspaper, magazine, broadcast or cable outlet. The story was covered in alternative outlets like The Intercept (9/23/16, 9/23/16, 9/28/16), Common Dreams (9/23/16) and Mintpress (9/26/16).

The media silence on Temer’s admission is striking, especially considering that the Council of the Americas’ members include some of the biggest names in corporate media, including News Corp, Time Warner, Bloomberg and the Financial Times.

But as signaled by Vice President Joe Biden’s recent praise for Temer’s “commitment to maintaining Brazil’s regional and global leadership role during the recent period of political change,” the US government is quite pleased with the new pro-austerity regime in Brazil (for as long as it lasts; Temer has already been barred by an electoral court from political campaigning for eight years for violating campaign spending limits). Given this official friendliness, then, it’s not surprising that elite media are not eager to expose the shady origins of Washington’s new friends.

India carried out multiple “surgical” military strikes inside Pakistan over a five-hour period Wednesday night, bringing South Asia perilously close to an all-out war with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Not only would a war between India and Pakistan be the first-ever war between nuclear-armed states; it could rapidly draw in the United States and China on opposed sides.

In anticipation of a Pakistani counterstrike (or so as to provide cover for Indian war preparations), Indian authorities on Thursday ordered the evacuation of all those living within 10 kilometers of the Pakistani border in the Indian states of Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif denounced Wednesday’s night attack as “unprovoked and naked” Indian “aggression” and called an emergency meeting of his cabinet for today to discuss Islamabad’s response.

India says it attacked seven “terrorist launching pads” on the Pakistani side of the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-held Kashmir; that its forces penetrated up to 3 kilometers inside Pakistani territory; and that they inflicted “significant casualties” on “terrorists and those trying to shield them.”

The military has been tight-lipped about the operation. But Indian media reports, based on official sources, said Indian commandos had crossed into Azad or Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir both on the ground and in helicopter gunships and that their “kills” were in the “double-digits.”

India and Pakistan have passed through repeated war crises over the past quarter-century and in 1999 fought an undeclared war in the remote Kargil region of Indian-held Kashmir. However, New Delhi has not publicly admitted to carrying out military action inside Pakistan for decades for fear that this could trigger a rapid escalation to war and even nuclear-war.

Yesterday’s attack came ten days after anti-Indian Islamist militants attacked the Indian military base at Uri, in the Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir, killing eighteen Indian soldiers. Without so much as a cursory investigation, India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government held Islamabad responsible for the attack and vowed it would punish Pakistan.

India’s media, opposition parties, and a long list of retired military officers all joined in the clamour for India to bloody Pakistan.

At a celebratory press conference yesterday, the Indian Army’s Director General of Military Operations, Lt. General Ranbir Singh, said the “surgical strikes” had been aimed at “terrorist teams” positioned across the Line of Control for “launch” into India.

India, Singh claimed, has no further plans for cross-border actions. “However,” he continued ominously, “the Indian Armed Forces are fully prepared to deal with any contingency which may arise.”

Pakistan’s military, meanwhile, is vehemently denying that India mounted any “surgical” cross-border attacks, calling the claim “an illusion” and “fabrication of truth” promoted by India “to create false effects.”

The Pakistani military does concede two of its soldiers were killed and nine others wounded Wednesday night, but is attributing the casualties to cross-border artillery and gunfire—a regular occurrence across the Line of Control (LoC). In its statement challenging India’s claims, the military said that “Pakistan has made it clear that if there is a surgical strike on Pakistani soil,” it “will be strongly responded” to.

Both sides are clearly spreading disinformation—a further sign of how dangerous the situation is.

Take New Delhi’s claim that yesterday’s attack was aimed at preventing the imminent dispersal of terrorist squads into India. It is a transparent, trumped-up pretext for a reckless act of aggression.

The World Socialist Web Site has no brief for Pakistan’s reactionary, communalist ruling elite and its military, which have time and time again trampled on the democratic rights of the Pakistani people and served as a satrap for US imperialism. Having been schooled in the stratagem by the CIA, which enlisted Islamabad as its junior partner in its covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Pakistan has used Islamist terrorists in pursuing its military-strategic rivalry against India, particularly so as to politically suppress and divert the popular opposition to Indian rule in Kashmir along communal lines

But why would Pakistan—which has repeatedly voiced alarm over the military-strategic gap between it and India, a country with a six times greater population and seven times bigger economy—mass terrorists to strike India when New Delhi is already on a war footing?

Rattled by the falling off of Indian’s growth rate after 2010, the India bourgeoisie brought Narendra Modi and his virulently right-wing BJP to power to intensify the exploitation of the working class and assert its great-power ambitions on the world stage. In pursuit of the latter aim, India has integrated itself ever more completely into Washington’s war drive against China and, bolstered by US support, sought to impose itself as the regional hegemon.

While the Indian elite paints the country as an innocent victim of Pakistani “terrorism”, the BJP government has pursued confrontation with Pakistan. Soon after taking office it instructed the military to adopt a more aggressive posture on the LoC, resulting in 2015 in the most prolonged cross-border shelling in a decade. More than a month before the Uri attack, Modi announced that India would leverage the ethno-nationalist insurgency in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan against Islamabad, effectively threatening Pakistan with dismemberment.

Yesterday’s attack was meant to show that New Delhi is ready to take greater risks in advancing its strategic interests and that vis à vis Pakistan it will no longer be bound by the so-called policy of “strategic restraint.”

As for Pakistan’s claims that there were no cross-border strikes, they are simply not credible. Various Pakistani government officials and political leaders have made statements that implicitly or explicitly contradict the military’s version of events. Among these is Defense Minster Khawaja Muhammad Asif, who declared, “If India tries to do this again, we will respond forcefully.”

By denying that India has carried out a military raid inside Pakistan, Islamabad is seeking to avoid further escalation, without having to make a public and, from the reactionary standpoint of capitalist geopolitics, humiliating admission that it won’t make good on its repeated threats to answer any Indian cross-border thrust with a military strike of its own.

This stance however is likely only to encourage the Modi government and the most bellicose sections of the Indian elite who will hold it up as proof of how weakened Pakistan is. Yesterday, the entire political establishment, including the Congress Party and the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) joined forces, including at an all-party meeting convened by the BJP, to celebrate the aggression against Pakistan. The media, meanwhile, went into overdrive to hail the military strikes, amplifying the government’s claims that they were proof of a bolder, more powerful India, and trumpeting the military as veritable heroes.

The strategic rivalry between India and Pakistan, which today threatens the people of South Asia with a nuclear holocaust, is testament to the failure of bourgeois rule. It is rooted in the 1947 communal partition of South Asia into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India, which was implemented by the Congress Party and the Muslim League, the rival parties of the South Asian bourgeoisie, in conjunction with the subcontinent’s departing British colonial overlords.

That said, a huge factor stoking the war danger is Washington’s more than decade-long drive to transform India into a frontline state in its strategic offensive to isolate, encircle and prepare for war with China. Under Modi, India has lined up with the US in the South China Sea dispute and developed closer strategic bilateral and trilateral ties with the US’s key Asian-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia. Last month, Modi agreed to allow US warplanes and battleships to make routine use of Indian military bases.

Under George W. Bush and Obama, the US has lavished “strategic gifts” on India, giving it access to its most advanced weaponry and creating a special status for it in the world nuclear regulatory regime that has the effect of allowing New Delhi to concentrate the resources of its indigenous nuclear program on nuclear weapons development.

Invariably the strengthening of the Indo-US alliance has been associated with the downgrading of Washington’s ties with Pakistan, which throughout the Cold War was the principal US ally in South Asia.

Islamabad has warned that Washington has overturned the balance of power in South Asia, and that its ever-closer strategic partnership with New Delhi is emboldening India, and fuelling an arms and nuclear arms race, but all to no effect.

Fearing strategic isolation, Pakistan has drawn closer to its long-time ally China. But that has only increased its estrangement from Washington and fuelled its rivalry with India.

Eager to placate New Delhi, Washington likely gave it the green light to “punish” Pakistan, although the Obama administration, which still relies on Pakistan to provide crucial logistical support to the US occupation forces in Afghanistan, has denied it.

Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice called her Indian counterpart, Ajit Doval, Wednesday evening just hours before the Indian “surgical strike,” purportedly to give condolences for the Uri attack and express support for India’s fight against terrorism. Press reports suggest Rice’s call was precipitated by concerns over growing complaints in India that Washington has been insufficiently supportive, including for failing to label Pakistan as responsible for the Uri attack.

What is incontrovertible is that US government officials have refused to condemn yesterday’s “surgical strikes” on Pakistan, although they were patently illegal and highly provocative. Instead they have issued ritualistic calls for both sides to show restraint and move toward dialogue.

The US is playing a most dangerous and incendiary game. In pursuit of its anti-China alliance with New Delhi, it is encouraging India’s government, now led by the communally toxic BJP, to pursue an aggressive, but supposedly “calibrated,” policy of diplomatic, economic and military action against Pakistan—a country with which it has fought four wars and that has threatened to meet any large scale Indian attack with the speedy use of its recently deployed “battlefield” or tactical nuclear weapons.

Some of the largest demonstrations and labour strikes France has ever seen spread across the country from March to July. The action is set to continue in September as hundreds of thousands of workers and students protest a neoliberal labour law forced through the national assembly by the ruling Socialist Party (PS) led by President François Hollande.

The government passed the Loi Travail in July without debate or a vote (Hollande invoked a rarely used article of the French constitution that allows the president to rule by decree). The labour reform makes it easier for employers to hire and fire employees, and to impose wages and working hours. Hollande’s reforms, which are opposed by a large majority of the French public, threaten labour rights won by French workers in struggles over the course of the last century.

A Nuit Debout in Place de la République, Paris.

“This law is not just bad by itself but signifies the destruction of the entire legal architecture protecting workers’ rights in France,” Jean-Yves Lesage explains to me. Lesage is a printer in a newspaper plant who has been a union activist and member of the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), France’s largest union federation, for 30 years. The CGT is close to the French Communist Party and is leading the protests against Hollande’s labour reform.

“In France we have three levels of labour laws,” he says. “The national minimum for every person, which is the labour code (Code du travail), laws for each industrial sector, which cannot be below the national standard, and laws for each workplace, which cannot be below the legal standard for that sector.

“This architecture is very important because it gives every worker a minimum standard of labour rights even where the trade union is weak or non-existent,” says Lesage. “The new labour law changes this architecture and accepts that a workplace labour agreement could be of a lower standard than a sector-wide agreement, which in turn could be below that of the national standard for labour rights. The door is then open to force workers and their unions to accept agreements under the level of any existing law. This means that there is no end to the extent to which labour rights can be undermined in each workplace.”

This alarming prospect explains the intensity of the demonstrations against Loi Travail: workers are determined not to submit to what they consider the almost complete abrogation of their labour rights.

Police response to protests

The official response has been massive police repression. Since March, 2,000 people have been arrested, demonstrators attacked with rubber bullets, water cannons and tear gas. Hundreds of protestors were injured during the biggest gathering so far (an estimated 1.3 million people) on June 14 in Paris. The police response made parts of the city look like a war zone.

“The state repression of union demonstrations against the new labour law has been super-violent on a scale that I have never seen before in France,” says Florian, a union activist affiliated with the National Confederation of Labour (CNT), an anarcho-syndicalist union allied with the CGT in protesting the labour reform. (He asked that his last name not be included for fear of reprisal from the French government.)

“For the past four months, in these protests several people have lost their eyes due to rubber bullets fired at them by the police, a man has been put in a coma because the police fired a grenade at him which exploded near his face. These grenades have rubber bullets inside them. Another man was injured by a grenade fired at his spine. Police have also broken into a CNT local office in Lille and destroyed it, arrested its members for protesting, and confiscated files.”

The severity of official repression has been facilitated by the state of emergency declared in November 2015 following terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. The emergency grants police increased powers to act without judicial consent. House searches can be conducted without warrants at any time and house arrests made. Curfews can be imposed, public movement limited and mass gatherings stopped. Public spaces such as bars and theatres can be closed and media can be censored.

A French state of emergency is only supposed to last for 12 days, but the Hollande government has extended it several times. After the Bastille Day attack in Nice this July, which killed 84 people, the national assembly voted to maintain the state of emergency until January 2017.

“The French government is using the state of emergency to suppress labour rights and human rights in France,” says Richard Wagman, co-founder of France’s New Anticapitalist Party (NPA), which has also been an active participant in the demonstrations. “Since the promulgation of the state of emergency and the massive deployment of police, military and paramilitary forces, there have been practically no arrests of suspected terrorists. The first arrests carried out under the emergency were those of ecologists who were put in jail for protesting against the climate conference in Paris last December.

“Since then,” continues Wagman, “numerous trade unionists, social rights activists, anti-racist organizers, environmentalists and other progressives have been arrested, as the police no longer have to offer the same constitutional guarantees in prosecuting suspects for offences which are often imaginary. When terrorist attacks traumatize the country and police powers are increased, it’s the workers’ movement which is pushed back.”

Under Hollande, France’s military interventions abroad have increased dramatically, with attacks on Libya and Syria, and thousands of troops dispatched to Mali and the Central African Republic. According to Lesage, the terrorist attacks in France can be connected to the Syrian and Libyan campaigns, but “it is also linked to our colonialist history, our Muslim immigrants and the discrimination they suffer.”

Muslims in France are treated “violently” by the police, says Florian, who agrees the roots of terrorism lie in France’s foreign policy, especially its attack on Syria. “France needs to stop creating chaos in the Middle East and selling weapons all over the world if its government wants to end terrorism on its soil,” he says.

Business lobbies, citizens stay up all night

France’s largest business lobby—the Movement of the Enterprises of France (MEDEF)—enthusiastically backs the reforms and has long pressured the Socialist Party to lower labour standards in the face of prolonged recession and 10% unemployment. Hollande, who alongside Angela Merkel of Germany pressed Greece and other European countries to impose austerity on workers, was bound to pursue the same agenda at home.

“All EU governments faced with the pressures of globalization are enforcing austerity to reduce the living standards of their workers down to the level of China and India,” says Lesage. “Euro-capitalists now need a state better able to control the waves of public anger unleashed by this destructive process.”

This anger is particularly widespread in France. Hollande came to power four years ago by declaring that his enemy was “high finance.” But he proceeded to serve precisely this sector by enacting unprecedented neoliberal measures against the working class.

This betrayal has created widespread disillusionment with politics in France, leading to the phenomenon of Nuit Debout (“Rise Up All Night”). As part of the labour demonstrations over the summer, thousands of people have occupied public squares overnight to discuss politics and economics, and what kind of society they would prefer to live in.

“The convergence of struggles was the main theme put forth in Nuit Debout,” says Wagman, “bringing together workers and youth from different sectors in democratic, non-hierarchical debates, as well as initiating a number of militant initiatives to support ongoing struggles in different sectors.”

The phenomenon, which was inspired by the 2011 Indignados movement in Spain, has spread to other countries in Europe. “It is a modern form of proletarian internationalism in terms of class consciousness and democratic forms of organization,” Wagman says.

“People are tired of voting for progressive policies and being deceived. They can see that the political system does not work,” says Florian, who attended Nuit Debout in Place de la République, Paris, where the movement began. “When people do not agree with neoliberal measures and make this clear, the government passes these anyway and this is done by a so-called socialist government which keeps lying and working against the public interest.

“Nuit Debout shows that the French people crave politics, but a genuine socialist politics and the creation of a true participatory democracy that benefits everyone and not just the corporate elite. They want to be involved in fashioning such a democracy and refuse to be marginalized and manipulated by the economic elite.”

Hollande has become so unpopular in France that he could not even trust his own party members to vote for the labour reform legislation, which is why he rammed it through the national assembly on July 20. Christian Paul, a deputy in the assembly who leads a dissident faction of the Socialist Party, warned this “would be politically devastating.” He told Prime Minister Manuel Valls in early July that “he risked further alienating left-wing voters if he overrode parliamentary opponents and forced the labour reform bill onto the statute books by decree ahead of legislative and presidential elections in mid-2017.”

While the Socialist Party appears headed for a significant loss in those elections, no formidable alternative exists on the left. The Left Front, a coalition of the Communist Party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Left Party and the Unitarian Left, has only 15 seats in the national assembly out of a total of 577 (the far left is better represented at the regional and departmental level). The major opposition party, with 199 seats currently, are the right-wing Republicans (formerly the Union for a Popular Movement) led by Nicolas Sarkozy, who also drew mass protests in response to labour reform proposals when he was prime minister

Sarkozy has called Hollande’s Loi Travail “far too weak to solve the problems, but stinging enough to arouse the passions of the left. The government has proven its weakness faced with the protests.” (The Republicans are one of several groups challenging the legislation as unconstitutional.) Sarkozy would also prefer that the police had even more leeway to address terrorism. “We must be merciless,” he said at the end of July, “the legal quibbling, precautions and pretexts for insufficient action are not acceptable.”

The CGT has reacted with defiance to the imposition of the labour reform and large demonstrations are planned for September.

“We’re going to maintain the climate that we’ve known for the past four months and are thinking very concretely of other [protests] in the fall,” Philippe Martinez, the CGT secretary-general, told the newspaper L’Humanité. “I would remind you that there are laws that have been passed, but never applied.”

Asad Ismi is an independent journalist and activist who covers international affairs for the Monitor. 

This article was published in the September/October 2016 issue of The Monitor.

Amid mounting public threats that the US is preparing an escalation of its military intervention in Syria, the New York Times Thursday published a lead editorial branding Russia as an “outlaw state.”

This ratcheting up of rhetoric that has grown increasingly hysterical in regard to Russia is a response to the debacle suffered by US imperialism in its over five-year-long proxy war for regime change in Syria. Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air power, appear to be on the brink of retaking all of the eastern portion of Aleppo, the last major bastion of the US-backed “rebels,” composed principally of Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militias.

Secretary of State John Kerry issued an ultimatum to his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov Wednesday: either Russia grounds both its own and the Syrian government’s warplanes, or Washington will break off all negotiations with Moscow on Syria.

The significance of this threat was further spelled out in a press briefing by State Department spokesman John Kirby, who told reporters that as a consequence of Russia failing to bow to US demands, “extremists and extremist groups will continue to…expand their operations, which will include, no question, attacks against Russian interests, perhaps even Russian cities, and Russia will continue to send troops home in body bags, and they will continue to lose resources—even, perhaps, more aircraft.”

The provocative and utterly reckless character of Kirby’s remarks was no accident. That Washington intended to communicate a threat to unleash CIA-sponsored terrorism against Russia was underscored by a Washington Post column by Philip Gordon, who until last year was the White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf. The piece, which warned in its headline that “Russia will pay the price,” used almost identical language, stating that continued Russian action in Syria “could very well result in terrorist attacks against Russia.”

Gordon went on to warn that the Obama administration could take actions to “increase costs on Russia,” adding, “Arming the opposition with shoulder-fired missiles capable of hitting Russian and Syrian planes over Aleppo is among the options.”

The ex-White House aide finally cautioned Moscow that if “Hillary Clinton becomes the next U.S. president, Putin could be facing a U.S. leader who has long supported a no-fly zone in Syria and robust support for the opposition, has expressed skepticism about Russia’s intentions in Syria, and will be looking to more clearly reassert American leadership in the Middle East.”

It is evident, however, that the question of whether an escalation of the US intervention in Syria can wait until after the US election of November 8 has become the subject of heated debate within the US ruling establishment.

The Reuters news agency cited unnamed senior officials as saying that the Obama administration is considering “tougher responses to the Russian-backed Syrian government assault, including military options,” including the provision of heavier weaponry to the Al Qaeda-linked “rebels” and air strikes on Syrian government positions. (This second option was already put into practice with the September 17 US bombing that killed and wounded close to 200 Syrian troops near Deir Ezzor, which Washington claimed was an accident.)

With its editorial denunciation of Russia as an “outlaw state,” the New York Times is effectively weighing in on the debate within America ruling circles over the US intervention in Syria. It wants a military escalation and it wants it now—against Russia.

The Times writes:

“President Obama has long refused to approve direct military intervention in Syria. And Mr. Putin may be assuming that Mr. Obama is unlikely to confront Russia in his final months and with an American election season in full swing. But with the rebel stronghold in Aleppo under threat of falling to the government, administration officials said that such a response is again under consideration.”

To bolster its case, the Times throws in unsubstantiated charges made in an investigation driven entirely by “evidence” supplied by the Ukrainian secret police that Russia was responsible for the July 2014 shootdown of a Malaysia Airline jet over the war-torn Donbass region.

Putin, the newspaper declares, is guilty of “butchering civilians in Syria and Ukraine, annexing Crimea, computer-hacking American government agencies,” and “crushing dissent at home.”

Putin’s government represents Russia’s ruling oligarchy, which enriched itself through the theft of state property during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism. Its intervention in Syria, though of a defensive character, in response to US attempts to encircle and isolate Russia, represents the interests of this oligarchy and provides no progressive solution to the catastrophe unleashed by imperialism on Syria and the broader Middle East.

That being said, the crimes of Putin pale in the face of those carried out by successive US administrations, all of them with the complicity and propaganda support of the New York Times.

The US government is responsible for over a million deaths in Iraq and hundreds of thousands more from Afghanistan to Libya and Yemen. It instigated the regime-change operations in both Ukraine and Syria that gave rise to the “butchery” in those countries, much of it inflicted with weapons supplied by the CIA.

Moreover, even as the Times attacked the Russians’ “butchery” in Syria, the Pentagon announced that it is sending another 600 US troops to Iraq to prepare for a siege of Mosul, which, like the previous assaults on Fallujah and Ramadi, will entail massive crimes against the civilian population.

As for Russian computer hacking, the Times speaks on behalf of the US government, which, through the NSA, engages in the most massive spying operation the world has ever seen. And as for “crushing dissent at home,” the US, it should be recalled, is a country where the police murder over 1,000 people every year and the so-called “justice system” keeps some 2 million people behind bars. In brief, the Times editorial is a piece of war propaganda.

The term “outlaw state” was first put into official use by Ronald Reagan. It was later rendered as “rogue state” under Bill Clinton and, then, under George W. Bush, became the “axis of evil.” Invariably, these terms were used to describe oppressed, semi-colonial countries targeted by US imperialism for war and conquest: Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, North Korea, Iran, etc.

Now, in the pages of the New York Times, the term is used to describe Russia, a country of 146 million people armed with nuclear weapons. The implications could not be more ominous.

While the motivations of the Times editors may include short-term political considerations—the possibility of an “October surprise” in Syria boosting the prospects of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton—the anti-Russia propaganda campaign that the newspaper is leading has far deeper roots in the crisis of American capitalism and the protracted drive by US imperialism to overcome its historic decline through the instrument of militarism.

If words have any meaning, the Times editorial is a warning: behind the backs of the people of the United States and the entire planet, the preparations for a third world war are advancing rapidly.

The tragic video of a two-year-old crying over the body of her mother who collapsed from an overdose at a Dollar Store in Massachusetts has brought attention to the epidemic of cheap heroin in the United States.

Drug trafficking is not just a problem in America’s cities it is the main problem. Turf wars by drug dealers account for most of the murders in the United States. Drug-related shootings are at all-time highs. Crimes by drug addicts account for most of the prostitution, robberies, and burglaries in America. Prisons are packed with heroin users along with psychiatric wards and graveyards.

For eight years President Obama has been the commander-in-chief of U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan, a country that produces 90% of the opium in the world. ¹   With a stroke of his pen Obama could shut off most of the drug supply to 17 million heroin and opium addicts. Instead, his legacy is the same as George W. Bush. He allowed drugs to flow unimpeded out of Afghanistan for both terms of his presidency.

In a September 17, 2016 speech to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, President Obama insisted that it would be a personal insult to him if African Americans do not vote for Hillary Clinton. He said that only she can continue his legacy of support for the black community.

Wait. A legacy of support for the black community. Really?

Unemployment rates have not dropped in black communities during Obama’s presidency. Home ownership rates are lower among blacks than before he took office. African-Americans are experiencing stagnant wages and diminishing wealth just like everyone else. Racial tension is at its highest level ever in the United States. Finally, there is an epidemic of drug use and violence plaguing black and white communities all over the country.

Since Obama is now a lame-duck it is more important to examine the record of his hand-picked successor, Hillary Clinton. What did she do about the drug problem in black communities while she was in office during Obama’s first four years?

While acting as the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was responsible for the activities of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

The mission of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) is to combat international crime and illegal drugs, and their impact on the United States, its citizens, and partner nations ²

Last year the INL received over four billion dollars to distribute among five thousand drug interdiction personnel around the world. ³ In 2013 the DEA reported that over the four years that Hillary managed the multi-billion dollar program at the State Department, the flow of drugs north from Mexico increased:

The availability of heroin continued to increase in 2012, likely due to high levels of heroin production in Mexico and Mexican traffickers expanding into white powder heroin markets in the eastern and midwest United States.⁴

The DEA further reported that during the years that Hillary Clinton was in office so much Mexican heroin flooded into the country that the price of the narcotic dropped to the point that it was easier to obtain than prescription pain medicine.⁵

OK, so Hillary did nothing to stop the flow of heroin from Mexico when she was in office.  But what did she do about the flow of drugs out of Afghanistan?   The UN Office of Drugs and Crime provides the answer.  It reported that opium production in Afghanistan reached a ten-year peak in Hillary’s final year. ⁶

So much for Hillary Clinton’s efforts to stop the flow of heroin into African-American communities in the United States  when she was in a position do something about it.

Hillary’s website describes her 5-point plan to save Americans from drug addiction. It is Band-Aid therapy on steroids.

First, she will combat narcotics trafficking by giving money to public schools for education.  Every parent knows it is much easier to keep bad stuff away from children than to teach them to resist temptation.

Next she will provide two million first responders with $400 injection devices to administer drugs to people who are having overdoses. Keep the cheap dope away from them and they won’t overdose and need a $400 injection.

Next, she will provide free medical services to drug addicts.  Again, there would be no addicts if cheap drugs weren’t available everywhere.

Finally, she will make the criminal justice system focus more on drug rehabilitation than on drug interdiction.  There goes the last hope to address the central issue of restricting the flow of illegal narcotics into the country.

Despite the assessment by the DEA that the largest flow of heroin into America is coming from Mexico, Hillary has ridiculed the idea of building a wall on the border. She proposes to do nothing at all about the flow of opium from the poppy fields of Afghanistan.

That is the legacy that Obama insists Hillary Clinton must continue.

For 7 years, Stephen A. Molling was the Executive Director of a non-profit youth development program in East Baltimore. He has witnessed the devastating effect of heroin on urban families first-hand. He is the author of The Uragon Protocol.

Notes:

¹ UNITED NATIONS Office on Drugs and Crime. “World Drug Report 2016” Page xii
² http://www.state.gov/j/inl/faqs/index.htm
³ ibid
⁴ https://www.dea.gov/resource-center/DIR-017-13%20NDTA%20Summary%20final.pdf
⁵ ibid
⁶ UNITED NATIONS Office on Drugs and Crime. ” World Drug Report 2013” p.30

President Barack Obama has agreed to give Israel a record $38 billion in military aid over the next 10 years, cementing his legacy as the strongest financial supporter of Israel ever to occupy the White House. Obama, whom Israeli journalist Gideon Levy calls “the patron of the occupation,” increased the amount of money the U.S. provides Israel each year from $3.1 to $3.8 billion.

Although the corporate media portray the relationship between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as chilly, Obama put his money where his heart apparently is with the unprecedented allocation of military assistance to Israel.

Netanyahu, who described the increase in U.S. monetary aid as “unprecedented” and “historic,” characterized it as “the greatest accomplishment since sliced bread,” according to Aaron David Miller, vice president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “The bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable,” Obama declared on Sept. 21 as he shook hands on the deal with Netanyahu.

  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (center left) talks with President Obama in New York last week. (Video still from The Jerusalem Post)

The annual $3.8 billion, more money than the U.S. gives to any other country, will fund the continuing Israeli military occupation of Palestinian lands, now in its fifth decade.

Israel exercises complete control over every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. That includes borders, airspace, ingress and egress of people and goods, and the seashore and waters off the coast of Gaza. The occupation violates fundamental human rights of the Palestinians.

Two years ago, 60 Israeli youths signed an open letter to Netanyahu announcing their refusal to serve in the Israeli military because of the dehumanization of Palestinians living under occupation. In the occupied Palestinian territories, they wrote, “human rights are violated, and acts defined under international law as war-crimes are perpetuated on a daily basis.” The signatories cited “assassinations (extrajudicial killings), the construction of settlements on occupied lands, administrative detentions, torture, collective punishment and the unequal allocation of resources such as electricity and water.”

Flavia Pansieri, former United Nations deputy high commissioner for human rights, said last year that human rights violations “fuel and shape the conflict” in the occupied Palestinian territories, adding, “[h]uman rights violations in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are both cause and consequence of the military occupation and ongoing violence, in a bitter cyclical process with wider implications for peace and security in the region.”

Israel took over the West Bank and East Jerusalem by military force in 1967 and has held it under military occupation ever since. U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, passed in 1967, refers to “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and calls for “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Yet Israel continues to occupy the Palestinian territories it acquired in the Six-Day War between Israel and nearby Arab countries that year.

Since 1967, Israel has transferred more than half a million of its own citizens into the Palestinian territories. It persists in building Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which is occupied Palestinian territory.

But a state that is occupying territory that is not its own cannot build settlements on that territory and transfer its own citizens into them. Under Article 8.2(b)(viii) of the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, such action constitutes a war crime.

In criticizing Israel’s building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands, Secretary of State John Kerry said that since Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the number of Israelis in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has grown by 95,000, including 15,000 during the past year alone. Israel plans to build 2,400 new housing units in the settlements as it demolishes more and more Palestinian homes.

Kerry’s criticism rings hollow as the Obama administration consistently uses its veto in the Security Council to block the Palestinians’ campaign to block illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Obama is reportedly considering a council resolution to set the parameters for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, although the powerful pro-Israel lobby opposes such a move.

As this article is being written, the Women’s Boat to Gaza, with 13 women aboard, is sailing to Gaza to protest Israel’s blockade of what is often called the world’s largest “open-air prison.” In Gaza, 1.8 million people live on a 140-square-mile strip of land. It is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Gazans cannot enter or leave without Israeli permission. They cannot import or export goods without Israeli permission. They cannot fish in their own waters without Israeli permission.

In July 2014, Israel invaded Gaza and killed 2,251 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians. The number of Palestinians wounded was 11,231, including 3,540 women and 3,436 children. On the Israeli side, six civilians and 67 soldiers were killed and 1,600 were injured. Tens of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes, and the infrastructure was severely damaged. Numerous schools, U.N.-sanctioned places of refuge, hospitals, ambulances and mosques were intentionally targeted by Israel.

Israel used the “Dahiya doctrine” to apply “disproportionate force” and cause “great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure, and suffering to civilian populations,” as defined in the 2009 U.N. Human Rights Council (Goldstone) report. These acts constitute evidence of war crimes under Article 8 (2)(a) of the Rome Statute.

U.S. political leaders and the corporate media portray a false equivalence of firepower between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza. But Israel’s use of force greatly exceeds that of the Palestinians.

The White House and Congress condemn the rocket fire into Israel by Hamas and the “deliberate targeting of civilians.” But Washington says Israel has a right to defend itself, justifying Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza and blaming Hamas, while minimizing Israel’s role in creating and escalating the violence.

Israel’s overwhelming use of military force constitutes collective punishment, which is a war crime. The laws of war, also known as international humanitarian law, are primarily found in the Geneva Conventions. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a party, specifically forbids collective punishment. It says, “No protected person [civilian] may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. … Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.”

The U.N. secretary-general characterized Israel’s blockade of Gaza as “a continuing collective penalty against the population of Gaza.”

“Israel is able to act with utter impunity because of the military, economic and political support it receives from governments around the world,” according to Zaid Shuaibi, a spokesman for the Palestinian BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) National Committee. Israel would be unable to carry out its policies of aggression in Gaza without the support of the United States.

Fifty-seven percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans think the increase in military aid to Israel is too high.

Hundreds of Israeli officials, intellectuals and artists signed an open letter to Jews worldwide to oppose the occupation. The 470 signatories, including high-ranking officers of the Israel Defense Forces, ambassadors, ministers, high government officials and members of the Knesset, wrote: “The prolonged occupation is inherently oppressive for Palestinians and fuels mutual bloodshed. It undermines the moral and democratic fabric of the state of Israel and hurts its standing in the community of nations.”

In his Sept. 20 farewell speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama appeared to oppose Israel’s permanent occupation and settlements, saying, “Surely Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel … (and if) Israel recognizes that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land.”

But Obama’s actions speak louder than his words. Although he has the power to condition U.S. aid to Israel on ending the occupation and ceasing construction of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, Obama has chosen instead to serve as “patron of the occupation.”

The annual $3.8 billion, more money than the U.S. gives to any other country, will fund the continuing Israeli military occupation of Palestinian lands, now in its fifth decade.

Israel exercises complete control over every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. That includes borders, airspace, ingress and egress of people and goods, and the seashore and waters off the coast of Gaza. The occupation violates fundamental human rights of the Palestinians.

Two years ago, 60 Israeli youths signed an open letter to Netanyahu announcing their refusal to serve in the Israeli military because of the dehumanization of Palestinians living under occupation. In the occupied Palestinian territories, they wrote, “human rights are violated, and acts defined under international law as war-crimes are perpetuated on a daily basis.” The signatories cited “assassinations (extrajudicial killings), the construction of settlements on occupied lands, administrative detentions, torture, collective punishment and the unequal allocation of resources such as electricity and water.”

Flavia Pansieri, former United Nations deputy high commissioner for human rights, said last year that human rights violations “fuel and shape the conflict” in the occupied Palestinian territories, adding, “[h]uman rights violations in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are both cause and consequence of the military occupation and ongoing violence, in a bitter cyclical process with wider implications for peace and security in the region.”

Israel took over the West Bank and East Jerusalem by military force in 1967 and has held it under military occupation ever since. U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, passed in 1967, refers to “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and calls for “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Yet Israel continues to occupy the Palestinian territories it acquired in the Six-Day War between Israel and nearby Arab countries that year.

Since 1967, Israel has transferred more than half a million of its own citizens into the Palestinian territories. It persists in building Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which is occupied Palestinian territory.

But a state that is occupying territory that is not its own cannot build settlements on that territory and transfer its own citizens into them. Under Article 8.2(b)(viii) of the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, such action constitutes a war crime.

In criticizing Israel’s building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands, Secretary of State John Kerry said that since Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the number of Israelis in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has grown by 95,000, including 15,000 during the past year alone. Israel plans to build 2,400 new housing units in the settlements as it demolishes more and more Palestinian homes.

Kerry’s criticism rings hollow as the Obama administration consistently uses its veto in the Security Council to block the Palestinians’ campaign to block illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Obama is reportedly considering a council resolution to set the parameters for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, although the powerful pro-Israel lobby opposes such a move.

As this article is being written, the Women’s Boat to Gaza, with 13 women aboard, is sailing to Gaza to protest Israel’s blockade of what is often called the world’s largest “open-air prison.” In Gaza, 1.8 million people live on a 140-square-mile strip of land. It is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Gazans cannot enter or leave without Israeli permission. They cannot import or export goods without Israeli permission. They cannot fish in their own waters without Israeli permission.

In July 2014, Israel invaded Gaza and killed 2,251 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians. The number of Palestinians wounded was 11,231, including 3,540 women and 3,436 children. On the Israeli side, six civilians and 67 soldiers were killed and 1,600 were injured. Tens of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes, and the infrastructure was severely damaged. Numerous schools, U.N.-sanctioned places of refuge, hospitals, ambulances and mosques were intentionally targeted by Israel.

Israel used the “Dahiya doctrine” to apply “disproportionate force” and cause “great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure, and suffering to civilian populations,” as defined in the 2009 U.N. Human Rights Council (Goldstone) report. These acts constitute evidence of war crimes under Article 8 (2)(a) of the Rome Statute.

U.S. political leaders and the corporate media portray a false equivalence of firepower between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza. But Israel’s use of force greatly exceeds that of the Palestinians.

e White House and Congress condemn the rocket fire into Israel by Hamas and the “deliberate targeting of civilians.” But Washington says Israel has a right to defend itself, justifying Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza and blaming Hamas, while minimizing Israel’s role in creating and escalating the violence.

Israel’s overwhelming use of military force constitutes collective punishment, which is a war crime. The laws of war, also known as international humanitarian law, are primarily found in the Geneva Conventions. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a party, specifically forbids collective punishment. It says, “No protected person [civilian] may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. … Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.”

The U.N. secretary-general characterized Israel’s blockade of Gaza as “a continuing collective penalty against the population of Gaza.”

“Israel is able to act with utter impunity because of the military, economic and political support it receives from governments around the world,” according to Zaid Shuaibi, a spokesman for the Palestinian BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) National Committee. Israel would be unable to carry out its policies of aggression in Gaza without the support of the United States.

Actress Lisa Gay Hamilton, who is on the Women’s Boat to Gaza, wrote, “I’m here because I’m concerned about the effects of war and blockade on the women, as schools, hospitals, and homes have been periodically destroyed and sources of power and water compromised. … I’m here because my president just increased U.S. military aid to Israel from $3.1 to $3.8 billion per year over the next 10 years, with … no mention of the situation in Gaza.”

Fifty-seven percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans think the increase in military aid to Israel is too high.

Hundreds of Israeli officials, intellectuals and artists signed an open letter to Jews worldwide to oppose the occupation. The 470 signatories, including high-ranking officers of the Israel Defense Forces, ambassadors, ministers, high government officials and members of the Knesset, wrote: “The prolonged occupation is inherently oppressive for Palestinians and fuels mutual bloodshed. It undermines the moral and democratic fabric of the state of Israel and hurts its standing in the community of nations.”

In his Sept. 20 farewell speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama appeared to oppose Israel’s permanent occupation and settlements, saying, “Surely Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel … (and if) Israel recognizes that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land.”

But Obama’s actions speak louder than his words. Although he has the power to condition U.S. aid to Israel on ending the occupation and ceasing construction of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, Obama has chosen instead to serve as “patron of the occupation.”

The State Department admitted that the Nusra Front could be receiving U.S. arms via allied nations, and it’s not the first time the U.S. or its allies have been accused of aiding extremist groups in Syria.

The State Department moved quickly to deny a Syrian rebel commander’s recent allegations that the United States is offering arms and military equipment to extremist groups in the Syrian civil war.

On Monday, German newspaper Köelner Stadt-Anzeiger published an interview with Abu Al Ezz, a commander in the Nusra Front, in which he claimed that the United States offers indirect support to his group by sending equipment and aid via allied countries.

“Yes, the US supports the opposition [in Syria], but not directly. They support the countries that support us. But we are not yet satisfied with this support,” Al Ezz said, according to a translation published by RT.

The Nusra Front, or Jabhat-al-Nusra, recently attempted to rebrand itself as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and distance itself from its traditional allies, the terrorist group al-Qaida. However, the group’s leadership and extremist ideology remain unchanged, and both RT and Köelner Stadt-Anzeiger continue to refer to the group by its former name.

According to Al Ezz, U.S. materiel has been key in turning the tide against Syrian army forces:

Due to these rockets [American-made TOW anti-tank missiles], we reached a balance with the regime. Our tanks came from Libya via Turkey, joined by the [BM-21] multiple rocket launchers.

“The [Assad] government forces have an advantage because of aircraft and missile launchers, but “we have the American-made TOW missiles, and the situation in some areas is under control,” Al Ezz added.

When asked if the TOW missiles were initially intended for Jabhat Al-Nusra or if the group obtained them from the moderate Free Syrian Army, the jihadist clarified: “No, the missiles were given to us directly.”

But Al Ezz went on to add that training on how to use these weapons came directly from the US and its allies. When Jabhat Al-Nusra was besieged, Al Ezz said they “had officers from Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel and America here… Experts in the use of satellites, rockets, reconnaissance and thermal security cameras.”

The German journalist asked if US instructors were really present among the jihadists’ ranks. Al Ezz replied: “The Americans are on our side.”

Al Ezz added that Jabhat Al-Nusra received funding from US allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel for achieving specific military goals during the Syrian conflict.

“We got 500 million Syrian pounds (around $2.3 million) from Saudi Arabia. To capture the Infantry School in Al Muslimiya years ago we received 1.5 million Kuwaiti dinars (around $500,000) and Saudi Arabia’s $5 million,” Al Ezz said.

The funds came from the “governments” of those states, not from private individuals, he added.

“Israel is now giving us support because Israel is at war with Syria and with Hezbollah,” Al Ezz said.

As for the ceasefire, the Nusra Front and its allies are refusing to honor it, he said. “We will carry out the next overwhelming attack against the regime in a few days. We have regrouped our forces in all provinces, including Homs, Aleppo, Idlib and Hama.”

The Nusra Front and its allies are refusing to honor the ceasefire, he said. “We will carry out the next overwhelming attack against the regime in a few days. We have regrouped our forces in all provinces, including Homs, Aleppo, Idlib and Hama.”

In a press briefing on Monday, State Department spokesman Mark Toner denied Al Ezz’s allegations, saying:

We’ve absolutely not provided – I can’t say that as – vehemently enough, that we would never provide Nusrah with any kind of assistance whatsoever. We view them as a foreign terrorist organization, we view them as an affiliate of al-Qaida, and we’re going to seek their continued destruction.

But later in the same briefing, Toner said that “there are those – and not the United States – but there are those who back various groups and opposition groups within Syria who also may seek to arm them,” effectively admitting that arms could have traveled from the United States to the rebels via another member of the Western-backed coalition in the region.

Watch Syrian rebels fire an American anti-tank missile at a Russian T-90 tank:

Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, also raised the issue of the United States’ arming of rebel groups during a special session of the U.N. Security Council on Sunday. Before a genuine peace process can occur, Churkin said Russia has “to see proof that there is a genuine desire to separate US-allied rebel groups from the Al-Nusra Front, then destroy the Al-Nusra Front and bring the opposition into a political process.”

Al Ezz’s interview is hardly the first time the United States or its allies have been accused of supporting the Nusra Front and other extremist groups operating in Syria. Israel, the recipient of $3.1 billion in annual military aid from the United States and a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, has reportedly aided the group with airstrikes and medical care. Earlier this month, an Israeli journalist recorded the commander of another rebel group pleading with the Israeli government for increased military assistance.

And in a December 2015 episode of the BBC Radio series “The Report,” investigative journalist Peter Oborne showed that military aid from the United Kingdom and United States to so-called “moderate rebel” groups like the Free Syrian Army flows freely to more extreme groups like the Nusra Front.

Alastair Crooke, a British diplomat and former intelligence analyst for MI6, the U.K.’s primary foreign intelligence agency, told Oborne:

The West does not actually hand the weapons to al-Qaida — let alone to ISIS — but the system they’ve constructed leads precisely to that end. The weapons conduit that the West gave to the FSA is understood to be a sort of Wal-Mart that the radical groups can take weapons and use to fight Assad. The weapons migrate along the line to the more radical elements.

Watch “American allies accused of arming jihadist group Al-Nusra Front”

“President Obama has long refused to approve direct military intervention in Syria,” the New York Times asserted in an editorial (9/29/16) about “Vladimir Putin’s Outlaw State.”

That’s a peculiar thing to say, given that the Times regularly covers the United States’ ongoing direct military intervention in Syria. Since 2014, according to official Pentagon figures, the US has carried out 5,337 airstrikes in Syria. According to the monitoring group Airwars, these airstrikes (along with a few hundred strikes by US allies) havelikely killed between 818 and 1,229 Syrian civilians.

Nor is direct US military intervention in Syria limited to aerial attacks. In May 2015, the New York Times (5/16/15) reported on a combat raid by US Delta Force commandos in eastern Syria. Later that year, the Times (10/30/15) observed that President Barack Obama had announced he was sending (in the paper’s words) “several dozen” special forces troops on an “open-ended mission” inside Syria.

This somehow does not meet the New York Times‘ definition of “direct military intervention in Syria.”

Just a couple of weeks ago, the Times (9/16/16) wrote about three dozen more special forces going to aid Turkish troops inside Syria. Officially, these will have an “advise and assist” role—but the Times (12/27/15) has elsewhere noted the frequent US practice with regard to special forces of “resorting to linguistic contortions to mask the forces’ combat role.”

The Times, for its part, is engaging in some kind of linguistic contortion of its own to make none of this qualify as “direct military intervention in Syria.” Presumably it has something to do with the airstrikes and special forces not being aimed at the Syrian government of Bashar Assad, but at the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS—a rival to Assad’s power in Syria that the US is semi-officially at war with, even as Washington providesarms and training to other armed groups trying to overthrow Assad.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. You can follow him on Twitter at@JNaureckas.

Last week, the US Congress approved the Stability and Democracy for Ukraine Act, or “STAND for Ukraine.” As the Ukrainian Embassy in the US has reported, American congressmen unanimously supported the bill.

The bill’s list of means for supporting democracy in Ukraine includes the supply of lethal defensive weapons systems. The legislation will come into force following a vote in the Senate and its signing by the US President. From that point on, Washington will be able to officially supply lethal weapons to Ukraine.

The act’s adoption was an expected development. After all, it is well known that a Ukrainian lobby effectively works in the US and throughout the West. During his visit to New York, Poroshenko (right) met with representatives of the Ukrainian Diaspora who have had strong positions in American political circles since the end of the Second World War.

As a point of comparison, the numerous Russian diaspora in the US and its organizations, and in particular the Congress of Russian Americans, are nowhere close to matching the efficiency of Ukrainian circles’ lobbying activism. The fault for this, in my opinion, can be assigned to both sides, both Russian Americans themselves and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia and other government agencies and non-governmental organizations.

It is also important to recognize that numerous Western politicians and economists were included in Ukraine’s administrative organs, all the way up to the ministry level, following the coup d’etat in Kiev. The Ukrainian president’s aides and advisors have proven their effectiveness.

One of them is the former Secretary General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who has the status of a freelance advisor. Rasmussen previously stated that NATO should provide Ukraine with lethal weapons if Russia does not fulfill the Minsk Agreements and continues to “destabilize Eastern Ukraine.” Rasmussen’s statement was a manifestation of Ukraine’s lobbying efforts and organizations in Western countries just as much as it is an element of the West’s overall information policy, the goal of which is convincing Western political circles and public opinion that Russia is a party to the conflict in Donbass and threatens Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

As can be seen in the US Congress’ resolution, this is yet another success. Poroshenko can be satisfied with at least this part of his trip to New York.

But the experience of American support for “democracy” around the world attests to the fact that the US Congress is in fact promising new bloodshed and destruction for the people of Ukraine and Donbass. Ukrainians have never been good strategists, and this obvious truth has never benefitted the majority. One only needs to look at the experience of former Yugoslavia or that of Libya and Syria to be assured that America’s “benevolence” towards the people of Ukraine will only lead to the further division of the country and new victims. The US is not interested in a strong Ukraine, but in deterring Russia at any cost. For them, Ukrainians are but expendable material, just like the people of Donbass.

But what is most interesting for me personally in the US Congress’ resolution is another aspect which somehow found itself on the periphery of the Russian foreign ministry’s attention. Although lethal weapons were illegally delivered earlier, as many Donbass militiamen and even Ukrainian soldiers have exposed, the official green light to supply Ukraine with lethal weapons in fact makes the US a party in the armed conflict in the former Ukraine.

Earlier, the US State Department’s participation in the events of the Euromaidan legitimized the coup d’etat and gave a powerful impetus to the ensuing civil war. The burden of responsibility for the coup and the beginning of the civil war, however, must also be put on France, Germany, and Poland, whose foreign ministers signed on February 21st, 2014 the Agreement on Settling the Political Crisis in Ukraine. In so doing, these countries of “united Europe” and the US acted as parties to the political conflict in former Ukraine or, more precisely, its initiators.

Probably because of the peace-loving ideological foundations of the Russian foreign ministry, this thesis has yet to be voiced on the international arena. Instead, Sergey Lavrov’s ministry continues to fend off accusations of Russian involvement in the conflict in Donbass. It is difficult to blame the Donbass republics’ foreign ministries for this insufficient line, as they lack diplomatic experience. Yet it is this argument that will emerge in negotiations on the fate of Donbass and will put the blame on the United States for participating in the murder of the peaceful population of Donbass.

Palestinian pro-Syrian government militia from the Al-Quds brigade and the Syrian army recaptured the tumultuous Handarat refugee camp north of Aleppo city. After this success, the loyalists took control of nearby areas of Kindi Hospital and Shuqayf-Jandoul and the al-Kindi hill. Now, the pro-government forces are securing the gains.

The foreign minister of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez denounced the existence of U.S. military bases in Latin American Thursday and called for the governments in the region to unite and demand their closing, remarks that came during the third annual Latin American Summit of Progressive Movements in Ecuador.

According to Rodriguez, who spoke to an audience in the capital city of Quito, these bases only provoke conflict in the region. “We denounce the presence of 70 U.S. bases in our region, we have to unite and demand the closing of these bases,” said Rodriguez.

Ecuador’s former foreign minister Ricardo Patiño introduced Rodriguez, warning that the imperialist powers will continue to attack the progressive forces in Latin America.

“But we are stronger,” said Patiño. “We need to be better organized to be able to defend ourselves.”

Patiño recalled the decision of Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa to close the U.S. navy base in the city of Manta in 2007. When faced with criticism, Correa said he would allow a U.S. base in Ecuador as long as the northern country allows an Ecuadorian navy base in its territory.

Rodriguez also spoke about the attacks against the progressive governments in the region by the new conservative leaders in Argentina and Brazil, with the support of imperialism.

“Right-wing governments in the region are franchises of the (U.S.) Pentagon and the Department of State, that are destroying what the left has achieved,” said Rodriguez.

Rodriguez said she hopes the region could soon count again on Argentina and Brazil to work on a stronger integration.

The foreign minister reflected on the sovereignty struggles of Venezuela that late president Hugo Chavez, leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, often explained to the people.

“More than to rethink the integration process in the region, we have to defend it, we need to build a pluri-polar and multi-centered world like Chavez talked about,” said Rodriguez.

US officials have threatened Syria and its allies – including Russia specifically – that the collapse of a US-proposed ceasefire will lead “Gulf states” to arm militants with shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.

A Reuters article titled, “Gulf may arm rebels now Syria truce is dead: U.S. officials,” would elaborate, claiming:

One U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss American policy, said Washington has kept large numbers of such man-portable air defense systems, or MANPADS, out of Syria by uniting Western and Arab allies behind channeling training and infantry weapons to moderate opposition groups while it pursued talks with Moscow.

But frustration with Washington has intensified, raising the possibility that Gulf allies or Turkey will no longer continue to follow the U.S. lead or will turn a blind eye to wealthy individuals looking to supply MANPADS to opposition groups.

“The Saudis have always thought that the way to get the Russians to back off is what worked in Afghanistan 30 years ago – negating their air power by giving MANPADS to the mujahideen,” said a second U.S. official.

However, in reality, ambitions to down Russian and Syrian aircraft over Syria are not Saudi in origin, but rather come from the highest levels of policy and politics within Washington.  Washington-based corporate-financier policy think tank, the Brookings Institution, in a paper titled, “What to do when containing the Syrian crisis has failed,” would admit (emphasis added):

We must also be clever about employing various options for no-fly zones: We cannot shoot down an airplane without knowing if it’s Russian or Syrian, but we can identify those aircraft after the fact and destroy Syrian planes on the ground if they were found to have barrel-bombed a neighborhood, for example. These kinds of operations are complicated, no doubt, and especially with Russian aircraft in the area—but I think we have made a mistake in tying ourselves in knots over the issue, since there are options we can pursue.

In a 2015 Fox News interview, US Senator John McCain would admit:

I might do what we did in Afghanistan many years ago, to give those guys the ability to shoot down those planes. That equipment is available.

When asked to clarify his statement as to who would be shooting down the planes, McCain would answer:

The Free Syrian Army, just like the Afghans shot down the Russian…

In essence then, the US is merely laundering anti-air weapons and the ambition to use them through Saudi Arabia, as it has done so with all the weapons, terrorists, vehicles, money, and support used to trigger and perpetuate the ongoing war in Syria – with the Saudis at best, merely partners.

The US is Knowingly Going to Arm Al Qaeda, ISIS with Anti-Air Missiles

US politicians and policymakers are already acutely aware that any weapons they send into Syria – including anti-air missiles – will immediately end up in the hands of designated foreign terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda and ISIS. They are aware of this because thousands of anti-tank missiles the US has sent into the country, as well as fleets of Toyota trucks, ammunition, food, and other supplies have already ended up in Al Qaeda and ISIS’ hands.

This is not only through the seizure of weapons by terrorist organizations from “moderate rebels,” but because America’s “moderate rebels” have either voluntarily joined the ranks of designated terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda and ISIS – or were affiliated with terrorists from the very beginning and even before the conflict even began.

In a particularly embarrassing episode, it was reported by the pro-war, corporate-financier funded and chaired Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) blog, The Long War Journal in an article titled, “Islamic State used US-made anti-tank missiles near Palmyra,” that:

In a new video released by the Islamic State, the jihadist group shows the capture of the ancient city of Palmyra, also known as Tadmur in Arabic. During the video, at least one US-made BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missile is seen being used against Syrian regime troops near the city.

The report continued by stating:

This is not the first time the Islamic State has shown with TOWs. Last December, the jihadist group also published photos showing its forces using TOW missiles against Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces in the Damascus countryside. The United States has supplied several FSA groups with TOW missiles, which have sometimes fallen into the hands of jihadist groups or have been used to assist jihadist groups. The TOW used in Palmyra was likely captured from battles with the FSA in other parts of Syria.

It is not only possible that any anti-air weapons sent into Syria will end up in the hands of Al Qaeda or ISIS, it is inevitable.

Any nation supplying militants with such weapons is all but intentionally ensuring they eventually end up in the hands of terrorist organizations.

America Sowing the Seeds for New Levels of Global Terrorism for Decades to Come

And what US policymakers seem unaware or unconcerned with is the possibility that such weapons may be turned against their own forces not only in Syria – including US and European warplanes – but across the region, including on the battlefield in Yemen, targeting US-made Saudi warplanes.

Also possible is that these weapon systems are spirited out of the region and used to target civilian aircraft in terrorist attacks around the world.

As the US continues leveraging the downing of MH-17 over Ukraine against Russia, it simultaneously attempts to all but ensure the most dangerous terrorist organizations on Earth gain access to anti-air weaponry. It is a clear indicator that the US, not Russia nor the Syrian government, pose a threat to global peace and stability.

The same US who knowingly created and wielded Al Qaeda against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s before claiming to be victimized by this mercenary force on September 11, 2001 -precipitating a decade and a half of “War on Terror” – is hereby standing up a terrorist mercenary force larger and better armed than ever before. The US is sowing the seeds of global terrorism for decades to come by doing so.

America’s fueling of the Syrian conflict directly and through its Persian Gulf proxies has turned the entire Middle East and North African region into a hotbed of failed states, terrorism, and humanitarian crises. Russia’s failure to prevent US intervention in Libya has left the nation divided and destroyed, hemorrhaging refugees across the Mediterranean Sea into Europe and inviting terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and ISIS to expand across not only the ruins of Libya, but also across the rest of the region and beyond.

Russia’s failure to stop the division and destruction of Syria will result in a catastrophe greater still – and despite the level of destruction and violence unfolding today in Syria – should Damascus collapse and militant groups be left intact – Syria will face exponentially greater violence and destruction that will make Libya’s ongoing sociopolitical and humanitarian catastrophe pale in comparison.

The US, by erasing the lines of even rhetorical sensibility, does however open a window of opportunity for Syria and its allies to respond with asymmetrical warfare, targeting US and European warplanes illegally operating over Syria in such a way as to make it difficult if not impossible to determine whether or not America’s own anti-air weapons are being used against its and its allies’ warplanes.

US policy which essentially places anti-air missiles into the hands of terrorists – is so ill-conceived and desperate, the fact that it has been tabled in the first place illustrates Washington’s increasingly weak and desperate hand. If this policy is properly exposed for what it truly implies both for Syria and the state of global security for decades to come, and should it be countered intelligently by Syria and its allies, it can be turned back against Washington and add further impetus to finally end this war in the Syrian people’s favor – not Washington’s.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Tension between Russia and USA rose dangerously, on Thursday 29th of September, as the spokesman of the American Pentagon proceeded to indirect, still clear and quite unprecedented threats, about what can happen to Russian soldiers, interests and even cities, if Moscow and Damascus do not alter their policy in Syria. In the same time the US Secretary of State is threatening with suspension of talks with Russia on the situation in Syria.

Answering to these threats, the spokesman of the Russian Ministry of Defense said that (Pentagon’s spokesman Kirby’s) “words are the most frank confession by the U.S. side so far that the whole ‘opposition’ ostensibly fighting a civil war in Syria is a U.S.-controlled international terrorist alliance…What makes Kirby’s statement particularly shocking is that the scale of direct U.S. influence on terrorists’ activity is global, and that it reaches as far as Russia.”

These exchanges came only three days after US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter went to the Air Force Global Strike Command base, in Minot, South Dakota, to defend the massive modernization of the US nuclear arsenal and issue bellicose threats against Russia, essentially outlining plans for a nuclear war with Russia!

Look for more information in the following articles:

http://www.crossroadstoday.com/story/33276365/the-latest-russian-military-slams-us-comments-on-syria

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN11Z0RI?il=0

https://www.rt.com/news/361055-syria-russia-usa-threats/

http://www.businessinsider.com/kerry-russia-syria-negotiations-2016-9

http://www.globalresearch.ca/pentagon-chief-outlines-us-plans-for-nuclear-war-with-russia/5548284

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/09/29/syri-s29.html

Once more, the question some observers are putting is if President Obama is really in control of the US state apparatus, or we are facing one more “revolt” of the “party of War” inside it. For eight years, Obama is trying to reverse the neocon scenario for a bigger conflict in the Middle East which would extend, after Syria and Lebanon, to a probably nuclear conflict with Iran. In this context, the Syrian war can be seen as the prelude and the preparation of the greater war against Iran.

Who is deciding US Foreign Policy, the President or the “War Party”? This is exactly the question Stephen Cohen, one of the leading and deeper students of Russian affairs in USA is putting, in his review of the new rise of Cold War in both Ukraine and Syria

https://www.thenation.com/article/who-is-making-american-foreign-policy-the-president-or-the-war-party/

Another observer, ex-British diplomat Alistair Crook also warns about the “Party of War” inside the US administration and state which is not obeying Obama’s orders

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/09/26/new-cold-war-spins-out-of-control/

For the activities regarding Syria and Turkey of the neocon “War Party” and its friends outside the US you may see

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/middleeast/syria-assad-obama-airstrikes-diplomats-memo.html?_r=0

and

http://www.defenddemocracy.press/turkey-military-coup-possible/

A quarter of a century after the unilateral dissolution of Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the USSR, we are found again in a situation of a rapidly developing nuclear arms race, without the checques and balances, the Arms Control tools (like the ABM treaty) and the codes of behavior existing during the Cold War, at least after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/dangerous-crossroads-both-russia-and-america-prepare-for-nuclear-war/5548074?utm_campaign=magnet&utm_source=article_page&utm_medium=related_articles

The Monsanto Company has been reeling from an image crisis for several years now, one that reached a fever pitch with the first March Against Monsanto in May 2013.

The bad press and constant protests, both in its home country of the United States and especially abroad where GMOs are banned in 38 countries, have continued ever since, leading to company plans to possibly change its name and culminating with a pending, agreed-upon sale to Bayer this year.

But while the company has been universally questioned, criticized and protested against by the general citizenry, it has made inroads in large part because of its close relationships with government and academic institutions, as well as the lack of clear, concise labeling on GMO foods.

And now, Monsanto has partnered about with two of the biggest names in academia: Harvard University and MIT, for a new project that could change the face of agriculture in many unforeseen ways.

Monsanto Teams Up With Harvard, MIT for Controversial CRISPR GMOs 

The current regulatory framework for GMO crops has been roundly criticized by watchdog groups and scientists who say that Monsanto’s new crops are approved despite a lack of long-term, independent safety testing.

But it’s still at least somewhat time-consuming for new crops to make it to market, giving customers and watchdog groups a chance to be vigilant.

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)

The highly controversial new CRISPR technology for creating genetically engineered crops could change all that, however. Also known as gene-editing, this technology allows scientists to simply “exchange a couple letters in an organism’s genetic code (either an A, G, C or T) and replace it with one that is somehow beneficial for a specific purpose,” as noted in this article from the website DigitalTrends.com. Regular GMOs swap a plant’s genes with those from an entirely different organism.

The new CRISPR technique will allow many more scientists and companies to begin experimenting with changing the genes in our natural food crops (which could be highly profitable in the long run, especially since consumers aren’t likely to know that it’s being done to their food), and now Harvard and MIT are getting in on a piece of the action.

Monsanto announced recently that it has reached an agreement with the Broad Institute (a biomedical and genomic research institute) of MIT and Harvard University, continuing a trend of corporate infiltration of academia that also included a recent $6 million dollar donation by Bill Gates to help “de-polarize” the debate on GMOs at another top university, Cornell.

The agreement will help “deliver a wide array of crop improvements in global agriculture,” the press release stated, and is considered to be the institute’s first agricultural license.

“The license to CRISPR-Cas from the Broad Institute provides access to an exciting tool for our growing body of genome-editing research,” said Dr. Tom Adams of Monsanto. “Genome-editing technology is complementary to our ongoing discovery research and provides an incredible resource to further unlock our world-leading germplasm and genome libraries.”

But what will be the unintended consequences of this strange new world in biotechnology, and will the citizens even know what types of experiments they may be eating?

Here is what the Green party/European Free Alliance group in the European parliament had to say on CRISPR GMOs according to this article from GMWatch.org. In Europe there is a push to classify them along with regular GMOs which could lead to bans and/or restrictions.

“Gene editing raises similar concerns as [genetic modification] as regards intellectual property rights and the impact on traditional and organic farming models. As such, it would make sense for gene editing to be covered by the same regulatory regime as existing GMOs,” they said in a statement. “However, the current EU legislation on GMOs is clearly in need of a major overhaul, notably to significantly improve the risk assessment process and ensure its independence, as well as to take account of the socio-economic impact of GMOs.”

Natalie Bennett, the UK Green Party leader, had this to say about the new technology: “The Green party believes that with these new technologies, with their often unknown side effects and impacts, it is important to maintain the precautionary principle. These are genetic modifications using new techniques; they should be treated accordingly.

“It was only last week that researchers writing in the prestigious journal Science expressed grave concerns about one particular use of gene editing technology, the gene drive, while the European Food Safety Authority concluded in 2012 that cisgenesis [another technology for altering plants] should be treated in terms of regulation and oversight as a GM technology, at least initially.

“With new techniques and possibilities being developed every year, now is not the time to allow a wild west of release of organisms without full safety oversight and consumer information.”

Untested, Unlabeled CRISPR Technology: Full-Speed Ahead in the U.S.

Unfortunately in the United States and despite the concerns of many others like Bennett, the CRISPR gene-editing experiment continues full-speed ahead.

As of right now there will is no regulation needed for CRISPR-created GMO plants such as a new non-browning mushroom created by a Penn State University scientist in the lab, according to the USDA in this article from the Organic Consumers Association.

The technology is also excluded from the new “GMO labeling law (which many described as toothless to begin with)” so there may come a time when such gene-edited crops flood store shelves without customers even knowing, despite the complete lack of independent, long-term safety testing.

For more on the controversial technology and the new Harvard and MIT agreement, you can click on this link.

It was momentous on one fundamental level. Here was the President of the United States, Barack Obama, holding the torch for a wretched ally the politicians on the Hill and others have had reservations over for many years.  Saudi Arabia, ever the thorn and asset of US interests, facing the grief of families who lost members on September 11, 2001.  This, the same ally whose theocratic bent remains the most bruising of obstacles in any claims that the US is open to a global democratic experiment.

In the end, it came down to a very American formula, one born in the court room and ligation process. It also left a good deal of mud on the Presidential power of veto.  “I would venture to say,” ventured press secretary Josh Earnest, not without some hyperbole, “that this is the single most embarrassing thing that the United States has done, possibly since 1983.”

The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act permits US courts to waive an assertion of foreign sovereign immunity, one of the treasured features of a State’s legal armoury, regarding acts of terrorism that occur on US soil.  While Saudi Arabia claims no direct role in the 9/11 attacks, it cannot say the same about its zealous nationals, with fifteen of the 19 plane hijackers boasting that nationality.

True to form, its diplomats were heating the issue and reminding US lawmakers about the consequences of JASTA becoming law.  In the cold, monetarily inclined words of Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir, “everybody will begin to think twice before they invest in a place where their assets could be seized.”[1]

Sen. Chuck Schumer, chief sponsor of the bill, explained with some solemnity that, “Overriding a presidential veto is something we don’t take lightly, but it was important in this case that the families of the victims of 9/11 be allowed to pursue justice, even if that pursuit causes some diplomatic discomforts.”[2]

Nerves through Washington duly frayed.  Playing the 9/11 card is a rotten business, but it certainly worked to convince members on both side of the aisle that the President’s veto had to be overturned.  The façade was duly taken down; and the ugly, protective mask of the relationship with Riyadh ripped off.  Admitting to an avenue of legal action, or at any rate permitting it, against an ally was tantamount to a confession.

One such individual was CIA director John Brennan, whose befuddled security mind has to juggle the plotting machinations of Riyadh with the dictates of US security.  “It would be an absolute shame if this legislation, in any way, influenced the Saudi willingness to continue to be among our best counterterrorism partners.”

President Obama was more forthright. The passage of the bill effectively meant that the various imperial efforts of the US would be compromised.  Vast, gargantuan and spread over the earth, US engagements and actions would suddenly face the prospect of legal targeting.

His concern with such actions had to with “not wanting a situation in which we’re suddenly exposed to liabilities for all the work that we’re doing all around the world, and suddenly finding ourselves subject to private lawsuits in courts where we don’t even know exactly where they’re on the up and up, in some cases.”[3]

Speculation was already being advanced by various legal authorities.  JASTA, argued Theodore Karasik, would also permit Saudi citizens an avenue to sue the US government and its employees in foreign courts. That would well accompany additional moves to amend domestic laws “to allow their citizens to sue the US government and its employees in foreign courts, most likely state security courts.”[4]

Stephen I. Vladeck of the University of Texas School of Law goes further in suggesting that the law will do little to bring home the litigious bounty for victims of 9/11 while enlarging the scope for US plaintiffs to launch suits against states for international terrorism, whether Washington deems them sponsors of terrorism or otherwise.[5]

The punch against US power, however, would come in the form of taking Washington’s policies to task in very specific cases.  Would, for instance, the Syrian regime be justified in suing the United States for its role in sponsoring Syrian rebel fighters who go on to commit acts of terrorism?  Justice can be truly blind, though the legal authorities often fear it.

Much of this fuss may be unfounded.  States continue to pursue claims against each other in the International Court of Justice, though they tend to do so with velvet gloves and utterances of mock decency.  In some cases arbitral channels over matters of wrongful death can also be used.  But States have continued over the years to cite a veil of sovereign immunity in the courts that has, at stages, begun to tear. The Nuremberg war crimes trials made a decent start of it.

Over time, the deaths of nationals has generated a basis to seek compensation, though a state might well be reluctant to part with money in the bargain.  Granting an award is no guarantee of receiving it.  But rarely has there been such an overt challenge to assumptions of sovereign immunity, a domestic effort to effectively overturn an internationally accepted rule.

Following that other accepted notion of reciprocity at international law, other countries may well see their nationals rush to the courts to seek redress for the actions of the US imperium, allies or otherwise.  They should be mindful of the comments of Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee: “All they want is the opportunity to present their case in a court of law.”

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

Notes

TISA, TTIP and TPP continue to be negotiated in secret, as WikiLeaks recently released a new leak from the updated TISA (Trade in Services Agreement) core text and annexes. If you want to know what TISA means in 7 words, it’s this: total privatization and commodification of public services.

Unfortunately, once something is privatized, it becomes very difficult to ever get it back into the public hands. Of the 3 T-Treaties, TISA is the largest, encompassing 24 countries (including blocs such as the EU) which produce over 2/3 of global GDP, yet has received the least attention.

Protests against the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, negotiated primarily between the US and EU) have been strong, to the point where several European government officials have publicly stated that the treaty doesn’t look like it will pass. Protests have also been strong against the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership, negotiated primarily among the US, Japan, Canada, Australia and other Pacific nations).

Since the worldwide economy is shifting from being product-based to being service-based, TISA has the potential to become one of the most important economics treaties on Earth. Already, according to 2015 figures from the World Bank, service industries account for 78% of US GDP and 74% of EU GDP. Together, the 3 T-Treaties promise to cement massive control in the hands of the international corporatocracy, disempowering sovereign states and preventing governments from setting laws, regulations and policy to protect their nations, markets and people.

All About the Corporatocracy

It’s laughable to hear politicians defend TISA and the other treaties by trying to claim they will be good for jobs or the economy. For most people in TISA, TTIP and TPP affected nations, the results will be disastrous, as discussed in How the TPP is Going to Affect You. The aim of these treaties is to open up markets for multinational corporations to exploit new labor and consumer markets – with less governmental regulation than before. These treaties give the corporatocracy the power to force down wages. This article talks about the proposed TISA agreement:

“The “disciplines,” or treaty rules, would provide foreign services providers free access to domestic markets at “no less favorable” conditions than domestic suppliers and would restrict governments’ ability to regulate services. This would essentially change the regulation of many public and privatized or commercial services from serving the public interest to serving the profit interests of private, foreign corporations.”

You may not like tyrannical governments, but tyrannical corporations are even worse, because at least a government can be petitioned, replaced or overthrown; private corporations answer to no one except their shareholders. The point of government is protect the rights of its citizens, which includes regulating creatures like corporations who are created for the sole purpose of making as much money as possible above anything else. TISA, TTIP and TPP all gut the ability of national governments to enact laws to protect their land and citizens from marauding foreign multinationals. It’s corporate hegemony, pure and simple.

TISA, TTIP and TPP would disallow GMO and country-of-origin labeling, would essentially make Google, Facebook and any website owner a “copyright cop”, and would even require all signatory states to make their national laws conform (and be subordinate to) the ones in these treaties!

ISDS (Investor State Dispute Settlement): Parallel Legal System in All 3 T-Treaties

Much has already been written about the ISDS (Investor State Dispute Settlement), but for those who don’t know, the ISDS is a parallel legal system that only multinationals have access to. People, local companies and even national governments do not have access to it. The ISDS tribunal is staffed (of course) with corporate lawyers. ISDS even gives corporations the power to get legal damages in “expected profit”. The way it is written, a Vietnamese phone company, for example, could bring its company (with its workers paying its wages) into the US, could set up business there, and could sue if the local, state or national government tried to stop them.

Opposition to TISA, TTIP and TPP Growing

Despite the secrecy surrounding TISA, TTIP and TPP, the public and nations states alike have gained enough knowledge of them to mount widespread opposition. Recently (and surprisingly) Vietnam refused to ratify the TPP, even though some considered it would benefit greatly from the clauses dealing with wage rates. Meanwhile, literally hundreds of thousands of people protested the TTIP in Germany. The French Government has opposed the deal (French Prime Minister Manuel Valls demanded a finish to the talks) and German Vice-Chancellor and Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel revealed that TTIP negotiations had basically failed. He stated:

“In my opinion, the negotiations with the United States have de facto failed, even though nobody is really admitting it … Europeans must not give in to (the Americans’) demands.”

Those American demands he is referring to are things like Europeans accepting hormone-filled beef and chlorine-filled chicken. Europe’s food standards are much higher than those of the US, which has been more influenced and corrupted by Big Agra and Big Biotech (and their toxic array of pesticides and GMOs) more than the EU. In the US, around 70% of supermarket food is GMO and around 90% of beef is made using growth hormones, whereas the GMO rate in the EU is way lower, and hormone-fed beef is banned.

TISA, TTIP and TTP: calculated economic warfare against the BRICS nations.

3 T-Treaties: Economic Warfare Against BRICS

As much as TISA, TTIP and TTP embolden multinational corporations, the 3 T-Treaties also serve another agenda: the geopolitical plan for the US and allies to isolate the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). To understand this, you need to realize that the so-called New World Order is very much an Anglo-American-Zionist dominated agenda. It’s all about the push towards global governance or world government, by centralizing power in every area of life: political, military, educational, financial and more. TISA, TTIP and TPP represent nothing less than economic warfare against BRICS.

TTIP forges ties with the EU and surrounding nations, but deliberately excludes Russia. TPP forges ties with Japan, other Pacific nations and some South American nations, but deliberately excludes China, India and Brazil. TISA forges ties with countries all over the world (sort of a combination of TTIP and TPP) but none of them are the 5 BRICS countries. The plan is obvious: isolate, ostracize and weaken any nation which dares to challenge US supremacy. This goes hand-in-hand with US military agenda (the Pivot to Asia) which aims to inflict the same kind of weakening in a military sense.

Conclusion: TISA, TTIP and TTP are a Colossal Power Grab

TISA, TTIP and TTP are an attempt to rewrite the playing rules for a massive amount of the world economy, bring financial pressure to bear down upon the perceived opponents and enemies of the US, consolidate more power for the corporatocracy, open up new markets for exploitation without regulation, and make the public even more powerless against Big Money. These 3 T-Treaties (and others like them such as CETA being negotiated between Canada and the EU) must be first brought out of secrecy and under scrutiny. They remove sovereignty and decision-making ability away from the local and regional level. It’s yet more centralization of power – the overriding theme of the New World Order agenda. That reason alone is hopefully sufficient for anyone unsure about these T-Treaties, and new to the sphere of conspiracy research, to regard them with a large dose of distrust.

Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative news / independent media site The Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com (FaceBook here), 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:

*https://wikileaks.org/tisa/#September%2015,%202016%20Publication

*http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.SRV.TETC.ZS

*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/how-tpp-will-affect-you/

*http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org/sites/default/files/Memo-Proposed%20TISA%20March%202014.pdf

*http://commondreams.org/news/2016/09/16/tpp-ropes-its-corporate-power-vs-people-power-capitol-hill

*http://bigstory.ap.org/article/611ff828b5ed44d5ad56ab46e0781e52/german-economy-minister-says-eu-us-trade-talks-have-failed

*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/big-pharma-big-agra-mergers-synthetic-agenda/

*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/pivot-to-asia-militarization-of-pacific/

William Engdahl recently explained how Washington used the corrupt Brazilian elite, which answers to Washington, to remove the duly elected President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, for representing the Brazilian people rather than the interests of Washington.

Unable to see through the propaganda of unproven charges, Brazilians acquiesced in the removal of their protector, thereby providing the world another example of the impotence of democracy.

Everyone should read Engdahl’s article. He reports that part of the attack on Rousseff stemmed from Brazil’s economic problems deliberately created by US credit rating agencies as part of Washington’s attack to down grade Brazilian debt, which set off an attack on the Brazilian currency.

Brazil’s financial openness made Brazil an easy target to attack. One might hope that Vladimir Putin would take note of the cost of “economic openness.” Putin is a careful and thoughtful leader of Russia, but he is not an economist. He has confidence in neoliberal Elvira Nabiulina, Washington’s choice to head the Russian central bank. Nabiulina is unfamiliar with Modern Monetary Theory, and her commitment to “economic openness” leaves the Russian economy as exposed as Brazil’s to Washington destabilization. Nabiuina believes that the assault on the ruble is due to impersonal “global market forces,” not to Washington’s financial clout.

Nabiulina, an indoctrinated and propagandized neoliberal, is essentially a servant of Washington, not that she is aware of her role as “useful idiot.” She delights in the applause she receives from the Washington Consensus for leaving the Russian economy open to Washington’s manipulation. Being a neoliberal, she does not understand that Russia’s central bank can create at zero cost the money with which to finance productive projects in Russia. Instead, she thinks that the money entering the economy from the central bank is inflationary, but the money entering the economy from foreign sources is not.

Money is money regardless of whether it is made available by the central bank or by foreign creditors. As long as the money, whatever its source, is used productively, the money is not inflationary.

There is a huge difference between the money created by the central bank and the money created by foreign creditors. Money lent by foreign banks in the form or US dollars or euros must be repaid with interest in the foreign exchange in which the money was lent. Money created by the central bank to finance public infrastructure projects does not have to be repaid at all, much less with interest and in foreign exchange earned by exports.

Funds acquired from borrowing abroad bring many risks. The money can be pulled out, collapsing a freely traded ruble. The interest that must be paid is a drain on Russia’s foreign currency reserves. Foreign borrowing also brings a foreign exchange risk, which rises with economic sanctions. If the ruble drops in value or is driven down with an orchestrated attack, the ruble cost of the foreign loan can rise dramatically.

None of these risks and costs are present when the central bank is the source of money. The appropriate use of the Russian central bank is to create the money with which to finance public projects and to serve as lender of last resort to private Russian companies unable to obtain funding from Russian banks. This use of the central bank insulates the Russian economy from orchestrated destabilization.

It is unfortunate for Russia that Nabiulina and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev believe that Russian debt financed by hostile foreigners is preferable to money created by Russia’s own central bank. Glazyev, alone among Putin’s advisers, understands this. We suspect that the Atlanticist Integrationists have a target on Glazyev’s back as they hope to integrate Russia with the West regardless of the costs to Russia. These Russian “America Worshipers” are Russia’s greatest problem.

For Washington, neoliberal austerity is for “export only” to countries that Washington intends to turn into dependent financial colonies. By accommodating Washington’s goal, Nabiulina is engaging in a charade. The dollars and euros borrowed from abroad are not the money that goes to the Russian borrowers. The borrowed foreign exchange is held by the central bank. Nabiulina then creates the rubles that finance the projects. There is no point whatsoever to borrowing foreign currencies as backing for domestically created rubles. Regardless of whether Russia borrows abroad, the central bank must create rubles with which to finance the projects. So there is no point to the foreign borrowing.

A Russian government that cannot understand this is in deep trouble.

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.

Le «Psyops» (Operazioni psicologiche), cui sono addette speciali unità delle forze armate e dei servizi segreti Usa, sono definite dal Pentagono «operazioni pianificate per influenzare attraverso determinate informazioni le emozioni e motivazioni e quindi il comportamento dell’opinione pubblica, di organizzazioni e governi stranieri, così da indurre o rafforzare atteggiamenti favorevoli agli obiettivi prefissi».

This carefully documented report by political correspondent Marwa Osman confirms that the US is supporting and arming the Al Qaeda affiliated rebels  which are the object of the Syrian government’s endeavor to Liberate Aleppo, with the support of Russia. 

Crimes against humanity are being committed by Al Qaeda with the support of its sponsors including the US, Britain, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. 

The Western media reports accusing Russia of deliberately targeting civilians are fabricated. 

The Syrian government operation is directed against the various terrorist entities with the support of Russia.

America’s air raids launched by Obama in 2014 under a fake counterterrorism label are intent upon protecting rather defeating the ISIS – Daesh terrorists.  

(M.Ch. GR Editor)

The Israeli Military Censor has outright banned the publication of 1,936 articles and redacted some information from 14,196 articles over the past five years. That is 1,936 articles that professional journalists and editors decided were of public interest but which never saw the light of day.

In fact, the IDF Censor redacted at least some information from one in five articles submitted to it for review since 2011, according to data provided by the Israeli army at the request of +972 Magazine, its Hebrew-language sister site Local Call, and The Movement for Freedom of Information.

Under the new chief IDF censor who entered the job last year, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of instances in which the Censor contacts publishers with demands to alter or remove items that have already been published — almost double the number of post-publication censorship attempts in years past. At the same time, the new IDF Censor is intervening slightly less in articles submitted to her office for review prior to publication.

Since the start of 2011, the years that saw the most censorship were those in which Israel was engaged in warfare in the Gaza Strip. The highest rates and frequency of censorship took place in 2014, the year of Operation Protective Edge, and the second-highest was 2012, the year of Operation Pillar of Cloud.

Furthermore, the data confirms that the IDF Censor’s office bans the publication of documents and materials from the State Archives, documents that have already approved for publication, and some of which have already been published in the public domain.

The Israeli military censor in Israel draws its authority from emergency regulations put in place during the British Mandate period, many of which have remained on Israel’s law books for upwards of 70 years.

While other countries have formal mechanisms for requesting that journalists refrain from publishing certain information relating to national security, Israel is all but alone among Western democratic states that have a legally binding state censor. Nowhere else must reported materials be submitted for prior review.

Media outlets in Israel, lately expanded to include independent blogs and websites (like +972 Magazine) are required to submit to the IDF Censor for prior review any articles that fall under a broad list of topics relating to national security and foreign relations. The Censor may forbid publication of part or all of the article. That said, the decision of which articles and news items are submitted to the censor for review is made on a case-by-case basis by news organizations and editors themselves. However, once an article has been censored by the military, the journalist is forbidden from revealing what information has been removed, or even to indicate that information has been censored.

Adding to the lack of transparency is the fact that the IDF Censor is technically a part of IDF Intelligence branch. Because of that institutional association, “it is not subject to freedom of information laws,” explains Attorney Nirit Blayer, executive director of the Movement for Freedom of Information. “Nevertheless, the person in charge of freedom of information in the IDF has an approach of publishing anything that can be published.” Therefore, we received the requested information quickly and without much difficulty.

Here is the data:

Between the years 2011 and August of 2016, between 13,000 and 14,000 items were submitted to the IDF Censor for prior review each year. During 2011 and 2013, between 20 and 22 percent of items submitted for review by the IDF Censor were redacted either in part or in full, although in the vast majority only part(s) of the item was blocked for publication.

In 2014 there was a significant spike in the frequency of censorship, most likely explained by the war in Gaza that year. Of the articles submitted for prior review by the censor that year, 26 percent (3,719 articles) were partially or fully blocked for publication (22 percent were partially redaction, 4 percent were fully censored).

In the past two years, however, there has been a slight reduction in the percentage of articles that were redacted or censored. The IDF Censor partially or fully censored 19 percent of items submitted for review prior to publication. From the start of 2016 through August, that number dropped even further to 17 percent — the lowest rate of censorship intervention in the past five-and-a-half years.

However, from the very beginning of her tenure as the current IDF Censor last year, Col. Ariella Ben-Avraham has been expanding the scope of the IDF Censor’s purview, putting an emphasis on Facebook pages and blogs that self-identify as news or media pages. In late 2015, she contacted dozens of such Facebook pages (including +972 Magazine’s) and sent them a military censorship order requiring them to submit relevant materials prior to publication.

It is now apparent that Ben-Avraham’s proactive policies are not limited to demanding the submission of materials. The current IDF Censor has also been actively seeking the removal, in part or in whole (the data we received does not distinguish), of materials that have already been published.

Between 2011 and 2013 the IDF Censor sought the removal of already-published materials, on average, 9, 19 and 16 times per month, and 37 times a month during 2014 (when a war took place). In 2015, a year that saw no wars take place, the IDF Censor contacted publishers on average of 23 times a month with demands to remove content that had already been published. Thus far in 2016 (through August), that number has soared to an average of 37 times a month, the same rate as in wartime, or in other words, nearly two-times more frequently than in 2012.

The censor also revealed that between 2014 and 2016, roughly 9,500 files from the State Archives relating to national security were submitted for review. According to the censor, roughly 0.5 percent of those documents were partially or fully censored. It was not clear how many individual documents were contained in the 9,500 files.

The IDF Censor, in response to our questions, said that it has never approached third-party hosts of news or media (like ISPs or social media platforms) in order to seek the removal of information that was published despite its censorship attempts. However, authorities in Israel use other means of controlling the flow of information and censorship online, even when that information was not published by a person who falls under Israeli jurisdiction, as was reported on +972 earlier this summer.

In that case, like many others, the state used another tool for blocking the publication of information it sought to keep secret — judicial gag orders. Gag orders are issued by judges, often without much deliberation and almost always without any consideration of the public interest to know. The number and frequency of judicial gag orders in Israel has grown dramatically in recent years.

The number of gag orders issued by Israeli courts has more than tripled in the past 15 years, according to soon-to-be published research conducted by Noa Landau, editor of Haaretz’s English edition, during a fellowship at the Reuters Institute at Oxford last year. Collecting data from Israeli police, the court system, the Israeli army, and Haaretz, Landau found that in the past five years alone, the number of gag order requests went up by roughly 20 percent.

So while the IDF Censor — with the exception of during wartime — is keeping the use of its powers at levels that remain relatively static, in some ways even reducing the them, Israeli authorities have found a work-around in judicial gag orders.

The one piece of data that is missing from the picture, however, is self-censorship. How often do journalists and editors decide on their own not to investigate, look into or write about sensitive topics because they believe the military censor or a judge will stop them from publishing their story? How many stories simply disappear that way every year? We’ll never know.

He was a Jordanian Journalist, a Leftist, a self-proclaimed “anti-Imperialist”. He was a pro-Syria activist and a fierce supporter of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s Government against the West’s war of aggression for regime change in that country. And now he is the victim of Jordan’s first ever political assassination.

Nahed Hattar, a secular Jordanian author and writer, was shot dead on September 25^th, at the steps leading to the High Court Of Justice in Amman, the very court he was about to be tried in for “offending the Islamic religion” after sharing a “caricature” drawing mocking ISIS’s skewed version of Islam on his personal Facebook page.

Let that mental image sink in for a second: a man shared a controversial image on an online platform (something millions around the world do on a daily basis), and now he is dead with three (maybe four) bullets to the head.

Hattar, a father of two, was an ardent advocate of the Syrian government, Hizbollah’s Resistance movement, and a relentless opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood and Takfiri groups in his journalistic writings, TV appearances… and on his personal Facebook page, which evidently got him killed.

It all began on August 3^rd, 2016, when Hattar shared a cartoon drawing portraying Heaven and God from the perspective of Islamic extremists (i.e. depicting a bearded man in bed, surrounded by virgins and alcohol); a maelstrom of public anger and backlash bordering on organized mob madness ensued, prompting Hattar to swiftly delete the post and apologize for unintentionally offending Muslims, lambasting at the same time those who took his post out of its strictly political context and distorted his intentions.

But it was too late; the anti-Nahed Hattar screed had already intensified and caught frenzied traction on a public level, especially among conservatives and religious groups which permeate Jordanian society. An avalanche of blind recriminations and accusations of offending Islam and Muslims coupled with numerous death threats and personalized insults were unleashed against Hattar in what now appears to have been an organized effort to take aim at the 56 year-old writer and settle scores with him due to his political stance, especially with regards to the Syrian conflict.

Many called for the man’s execution, and Facebook groups calling for “avenging Islam” and “killing” Hattar popped up everywhere with hundreds of supporters and enthusiasts applauding the witch hunt, culminating in the eventual arrest of Hattar by Jordanian authorities for offending Islam and religious agitation. The “Islamic Action Front” (Jordan’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood group) joined in the incitement orgy by calling the Jordanian Government to give Hattar “the severest of punishments” for his deed.

And what was his “deed” exactly?

Sharing a satire sketch (one that he did not draw by the way!) on his personal Facebook Page, to hammer home his viewpoints as a secularist on what is currently happening in a region marred only by sectarianism and religious bloodletting.

It wasn’t an anti-Islam rant or a sectarian post; it was a political one, driven primarily by Hattar’s well-known positions on the Syrian War, and his avowed political enmity towards the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, Takfiri movements and Islamic extremism, Hattar himself even titled the post with the tag: “ISIS’s God”.

Hattar was assassinated by a radical Islamic preacher (a lone wolf?) who decided to take matters into his own hands and “avenge Islam” on behalf of the many who called for exactly that.

I find myself wondering what thoughts were going through Nahed Hattar’s mind in that split second (or what, more than a month later, turned out to be a fateful moment) when he clicked on the “share” button of a silly caricature mocking the mentality and the sexually-driven ideology of ISIS.

Maybe Hattar was thinking of Syria; and the systematic destruction wrought upon that country, which he loved and passionately defended, courtesy of the various incarnations of western funded Islamist extremists. Maybe he was thinking of all those graphic videos of beheadings, guttings, suicide bombings, and sectarian lynchings of civilians in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen. Maybe he was getting sick of the sectarianism that has engulfed the Arab World ever since the so-called Arab spring laid dreadful waste to the entirety of the Middle East region.

Or maybe he wasn’t thinking anything at all really, just another harmless post on a personal Facebook page; I mean how many of us give two thoughts before publishing anything, let alone a silly cartoon, on our own social media web pages. How many of us contemplate the ramifications of an impulsive comment, “like” or share of a Facebook post before “braving through” with it.

One thing is for sure, Nahed Hattar did not foresee that sharing an anti-ISIS satire drawing, an act that he later came to apologize for, would lead to a ghastly death at the hands of a living, breathing, walking incarnation of the very caricature he had shared on his page.

Ahmad Barqawi, a freelance columnist and writer 

Dr. Léopold Munyakazi was deported to Rwanda early this morning. Immigration attorney Ofelia Calderón defended the gentle professor pro bono from the time of his arrest in 2009 to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, where she gave oral argument earlier this year. 

Dr. Munyakazi is a linguist, scholar, and former French professor at Goucher College, who was arrested after giving several lectures at northeastern campuses in which he challenged the Rwandan government’s official, legally enforced description of the Rwandan massacres of the 1990s as “genocide against the Tutsi.” The U.S. government and the Clinton dynasty are both deeply committed to the same description, which has become a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. Top officials including the U.S. president, UN Ambassador and Secretary of State frequently tell us that we are obliged to intervene in other sovereign nations to stop genocide because we failed to do so in Rwanda.

Munyakazi said that the Rwandan massacres were the result of a longstanding class conflict, not an ethnic conflict, and that they were therefore incorrectly characterized as genocide. Hutus and Tutsis, he said, are not properly understood as ethnicities. They share the same language and culture, eat the same food, and marry each other, and the vast majority are Christian.

Although Dr. Munyakazi was arrested shortly after giving his controversial talks, anonymous witnesses soon accused him of genocide crime in Rwanda in 1994. These accusations were made more than ten years after the genocide, and despite the fact that Dr. Munyakazi had been a free man in Rwanda before emigrating to the United States.

Christine Frechard, Dr. Munyakazi’s friend in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said that she was able to speak to him on the phone before he boarded the plane and that he remained in good spirits. Responding to her distress, she said, he told her not to worry, that it was going to be all right, and that he remained committed to his truth. Frechard said that she is contacting Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and foreign embassies in Kigali to ask them to keep watch over Léopold’s welfare in custody.

Dr. Munyakazi joins three other celebrated political prisoners in Rwanda. They are Victoire Ingabire, who attempted to run against President Paul Kagame in 2010, Deo Mushayidi, the former president of the Rwandan Journalists Association, and Kizito Mihigo, a popular Rwandan gospel singer who recorded a song in which he sang that members of both groups, Hutu and Tutsi, were victims in the Rwandan war and that both must be remembered in order for Rwandans to heal.

Mihigo was arrested shortly after recording that song and sentenced to ten years for plotting to murder the president and bring down the Rwandan government.

A powerful array of institutional/oligarchic interests is behind the rabid demonization of all things Workers’ Party.

This morning at 9:50 am, women representing 13 countries spanning five continents began their journey on Zaytouna-Oliva to the shores of Gaza, which has been under blockade since 2007. On board are a Nobel Peace Laureate, three parliamentarians, a decorated US diplomat, journalists, an Olympic athlete, and a physician. A list of the women with their background can be found here.

When asked why they are going, the women gave a variety of responses. Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate from Ireland, notes that “theysay that ‘silence is golden’, but regarding the plight of Palestinians in Gaza the silence of the world, especially concerning their little children, shows a lack of moral and ethical leadership from the international community. Why has it lasted so long?”

For two of the women, their countries’ own historical struggles for human rights played an important role in their decision to join the Women’s Boat to Gaza. Leigh-Ann Naidoo, an Olympic volleyball player from South Africa, feels that “South Africans understand the importance of international solidarity in fighting regimes that practice segregation.” Marama Davidson, a Maori Member of Parliament from New Zealand, carries with her a strong personal connection to Palestinian women in Gaza. “As an indigenous woman myself, I want to stand alongside the women of Gaza and to draw attention to the ongoing humanitarian crisis there.”

The Amal-Hope II has been making final preparations to sail and is scheduled to depart from Messina soon. Both boats are expected to arrive in Gaza in early October.

Yudit Ilany, an Israeli participant who has sailed with the Zaytouna-Oliva since Barcelona, said “The blockade of Gaza is a crime against humanity being committed in my name, and it is my duty to protest it in any way possible.”

CONTACT: Ellen Huttu Hansson

E-mail: ellen.huttu.hansson@gmail.com

Freedom Flotilla Italy Lucia Intruglio / Palmira Mancuso

Email: lucia.intruglio@gmail.com /palmira.mancuso@messinaora.it

The Women’s Boat to Gaza is an initiative of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition composed of civil society organizations and campaigns from more than a dozen countries. For more information, visit www.womensboattogaza.org.

In July 2016 the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin signed a law to ban the cultivation and breeding of genetically modified plants and animals (GMO), except in cases where they will be used in testing and scientific research. In fact, this law makes Russia the world’s largest GMO-free territory and offers a great platform for the development of organic agriculture.

This decision made by the Russian government was also influenced by environmental organizations, farmers and other representatives of Russian society, concerned by the absence of reliable scientific studies on the long-term (‘long-term’ comes here with an emphasis) risks of GMO food to human health and the environment. The Kremlin has also apparently taken into consideration the interests of national food security, as the world market of genetically modified (GM) seeds is monopolized by transnational, mostly American, German and Swiss based companies.

Author Elena Sharoykina

original article in Russian at http://www.vz.ru/opinions/2016/9/21/833682.html

Many European Union countries, unlike the U.S., have already applied restrictions on GMOs, similar to the ones implemented now in the Russian Federation. Only five EU countries (Spain, Portugal, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania) have been cultivating GM crops, but even they have begun to decrease the area of GM crop cultivation gradually.

The U.S., represented by its biotechnology corporations, has been trying to conquer the EU agricultural sector and to make it a part of the GMO global market. This agricultural misalliance would be officially named Transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP), and the mass media has already named it ‘economic NATO’. It’s interesting to note that the GMO question appears to be one of the main bones of contention in the negotiation process around TTIP.

Amidst this discussion in the middle of September 2016 it was announced that German chemical & pharmaceutical giant Bayer agreed to buy US seeds and pesticides corporation Monsanto in a $66 billion takeover deal.  If the sides finalize the agreement (which is to be signed by the end of 2017) and regulatory authorities in USA and EU approve it, it will create a ‘transatlantic monster’, the likes of which the world has never seen before.  The new company will to a great extent dictate to the whole world what to eat, what medicine to take and how to run agriculture.

Let’s try to find out what is behind this news and what it means for Russia, Europe and for everyone worldwide. To begin with a few words about the principal characters in this play – the companies Bayer and Monsanto.

The Bayer company was founded in 1863. It was mainly known for marketing heroin as cough suppressant and aspirin.  Nowadays the company produces a wide range of agrochemical, pharmaceutical and medical products and one of its branches carries out studies in the field of genetic engineering (Bayer CropScience).

The historical connection between Bayer and the ‘death industry’ is however not so well-known:  it was a manufacturer of chemical weapons for the German government during World Wars I and II. We know as well very little about almost hundred years of ‘special relationships’ with the U.S..  According to distinguished historian, the Stanford University professor Anthony C. Sutton,  the I. G. Farben cartel (Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustie AG) was formed in 1925 by Herman Shmitz out of six already giant German chemical companies, including Bayer, with Wall Street financial assistance.

“Twenty years later the same Hermann Schmitz was put on trial at Nuremburg for war crimes committed by the I.G. cartel… but the American affiliates of I.G. Farben and the American directors of I.G. itself were quietly forgotten; the truth was buried in the archives… Without the capital supplied by Wall Street, there would have been no I.G. Farben in the first place and almost certainly no Adolf Hitler and World War II”, Sutton wrote in his book ‘Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler’.

In the post-war period the ‘scientific’ potential of Bayer was again in demand – but this time the Nazis were replaced by NATO generals. The connections of Bayer with the western military-industrial complex in fact never ceased.

The second participant in the ‘deal of the year’ – U.S. company Monsanto – is famous today mostly for its achievement in the fields of genetic modification of seeds and production of pesticides for GM crops. However, like Bayer, shortly after its foundation in 1901, Monsanto became deeply involved in purely military projects. In its Dayton laboratory in Ohio, as a part of the Manhattan project, the first polonium-based neutron initiators were constructed. They were used in the atomic bombs, which the USA dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (leaving more than 200 thousand dead).

During the Vietnam War Monsanto was the largest supplier of Agent Orange for the U.S. army. It was used as chemical weapon (nearly 3 million people were affected, half a million were killed).

In other words, Bayer and Monsanto should be considered as very unusual companies. They are not only the largest representatives of the chemical and biotechnological industries of the Old and the New World, but, in some ways, they also fully represent their military-industry group.  That is why the deal in question must not only be studied from the economic point of view, but also assessed as a geopolitical issue reflecting the current balance of power between the USA and EU.

To my mind, it is not that much about a take-over, it’s a merger between Bayer-Monsanto, and it creates a new transnational structure. If this was not the case, the influence of the EU in the relationship between Washington and Brussels would grow significantly, but it is completely different in reality. Moreover, taking into consideration the importance of the GMO factor in U.S. foreign policy, it is difficult to imagine that the White House would let this huge assets flow into anybody’s hands, certainly not into the hands of the Germans.

Apparently, the merger of these two giants is part of a backstage U.S.-EU agreement and trade-offs within the TTIP negotiations process.  Brussels, in exchange for a ‘back-down’ on some disputable issues, has gained an extra share in the global biotechnology industry. Monsanto, on the other hand, by re-branding a U.S.-company to a European one, expects to open the E.U. market for its GM production.

Let me remind you that the first $ 62 billion offer, made by Bayer in May 2016, was declined by Monsanto. However, after loud statements made by leaders of Germany and France in August, saying that the negotiations on TTIP actually had failed, the parties ‘suddenly’ reached a consensus.  It is obvious that the parties had a ‘package deal’, and it was agreed on a state-to-state level. If this is the case, the progress in Bayer-Monsanto merger deal will be followed by progress in the  TTIP negotiations.

For European citizens, the  vast majority of whom, just like the Russian people, have taken a stand against the spread of GMO agriculture, such a ‘package deal’ would be a betrayal of public interests by the European bureaucracy machine.

The fall of Europe as one of the few ‘green bastions’ in the world under the pressure of U.S. corporations would mean trouble for Russia too.   ‘Genetically modified NATO’ has been moving closer to our borders, threatening our biological, genetic and food security.

We want to believe that one day, in some miracle, corrupted European bureaucrats will be replaced by nationally oriented leaders. It is possible then, if it is not too late, we will form a ‘green axis’ Paris-Berlin-Moscow and through our joint efforts expand the borders of the continental GMO-free zone. That would allow us to protect the traditions of agriculture in the Old World, to develop organic agriculture and to reform the world economy according to the principles of sustainable development.

But can Europeans afford to wait for a miracle? Or is it high time to act?

A nation is its institutions, and should those institutions weaken, the nation itself will be weakened. And should those institutions be destroyed, the nation, for all intents and purposes, will also be destroyed.

A dramatic example of how to destroy a nation unfolded in 2003 in Iraq as a US led axis invaded and occupied it, intentionally targeting and destroying Iraqi institutions and essential infrastructure, including the police, military, and the government as well as bridges, electricity, and communications.

In the ruins left in the wake of the US-led invasion, through the “Coalition Provisional Authority,” US and European corporations were invited in to not only rebuild these institutions and infrastructure, but to do so in a manner making them dependent on and profitable to US-European corporate-financier interests well into the foreseeable future.

The West’s vast influence in Iraq today is owed to this process. While it is likely the West envisioned a client state far more obedient and subservient to Western interests than Iraq is today, the complicity it does receive across Iraq and even across the wider region, is vastly greater than before the 2003 invasion.

America’s Burgeoning Terror-State in the Levant 

In Syria, the United States has engineered and perpetuated a proxy war against the government in Damascus and its Russian and Iranian allies beginning in 2011. Before even the armed conflict began in 2011, the United States admittedly poured resources into opposition groups including the Muslim Brotherhood to prepare the ground for violent subversion.In 2007, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh would write in his 9-page report, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” that:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Hersh’s now prophetic report would also reveal US support for the Muslim Brotherhood:

There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.”

The US, through backing a large, alternative political front, was already well on its way in 2007 toward creating a parallel state within Syria to eventually undermine and overthrow before eventually absorbing the Syrian nation.

As hostilities began, the US augmented its proxy political party with both opposition media fronts and armed militant groups – essentially the creation of mass media and an army for its growing parallel terror state.

The New York Times in 2013 would admit in an article titled, “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A.,” that:

With help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to air traffic data, interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders.

As the war has continued on, the United States and its Arab and European allies have steadily built other institutions to augment the political, military, and media capabilities of this burgeoning terror-state, including hospitals operated in Al Qaeda-held territory by Western NGOs, and of course the so-called “White Helmets,” described on their own website as:

The volunteers save people on all sides of the conflict – pledging commitment to the principles of “Humanity, Solidarity, Impartiality” as outlined by the International Civil Defence Organisation. This pledge guides every response, every action, every life saved – so that in a time of destruction, all Syrians have the hope of a lifeline.

In reality, the “White Helmets” operate solely in terrorist-held territory, as the nation of Syria already has an effective, professional, and well organized civil defense organization. The “White Helmets” appear to be “targeted intentionally” because they are operating side-by-side designated terrorist organizations including Al Nusra, quite literally Al Qaeda in Syria.

In one graphic instance (GRAPHIC VIDEO), these “White Helmet” Al Qaeda auxiliaries can be seen literally standing by as Al Nusra terrorists execute a prisoner, before rushing in to remove the body. Had Syrian or Russian warplanes struck these terrorists in the midst of carrying out war crimes, these “White Helmets” would have rightfully been liquidated side-by-side the terrorists they were aiding and abetting.

Despite the “White Helmets” severing quite literally as Al Qaeda auxiliaries, the US through USAID and more recently, the German government, have provided the faux-NGO millions in funding.

US State Department Deputy Spokesperson Mark Toner in April 2016, according to a US State Department official transcript, would admit:

Well, I can tell you that we provide, through USAID, about $23 million in assistance to them [the “White Helmets”].

Toner was responding to queries by journalists regarding why a US-funded organization was receiving millions of dollars in assistance, but whose leader is banned from traveling to the United States. Toner attempted to claim the situation was “complicated,” but in reality, it is a simple matter of the US once again arming and funding terrorists abroad while simultaneously attempting to pose as fighting them back home.

More recently, AP would report in an article titled, “Germany ups financial support for Syria’s White Helmets,” that:

Germany’s Foreign Ministry says it is increasing financial support for the Syria Civil Defense group, also known as the White Helmets. 

The ministry said in a statement Friday that it has raised its funding for the group this year from 5 million euros ($5.61 million) to 7 million euros ($7.85 million).

With a sectarian extremist political party like the Muslim Brotherhood, an armed force comprised of Al Qaeda and other extremist groups, and an array of complicit alleged NGOs including the “White Helmets,” the US and its allies have attempted to create a parallel state within Syria – a parallel state it hopes will eventually inherit the entirety of Syria’s territory, just as violent sectarian terrorist factions have assumed control over Libya – deconstructing it as a functioning nation state and plunging its people into open-ended, perpetual catastrophe that is reverberating across the planet in the form of terrorism and migrant crises.

The US and its partners are posing as fighting against terrorism, while carving out entire nations for Al Qaeda and its affiliates everywhere from the North African nation of Libya, to the  ‎Levantine nation of Syria. It is a foreign policy in reality that cannot be sustained with the unraveling rhetoric used to promote and perpetuate it on the global stage, particularly in front of the UN.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.

Monday night’s debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump plumbed new depths in the degradation of American politics. A billionaire and a multi-millionaire, both widely hated, traded false promises, platitudes, attack lines and reactionary bromides without seriously addressing any of the pressing issues facing the American people.

On social policy, Trump combined calls for trade war with a program of sweeping corporate tax cuts and the elimination of all regulations on business, at one point boasting of his own evasion of federal income taxes. Responding to Clinton’s criticism that he benefited personally from the housing market collapse, he declared, “That’s called business.”

Clinton, who has the closest ties to Wall Street, said the financial crisis of 2008 was the product of “tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off Wall Street.” She evidently hoped that no one would pick up on the fact that her husband’s administration and the Democratic Party as a whole played a central role in this process.

But the heart of the debate, as far as the ruling class is concerned, lay in foreign and military policy, where Clinton has focused the majority of her attacks on Trump, presenting herself as a more ruthless and militaristic future commander-in-chief.

Clinton continued the war-mongering diatribes against Russia that have dominated her campaign since the run-up to the Democratic National Convention in July, along with her attacks on Trump from the right, branding him a stooge of Russian President Vladimir Putin. She repeated the claim, never substantiated, that Putin was responsible for hacking the email of the Democratic National Committee.

In response to alleged cyber attacks by “Russia, China, Iran or anybody else,” she declared, “We are not going to sit idly by… and we’re going to have to make it clear that we don’t want to use the kinds of tools that we have. We don’t want to engage in a different kind of warfare. But we will defend the citizens of this country. And the Russians need to understand that.”

This language echoes her remark at a September 7 forum on national security policy in New York City, where she declared that a Clinton administration would treat cyber attacks as acts of war and respond with military force.

Besides suggesting war with Russia—possessor of the world’s second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons—Clinton called for stepped-up US military operations in the Middle East, including intensified air strikes on ISIS and the wider use of drone missile assassinations, targeting, in particular, ISIS leader Abu Baker al-Baghdadi. Such state killings should become “one of our organizing principles,” Clinton concluded.

Trump was typically bombastic in his threats of military action in the Middle East, but less explicit about war against more formidable targets such as Russia and China. But the logic of his “Fortress America” appeals to economic nationalism and trade war, and his identification of Mexico, China and other countries as US enemies, leads inexorably to the same program of global military aggression.

Moderator Lester Holt of NBC News did not ask Clinton how many millions of lives she was prepared to sacrifice in a potential war with Russia. However, indicative of discussions going on behind the scenes, he did ask the candidates’ opinions on reports that Obama “considered changing the nation’s longstanding policy on first use” of nuclear weapons. This was a reference to articles revealing that Obama had considered adopting an explicit no-first-use nuclear policy, a proposal he ultimately discarded after it came under attack from within his own administration.

Trump first said that he would “not do first strike,” before adding, “I can’t take anything off the table.” Clinton pointedly did not reply to the question.

In the aftermath of the debate, the media and most of the political establishment declared Clinton the “winner.” This is because she is seen as the more reliable instrument of US imperialism’s aggressive global policy, involving a vast escalation of military violence after the election.

Clinton is seeking to mobilize behind this policy privileged, pro-war sections of the upper-middle class who support the Democratic Party on the basis of identity politics. This was the essential significance of her pointed reference (in relation to police violence) to “systemic racism” in the United States.

The 2016 election campaign was dominated for many months by explosive popular disaffection with the whole political and corporate establishment. But it has concluded in a contest between two candidates who personify that establishment—one a billionaire from the criminal world of real-estate swindling, the other the consensus choice of the military-intelligence apparatus and Wall Street.

This outcome has an objective character. The two-party system is a political monopoly of the capitalist class. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are political instruments of big business. The claims of Bernie Sanders and his pseudo-left apologists that it is possible to reform or pressure the Democrats—and even carry out a “political revolution” through it—have proven to be lies.

With six weeks to go until Election Day, it is more clear than ever that whoever wins, the people of the United States and the entire world confront immense dangers, including the threat of a military conflict involving nuclear powers such as Russia and China. The greatest danger, however, is the gulf that exists between the advanced state of the war plans of the ruling class and the level of popular consciousness. Everything must be done to alert workers and young people to what is being planned and build a political leadership to oppose war and the capitalist system that produces it.

The working class must prepare itself politically for the struggles to come. This is the essential significance of the Socialist Equality Party’s election campaign and its candidates, Jerry White for president and Niles Niemuth for vice president. We urge workers and young people to support our campaign and attend the November 5th conference on “Socialism vs. Capitalism and War,” being held in Detroit.

Reports issued this week by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) point to worsening stagnation in the global economy and a consequent rise of nationalist tensions.

The WTO forecast that global trade would grow by only 1.7 percent this year, compared to the already low rate of 2.8 percent it had predicted in April. In the analytic chapters of its latest “World Economic Outlook” (WEO) report, the IMF warned that “broad-based” low inflation and outright deflation could lead to a full-blown deflationary cycle in which lower prices, combined with falling investment, lead to a further economic contraction.

“Disinflation has been taking place across a broad range of countries and regions,” the report stated. “By 2015 inflation rates were below medium-term expectations in more than 85 percent of a broad sample of 120 economies—20 percent of which were actually experiencing outright deflation.”

The WTO report focused on the rapid downturn in global trade, particularly over the past three years. Since the 1980s, world trade has grown at a rate 1.5 to 2 times faster than the growth in global gross domestic product. This year, the trade growth rate will only be 80 percent of GDP, the first time trade growth has dipped below GDP growth since 2001 and only the second time since 1982.

“The dramatic slowing of trade growth is serious and should serve as a wake-up call,” said WTO Director-General Roberto Azevêdo. Having earlier pointed to the rise of protectionist measures, especially by major countries, the WTO again raised its concerns over this issue. It was necessary to ensure that the slowdown did not “translate into misguided policies that could make the situation much worse, not only from the perspective of trade but also for job creation and economic growth and development.”

“This is a moment to heed the lessons of history and recommit to openness in trade, which can help to spur economic growth,” Azevêdo said.

The reference to the “lessons of history” was an allusion to the experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when all of the major economic powers reacted to a contraction in world markets by imposing increased tariff barriers and forming currency blocs, further exacerbating the downward spiral and contributing to the conflicts that erupted in 1939 in the Second World War.

His remarks were echoed in a speech delivered by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde in Chicago yesterday. She said the world economy faced the danger of constrictions on trade and increased protectionism.

“Restricting trade is a clear case of economic malpractice,” she said. Limiting economic openness was “sure to worsen the growth outlook for the world,” and it was necessary to “reverse the trend toward protectionism and restore a climate that supports a rebound in trade.”

The IMF drew attention to the slowdown of trade in its WEO report, noting that it was a symptom of sluggish growth. “Empirical analysis suggested that up to three-fourths of the shortfall in real trade growth since 2012 compared with 2003-2007 can be traced to globally weaker economic growth, notably subdued investment.”

The decline in investment is particularly significant because investment is the driving force of economic expansion in the capitalist economy. Investment is carried out in the expectation of future profits, leading in turn to higher employment and greater demand for raw materials and industrial goods, thereby promoting broader economic expansion. But as profit expectations decline, investment falls, bringing about economic contraction and a turn to financial speculation and manipulation to boost profits.

The IMF warned that the “quantitative easing” measures of central banks, carried out with the rationale that low interest rates will lift inflation and stimulate investment in the real economy, but in reality only boosting speculation, were reaching their limit. It said “bold policy actions” were needed to avoid the risk of chronically undershooting inflation targets and eroding the credibility of monetary policy, especially in the advanced economies.

The IMF has been calling for some time for increased government spending on infrastructure programs in order to provide an economic boost.

This call was repeated by Lagarde in her Chicago speech. She said governments with so-called fiscal space, such as Canada, Germany and South Korea, had to more aggressively pursue government spending. She also called for greater coordination among major countries. The IMF has been regularly making such calls at meetings of the G20 in the recent period, but has failed to elicit any concrete action.

“No doubt, the current situation is different from the 2008 crisis, which required a prompt, massive and coordinated fiscal response,” Lagarde said. “But as our ‘new mediocre’ is less acute, it is also more divisive and subtle than a full-blown crisis, and it could prove just as toxic as the recovery has so far proven elusive.”

She said if all countries worked to stimulate their own growth, this would bring “positive spillovers” that would “reinforce each other” and benefit the world economy as a whole. While such an approach might appear to be in accord with logic and reason, however, it runs into the objective obstacle of the division of the world into rival great powers with conflicting interests. All the major powers are in favour of such action, provided someone else does it.

The US, for example, wants to see increased spending by Germany to boost the European economy, thereby benefiting American exporters and investors. Germany, on the other hand, fears that such measures will weaken its financial position to the benefit of US banks and investment houses.

Consequently, rather than increased collaboration, the world economy is marked by increased national tensions and rivalries. The rise of protectionist measures—initiated in the main by the advanced economies—is accompanied by outright economic warfare, expressed most sharply in the European Union’s demand for a €13 billion back tax payment from Apple, the sinking of the US-based Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership by Germany and France, and the US Justice Department’s $14 billion fine against Deutsche Bank, which threatens to send the German banking giant into bankruptcy.

The intractable contradictions gripping the world economy were highlighted in another part of the IMF’s WEO analysis, where it called for China to pull back from “unsustainably high growth targets” by reining in credit growth. China has responded to the global economic slowdown by increasing credit by 13 percent this year—the fastest expansion since the 2008 financial crisis.

But with the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio at 250 percent and rising, these measures could set off a financial crisis. The IMF called for a comprehensive plan to address “vulnerabilities” in the financial sector. “A disorderly deleveraging … could trigger contagion in emerging market financial markets,” it said.

Thus, while calling for increased global growth, the IMF wants the world’s second largest economy, where the growth rate of 6.5 percent is far higher than most of the rest of the world, to cut back on stimulus lest this set off a financial crisis with global repercussions.

The remarks by both Lagarde and Azevêdo point to fears in policy-making circles that the world economy is increasingly riven by nationalist tensions which, despite their warnings, they are unable to reduce.

There are other, related concerns, generally referred to somewhat euphemistically as a “backlash” against globalisation. At heart, this is a reference to mounting social opposition to the growth of social inequality and hostility to the entire political and corporate establishment, a phenomenon reflected in contradictory ways in the support for Bernie Sanders in the US presidential race, the Brexit vote in the UK, the crisis of the traditional ruling parties and rise of right-wing populist parties in Europe, and the elevation of Donald Trump as the Republican presidential candidate in the US.

Fear is mounting within the international capitalist class of this opposition taking the form of a conscious struggle by the working class on the basis of a socialist perspective. Some of what is being discussed behind closed doors was revealed in an editorial published earlier this month by the British Economist magazine, which warned that the present economic climate bore a striking similarity to the “backlash” that led to the Russian Revolution.

A century later, the Economist wrote, what may be taking place is a return to “1917 and all that.”

Just a few links …

The White House and State Department are miffed that Syria and Russia are cleaning up their Jihadis in Aleppo city.

There is a false claims evolving in western “news” that the current Aleppo operation led to the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement. Two points on this: 1. The ceasefire did not “break down”. It expired after a previously agreed period. Both sides did not agree to a prolongation. 2. The most important ceasefire point was the physical separation of al-Qaida and other U.S. proxy rebels. The U.S. was unable (or unwilling) to fulfill that point.

See: Moscow Makes Public Full Text of Russia-US Deal on Syria

The main priority in Syria, according to the document, is the demarcation of territory controlled by Daesh and al-Nusra Front terrorist groups and territories controlled by Syrian rebels.

After the end of the ceasefire the U.S. and its subaltern allies are flooding Syria with new weapons:

• US-backed rebels now equipped with advanced rocket launchers The BM-21 truck mounted Grad multiple rocket launcher have a range of up to 40 kilometers. At least three new ones have been photographed over the last two days.
• ‘Aleppo must not fall’: US allies to flood [Aleppo] with anti-aircraft missiles
  “The US confirmed the green light to begin sending them to rebels through supply routes still open through Jordan and Turkey,” the source said. “Rebels are being told only to target Syrian helicopters, not Russian – but it’s not clear they will abide by this.”

Both rockets and MANPADs are part of a “Plan-B” the CIA had already developed in May 2015 but which was held back until now. There are likely additional military elements to this plan. On the diplomatic side the U.S. (and its stooges) -obviously unable to act rationally- now imitate defiant children. “If we can’t get exactly what we want we will never again talk to you.”

• US Threatens to Suspend Engagement With Russia in Syria Over Aleppo Situation
• Unrelated EU Sanctions linked to Ukraine now suddenly get linked to Russia’s stipulated official support for the Syrian government: Syria Attacks May Complicate EU Decision on Russia Sanctions

A very major issue for Syria (and one reason why many Syrians flee the country) are U.S. and EU sanctions. Their consequences were so far hardly ever reported. Here is the first major piece in U.S. media about them: U.S. and EU Sanctions Are Punishing Ordinary Syrians and Crippling Aid Work, U.N. Report Reveals

In a 40-page internal assessment commissioned to analyze the humanitarian impact of the sanctions, the U.N. describes the U.S. and EU measures as “some of the most complicated and far-reaching sanctions regimes ever imposed.” Detailing a complex system of “unpredictable and time-consuming” financial restrictions and licensing requirements, the report finds that U.S. sanctions are exceptionally harsh “regarding provision of humanitarian aid.”
…
An internal U.N. email obtained by The Intercept also faults U.S. and EU sanctions for contributing to food shortages and deteriorations in health care.
…
The email went on to cite sanctions as a “principal factor” in the erosion of Syria’s health care system.

The piece also explains that the Syrian and Russian behavior towards insurgent occupied cities is in no way more severe than the usual U.S. procedures:

Meanwhile, in cities controlled by ISIS, the U.S. has employed some of the same tactics it condemns. For example, U.S.-backed ground forces laid siege to Manbij, a city in northern Syria not far from Aleppo that is home to tens of thousands of civilians. U.S. airstrikes pounded the city over the summer, killing up to 125 civilians in a single attack. The U.S. replicated this strategy to drive ISIS out of Kobane, Ramadi, and Fallujah, leaving behind flattened neighborhoods. In Fallujah, residents resorted to eating soup made from grass and 140 people reportedly died from lack of food and medicine during the siege.

To help with the sanctions and other issues China had recently agreed with Syria to provide medical support. But just like Russia, China is now considered a U.S. enemy and the CIA and Pentagon are eager to fight it.

Risky business: Is US supporting anti-Chinese militants in Syria? 

With war hawks in US/Turkey/Qatar/Saudi arming and funding anti-Chinese militants in Syria that are planning more attacks on Chinese embassies and interests abroad, coupled with US gunboat diplomacy in the South China Sea, this dangerous “deterring the dragon” combination risks turning into a “provoking the dragon” scenario, and may escalate into a military conflict between two nuclear powers.

(The piece also includes this vignette about the anti-Chinese TIP Uighurs in Syria:

Later videos emerged of US/UK-funded White Helmet members with two captured young Syrian soldiers in Kahn Touman, and taunting “Assad, Russia, Iran and China, are they stronger than god?” The two soldiers were later executed by TIP militants.)

U.S. official: THAAD to be deployed to deter North Korea threats

THAAD is a long range missile defense system. Putting it into South Korea makes no sense if one wants to counter shorter ranged North Korean missiles. The target here is obviously China. This will have consequences.

—

A lot of hype is made today about two hospitals in east-Aleppo that were allegedly bombed:

• Two hospitals bombed in eastern Aleppo, Syria
• Two hospitals bombed in rebel-held Aleppo amid government assault

The second piece, in the Washington Post, originally included this sentence:

Neither hospital was seriously damaged and both are expected soon to function again, …

I pointed that out several times today to “bombing” hypers including to Washington Post writers. Soon after that the piece was “updated” and the sentence changed to:

Both hospitals are expected to be repaired, but they are badly damaged.

Still, according to the piece, only two people were killed in the relevant strikes and three injured. Had the attacks actually targeted the crowded hospitals both would have been destroyed and many more people would be dead. Instead the hospitals seem to have received only collateral damage from strikes on nearby military targets. But pointing that out does not fit the U.S. propaganda line.

Meanwhile the U.S. and its allies continue their daily business of killing people in Syria and elsewhere.

• Afghan official: 13 civilians killed in airstrike on house
• Erdogan’s forces kill nine Syrian civilians near borders in Hasaka countryside
• Suspected US airstrikes hit Somali army base near Galkacyo town,killing at least 10 soldiers according to officials and local media.

—

I somewhat agree with this election take by Peter Hitchens:

The world’s fixated on Trump. But Hillary could drag us ALL into a catastrophic war

After Monday’s TV show with Clinton and Trump CNN had published a poll claiming that Clinton was the winner of the debate by a wide margin. CNN later released (pdf) the poll data. It turns out (page 9) that only white people and only those above 50 years of age responded to the question. The poll was also heavily skewed towards democratic voters. In other words: it was completely fictional and useless besides giving Clinton additional (false) media momentum.

Scott Adams’ take: Clinton won the debate last night. And while she was doing it, Trump won the election. He had one thing to accomplish – being less scary – and he did it.

North Dakota police with military-style equipment surrounded Native Americans gathered in prayer against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline on Wednesday, disrupting their plan to cross sacred and treaty-protected land in protest of a project they fear will destroy their livelihood.

“ND authorities deploy armed personnel with shotguns and assault rifles, military vehicles, and aerial spray on peaceful Water Protectors gathered in prayer,” wrote the Sacred Stone Camp, in a Facebook post.

Officers with military-style armored vehicles and shotguns threatened the protesters, who call themselves “water protectors” for defending the Missouri River from imminent pollution, reported Unicorn Riot. Up to 21 were arrested, the channel reported.

Witnesses filmed the crackdown but said their access their Facebook was blocked. One participant, Thomas H. Joseph II, posted a chilling video narrating the mobilization and his getaway. Helicopters are heard as he says that tear gas is being dropped, and an officer loads his gun as protesters, some on horseback, chant, “We have no guns.”

In the video, Joseph said that “one guy’s about ready to blast us” but later added that no fires were shot.

“We gathered in prayer un-armed, prayed, sang songs, and attempted to leave,” he later wrote in a Facebook post. “No threats, No vandalism, No violence was taken on our part.”

Police and private security personnel have been more aggressively cracking down on actions against the pipeline since the governor declared a state of emergency. The state is currently investigating an incident in which contracted private security film Frost Kennels unleashed dogs during a nonviolent direct action, ending with six bitten, including a pregnant woman and a child, according to organizers at the action.

Alternative media outlet Unicorn Riot previously accused Facebook of censoring its livestream of police repression, saying they received a popup security alert when they tried to post the video.

“We will not let them stop our mission to amplify the voices of people who might otherwise go unheard, and broadcast the stories that might otherwise go untold,“ they told RT.

The pipeline, expected to transport over half a million barrels of oil a day through four states, has united over 300 tribes in resistance. Several lawsuits are pending against the company, which has retaliated with restraining orders. The White House halted construction on federal land, which makes up three percent of the pipeline’s path, but has not issued any other statement against the pipeline—motivating Facebook users to demand a response after Wednesday’s crackdown.

President Barack Obama met with tribal representatives on Monday but only made an indirect reference to the historic native gathering: “I know that many of you have come together across tribes and across the country to support the community at Standing Rock,“ he said. “And together, you’re making your voices heard.“

Jose Manuel Barroso had closer contact with Goldman Sachs during his tenure as European Commission chief than he has previously admitted, according to Portuguese media.

Correspondence obtained by Portuguese daily Publico under a freedom of information request suggests that Barroso, who took a job with the US bank earlier this year, held unregistered meetings with Goldman’s top people.

Washington has unmasked plans to arm militants with MANPADS to oppose the Russian air grouping operating in Syria. On September 27, the so-called “unnamed US officials” told Reuters that the US has kept high numbers of MANPADS out of Syria by uniting the US Western and Middle Eastern allies, but now it’s a matter of time when the air defense systems will be supplied.

The unnamed sources one more time blamed Russia and Syria for air strikes on militant targets and emphasized that that “The opposition has a right to defend itself and they will not be left defenseless in the face of this indiscriminate bombardment.”

The same day, the Syrian government forces launched a full-scale offensive on the militant-controlled eastern neighborhoods of Aleppo city. The operation started after five days of intense air and artillery strikes on militant targets in the besieged areas and after previous gains in the Sheikh Sa’eed Neighborhood. By September 28, the loyalists have fully secured the Farafira Neighborhood, the area northwest of the Aleppo Citadel and Osama Bin Zaid Mosque. The advance is ongoing.

The army and Liwaa Al-Quds also attacked the Handarat refugee camp in northern Aleppo. The loyalists entered the camp after securing the Shaher area.

The Syrian government forces, led by the Tiger Forces, have launched a counter-attack against Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra), Jund al-Aqsa (a terrorist group with links to Al Qaeda and Jabhat al-Nusra) and the Free Syrian Army in the northern part of Hama province where the joint terrorist forces seized few sites yesterday. The loyalists have entered the villages of Talisiyah and Sha`tha controlled by terrorists and engaged the terrorist alliance in the area of Ma’ardas. Clashes have been also ongoing in the areas east of Sha`tha.

[GR Editor: According to the Los Angeles Times:

It is not clear if these weapons would be effective against the Russian air force. The Russian planes are equipped with more sophisticated weaponry and avionics, and can strike their targets from a higher altitude than their Syrian counterparts and stay beyond the reach of the operational ceiling of MANPADS found in Syria. Most of the downed planes have been the low-flying jets and helicopters of the government, with older, overworked airframes from the ’50s and ’60s that have been mothballed by the world’s armed forces elsewhere.]

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Bombs, domestic and foreign, are defining the nature of politics in the United States, the European Union and among radical Islamist groups and individuals.  The scale and scope of bomb-politics varies with the practitioner.  ‘Wholesale bombers’ are state actors, who engage in large-scale, long-term bombing designed to destroy adversary governments or movements.  ‘Retail bombers’ are groups or individuals engaging in small-scale, sporadic bombings, designed to provoked fear and secure symbolic outcomes.

Apart from planned bombings, there are improvised bombings committed by deranged individuals who engage in suicide attacks without any political backing or coherent purpose.

In this paper we will focus on the nature of ‘wholesale’ and ‘retail’ bombings, their frequency, political consequences and long-term impact on global political power.

Bombing as Everyday Events

Prof. James Petras

The US and EU are the world’s foremost practitioners of ‘wholesale bombing’.  They engage in serial attacks against multiple countries without declaring war or introducing their own citizen ground troops.  They specialize in indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations – unarmed women, children, elders and non-combatant males.   In other words, for the ‘wholesale bombers’, unleashing terror on societies is an everyday event.

The US and EU practice ‘total war’ from the skies, not sparing a single sphere of everyday, civilian life.  They bomb neighborhoods, markets, vital infrastructure,  factories, schools and health facilities. The result of their daily, ‘ordinary’ bombing is the total erasure of the very structures necessary for civilized existence, leading to mass dispossession and the forced migration of millions in search of safety.

It is not surprising that the refugees seek safety in the countries that have destroyed their means of normal existence.  The wholesale bombers of the US-EU do not bomb their own cities and citizens – and so millions of the dispossessed are desperate to get in.

Wholesale bomb policies have emerged because prolonged ground wars in the targeted countries evoke strong domestic opposition from their citizens unwilling to accept casualties among US and EU soldiers.  Wholesale bombing draws less domestic opposition because the bombers suffer few losses.

At the same time, while mass aerial bombing reduces the political risks of casualties at home, it expands and deepens violent hostility abroad.  The mass flight of refugees to US-EU population centers allows the entry of violent combatants who will bring their own version of the total war strategies to the homes of their invaders.

Secular resistance has generally targeted enemy soldiers, whether they are imperial invaders or jihadi mercenaries.  Their targets are more focused on the military.  But faced with the politics of long-distance, wholesale bombing, the secular opposition becomes ineffective.  When the ‘secular opposition’ diminishes, ethno-religious combatants troops emerge.

The Islamists have taken command of the resistance, adopting their tactics to the imperial policy of total serial wars.

Retail Bomb-Warfare

Lacking an air force, Islamist terrorists engage in ground wars to counter imperial air wars.  Their response to drone warfare, is hand-made improvised bombs, killing hundreds of civilians.  Their victims may be decapitated with hand-held swords, rather than computer-controlled missiles. They capture hostile population, committing pillage, torture and rapine, rather than bomb from a distance, to dispossess and drive into exile.

‘Retail bomb’ terrorists are generally decentralized and may be recruited overseas.  Their bombs are crude and indiscriminant.  But like the wholesale bombers, they target population centers and seek to provoke panic and despair among the civilian population.

Islamist ‘retail bombers’ seek to expand their range by attacking the home countries of ‘wholesale bombers’ – the US and Europe.  These attacks are exclusively for propaganda and do not constitute any threat to strategic imperial military targets.  They expose the vulnerability of their enemies’ civilian population.

While imperial bombers and Islamists bombers have been at war against each other, they have also served as allies of convenience.  Several recent examples come to mind.

US-EU ‘wholesale bombing’ campaigns against Libya, Syria and Yemen worked in tandem with Islamist mercenary ground fighters.  ‘Wholesale bombers’ devastated the infrastructure and military installations of the governments of Syria and Libya in support of advancing Islamist ground troops.  In other words, ‘wholesale bombings’ are not sufficient to achieve targeted ‘regime change’, thus the resort to terrorist ‘retail bombers’ and jihadi ‘head choppers’ to advance on regional and local targets.

The most blatant recent example of the convergence of imperial wholesale bombers in support of Islamist retail bombers and terrorists was the September 17, 2016 US-EU attack on a Syrian military installation, killing and wounding almost two hundred Syrian soldiers who had been engaged in combat against ISIS terrorists.  While Washington claimed that the hours-long aerial bombardment of Syrian government soldiers was a ‘mistake’, it allowed the jihadi ‘retail bombers’ to take the offensive and overrun the base.  Acting as air-support for ISIS, the US Pentagon effective shut down any possibility for peace negotiations and sabotaged a fragile ceasefire.   This was a major victory for Washington’s politics of permanent wholesale bombing and ‘regime change’.

Just as the US launched its propaganda and wholesale bombing attack against the Syrian government, an improvised ‘retail bombing campaign’ was launched in the US – in Manhattan and New Jersey!  The latest series of retail bombing attacks in the US led to three dozen, mostly minor, injuries, while the brutal US wholesale bombing of Syrian troops killed over 62 government soldiers and wounded many more.  The political impact and consequences of wholesale and retail terror bombings in both regions was highly significant.  The US had no more right to launch an air attack on Syrian government troops engaged in defending their country, than the US-based retail terrorist (an Afghan-American) had in planting improvised bombs in US cities.  Both actions are illegal.

Political Consequences of Bombing Warfare

The US-ISIS coordinated bombing of Syrian soldiers has set the stage for all-out warfare.  Peace talks were violently sabotaged by the Obama Administration.  Syria and Russia now face the combined forces of ISIS, Turkey and the US with no hope for a negotiated solution.  The battle for control of Aleppo will intensify.  Russian negotiators have failed to check their cynical American ‘allies’ in their much-ballyhooed ‘war on terror’.   They have no choice but to continue to supply air cover for their Syrian government allies.

The US has embraced the Turkish invasion of Syria, betraying both their Kurdish allies and some element among their ISIS partners.  Bombing continues to be Washington’s main option in the Middle East.

The recent retail terror bombing in the US has the predicted consequence – a mass media whipped into a frenzy of fear mongering.  New York City is further militarized.  The face of the ‘enemy’ (a young Afghan-American, whose own father had tried to turn over to the FBI for his jihadi connections) is on a hundred million TV screens continuously.  The electoral campaign salivates in anticipation of a terror war for whoever wins the presidency.  Blind fear rather than concrete economic demands take the place of political debate.

Immigrants, Muslims and terrorists replace Wall Street tax evaders, profiteers and speculators as the villains in a country mired in economic and social crises.  Economic policies, which have created mass insecurity and misery, are obscured by the militarist rhetoric.

 Militarism, war and wholesale bombing replace the incremental advances in improving peaceful productive relations with Cuba and Iran.

 the politics of bombing, as a strategy and way-of-life affects domestic and foreign policy . . . even as the vast majority of American voters look for alternatives, for jobs, housing, and education and seek to live without fear and threats.

Wholesale wars lead to retail wars.  Overseas bombs lead to bombs at home.  Invasions and occupations provoke outrage and retaliation.  The answer is not to do unto others what you don’t want done on yourself.

A nation is its institutions, and should those institutions weaken, the nation itself will be weakened. And should those institutions be destroyed, the nation, for all intents and purposes, will also be destroyed.

A dramatic example of how to destroy a nation unfolded in 2003 in Iraq as a US led axis invaded and occupied it, intentionally targeting and destroying Iraqi institutions and essential infrastructure, including the police, military, and the government as well as bridges, electricity, and communications.

In the ruins left in the wake of the US-led invasion, through the “Coalition Provisional Authority,” US and European corporations were invited in to not only rebuild these institutions and infrastructure, but to do so in a manner making them dependent on and profitable to US-European corporate-financier interests well into the foreseeable future.

The West’s vast influence in Iraq today is owed to this process. While it is likely the West envisioned a client state far more obedient and subservient to Western interests than Iraq is today, the complicity it does receive across Iraq and even across the wider region, is vastly greater than before the 2003 invasion.

America’s Burgeoning Terror-State in the Levant 

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Hersh’s now prophetic report would also reveal US support for the Muslim Brotherhood:

There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.”

The US, through backing a large, alternative political front, was already well on its way in 2007 toward creating a parallel state within Syria to eventually undermine and overthrow before eventually absorbing the Syrian nation.

As hostilities began, the US augmented its proxy political party with both opposition media fronts and armed militant groups – essentially the creation of mass media and an army for its growing parallel terror state.

The New York Times in 2013 would admit in an article titled, “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A.,” that:

With help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to air traffic data, interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders.

As the war has continued on, the United States and its Arab and European allies have steadily built other institutions to augment the political, military, and media capabilities of this burgeoning terror-state, including hospitals operated in Al Qaeda-held territory by Western NGOs, and of course the so-called “White Helmets,” described on their own website as:

The volunteers save people on all sides of the conflict – pledging commitment to the principles of “Humanity, Solidarity, Impartiality” as outlined by the International Civil Defence Organisation. This pledge guides every response, every action, every life saved – so that in a time of destruction, all Syrians have the hope of a lifeline.

In reality, the “White Helmets” operate solely in terrorist-held territory, as the nation of Syria already has an effective, professional, and well organized civil defense organization. The “White Helmets” appear to be “targeted intentionally” because they are operating side-by-side designated terrorist organizations including Al Nusra, quite literally Al Qaeda in Syria.

In one graphic instance (GRAPHIC VIDEO), these “White Helmet” Al Qaeda auxiliaries can be seen literally standing by as Al Nusra terrorists execute a prisoner, before rushing in to remove the body. Had Syrian or Russian warplanes struck these terrorists in the midst of carrying out war crimes, these “White Helmets” would have rightfully been liquidated side-by-side the terrorists they were aiding and abetting.

Despite the “White Helmets” severing quite literally as Al Qaeda auxiliaries, the US through USAID and more recently, the German government, have provided the faux-NGO millions in funding.

US State Department Deputy Spokesperson Mark Toner in April 2016, according to a US State Department official transcript, would admit:

Well, I can tell you that we provide, through USAID, about $23 million in assistance to them [the “White Helmets”].

Toner was responding to queries by journalists regarding why a US-funded organization was receiving millions of dollars in assistance, but whose leader is banned from traveling to the United States. Toner attempted to claim the situation was “complicated,” but in reality, it is a simple matter of the US once again arming and funding terrorists abroad while simultaneously attempting to pose as fighting them back home.

More recently, AP would report in an article titled, “Germany ups financial support for Syria’s White Helmets,” that:

Germany’s Foreign Ministry says it is increasing financial support for the Syria Civil Defense group, also known as the White Helmets. 

The ministry said in a statement Friday that it has raised its funding for the group this year from 5 million euros ($5.61 million) to 7 million euros ($7.85 million).

With a sectarian extremist political party like the Muslim Brotherhood, an armed force comprised of Al Qaeda and other extremist groups, and an array of complicit alleged NGOs including the “White Helmets,” the US and its allies have attempted to create a parallel state within Syria – a parallel state it hopes will eventually inherit the entirety of Syria’s territory, just as violent sectarian terrorist factions have assumed control over Libya – deconstructing it as a functioning nation state and plunging its people into open-ended, perpetual catastrophe that is reverberating across the planet in the form of terrorism and migrant crises.

The US and its partners are posing as fighting against terrorism, while carving out entire nations for Al Qaeda and its affiliates everywhere from the North African nation of Libya, to the  ‎Levantine nation of Syria. It is a foreign policy in reality that cannot be sustained with the unraveling rhetoric used to promote and perpetuate it on the global stage, particularly in front of the UN.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Syrian religious leaders representing the republic’s three largest churches (Greek Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, and Syrian Orthodox) recently issued a statement calling for an end to the economic sanctions on Syria, which they blamed for impoverishing the Syrian people.

That the west predictably ignored these calls is symptomatic of their abject refusal to address the most important truth about the war, which is that the militias waging war on the Syrian state are infinitely more dependent on an external predatory alliance of nations for constant flows of foreign mercenaries, funding, weapons, training, and even direct assistance on the battlefield than they are on any internal discontent with the Syrian government.

Those predatory nations include NATO states such as the United States, Britain, France and Turkey, and their regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Israel, as well as other governments that fall in the ‘western sphere’ such as Canada and Australia, both of whom have co-signed the objectives of the proxy-war on Syria.

Lifting the economic siege ON Syria would be a lot easier, but it would require westerners to come to terms with the reality that their governments are the problem, not the solution.

Targeted sanctions? 

The notion that the sanctions on Syria are ‘targeted’ in the sense that they only affect ‘regime officials’ is the oldest lie used to justify economic aggression – this same lie was used to justify the sanctions on Iraq after the first gulf war.

When Madeleine Albright (then US Ambassador to the UN) was asked whether she believed the colossal death-toll of Iraqi children caused by these sanctions was worth it, she famously replied in the affirmative, saying ‘we think the price is worth it’.

In terms of achieving US foreign policy objectives she was correct since healthy children are potential Iraqi soldiers capable of defending their country against US aggression, so it’s much more effective to bring the country to its knees first, even if it means killing children.

Today Syria is being ‘softened up’ by sanctions that are just as ‘comprehensive’ as those imposed on Iraq.

Visa, Mastercard and Paypal all suspended services to Syria in August 2011 after the announcement of Executive Order 13582 by the US Treasury, prohibiting US persons (corporate entities included) from providing any services to Syria, which is a severe blow given that global financial transactions are dominated not just by these corporations but by corporations based in countries that impose financial sanctions on Syria in general.

This means that even people living in countries that never went along with the sanctions are unable to send money to Syria using these three services on the grounds that these three corporations are technically US persons and thus subject to US laws.

It also blocks the ability of many among the Syrian diaspora to send remittances back to their families, which is particularly cruel given that remittances are one source of revenue that would logically increase during a war, due to greater efforts made by the diaspora to support their relatives back home, and also because of the money that Syrians made refugees by the war would wish to send back, assuming they find sources of income abroad.

Of the $1.6b (current USD) that Syria earned in remittances in 2010 (which is the last year for which accurate World Bank figures are publicly available), 75% came from countries that now impose financial sanctions on Syria

In the case of the GCC states, which contributed 37% of Syria’s pre-war remittance revenues, the move to block remittances was a defensive move by Damascus itself because of the colossal financial support that Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular have offered the Islamist proxies. As for the other 38% (which in addition to the previous 37% equals the 75% figure quoted earlier), this is made up of Jordan (16%), Turkey (14%), the EU (5%) and the Anglosphere bloc of the US, Canada, Australia and the UK (3%), all of which impose financial sanctions to varying degrees.

While it’s unclear what Syria’s remittance earnings actually are at present (especially given the cash-in-hand transfers that go unaccounted for and other informal methods) there’s no doubt that Germany in particular will host a sizable Syrian diaspora community in the near future and therefore may feel compelled to accommodate growing demands for financial sanctions to be lifted.

The exhaustive nature of the sanctions helps explain the pattern of corporations ‘over-complying’, that is refusing to do business with Syrian persons or entities altogether to avoid heavy penalties.

In March 2015 Paypal was ordered to pay $7.7m to the US Treasury for facilitating transactions worth a measly $44,000 between Cuba, Sudan and Iran that were in violations of US sanctions – that’s a $7.7m penalty for transferring up to $44,000, of which Paypal would have early taken only a small fraction in operating revenues.

With penalties that are orders of magnitude higher than the amounts violating the sanctions, why wouldn’t Paypal (and others) ‘over-comply’ with the sanctions just to play it safe?

Sanctions on Syrian oil exports only apply to the government (not ISIS) 

A currency depreciates when a country imports more than it exports, which is why the rising demand for heating fuels to keep Syrians warm in the coming winter months predictably led to Syria’s Central Bank announcing a 6% devaluation of the Syrian pound, which now officially trades at 517.4 against the US dollar.

Although Syria was an importer of petroleum products even prior to the conflict, this import bill was at least offset by export earnings from the sale of crude oil.

In the eleven years prior to the conflict (from 2000 to 2010 inclusively) 53.1% of Syria’s total export earnings of $81.9b (current USD) came from the sale of crude oil, however this percentage fell dramatically to around the 6.5% mark from 2012 onwards

The reason? In September 2011 the EU imposed sanctions which banned the importation of Syrian oil – a major blow given that in 2010 (the year prior to the conflict) the EU bloc was Syria’s single largest export-destination, earning 41.4% of total export revenues (exports in 2010 were $12.2b in current USD.

These sanctions were later lifted in May 2013, but only after the al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra (now known as Jabhat Fateh al Sham) had seized control of Syria’s oil fields in the north-east of the country.

A month later in April 2013 a split within the ranks of al Nusra produced ISIS which has been selling stolen Syrian ever since, largely thanks to the EU’s willingness to be their customers.

At the time, the EU’s decision (to begin funding al Qaeda via the theft of Syria’s natural resources) was promoted by the Guardian as a way ‘to help the moderate opposition’ despite their report also acknowledging that ‘al-Qaida and other extreme Islamist groups control the majority of the oil wells in Deir Ezzor province’.

To the extent that ISIS has developed a Frankenstein-like independence from its original backers, it’s because they can sell this stolen oil, meaning that they don’t rely on their sponsors as much as their so-called ‘moderate’ rivals.

Should oil prices rise again to above $100/barrel thereby making it viable for Syria to resume oil exports (that is if Saudi Arabia stops driving down prices) Europe will have to make a choice – either lift the sanctions and buy from the government, or continue funding ISIS.

Sanctions are destroying Syria’s healthcare system 

The sanctions, by helping to demolish the value of the Syrian pound by a factor of twelve (it’s pre-war value was 45 pounds per USD in 2010), has raised the price of imports by roughly the same factor, meaning that sanctions needn’t even formally prohibit the sale of medicines to Syria to make them unaffordable and scarce.

Maintaining the perception in the west that President Assad is almost solely to blame for the deterioration in public health is perhaps why the perspectives of Syrian doctors, who are in the best position to comment on the relationship between sanctions and healthcare, are routinely ignored.

Dr. Nabil Antaki, a medical practitioner who works in the government-held western Aleppo, had this to say about the sanctions, “we are disgusted by these sanctions because these sanctions and these embargoes have not been implemented against the Syrian government but against the Syrian people, all the Syrian people”.

Just as the sanctions on Iraq resulted in the deterioration of the water treatment systems by blocking the importation of the spare parts needed to fix them, Syria’s medical staff are experiencing similar difficulties when it comes to fixing their equipment.

Describing the bureaucratic hurdles in sourcing parts, “I wanted to replace one part of a piece of medical equipment. Normally this would take one week, it took a year and a half to get hold of the part because we couldn’t import it from Japan as it was a multi-national company”, Dr Antaki said.

Another doctor from Aleppo Dr. Tony Sayegh also blames sanctions, “something that makes life even more tough are the economic sanctions that the US and EU have imposed on Syria. The sanctions do not hit the government but the people”.

When I visited Syria in July 2015 as part of a delegation we met with Syria’s Health Minister Dr. Nizar Yazigi who pointed out that of the 70 pharmaceutical factories Syria once had, now only 20 remain.

These factories are what enabled Syria to achieve remarkable levels of self-sufficiency in the production of medicines prior to the war. According to the Syrian Economic Forum (which is critical of the government), 91% of the medicines consumed in Syria a year prior to the war (2010) were produced domestically.

The decimation of Syrian industrial capacity is not just a symptom of the generally destructive nature of war, but also because proxy-armies have looted industrial areas.

This is why after Sheikh Najjar’s industrial complex was taken back by the Syrian government in July 2014 (from Al Nusra, Ahrar al Sham and other smaller FSA militias) Aleppo’s industrialists, represented by the ‘Aleppo Chamber of Industry and Commerce’, began proceedings to take the Turkish government to The Hague (International Court of Justice) for their complicity in the plundering of ‘more than 300 factories’ including those used to produce medicines.

The combined strategy of plundering Syria’s productive capacity and then imposing sanctions on Syria to hinder the process of reconstruction looks like an attempt to shift the dependence of the Syrian public away from the government and towards to the forces seeking to topple the government.

This would also explain why the emphasis in the west is on directing charity towards organisations based outside Syria’s borders mainly in neighbouring countries, like Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan, on the pretext that it’s needed to help Syrian refugees, who, ironically, left Syria due to the policies of these countries (except Lebanon) in the first place.

By contrast, charities that operate in government-held Syria (where the vast majority of Syrians live), such as the Syrian Trust for Development, are often starved of donations from wealthier nations because those same nations either enforce the sanctions, or have online payment systems that are dominated by corporations that enforce the sanctions.

Other ‘charities’ however, like the Islamic Humanitarian Relief Foundation based in Turkeyand the Qatari Red Crescent, that have been caught smuggling weapons to the proxy-armies inside Syria, experience no such online blockades.

If the key concern was Syrian welfare then it would be far more effective to stop strangling the healthcare system that already exist, which Syrians spent decades building, and which serves the vast majority of the Syrian public.

Decades of progress in human development, wiped out 

To those unfamiliar with the region, Syria today epitomises nothing but war, which is why it may surprise them to know that prior to the conflict, Syria was actually something of a post-colonial success story, a feat largely achieved by a decades-long legacy of free healthcare, free education and a strong public sector.

Crunching the numbers (available from the World Bank and IMF databanks) gives one the impression that Syria ‘punched above its weight’ in terms of human development.

In the year prior to the war (2010), countries that were wealthier than Syria did only marginally better in terms of life expectancy on average, while countries with lower life expectancies than Syria did so on much higher incomes on average (weighted by population).

If China is excluded from the sample of nations wealthier than Syria, and if Peru is included to keep the sample at twenty nations, then Syria does better on life expectancy by 2.3 years than the revised sample average of 70.

As for the sample of nations with lower life expectancies than Syria (again, a sample of twenty nations) their average income works out at $11,385 (current international dollars) which is $5,010 higher than Syria – in other words, Syria did more for its people relative to its income than nations in the same proverbial ballpark.

Punching above its weight, Syria’s achievements on the eve of the war are only diminished by the inclusion of China – nothing to be ashamed of given China’s remarkable achievements in human development.

End the sanctions 

To those living in the so-called ‘west’, regardless of what you may think of the manner in which the Syrian government conducts itself militarily, this is not something you have much control over, however you do have some agency in opposing your own government’s policies that are fuelling this war.

Whether those policies include arming the death-squads that the Syrian government is predictably resisting, or imposing the cruel sanctions that are killing Syrians quietly, either through artificially inflated food prices and medicine shortages or by preventing them from receiving remittances from abroad, these are the actions you have some agency to oppose.

Westerners, if you want to ‘break the sieges’ (a reference to the PR slogan promoted by the ‘moderate’ mercenaries who for years have demanded NATO intervention on their behalf) you should start with the economic sieges imposed by YOUR governments against Syria.

Jay Tharappel is a Sydney-based political commentator, and active member of the organisation Hands Off Syria.