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The Chilcot Report – published earlier this summer – established the extent of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s role in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – and it found that much could have been done to resolve Saddam Hussein’s control over the region at that time via more peaceful means. Following the publication of the report, with a word count going into the millions and an outcome that the media generally regarded as being fairly damning for the ex-Prime Minister, Blair was quick to establish that he acted with appropriate action during that time. However, many media outlets, and people directly affected by the conflict at the time of it occurring feel otherwise – and there has been widespread concern as to whether or not Blair should be held to account for his role in the Second Gulf War.

Following the report’s publication, a petition has been gathering steam which demands that Blair should face further measures as a result of his role in proceedings – and as the petition has been submitted via the UK Parliament’s website, the British government is now required to respond to the submission as it breaches 10,000 signatures. It is not currently known what the stance of MPs will be on the matter – however, the Chilcot report made it clear based on evidence available that the Iraq war occurred as a result of flawed intelligence, meaning that many citizens feel it should be necessary for Blair in particular to face further action.

The petition in question requests that Parliament ‘should now agree to a process by which it can hold the former Prime Minister to account’. While it is a shout away from the 100,000 signatures needed for it to be debated in Parliament itself, it has already gained the attention of mainstream media and, as stated, will need to be addressed by elected representatives regardless of what the general consensus is in either Houses of Parliament.

The Chilcot Report arrived at the end of a whirlwind of a month in UK Politics, with the country having decided to leave the European Union via a ground-breaking referendum – and the resignation of a number of public figures, such as Prime Minister David Cameron. The UK now has a new PM in the form of former Home Secretary Theresa May, and the leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn continues to stand his ground while faced with a forthcoming leadership election. Whether or not Blair will be taken to task, it is clear that the summer of drama for UK politics is far from over.

Few sights are sadder in international diplomacy than seeing an aging figure desperate for honours. In a desperate effort to net them, he scurries around, cultivating, prodding, wishing to be noted.  Finally, such an honour is netted, in all likelihood just to shut that overly keen individual up.

Such a figure is former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who has become something of a prattler in chief, roaming an assortment of international stages in the vain hope that he might, just might become the next UN Secretary General.

Nominees, of which former Portuguese prime minister António Guterres is said to be favourite, have already been put forth by a range of countries, including New Zealand (Helen Clark), Croatia (Vesna Pusić), Argentina (Susana Malcorra).  The one country lagging in the affair was Australia.

That Rudd would even think he had a chance offers an insight into a particular brand of megalomania. Each position he has occupied has seen a form of micro-managed mania take hold. Employees and staff have been run ragged. His infamous work ethic has been less a case of efficiency than paranoia about sticking with a decision, and fortifying it against rivals.

Then came the deeply personal portraits of a man of the permanent grudge.  Wayne Swan, former Treasurer, and troubled friend for a period of 20 years, spared nothing in his memoir, The Good Fight.  “Kevin,” he suggested, “was prone to vengeful behaviour” and distinctly unstable.

Internationally, various instances of such instability have been charged to Rudd.  His outburst at the Copenhagen summit on climate change in 2010, at which he suggested in moment of frustration that, “Those Chinese fuckers are trying to rat fuck us” has become somewhat legendary.[1]  (China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Qin Gang diplomatically suggested disbelief about what “those reports” claimed.)

This has been coupled with an awful obsequiousness at points, typified by the usual line that Australia, if required to go to war against China with the United States, would happily do so. Hardly the stuff of a UN Secretary General.

The picture of Rudd, then, was a poor one to begin with, whereas others vying for the Secretary position, including former NZ Prime Minister Clark, were always going to be streets ahead.[2]

The issue in Australia has also descended into farce. The conservative Liberal-National government has found itself at odds as to what to do with Rudd, a person many would rather not see at the UN’s top job. For Rudd to even be considered for the UN required him to be put forth by his sponsoring country.

The debate has taken a very public form.  On the one hand, the Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, sees no problems with staying comradely on the subject.  Being a former prime minister, foreign minister and diplomat, was good enough, and party allegiance on this score did not matter.  To that end, she could count on the support of Attorney-General George Brandis.

The Treasurer, Scott Morrison, begged to differ, making the issue entirely in partisan terms.  As Labor did not push the candidacy for former treasurer Peter Costello’s bid to succeed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as head of the International Monetary Fund five years go, it was time to return the favour.

Ditto the right of right South Australian liberal senator Cory Bernardi, who sought to convince colleagues not to back an individual “dysfunctional”, “vengeful”, “unstable”, and a “megalomaniac”.

The opposition Labor Party was always going to assume that Rudd was suitable, a curious state of affairs given the fact that various members were thrilled at knifing their leader when he was prime minister.

Evidently, being UN Secretary General was far more appropriate than leading the country.  In the words of acting opposition leader, Tanya Plibersek, “There is no question that it is in our national interest to have an Australian in this vital role.”

The Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, had one corner to hide in: the suitability of Rudd for the role.  “When the Australian Government nominates a person for a job, particularly an international job like this, the threshold question is, ‘do we believe the person, the nominee, the would-be-nominee is well suited for that position?’”[3]

After denying that the issue had been factional, that the party room had been deeply unsettled by the debate as to whether Rudd’s name should be put forth, the great red herring of objectivity was trotted out.  Rudd was simply not suitable.

That he wasn’t suitable for a range of reasons is hard to contest, be it temperament, timing, and the rank fact that having an Australian in such a post would be problematic for various powers. Russia and China, for starters, would be suspicious about having such a pro-Washington voice at the helm of the international body.

Turnbull kept mum on that subject, leaving Rudd up the creek with no paddle in sight.  Only Senator Bernardi gave us a sense about what had happened with a congratulatory note for the prime minister: “Our participation in international institutions is more important than an individual’s ambition.” The conservative wing of the party had triumphed.

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

Notes

Heavy clashes are ongoing in and near Aleppo city as pro-government forces are tightening the siege of its militant-controlled areas.

On July 27, the Fateh Halab militant group launched an advance on the Kurdish controlled neighborhood of Aleppo city, Sheikh Maqsood. The Fateh Halab advance was supported by heavy artillery fire from the militant-controlled neighborhoods of Bani Zaid and Sakan Shababi. However, jihadists were not able to break the Kurdish YPG defenses and Fateh Halab lost several fighters in the failed advance.

Then, YPG units counter-attacked the militants in Youth Housing and seized it. This move contributed to the Syrian army’s operation aimed to encircle east of Aleppo.

When the Kurds were clashing with militants in Youth Housing, the Syrian army advanced in the Bani Zeid neighborhood, engaging the jihadi forces assisting Fateh Halab’s operations against the Kurds. Later, the Kurdish YPG also engaged militants in the area from the direction of Sheikh Maqsood.

By July 28, the Syrian army has captured a major part of the the district. If Bani Zeid is fully liberated, the Syrian army and the Kurdish YPG will need to consolidate their gains in west Aleppo, preparing for further clashes for the urban areas under the jihadi rule.

Reports appeared on July 28 that Jaysh Al-Fateh is massively deploying fighters in the southern countryside of Aleppo province in order to launch an offensive at Al-Hadher. This operation is aimed to lift the pressure from the militants encircled by pro-government forces in Aleppo city. There are no confirmed reports about numbers of fighters and military equipment that will be used by the militant group.

At least 44 people were killed and more than 170 others were wounded in a terrorist attack in the city of Qamishli on Wednesday. The ISIS terrorist group claimed responsibility for the attack.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), supported by the US-led coalition, have been struggling to enter the Manbij city center. Recently, the SDF seized over 10000 ISIS intelligence documents after seizing the group’s command center in western Manbij.

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The European Union and the USA have been negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) behind closed doors since 2013. Negotiators kept insisting that their secret talks would work in the best interest of the public and the environment.

But since Greenpeace leaked the TTIP draft negotiating documents it became clearer than ever, that this trade agreement could become one of the most dangerous weapons in the hands of the fossil fuel industry in its effort to kill Climate Action for the 21st century. The elephant in the room is here and it is huge: the word “climate” means something totally different in the TTIP papers.

Trade agreements: weapons for the fossil fuel industry

In 2011, the government of Quebec responded to concerns over water pollution by implementing a moratorium on the use of fracking. The energy company Lone Pine Resources then filed an investor-state lawsuitbased on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), seeking US$109.8 million plus interest in damages. In 2009, Swedish energy multinational Vattenfall sued the German government, seeking €1.4 billion in compensation for environmental restrictions imposed on one of their dirty coal plants.

The TTIP would put in place a parallel judicial system that allows companies to bypass national courts altogether. “I think this is one of the most dangerous things we have seen in the last decade: this idea of Investor State Dispute Settlements (ISDS). If a regulation only potentially cuts into the profits of a company, these companies can turn to arbitration”, warns Jesse Bragg from Corporate Accountability International.

According to a United Nations report, 35% of all cases in which corporations are suing governments on the basis of trade agreements, are so far related to Climate Change.  And with the fossil fuel industry currently under enormous pressure, these numbers are growing.

Fossil fuel corporations are increasingly using ISDS under existing trade and investment deals, thus contributing to a recent surge in legal cases. In 2014, for example, half of the new ISDS cases targeted policies affecting oil and gas extraction, mining, or power generation.

“As the anti-fossil fuel forces gain strength, extractive companies are beginning to fight back using a familiar tool: the investor protection provisions in free trade agreements”, warned Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein.

The fossil fuel industry now openly admits how it wants to make use of TTIP to maintain their polluting business. According to Houston attorney Tom Sikora, Legal Counsel with ExxonMobil, energy companies are particularly keen to turn to arbitration. And as US-based oil and gas giant Chevron stated in a 2013 statement, the company would lobby for “a world-class investment chapter” in TTIP. The company has had several meetings behind closed doors with the EU’s TTIP negotiators. To Chevron, TTIP is “one of our most important issues globally”. Meanwhile, Chevron remains one of the biggest polluters of our times, refusing to pay for its toxic mess, and currently facing a lawsuit for contamination of the Amazonian rainforest, as ordered by the Ecuadorian courts.

If an oil company describing a trade treaty between states as one of “our most important issues” raises suspicion, then what is actually written in the TTIP text?

TTIP – making climate protection a “trade barrier”

Elected governments normally have the right and power to regulate and adopt laws for protecting the air, the climate and people’s health. The TTIP would turn this principle upside down. Companies will no longer face restrictions such as having to prove that their operations violate a country’s environmental legislation. Instead, the TTIP imposes the complete burden of proof on the Governments, who will have to prove that all their measures are “necessary”, “appropriate” and “legitimate”.

Some examples from the leaked TTIP documents:

The general idea behind trade agreements – that of reducing unnecessary regulations – is not necessarily a bad one but the TTIP has no “crash-barrier-clauses” in the form of strong paragraphs, which ensure that governments will keep their right to regulate when it comes to protecting the environment, people’s health or the climate. In fact, in the TTIP text, the word climate appears only in the context of good “investor climates” and this speaks volumes.

• The chapter on national treatment and market access for goods demands that “all import and export licensing procedures are neutral in application and administered in a fair, equitable and transparent manner”. This might sound reasonable at first glance, but makes it potentially impossible to ban the import of certain products that destroy the climate or the environment, because this would be “discriminatory”. Furthermore, if there are any conditions to the import of certain goods, governments will have to prove that “other appropriate procedures to achieve an administrative purpose are not reasonably available.”
• The article on risk management states that governments “shall design and apply risk management in a manner as to avoid arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination, or disguised restrictions on international trade”. Any restrictions on international trade would enable companies to sue governments in Investor State Dispute Settlements – just as Lone Pine did when Quebec implemented a moratorium on fracking to protect its ground water (as reported above).
• The chapter on technical barriers to trade demands from governments to always choose the “least burdensome possible procedures” when they regulate. This means that democratically elected governments and parliaments could be forced to reduce restrictions for corporations, instead of controlling their emissions. This is an open invitation for corporations to sue governments for climate protection measures that would cut into the profits of the fossil fuel industry.

According to Professor Gus van Harten of Osgoode Hall Law School, “States may be deterred from implementing measures to fulfill their climate change responsibilities, faced with risks of uncapped financial liability due to ISDS claims”. In the case of Vattenvall and Germany mentioned above, just the threat of ISDS was enough for Germany to water down environmental standards related to the company’s coal plant.

A completely new scope

The TTIP would by far dwarf all trade agreements the world has seen so far, directly affecting the lives of 800 million people in the EU and the US. Of the 51,495 US-owned subsidiaries currently operating in the EU, more than 47,000 would be newly empowered to launch ISDS attacks on European policy making and government actions.

But the resistance of the global climate movement against the TTIP is rising. In June, a major coalition of more than 450 NGOs called on the US Congress to oppose TTIP because of its climate impacts. A letter signed by organisations including Greenpeace, 350.org and the Sierra Club reflects one of the broadest civil society coalitions to ever call on the US Congress officially. They state that “the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), as proposed, would empower an unprecedented number of fossil fuel corporations, including some of the world’s largest polluters, to challenge US policies in tribunals not accountable to any domestic legal system.”

Had the negotiation process leading to the TTIP remained so highly opaque, as was the case until the recent leaks, it would really sabotage the fight for energy transition. With the ink still wet on the Paris Agreement, citizens around the world are rising, demanding to keep fossil fuels in the ground. The TTIP and the ISDS are the latest tricks in the dirty industry’s book, which could turn out to be a valuable weapon in the hands of companies like Chevron and Exxon.

This is why it is important to stop it.

Further Resources:

TTIP Leaks: https://ttip-leaks.org

Profiling from Injustice: How law firms, arbitrators and financiers are fuelling an investment arbitration boom.

Polluters Paradise: How investor rights in EU trade deals sabotage the fight for energy transition.

The Brexit vote was a momentous political earthquake and the seismic shifts that caused it have been long in the making. It has ruptured so many political structures — decades and even centuries old, national and international — so deeply it could be decades before its damage can be fully reckoned. The damage reveals the fragility of Britain’s, and the West’s, political and economic structures caused by three-and-a-half decades of neoliberalism and austerity.

The Bremainers’ entirely laudable cosmopolitanism and anti-racism were tragically mixed up with a blindness to how fast and how far formerly social-democratic Europe had become neoliberal. The Brexiteers staged the latest popular revolt against neoliberalism and austerity, as the Greeks and the inhabitants of Donbass did in 2014 and the supporters in the United States of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are doing today. Despite the entire political establishment and all its financial and media resources backing remain — with even Labour’s Euro-sceptic leader Jeremy Corbyn urging “remain and reform” — the English and Welsh electorates voted decisively for Brexit.

While Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party and Tory Boris Johnson made racist appeals and there have been rising incidences of racist violence since the Brexit vote, most Brexiteers are not racist. They were rejecting the EU as the unelected enforcer of neoliberalism. The EU’s infamous democratic deficit is necessary to impose neoliberalism on social-democratically inclined populations. The largely right-wing leave campaign was aware of this, falsely claiming, for instance, that millions of pounds would be redirected from the EU into the National Health Service.

Brexit has revealed deep contradictions in both major parties. It was the decades-long fall in the Conservative party’s vote, most recently bleeding to the far-right UK Independence Party that led Prime Minister David Cameron to promise the ill-fated referendum so rashly, thinking nothing of dragging the entire country through a divisive and pointless referendum to solve an internal-party political problem. It has only become more acute: the Conservatives will now find it even more difficult to function as the party of property while retaining sufficient support to win elections.

Brexit has opened an equally fundamental divide in Labour. Socialist or social-democratic parties have typically been alliances between the manual working class and the professional and intellectual element, of what the Fabians, with quaint directness, called “brains and numbers.” Never easy — the social democrats split from Labour back in 1981 — this divide has been deepened by neoliberal inequality. The party’s “New Labour” professional elements dominate the parliamentary caucus while Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader with massive support from Labour’s union and working class base. This week, the parliamentary party attempted what former Scottish National Party leader, Alex Salmond, called a “disgusting coup” against Corbyn. If Corbyn wins the inevitably bitterly contested election, as he well might, Labour faces a deeper split.

Brexit has also disunited the Kingdom. Scots voted to remain. The SNP is promising another referendum on Scottish independence and leader Nicola Sturgeon was in Brussels to discuss Scotland’s continuing EU membership. Northern Ireland also voted to remain and Sinn Fein now wishes to open the question of Irish unification.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other EU leaders, aware of the dangerous example Brexit is setting, must now impose heavy penalties on Britain — though these will also hurt dominant EU interests — merely to prevent other countries from following suit. It remains to be seen whether they can impose these penalties and whether they will have the desired deterrent effect.

Internationally, Britain was the gateway into the EU for the U.S. and many other countries. Now, foreign companies that invest in Britain to access the EU markets will have to reconsider their strategies. The city of London, the financial sector that dominates the U.K.’s long deindustrializing economy, has suffered the greatest blow. It was led out of post-war doldrums by eurodollar business in the 1970s. Prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s first act in office was to lift capital controls and she followed it up with financial deregulation. Now London is Robin to New York’s Batman in the dollar-denominated international financial and monetary system, profiting from its vast asset inflations and torrential international capital flows that shored up demand for, and the value of, the U.S. dollar.

After they collapsed in 2008, however, international capital flows failed to recover and London became more reliant on Euro-denominated transactions. Its search for alternative business even led it to join China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank over U.S. President Barack Obama’s loud and clear objections. Brexit not only threatens Euro-denominated business but also Chinese business: EU membership was part of the attractions of London for China.

Who knew when Cameron rashly promised to hold this referendum it would be a game-changer at so many political and geopolitical levels?

Radhika Desai is a political studies professor and the director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba.

The recent book review “A Stark Nuclear Warning” by Jerry Brown, in which he has shared views on William J. Perry’s memoirs “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink”, raises a lot of questions and concerns.

Jerry Brown unequivocally describes Perry, who held many important positions in the past, including the U.S. Secretary of Defense in 1994-1997, as a double-hated man.

On the one hand, as the U.S. Secretary of Defense he helped to build a formidable U.S. nuclear arsenal several decades ago, being responsible for important technological advances with respect to U.S. nuclear forces, like launching the B-2 a heavy strategic bomber; revitalizing the aging B-52, a bomber from the same category as SOA (Strategic Offensive Arms) inventory; putting the Trident submarine program back on track; and making an ill-fated attempt to bring the MX ICBM, a ten-warhead missile, into operation.

On the other, William J. Perry has been identified as a staunch proponent of avoiding nuclear danger, nowadays, when he has retired and embarked “on an urgent mission to alert us to the dangerous nuclear road we are travelling.” He is clearly calling American leaders to account for what he believes “are very bad decisions”, such as the precipitous expansion of NATO right up to the Russian border (William J. Perry was a very brave man when he became the lone Cabinet member who opposed President Bill Clinton’s decision to give Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic immediate membership in the Alliance). William J. Perry has also not been supportive of President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in 2002.

It is interesting to note that a person who took an active part in the continuous U.S. SOA and TNW (tactical nuclear weapons) build-up today has concluded that there could be no acceptable defence against a massive-scale nuclear attack. According to him, the great paradox of the nuclear age is that deterrence of nuclear war is sought by building ever more lethal and precise weapons. For the sake of reality it should be underscored that this notion has to be attributed exclusively to the USA, who has a long time ago embarked upon an “offensive unconditional nuclear deterrence strategy” which has not practically been changed so far.

Jerry Brown observes that William J. Perry is convinced that parity is “old thinking” because nuclear weapons can’t actually be used – the risk of uncontrollable and catastrophic escalation is too high. Seemingly, he shares the earlier maxim once articulated by President Ronald Reagan: “A nuclear war cannot be fought, because it can never be won.”

Unfortunately, in his remarks Jerry Brown has made a number of inaccuracies in describing some facts of the immediate past and the present-day military-political environment.

He writes that: “…both the Soviet Union and the United States had developed hydrogen bombs”. In reality, the USA was the first state that produced H-bomb (1952), the USSR responded lately (1953). As is known, the USA was the first one who has produced an A-bomb; while the Soviet Union did so only in 1949. The USA was the first one who has created a classic SOA triad (ICBM, SLBM and heavy bombers), and MIRV ICBM. The USSR followed suit.

That is why it is irrelevant to claim that “the Soviets just stepped up their nuclear efforts and so did the U.S.”

Jerry Brown reminds about the Cuban missile crisis, but does not clarify that it has been initiated by Washington who unilaterally has deployed medium-range nuclear missiles “Jupiter” with 1 megaton each in Italy and Turkey, and at a time when the USA had nuclear warheads superiority over the Soviet Union as 17:1 (revelation by Robert McNamara). Only after that dangerous action Moscow has decided to move its SNF to Cuba (note: before the Cuban missile crisis has been resolved, the Soviet leaders have not even authorized to install nuclear warheads upon the missiles and combat aircraft brought to Cuba).

Jerry Brown is of opinion that the Cold War was over, and the nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union were located not only in Russia, but also in three new republics that “were not capable of protecting them.” After the demise of the USSR, Russia has brought all SOA and TNW from these republics back to its territory, despite the fact that all these nuclear assets have been strongly protected. This measure has been agreed upon between Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus and the Western nuclear powers.

I do not believe that the Cold War is over despite the Paris Charter for a New Europe heralded that in 1990. The Cold War has entered a new phase – qualitatively more dangerous that its first phase. Cold War 2.0 is characterized by a vast military build-up of NATO near the Russian borders, and a complete stalemate in arms control: currently there are 15 unresolved issues in this domain between the USA and Russia. In the first stage of Cold War Moscow and Washington signed 7 nuclear arms control accords, CWC and BWC, CFE-1 and CFE-1A treaties, a number of CBM arrangements. Since 2010 nothing has been done in this sphere.

So, it is incorrect to state that “the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States did not make any effort to slow nuclear competition; they did just the opposite.”

The reaction of Moscow to the fielding of the U.S. ground-based BMD assets in Europe was portrayed by Jerry Brown inaccurately.  Such elements plus sea-based components of the U.S BMD “shield” really create formidable threat to Russia and its allies because of two major reasons:

(a) the launching tubes of the U.S. BMD system Mk-41 can house not only defensive interceptors, but also offensive cruise missiles and other war-fighting means in the framework of the “Prompt Global Strike” which can be used as a first-strike weapon versus Russia;

(b) the U.S. and NATO BMD system has been tied up to their nuclear and conventional forces – such “appropriate mix” has been stamped up at the three recent NATO Summits in Chicago (2012), Newport (2014) and Warsaw (2016).

Washington still does not want to abrogate its Cold War thinking: to cancel its first use of nuclear weapons’ concept. All U.S. Administrations have declined to accept several Soviet and Russian initiatives on that issue.

President Barack Obama failed to ratify the CTBT (1996), though he has promised to do it during his presidency.

Recently, in the framework of NATO the debates on the further strengthening of this largest military bloc reliance on nuclear weapons have intensified.

The talk is about expanding the geographic scope and the total number of military exercises conducted with simulated use of bombs equipped with mock nuclear warheads, carrying military computer games on the use of nuclear weapons on the European continent, as well as the development of special scenarios on transformation of hypothetical conflict involving the general conventional forces into the conflicts with the use of nuclear weapons.

Suggestions have been made that in the course of combined command and staff games of a “new type” with the help of computer simulation while resolving non-nuclear and nuclear tasks in the scenario of the regional and global environment the condition of the “use of Russian strategy of nuclear escalation” as a counterweight to the “nuclear counter-escalation” to NATO is included. The idea of involving in such games not only representatives of the military, but also high-ranking civilian government officials participating in making the important decisions of national importance is articulated.

On June 25, 2015, during a hearing before the Committee on Armed Services of the US Congress devoted to the prospective role of nuclear weapons the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work called to oppose to the Russian nuclear doctrine by the U.S. nuclear capabilities with the aim to launch a strategy of “de-escalation of escalation.” In other words, it is interpreted in Washington in such a way that an escalation of threats of the limited use of nuclear weapons should be used to de-escalate conflicts fought with conventional weapons.

Commenting on the debate that took place during the meeting of the defense ministers of the member countries’ of the “transatlantic solidarity” in Brussels on 8 October 2015, the Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom to NATO Adam Thomson has publicly complained that before the Alliance held separate military exercises with the use of conventional and nuclear weapons, but has never tested the transformation of the first type of exercises in the second ones. But he further recognized with appreciation that the recommendation of the “transformation of NATO military exercises with the use of conventional weapons into nuclear drills” became the focus of attention within the Alliance.

Pentagon chief Ashton Carter on the same day told a news conference that the transatlantic pact should prepare an “updated instructions on the use of nuclear weapons” in order to adapt to new threats and challenges of the 21st century and, in particular, called for “better integrate non-nuclear and nuclear deterrence.” His compatriot Alexander Vershbow, NATO Deputy Secretary General, said at the Berlin Security Conference November 17, 2015, the Alliance also must “modernize nuclear deterrence, strengthening his best means of early warning and intelligence.”

In 2014-2016 in order to develop new nuclear posture the U.S. strategic nuclear forces held several military exercises in Central and Eastern Europe, and North Africa, employing heavy strategic bombers B-52H and B-2A, capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

In March 2004 Washington initiated on the constant basis a large-scale NATO air patrol operations in the airspace of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, code-named “Baltic Air Policing”. It involves combat aircraft (DCA), which are potential carriers of tactical nuclear weapons. Over the past twelve years, i.e. from March 2004 to July 2016, fifteen countries of the Alliance, that is, more than half of NATO member-states have been participated in this operation near Russian borders, including the three major Western nuclear powers: the USA, the United Kingdom and France. This operation is conducted day-in-day-out, and 365/366 days per annum.

Washington is modernizing its TNW, including those fielded in Europe, and has no intention to pull them back to the CONUS.

Two of the five existing types of nuclear bombs, namely B-61-7 and B-61-11, as well as a new perspective bomb B-61-12 have “of strategic importance”, as may be delivered to targets not only by tactical aircraft but also by heavy strategic bombers B-52H and B-2A: each can carry 16 such bombs. Both types of strategic bombers can to travel the distance of 11,000 km without refueling in the air, and more than 18,000 km with mid-air refueling. For this reason these types of bombs in the documents of the Pentagon and the State Department are labeled as “strategic”.

A new bomb B-61-12 with a pin-point accuracy is a first-strike nuclear weapon.

Hans Kristensen, a researcher, working at FAS, points out that

“… it is expected that in the next decade, NATO’s nuclear forces will undergo major improvements that will affect increasing quality performance characteristics of both the nuclear weapons and their means of delivery. The planned modernization will significantly increase the military potential of the Alliance’s nuclear policy in Europe.”

The “doomsday” clock is ticking. Nowadays it shows 23.57. Too alarming.

What to do? Seemingly, three initial steps are badly needed.

First. To make a pledge of no-fist-use of nuclear weapons a universal norm, starting from the USA and Russia. As a preliminary step towards this goal to make a commitment to resort to a defensive unconditional nuclear deterrence that threatens no one. Such notion will require no costs.

Second. The USA should withdraw all its TNW from Europe and the Asian part of Turkey.

Third. A multilateral new ABM Treaty limiting the number of BMD interceptors and their geographical deployments has to be elaborated.

The next U.S. Administration has to seriously consider these steps.

Prof. Vladimir Kozin is Head of Advisers’ Group at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and Professor of the Academy of Military Sciences of the Russian Federation.

More substantial remarks on these topics can be found in his monographs: “Evolution of the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense and Russia’s Stance” (1945-2013); “The U.S. Military Doctrine and its Military Policy Forecasting till 2075: Critical Analysis and Practical Recommendations” (in Russian); “Military policy and strategy of the USA in geopolitical dynamics of the XXI century” (as a co-author; in Russian);  “Militarization of Outer Space and Its Impacts on Global Security Environment”; “The U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Reduction or Modernization?” (in Russian; the English translation ongoing); “Evolution of the U.S. Missile Defense Beyond 2040 and Russia’s Stance”; “The Chicago Triad of the USA and NATO and its Consequences for Russia” (in Russian).

Convention confetti raining down on smiling faces should not conceal the bloody truth that trails Hillary Clinton.  As the balloons rise to celebrate her triumph, her victims continue to fall.

Following the bidding of her oligarchic backers in the hidden government, she has always been fervently eager to lend her immoral authority to the massacre of foreign peoples and the destruction of their central governments. Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Serbia, etc. – the list is as long as her moral turpitude is deep.

But as the “Queen of Chaos” is crowned and feted in the City of Brotherly Love, it is crucially important that we recall her role five years ago in the destruction of the African country that had the highest living standard on the continent, excellent health care, free education, good social services, etc. – Libya.

As Hillary Clinton Testifies, How Will Libya Shape Her Legacy …
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As Libya, according to plan, has descended into civil war and chaos (see Iraq, Syria, etc.) as a result of the 2011 “humanitarian intervention” instigated by Clinton and her ilk, it has disappeared from mainstream media propaganda. Out of sight, out of mind.  It will reappear in the corporate press if the American/Nato aggressors decide to bomb the country again in alliance with their friend, the Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, probably in support of the CIA-affiliated General Khalifa Haftar, who is presently wreaking havoc in eastern Libya with western support, as leaked tapes have shown.  The time for that renewed bombing may be fast approaching, though it might be delayed for political reasons until after the presidential election.

In the popular mind, of course, Clinton is associated with the controversial events of September 2012 in Benghazi that resulted in the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. As the Secretary of State, she was no doubt aware of Stevens’ work with the CIA organizing the transfer of the seized Gaddafi government weapons to Turkish ports.  As the Italian historian Paolo Sensini writes in his eye-opening book, Sowing Chaos: Libya in the Wake of Humanitarian Intervention, “The arms were then transferred to the jihadi forces engaged in terrorist actions against the government of Syria under Bashar al-Assad.”  While bi-partisan outrage over the Americans’ deaths was duly noted by the media and became a political football, the nature of Stevens’ work under Clinton and Obama received no mainstream media coverage, and the illegal and immoral wars against two countries continued apace.

But the Stevens’ issue pales in comparison to Clinton’s larger role in waging war on a sovereign nation for propagandistic “humanitarian” reasons.  As with Iraq (Hussein) and Syria (Assad), she was a central player in the lies told about Mu’ammar Gaddafi to justify a war of aggression.  Each in his turn was declared to be the new Hitler.  In Gaddafi’s case, he was falsely accused of killing 10,000 people in Tripoli, having his soldiers use Viagra and rape as a matter of policy, and of being a bloody mad dictator intent on genocide.  Rwanda and the Holocaust were elicited as warnings.  President Obama justified the savage attack on Libya, fully supported by his Secretary of State Clinton, with the following lie: “We knew that if we wanted [sic] … if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.” And he announced he was sending Clinton to London to meet with the Libyan “opposition” – aka terrorists.

The western media ran with these false accusations, as usual, as did Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, prominent Arab media.  Like Iraq, Syria, and Serbia, it was another war of aggression based on lies, and Clinton was a primary player.

She was fully aware of developments in Libya from the start; knew that the rebels were Islamic militants armed and trained by the US, Britain, France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and UAE; knew that they summarily executed anyone they considered their enemies; knew that this war of lies was aimed at preventing Gaddafi from fulfilling his goal of economic independence, not just for Libya, but for the entire continent of Africa by introducing the gold dinar into Africa as common currency; knew, in short, that Libya had to be raped, its Central Bank destroyed, for its exploitation by western globalists.  Thus her boss, Obama, in August 2011 confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank that Gaddafi had planned to use for the establishment of the African IMF and African Central Bank.  This is what Clinton termed “smart power at its best.” Under the pretext of ‘humanitarian intervention,’ Clinton supported the killing of tens of thousands and the destruction of an independent country to serve her masters.

Paolo Sensini characterizes the Democratic presidential nominee (and next president) perfectly:

Mrs. Clinton’s joyous exclamation on hearing the news of Gaddafi’s death sums up the recklessness and irresponsibility of an entire political class – an unrepentant class that has wreaked havoc around the world on a truly unprecedented scale.

When she thought cameras and microphones were off and exclaimed, “We came, we saw, he died,” she was speaking not just for herself but for the party and interests that she now represents.

“I’m with her,” says Michelle Obama.

“I am proud to stand with her,” says Bernie Sanders.

I wonder where the dead children of Libya stand.

But this is Hillary Clinton’s hour.  Congratulations!  Happy Anniversary!

We await your next war.

America’s press covers the Trump campaign with barely concealed hostility toward it, and with an obsessive emphasis upon the candidate’s positions regarding Russia; they’re attacking Trump as being (wittingly or unwittingly) an agent of Russia – and portraying Russia as being America’s enemy.

It’s not only Republican news media that are apparently agreeing with the Republican Mitt Romney’s famous statement made on 26 March 2012, about «Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe». (Romney, who was the star at the last Republican National Convention, hates Trump so much as to have refused even to attend this Republican National Convention.)

Thus, on Friday, 22 July 2016, right after the Thursday-night end of the Republican National Convention and Donald Trump’s acceptance speech there, the top of the homepage of Huffington Post was this:

AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

DARK… H.W. Speechwriter: ‘Very Dark And Frightening’… Garry Kasparov: Sounded Straight Out Of Russia… David Duke: ‘Couldn’t Have Said It Better!’… Speech Riddled With Inaccuracies… Andrew Sullivan: ‘Massive Lies And Distortions, Crammed With Incoherence’… Republicans Have Made A World-Historical Mistake…

That «H.W. Speechwriter» is just an incompetent way of referring to a speechwriter for GHW Bush – whose entire family hates Trump – and Huffington Post’s ‘journalist’ there hid that key fact, when reporting on that speechwriter’s comment about the speech: that the comment came from a friend of that inimical family, the Bushes, who hate Trump.

In other words: this ‘news’ report, simply and uncritically, stenographically, transmitted that particular Bush-family propaganda, against Trump – and this was supposed to be ‘news’ ‘reporting’: people such as this ‘reporter’ get hired in America to write ‘news’ that gets positioned at the top of one of the nation’s major ‘news’ sites. The second headline-link there was from «Gary Kasparov», but they also didn’t indicate that this person happened to be a famous Russian opponent of Russia’s current President, Vladimir Putin. The last two of the eight headlines linked-to in that homepage-topper, came from two writers who had been prominent editors at the Democratic Party’s neoconservative magazine, The New Republic, which had been one of the leading PR organs for every American invasion, especially for George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Hillary Clinton also supported.

None of this background-information was supplied to its readers by Huffington Post,whose readers presumably are unaware that they’re reading (especially atop the front page) political propaganda, instead of political news.

Paul Krugman, in The New York Times, at the same time as that Huff Post propaganda, bannered Donald Trump: The Siberian Candidate, and he linked there to (as his article’s sources) the rabidly anti-Putin articles that will here be discussed below. All of these articles were written by neoconservatives whose careers have been assisted by some of American’s biggest weapons-makers (the profits of which are now booming with ‘the new cold war’ that those writers had helped to create by their hate-Russia propaganda). Krugman – an economist famous for arguing that producing weapons (and all other industries for war) is just as economically productive as is producing food or art or anything else (or, in other words, that producing bombs is just as good as producing bridges or education) – is now also showing, by this article, that his political views are likewise exclusively neoconservative (i.e., slanted in favor of promoting America’s war-industries). And yet, many readers in America consider Krugman to be ‘liberal’ or even ‘progressive’; he is considered to be the opposite of a fascist, in America.

If America’s readers were well-informed, they’d know that this particular war, the war against Russia, had already become a hot one, to overthrow Russia-friendly leaders in Ukraine and Syria. It started being a hot war, by Obama against Russia, when the Russia-friendly Muammar Gaddafi in Libya was overthrown in 2011 under US leadership, which was supported especially by the neoconservative Hillary Clinton (who famously exulted at Gaddafi’s assassination, «We came, we saw, he died. Ha, ha!!»).

Earlier, under neoconservative President George W Bush, the hot war against Russia had actually begun by invading in 2003 Russia’s then-ally Iraq, after a barrage of neoconservative propaganda in America’s press had been aimed against the ‘threat’ to the US posed (allegedly) by ‘Saddam’s WMD’. But, in 2002, Barack Obama condemned that invasion in advance (with a keen eye to his upcoming political career to win the Democratic Presidential nomination), just as, in 2012, Obama condemned his opponent Mitt Romney’s statement about «Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe» (when Obama was secretly, like a double-agent – pretending to be friendly toward Russia, while actually planning war against Russia – already preparing for Romney’s ‘number one geopolitical foe’ to be his own second-term’s chief military and diplomatic target and national enemy). Obama was a gifted deceiver, much more gifted than Hillary. However, now that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, the intent to conquer Russia is considerably more overt. (After all, the US government’s prior propaganda-operation has, by now, even bragged to the world its propaganda-success against Russia. And they had good reason to be proud: they had deceived the world, and especially deceived the American public, to fear Putin, when it is actually the US itself that has been the aggressor between the two.)

To Read complete article on the Strategic Culture Foundation website click here

An interview by Be Curious TV with  Nabil Antaki a Syrian physician, and a Christian, who appeals to the West to open its eyes to the misinformation it is being fed.

BeCuriousTV: Welcome, Dr. Nabil Antaki. Please share with us what is happening in Aleppo and in Syria. You have been to Europe for a short while. You are Syrian, born in Syria and residing in Aleppo. You work as a doctor at the St Louis Hospital, in West Aleppo, meaning the area under the control of the regime. The people in the West do not realize what goes on in Syria after dusk. They could well ask which is worse, the violence perpetrated by the Syrian regime or that of the terrorists or “rebels”. This antagonism is reflected in the heart of our media, where on the one hand there are those who say that Bashar al Assad’s regime is terrifying his people, and on the other side those who maintain that Assad’s forces are defending their people against the “armed jihadis”. 

Dr Antaki: First of all I would like to clear up the so-called and often repeated Assad regime and  Assad army  confusion, which we do NOT appreciate in Syria. All over the media you read about Bashar’s aviation, Bashar’s army, while actually it’s the Syrian army, the army of the Syrian State, and when you said I live in the West of Aleppo, which is under the control of a regime, no, it’s the control of the Syrian state. Our people are not afraid of the Syrian army, because it’s an army that is defending all of Syria against terrorists who have invaded Syria in order to set up their Islamic state. This is why we should let everyone know that the Syrian people are not afraid of the Syrian army because it is not the army of a regime, as the media would have it, the people are actually very grateful for the presence of the Syrian army. Allow me to make an example. A few months ago the Syrian army went on the offensive to bring some relief to Aleppo which has been surrounded and besieged [by the terrorists] for the past 3 years. According to the Western media, it was the Syrian army that was setting siege to the Syrian people in Aleppo, while in fact the opposite was true, i.e. the Syrian army was trying to put a halt to the three years of terrorist siege of Aleppo. So, no, people are not afraid of the Syrian army, they are afraid of the terrorists.

BCT: So let me get this clear: the media of the West are not sending accurate news on what is being lived out in Aleppo? 

NA:  That’s exactly it. The Western media only report the events in East Aleppo. Since 2012 Aleppo has been cut into two. Three hundred thousand people live in the areas under the control of the terrorists to the East, while the remaining three quarters of the population, about 1.5 million people, live in the Western areas, which are under the control of the Syrian government.

So when we listen to what the Western media say is happening in Aleppo, they are focusing only on the Eastern area. When we cry out for help for Aleppo, it gets transformed into a cry for East Aleppo alone. When the media announced that the last pediatrician of Aleppo had been killed, it’s not true, because in West Aleppo there are about 100 pediatricians. Perhaps that was the last pediatrician in the other area, I have no idea, I have no information, but what I do know is that the inhabitants of the Eastern section live under the control of the terrorists.

BCT:  Have they let them escape from the area? 

NA: From the very start over a million and a half people ran to West Aleppo out of fear of the terrorists, but there are also some people who were afraid to leave, perhaps not having the means to leave, or afraid of losing what they had accumulated in the course of their lives, their little apartment, their TV. They thought that if they left they were liable to lose all they had, so they decided to remain, not out of ideological reasons but for practical purposes they preferred to stay put.

BCT: You have just told me about East Aleppo, which is under the control of the terrorists. Please explain to us the difference between the terrorists and the rebels.

NA: At the beginning of the war in Syria there were many different groups which included a tiny fraction of the democratic opposition, but most were terrorist groups intent on establishing an Islamic state. In the course of time these groups have been absorbed by the terrorist groups, which currently represent over 95% of the hundreds of armed opposition groups present in Syria. Therefore the Free Syrian Army and the opposition which are not terrorist, but are nonetheless armed, represent a mere 5% of the armed groups, the rest all being terrorists. The main terrorist groups are DAESH [ISIS] and Al Nusra. These two groups have been added to the list of “terrorists” by the United States and by Russia so that everyone has the right to target them from the air. However, there are other groups that come from Al Nusra, an affiliate of Al Qaeda, which have not yet been classified as terrorists. Among these are three main groups, Jaish al Islam [Army of Islam], Ahrar al Sham and Jaish al Fatah [Army of Conquest]. These three groups have been created by Al Nusra to avoid being included in the list of terrorists, however they originated in Al Nusra which is Al Qaeda in Syria. So, when these three groups are added to the list of terrorist groups, which will allow them to be neutralized, all we will have left will be the armed groups that don’t act as terrorists with whom we have managed to negotiate and reach a political compromise.

BCT: And what about the refugees? 12 million people in search of shelter.

NA: Half of the population of Syria has moved. There are 23 million people in Syria and 12 million have been thrown out of their homes, 3.5 million have sought refuge in neighboring countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. 8 million are internally displaced people who have not left Syria but have been forced to leave their homes. This situation is very serious and these people need assistance just as much as those who have left the country. U.N. agencies focus only on the people who live in refugee camps outside of Syria. All these people are not running away from the acts of the Assad regime or of the Assad army, as depicted by the media. These people are not running from Assad’s government, nor from the Syrian army, nor from the hypothetical actions of one of these groups. These people are either running away from the battle zones or from penury.

Most of the Syrian people now live below the poverty threshhold. 80% of the population of Aleppo depend on the food packages provided by NGO’s. These people are poor. They have run out of their savings. Those who have lost their jobs, those who had assets such as a workshop or a factory, a store, have lost everything. These people are penniless, they are fleeing this misery and the battle zones. They are also worried about the future of their children; they have put up with the war for 2, 3, even 4 years, but the war has been going on for 5 years and they want to ensure their children’s future by taking the decision to pick up and seek a future somewhere else, to begin a new life.

BCT: How have the Syrians weathered the economic sanctions and embargoes imposed on them by the West since the beginning of the war?

NA: They are disgusted with these sanctions because these sanctions and embargoes are not against the government of Syria but against the Syrian people, all of the Syrian people. For example, I personally, as someone who lives in Syria, have lost the right to do even the tiniest of operations. If I want to send 1000 dollars to my children, I am unable to. I can neither import nor export anything. This means paralysis. I am a doctor, I wanted to replace a part of a piece of some medical instruments. Normally this would have taken a week. In this case it took a year and a half to get the piece because we had to import it from Japan. So you see, it is the Syrian people who are hurt by these sanctions and at a certain point the EU did revoke them but only for the people who live in the areas under the control of the terrorists! The people who live in the areas under the control of the Syrian government weren’t allowed to do a thing. Contrary to their intentions, these sanctions  do not penalize the regime, they punish the people of Syria.

BCT: You are a Christian. A Christian of the Middle East. If one were to shed doubt on how balanced your point of view might be, what would be your reaction?

NA: I am not talking to you as Nabil Antaki the Christian, I am talking as Nabil Antaki the Syrian who has witnessed his country being attacked and destroyed. It’s not a matter of being Christian or Muslim, Syria is an ethnic and religious mosaic. There are eleven different Christian churches and as many different Muslim faiths, and it’s not because the Syrian government protects the minorities that we support it. No, the government is secular, it protects everyone, whether minority or majority, all are respected within Syria. It’s a secular regime. Differently from the Islamic state which absolutely does not respect the minorities. If the Christians are pro -government or pro Syrian state it is because from the very beginning they came out for the secular state, in opposition to an Islamic state. The current President is very popular. I myself am not actually one of his fans, I defend Syria not the President. But his popularity is objectively undeniable and in my opinion if we had free elections tomorrow, based on international law, affording the right to vote to all Syrians, including those displaced abroad, we would see this President of ours re-elected. The West has never understood this. Assad was popular at the beginning of the war against Syria, and support for him today is even stronger, not because he defends minorities, which is what the media would have people believe, but because he defends all Syrians. Christians make up about ’8% of the Syrian population, so when you say that Assad is popular because he defends the Christians and that this is why the Christians support Assad, it’s a joke. Whether we are for or against him has no effect on his popularity. We have neither armed groups nor arms, and we are just 8% of the population. Assad is popular with all the groups and sectors of our society, therefore if we want this war to end we have to stop demanding as one of the conditions that Assad leave. We have to negotiate with him, conduct free elections and work for democracy.

BCT: Allow me to take up a few issues that you have mentioned. You speak of Assad’s enormous popularity. But was it enormous in 2011 too?

NA: That is the issue! When the problems began, there were demonstrations against Bashar that numbered ten to fifteen thousand participants at most. These demonstrations were broadcast on televisions and the numbers were enormously exaggerated, up to one or two hundred thousand. On the other hand, massive spontaneous demonstrations were generated in the streets in support of the Assad government, in Aleppo, in Damascus, in all of the big cities. Over a million people who supported Bashar. No one filmed these demonstrations, or perhaps I should say no one broadcast them in the West. Hence, the organic demonstrations of millions of people have been ignored, while the few thousands who protested in the streets against Bashar were inflated beyond all recognition and highly exaggerated. From the outset there was an enormous amount of prejudice and partiality on the part of the media. Assad has always been very popular and this hasn’t changed. He may be even more popular than in the last years before the war. … Life wasn’t perfect but no one wanted the war, they wanted reforms. Even the most explicit enemies of the government did not want war and most certainly not this war. They wanted reforms and they wanted democracy, but no one wanted to kill Syria in order to improve Syria.

BCT: We have two coalitions on the ground in Syria, in your opinion how effective are they?

NA: In my opinion the international coalition is ineffective because it is impossible to be on the same side. There is a coalition of the United States and Europe with Turkey and the Gulf States and at the same time we know that Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are financing the jihadis, Daesh, Al Nusra. On the one hand they want to fight against the terrorists, on the other hand they are helping them. This is a complete aberration.

Besides, the Kurds in Syria have also taken up arms against DAESH. The United States has found an ally in the Kurds in the fight against DAESH. However Turkey is completely against arming the Kurds and therefore fights against them. So we have two countries who are allies, the United States and Turkey, but one of them is allied to the Kurds and the other is against them, this can never work. There are too many contradictions within the Western coalition and this is why it hasn’t achieved a thing. Before the Russian intervention, the air strikes of the coalition were mere cosmetics… They began to be effective only after Russia stepped in.

From our point of view, the Russian intervention has been extremely advantageous and it has the full support of the Syrian people, which contradicts the Western narration. The West accuses Russia of striking not only the terrorist groups but also the “moderate rebels”. Russia has been very successful at bombing the groups of the Islamic state, so now the West is trying to slow them down, maintaining that they are not targeting the terrorist groups and accusing Russia of helping Bashar instead of attacking DAESH. Of course this is untrue, when the West does the bombing everything is ok but when Russia wants to bomb, it doesn’t do it well enough.

BCT: How do you think the Western media are depicting the facts on the ground in Syria?

NA: The Western media are not impartial. They are biased, they are against the Syrian state. They support the terrorist-rebels. We do not request that they be for or against the regime,  we simply ask that they look at things objectively.

BCT: What do you feel like saying as your personal point of view?

NA: All I want to say to the West is to be more objective. Educate yourselves, don’t accept disinformation, put pressure on your governments because Syria is a country that wants its freedom, its prosperity and its democracy. The war has destroyed us, we have had enough, we want it to stop!

Over half the population of the European Union (EU) is overweight or obese. Without effective action, this number will grow substantially in the next decade warns an important new report.‘A Spoonful of Sugar: How the Food Lobby Fights Sugar Regulation in the EU’, by the research and campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), notes that obesity rates are rising fastest among lowest socio-economic groups. That’s because energy-dense foods of poor nutritional value are cheaper than more nutritious foods, such as vegetables and fruit, and relatively poor families with children purchase food primarily to satisfy their hunger.

The report argues that more people than ever before are eating processed foods as a large part of their diet. Bad for health, but good for the industry because sugar-rich processed foods have the highest profit margins (unlike fruit and vegetables), and the easiest way to make industrial, processed food cheap, long-lasting and enhance the taste is to add extra sugar as well as salt and fat to products.

There is an increasing body of scientific evidence showing the key role sugar plays in fuelling rocketing rates of obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes, as well as some types of cancer, and the new report argues that in cold economic terms the cost to European GDP is alarming. In the United Kingdom, the cost of obesity is estimated at £27 billion per year, and approximately seven per cent of national health spending in EU member states as a whole is due to obesity in adults. This is aside from indirect costs to societies such as sickness and early death or the impacts on carers.

So why isn’t action being taken to address this health crisis?

Simply because the food industry is able to resist regulation. The CEO report notes that the food industry has vigorously mobilised to stop vital public health legislation in this area by:

Pushing free trade agreements and deregulation drives that undermine existing laws;

Exercising undue influence over EU regulatory bodies;

Capturing scientific expertise;

Championing weak voluntary schemes;Outmaneuvering consumer groups by spending billions on aggressive lobbying.

Health policies, like mandatory sugar reductions, sugar taxes and food labels, would help consumers make healthier choices. But the leverage which food industry giants have over EU decision-making has helped the sugar lobby to see off many of these threats to its profit margins.

The report argues that key trade associations, companies and lobby groups related to sugary food and drinks together spend an estimated €21.3 million annually to lobby the EU.

The bottom line is money and profit. This trumps any notion of public health and the public interest. CEO explains that Europe is the world’s biggest food and drinks exporter, and food giant Nestlé is its most valuable corporation, valued at €208 billion – even more than Royal Dutch Shell.

The report states:

The European Commission and institutions such as the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) have been far too willing to listen to industry’s messages, reflecting their all too often overly close relationship with the food and drink industry.

It stresses that many of the initiatives that would help Europeans eat less sugar are weak and voluntary or challenged by the EU itself when enacted at nation state level: the capture of EU regulatory bodies is a major cause for concern.

Trade deals like TTIP and CETA could help the sugar lobby even more. The report notes that similar deals have already been used to force Mexico to pay hundreds of millions in compensation for taxing sugar.

While industry-funded studies influence European Food Standards Authority (EFSA) decisions, Coca Cola, Nestlé and other food giants engage in corporate propaganda by sponsoring sporting events and major exercise programmes to divert attention from the impacts of their products and give the false impression that exercise and lifestyle choices are the major factors in preventing poor health.The report goes on to say:

Trade lobby groups and food industry giants sponsor research into subjects such as obesity and diabetes, sometimes in partnership with the European Commission (EC). This can set industry-friendly parameters and result in publication bias. Decades of research emphasis on fat, exercise, and calorie counting has helped distract nutrition advice from the specific dangers of sugar.

The authors note that the EC Dutch Presidency of the first half of 2016 has been criticised for its Roadmap for Action on Food Product Improvement, which works hand in hand with the food industry; the Roadmap emphasises weak voluntary sugar reduction targets and public-private partnerships for industry.The report also notes that trade association FoodDrinkEurope spent approximately €1 billion in a successful campaign against a mandatory EU-wide ‘traffic light’ food labelling system that is most recommended by health experts and consumer groups. Food lobbyists are also mobilising PR tactics against sugar taxes.

Katharine Ainger, freelance journalist and co-author of the report says:

“So many independent scientific studies show a clear link between excessive sugar consumption and serious health risks. But the fact that there is still no consensus on the dangers of sugar among EU regulators proves just how powerful the food and drink lobby is. Sound scientific advice is being sidelined by the billions of euros backing the sugar lobby. In its dishonesty and its disregard for people’s health, the food and drink industry rivals the tactics we’ve seen from the tobacco lobby for decades.”

The industry is able to flex its considerable financial muscle to slant science, exert political influence and mount slick PR campaigns to carry on endangering the health of hundreds of millions of Europeans.It is not the first time that CEO has shown the EC to be a willing servant of a corporate agenda. Brussels swarms with corporate lobbyists whose spending power and political influence dwarfs that of civil organisations and consumer groups.

Industry lobbyists spend millions each year for good reason. They receive a return on what is essentially a key investment: the capture and corruption of public bodies, the co-writing of legislation, the avoidance of regulation and the bringing in of trade deals like TTIP that will effectively destroy any remnants of democracy and the existing limited ability of elected representatives and governments to check corporate power.While many advocate the democratic public ownership and management of key infrastructure, such as transport, health services, banking and utility companies, not much is ever mentioned about food. But what can be more vital to society than the control of the food supply and what we eat?

From the various chemical cocktails applied to our food to low-nutrient, sugar-rich products, the food and agriculture sector is knowingly damaging our health and has being doing so for decades. The powerful corporations that belong to this sector will continue to do so because their logic and corporate business models are based on maximisation of profit at all costs and by all means possible.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER: WHY WE NEED TO UNCOVER THE 9/11 DECEPTION

The 9/11 Consensus Panel has developed 48 Consensus Points of evidence (some of it new) refuting the official narrative of 9/11: http://www.consensus911.org/the-911-consensus-points/ This work has been translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

A selection of Panel members will host a discussion about the ongoing importance of the 9/11 deception, including selected Consensus Points. There will be time for questions.

The Panel employs a systematic medical model to determine the “best evidence” regarding the events of 9/11.

Panel Members include science academics, engineers, attorneys, commercial pilots, journalists, and others. Their bios are at http://www.consensus911.org/panel-members/

Dr. Graeme MacQueen, Panel Member, Prof. Emeritus, Peace Studies, McMaster Univ.
Elizabeth Woodworth, Co-founder, consensus911.org, Writer
Dr. Sean Sweeney, moderator, Professor, Murphy Institute, International Program for Labor, Climate and the Environment
Dr. Niels Harrit, Prof. Emeritus of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen
Others, TBA,

The failed coup in Turkey last week was a political and geopolitical earthquake as it has the potential to fundamentally alter the Middle East, NATO, and potentially the balance of power globally.  But while the implications of the recent developments are clear, what actually took place on the night/morning of July 15 – July 16 is still somewhat shrouded in mystery.  But why is that? Why are the connections for the most part not being made by Western pundits and journalists alike?

According to Australian authorities, data recovered from a home flight simulator belonging to the captain of Malaysia Flight 370 indicates that the device was used to plot a course to where the flight is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

Though some anti-war Americans see hope that Donald Trump would pull back from foreign wars, they also must face his undeniable record of racial and sexist bigotry, writes Marjorie Cohn.

In his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump declared, “My Dad, Fred Trump, was the smartest and hardest working man I ever knew. . . . It’s because of him that I learned, from my youngest age, to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people.”

Donald apparently forgot what his father taught him. The GOP nominee refuses to pay the people who work for him. “Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others,” wrote Steve Reilly in USA Today.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Moreover, Fred Trump, “the smartest” man his son ever knew, did not respect the dignity of black people. The legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie rented an apartment in the elder Trump’s Brooklyn complex in 1950. It turned out blacks were not welcome there.

University of Central Lancashire professor Will Kaufman, a student of Guthrie’s life and songs, noted that Guthrie thought “Fred Trump was one who stirs up racial hate, and implicitly profits from it,” lamenting “the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood.”

Guthrie responded to Fred Trump’s bigotry with this song:

I suppose

Old Man Trump knows

Just how much

Racial Hate

He stirred up

In the bloodpot of human hearts

When he drawed

That color line

Here at his Eighteen hundred family project

The acorn did not fall far from the tree of racial prejudice. In 1973, the Nixon Justice Department sued Fred and Donald Trump for systematic discrimination against African-Americans in housing rentals.

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof cited the Trumps’ former building superintendent who said he was told to code rental applications with a “C” for colored, which would flag the office to reject the application. The Trumps only rented to “Jews and executives,” not blacks, according to a rental agent.

Kip Brown, a former Trump casino owner, told the New Yorker, “When Donald and [former wife] Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor.  . . . They put us all in the back.”

In his 1991 book, John O’Donnell, former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Donald Trump as saying “laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”

The ‘Mexican’ Judge

Trump’s racial animus is not confined to African-Americans. He has vowed to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, calling Mexican immigrants “in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists”; build a wall on the southern U.S. border to keep people out; and temporarily forbid Muslims from entering the United States.

President Barack Obama bending over so a boy visiting the Oval Office could feel that the President’s hair was like his. (White House photo by Pete Souza)

At one of his rallies, Trump condescendingly pointed to a black man in the crowd, saying, “Oh, look at my African-American over here – look at him.”

And Trump denounced Gonzalo Curiel, a well-respected federal judge of Mexican heritage who is presiding over a lawsuit in San Diego filed by people claiming they were scammed by Trump University. After Curiel unsealed documents, Trump declared that Curiel had “an absolute conflict” that should disqualify him from the case. Trump’s reason: “He is a Mexican,” adding, “I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.”

Trump’s overriding theme, “Make America Great Again,” is a euphemism for “Make America White Again.” Indeed, Trump was a founder of the birther movement, whose aim was to discredit Barack Obama by claiming he was born in Kenya, thus stoking racist attacks throughout his presidency. That movement evolved into the Trump for president campaign, which is steeped in racial hatred.

As Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in her speech at the Democratic National Convention, Trump pits blacks against whites, reminiscent of what occurred during the era of Jim Crow. She quoted Dr. Martin Luther King’s remarks about how poor white workers in the South were told, “No matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man,” noting, “Racial hatred was part of keeping the powerful on top.”

Trump is sexist as well as racist. His comments about women reveal his misogyny. He has referred to women as “dog,” “fat pig,” “slob,” “degenerate” and “disgusting animal.” And Trump disgustingly said of Megan Kelly, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

The GOP nominee has no more respect for the disabled than he does for women, workers and people of color, publicly mocking a reporter with a disability.

And although he declared in his acceptance speech that he would “protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” Trump said nothing about protecting them from the hateful ideology within the United States.

The next president may fill three or four seats on the Supreme Court. Trump has vowed to nominate justices like Antonin Scalia, who said during oral argument in the affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas, that he was not “impressed by the fact that the University of Texas may have fewer” black students.

Scalia added, “Maybe it ought to have fewer. I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.”

Scalia opposed reproductive rights, universal health care, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, voting rights, immigrants’ rights, labor rights, LGBT rights and environmental protection. Trump, who has said he will pick his judicial nominations from lists drawn up by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, could move the high court radically to the right for decades to come.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said he hoped his children would not be judged by the color of their skin, but rather “by the content of their character.” Donald Trump’s character is racist, sexist, and just downright mean. A Trump presidency would pose an unimaginable danger to the people of this country.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild. Her most recent book is “Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.” Visit her website athttp://marjoriecohn.com/ and follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/marjoriecohn.

I answered some heartbreaking calls from Dr. Léopold Munyakazi phoning from an Alabama jail this week. Dr. Munyakazi is a gentle Rwandan born scholar, with a PhD in linguistics and further advanced degrees in French and African linguistics. He has lost his immigration case in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and will all but certainly be deported to Rwanda to face prison or worse.  The Rwandan government accuses him of genocide crime committed in 1994, but they made no such accusations until after he gave several talks on northeastern college and university campuses in which he said that the Rwandan war and massacres of the 1990s were a class conflict, not an ethnic conflict, and therefore not genocide.  These talks constituted a threat to President Paul Kagame’s totalitarian Rwandan regime, to the Clinton dynasty, and to “humanitarian” war ideology.

On the phone Dr. Munyakazi protested his innocence. He spoke of witnesses who had testified that he was not where his accusers said he was and therefore could not have done what he was accused of doing there. I told him that he didn’t have to convince me because I have been following and reporting on cases like his for years.  A Rwandan exile speaks out against Rwandan totalitarianism, disagrees with Rwanda’s constitutionally codified description of the 1994 massacres as “genocide against the Tutsi,” or testifies in defense of another Rwandan, and soon a gaggle of anonymous witnesses say that he or she too was guilty of genocide in 1994 and the Rwandan government demands his or her return to Rwanda.

The Rwandan government has even accused  Lin Muyizere, the husband of celebrated Rwandan political prisoner Victoire Ingabire of genocide crime, and tried to have him extradited from the Netherlands. Ingabire herself is now in the sixth year of a 15-year sentence in Rwanda for daring to run for president against Paul Kagame in 2010 and for “genocide denial.”  She did not say, like Dr. Munyakazi, that the Rwandan conflict was about class rather than ethnicity, but she did say,  in an equally challenging statement, that there were extremists on both sides, Hutu and Tutsi, that there were victims on both sides, and that all the victims must be remembered.  I had the honor of speaking to Victoire many times in 2010, and putting her voice on the air on Pacifica Radio’s KPFA-Berkeley and WBAI-NYC.

Yet another challenge to the Wikipedia/Hotel Rwanda story has come from Professors Allan Stam and Christian Davenport, after 10 years of research in Rwanda. In the 2015 BBC documentary Rwanda’s Untold Story, Allan Stam had this exchange with the BBC’s Jane Corbin:

Allan Stam: If a million people died in Rwanda in 1994 — and that’s certainly possible — there is no way that the majority of them could be Tutsi.

Jane Corbin: How do you know that?

Allan Stam: Because there weren’t enough Tutsi in the country.

Jane Corbin: The academics calculated there had been 500,000 Tutsis before the conflict in Rwanda; 300,000 survived. This led them to their final controversial conclusion.

Allan Stam: If a million Rwandans died, and 200,000 of them were Tutsi, that means 800,000 of them were Hutu.

Jane Corbin: That’s completely the opposite of what the world believes happened in the Rwandan genocide.

Allan Stam: What the world believes, and what actually happened, are quite different.

The Rwandan – and Burundian – Hutu and Tutsi divide

Dr. Munyakazi stated what seemed obvious to many who have studied  the history of Rwanda and Burundi.  He said that Hutu and Tutsi speak the same language, share the same culture, eat the same food, and even marry each other, with membership in one group or the other determined patrilineally. Ninety-three percent of Rwandans are Christian. They are distinguished instead, by historical class privilege.  Prior to colonization, the Tutsi were a cattle owning, feudal ruling class, the Hutu a subservient peasant class.  Belgian colonists reified this divide by issuing ID cards that labeled Rwandans and Burundians as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa.

Rwanda’s third population, the Twa, are traditionally forest people, hunter gatherers, but the Twa are only one percent of Rwanda’s population. They  also suffered in the Rwandan war and massacres of the 1990s, but the war and massacres were fundamentally a conflict between the historically privileged Tutsi and the historically oppressed Hutu.

There is nothing like the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide to prevent and punish class war.  Article II of the Convention says that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”  It says nothing about preventing or punishing the murder of masses of people in order to claim, reclaim or defend wealth and privilege. Nor does it say anything about the murder of masses of people in order to steal what they have, such as oil, land, water or mineral riches.

Dr. Munyakazi told me he believed the U.S. State Department had intervened in his case behind the scenes to make sure that he was sent back to Rwanda, and I told him that wouldn’t surprise me. President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, openly intervened as a litigant to make sure that Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana was extradited to stand trial at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda in 1999. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark defended Pastor Ntakirutimana in the U.S. and at the ICTR and called his conviction “a tragic miscarriage of justice.”

Dr. Munyakazi threatens President Paul Kagame, Samantha Power and the humanitarian warriors

Since a class conflict is not a genocide, Dr. Munyakazi is dangerous to Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who justifies his ruthless totalitarian regime by claiming to be the savior who stopped a genocide.  He is also dangerous to the Holocaust and genocide industries, whose false equation of the Holocaust and the Rwandan massacres is at the ideological foundation of “humanitarian” war ideology, as codified in Obama’s Executive Order — Comprehensive Approach to Atrocity Prevention and Response and in Mass Atrocities Prevention Operations, a Military Handbook, a collaboration between the Pentagon and Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights.  He is dangerous to UN Ambassador Samantha Power, who has built her entire career on a historically inaccurate, decontextualized, and grossly oversimplified account of the 1994 Rwandan massacres, during which U.S. officials “stood by.”  What would come of all their moral urgencies about “stopping the next Rwanda” in Libya, Syria, etc., if “Rwanda” were not the story we were all told?

And the Clinton dynasty

As if that weren’t enough, Dr. Munyakazi is  dangerous to the Clinton dynasty, which is so wedded to the lies about the Rwanda war and massacres that Bill Clinton presented one of his Global Citizen Awards to President Paul Kagame in 2009. For the past 22 years, Clinton has shed crocodile tears and called his “failure to intervene” in Rwanda the greatest mistake of his presidency.  This year, in support of his wife’s campaign, Bill Clinton claimed that she urged him to intervene in Rwanda. She affirmed that claim as evidence of her commitment to humanitarian “intervention.”

Trouble is President Bill Clinton did not “fail to intervene” in Rwanda.  He refused to intervene and stopped the UN Security Council from organizing an intervention, because the U.S. and UK had already intervened in support of General Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Army that invaded Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990.  Clinton was not going to let an intervention stop Kagame from finally overthrowing the existing, Hutu-led Rwandan government and seizing power.  The evidence of this is laid out in Robin Philpot’s Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa, Ed Herman and David Peterson’sEnduring Lies: Rwanda in the Propaganda System 20 Years Later, Peter Erlinder’s Accidental Genocide, Carla Del Ponte’s Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity and Jean-Marie Ndajigimana’s How Paul Kagame Deliberately Sacrificed the Tutsi.

Everything went according to the US/UK plan except that the loss of life in Rwanda was far greater than President Clinton or anyone at the Pentagon had anticipated. A massive cover-up was mounted at theInternational Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda, which indicted and prosecuted only Rwandan Hutus, and in the heroization of Rwandan President Paul Kagame.  Like Tony Blair, Clinton has tirelessly extolled the achievements of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, as the BBC reported in Rwanda’s Untold Story.  Belgian scholar Filip Reyntjens, in the same BBC doc, says that “their closeness is a closeness with what I call the most important war criminal in office today.”

On July 28, 1994, after General Paul Kagame had won the war and seized power in Rwanda, the New York Times reported that “the United States is preparing to send troops to help establish a large base in Rwanda to bolster the relief effort in the devastated African nation.”  Just over two years later, U.S. proxies Rwanda and Uganda invaded Zaire – what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo – in 1996 and then again in 1998, overthrowing first Mobutu, then Laurent Kabila, establishing the U.S. as the dominant power in the region, and leaving millions more dead in the wars and ongoing conflict over eastern Congo’s vast mineral wealth.  “The United States has been the superpower that has dominated what has happened in this area in the Congo and in Rwanda,” says Professor Edward S. Herman. “The American people know almost nothing about the area, and since the United States has had a strong position of support for Kagame and for the invasion of the Congo, that dominated all the institutions that were associated with it.”  Bill Clinton’s so-called “failure to intervene” was in fact a proxy intervention causing massive loss of life.

And what was the justification of Rwanda’s repeated invasion of Zaire and its  plunder and occupation of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo?  Kagame said he was going to hunt down the Hutus guilty of genocide, which the international community had been quick to equate with the Holocaust.

I asked myself what else to say to Dr. Munyakazi, on the other end of a cell phone connection between Oakland and Alabama, except that I know he is innocent?  I could barely hear him because the connection kept breaking up, but I was able to understand that he wants to appeal to the Supreme Court. I said I would speak to his lawyer and some other lawyers, doubtful as I am that the Court would hear his case. I said I would try to produce some radio coverage, but that it would be difficult to garner any attention for his story right now without tying it to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s decades of involvement in the events leading up to his pending “removal” to Rwanda, and that that would do nothing to help his case.  He said that he was committed to telling the truth about what really happened in his country, regardless of the consequences.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist who also contributes to the San Francisco Bay View, Global Research, the Black Agenda Report and the Black Star News, and produces radio for KPFA-Berkeley and WBAI-New York City.  In 2014, she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize by the Womens International Network for Democracy and Peace.  She can be reached at [email protected].

Two weeks ago a new coalition of European civil society groups (including Drone Wars UK) launched a Call to Action on Armed Drones at a meeting in Brussels attended by, amongst others, US drone whistleblowers Cian Westmoreland and Lisa Ling.

The European Forum on Armed Drones (EFAD) launch was on the eve of an important European Parliament meeting, jointly organised by the subcommittee on Human Rights and the Subcommittee on Security and Security and Defence, focusing on the human rights impact of armed drones in counter-terrorism operations.   A video of the meeting, including inputs from Jennifer Gibson of Reprieve and Radhya Almutawakel of the Yemeni Mwatana Organisation for Human Rights is availablehere.

While the UK is the only European country so far to have used armed drones, other countries are on the verge of acquiring the capability and are already using large military drones on active military deployments.  Here’s a brief survey of how some other European countries are already using large military drones.

France

France currently has 5 drones – 3 Reapers and 2 French made Harfang drones – in active service in northern African as part of Operation Barkhane. This is a French military counter-insurgency /terrorism operation spread across five countries (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger) in the Sahel region of Northern Africa.  France has around 3,500 troops deployed alongside fighter aircraft, helicopters and drones.  This long-term military operation grew out of the 2013 Operation Serval, launched following the request of the Malian government for military assistance against Islamist armed groups. Separate from the French military mission in the Sahal, around 12,000 UN peacekeepers also operate in Mali around 70 of whom have been  killed since operations began in 2013.

France has been operating Harfang drones since 2008 and ordered US Reaper drones in 2013.  Two were deployed to the Sahel in January 2014, with a third delivered in June 2015.  A third batch of three was ordered in December 2015 and are due to be delivered in 2019.  France has stated that it wants a total of 12 Reaper drones in its air fleet.

France’s drones in North Africa are based at Niamey in Niger, from where US drones also undertake surveillance missions.  A second US drone base in Nigeria is reportedly being developed at Agadez, 750km north of Niamey.  While the French drones are unarmed, they are very much involved in combat operations with Defence Minister Le Drian reporting soon after the French Reapers became operational that a French Reaper drone had led French and Mailian forces to engage and kill 10 suspected Islamist fighters.  There have been protests against the French military presence and the arrest of locals suspected of having links with militants – with some protesters being killed by security forces.

BBC footage from Niamey of French drones 

In 2014 airforce pilots in France took control of French Harfang drone operating in Mali in an experiment to conduct ‘remote split operations’ as the operation of drones at distance is called.  While the experiment was successful, it seems there are no on-going plans to operate them in this way.  Meanwhile France and the UK have been in discussion about launching a joint training effort to train more pilots for their reaper drones.

Italy

Italy currently operates 9 Predator and 6 Reaper drones, with the latter going through the process of being armed after gaining US approval to carry weapons in November 2015.  Italy will be only the second country after the UK to operate armed US drones.

Like the UK, Italy operates its drones remotely from its home territory at Amendola air base in southeast Italy. US drones also operate from Italy, based at the Sigonella Naval Station in Sicily and later this year NATO’s five Global Hawks will arrive and be permanently based there (see below).

Italian Reaper and operator

Italy first acquired US Predators in 2004 and deployed them to Iraq in early 2005 and then to Afghanistan in April 2007.  In 2011 Italy deployed its Reapers (as well as other military aircraft) over Libya during the Coalition air campaign to oust Muammar Gaddafi.

From 2014 Italy began replacing its Predators in Afghanistan with Reapers, with two of the Predators re-deployed to Kuwait for operations against ISIS in Iraq while others were deployed to Djibouti for anti-piracy operations on the Somali coast and in the Gulf of Aden.

In December 2015, Italian magazine L’Espresso was granted access to Italian drone pilots and footage of one of their missions over Iraq.  While some marvelled at the detail and very high resolution images in the footage, analysts warned in the New York Times that caution was needed as such clarity was rare (and may have been the reason this particular piece of footage was released).

Italy has also deployed its Predator and Reaper drones over the Mediterranean as part of Operation ‘Safe Sea’ to combat the threat of terrorism from Libya and in Operation ‘Our Sea’ to stop immigration from North Africa.  In February 2015 the drones were over Libya during the closure of the Italian embassy in Libya and the evacuation of Italian Nationals from the country

In January 2016 Italy gave permission for the US drones based in Sicily to fly armed missions in order to undertake strike missions in Libya and elsewhere in North Africa on a case-by-case basis.

Like other nations operating drones, Italy has had its fair share of crashes.  A Predator crashed in training accident in 2004, another crashed off Italian cost in Jan 2010 with another in June 2011.  Most recently in May 2016, the prototype of a new Italian developed drone called the Hammerhead crashed off the Sicilian coast.

Germany

Luftwaffe Heron drone

Currently the German Luftwaffe has three Israeli-made Heron 1 drones operating out of the Mazar-e-Sharif Base in northern Afghanistan since autumn 2010 as well as Luna drones operating from Gao in Mali in support of UN peacekeeping mission.

The drones operating in Afghanistan are leased from Israel via Airbus with Airbus contractors conduct the take-off and landings – the point most likely for crashes to occur.  As of November 2015, the German Heron drones in Afghanistan had completed more than 25,000 flight hours in support of German and Afghanistan Security Forces.

Germany has this month (July 2016)  deployed Luna drones to Mali as part of its contribution to the UN peacekeeping force.  These are to replace the much smaller Scan Eagle drones operated by the Dutch when they were on deployment. Germany has announced that it will deploy two Israeli-made Heron drones for the operation in Mali but this is unlikely to happen before November 2016.

In January 2016 Germany announced that from 2018 it will lease between 3 and 5 of the larger Heron TP drones from Israeli in a $650m contract to bridge the gap  until a new European combat drone is due to enter service in 2025.  According to Defence News the German Heron’s may be armed with the British made Brimstone missile.

However the use of armed drones has been extremely controversial in Germany, with concerns about purchase of such systems written into the German Coalition agreement signed in 2013. There has also been huge disapproval of the role played by the US base in Ramstein in US targeted killing with large protests regularly taking place. Nevertheless in September 2015 German as well as Swedish officers were reported to be taking part in US drone targeted killing operations in as part of US counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan.

Others

A number of other European countries are on the verge of acquiring US or Israeli large military drones.

The Netherlands ordered US Reapers in 2013 and four were expected to be delivered in 2016 but these have since been delayed due to budget issues. When confirming the deal the US stated  that the Reapers

will enhance the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capability of the Dutch military in support of national, NATO, UN-mandated, and other coalition operations. Commonality of ISR capabilities will greatly increase interoperability between U.S and Dutch military and peacekeeping forces.

In November 2015 Spain too ordered four US Reapers with the first two due to arrive in July 2017 and another two in 2019/20.  In autumn 2015 Switzerland ordered six Israeli Hermes 900 drones in $200m contract, with the drones expected to be delivered by 2020.  The purchase was extremely controversial in Switzerland as the Hermes 900 have been used in Gaza operations.

Poland, which is looking to acquire a large number of drones under various projects is considering between US and Israeli drones for its combat drone programme while the UK is offering an armed version of the Watchkeeper drone for a tactical drone programme.   According to press report around 60 drones will eventually be based at a dedicated drone base in the north-west of Poland.

NATO

On top of these national programmes, five massive Global Hawk drones will arrive in Europe by the end of 2016 as part of a new NATO programme.  The Global Hawks, to be based at the Sigonella air base in Italy, are the core of the Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) System which is collectively owned by 15 of the 28 NATO allies (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark,  Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway,Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, USA) under a $1.7 billion contract signed in May 2012.

One of the five NATO AGS (i.e. Global Hawks) drones due to be based in Italy from end of 2016

NATO states that the drones are to enable

persistent surveillance over wide areas from high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) aircraft, operating at considerable stand-off distances and in any weather or light condition. Using advanced radar sensors, these systems will continuously detect and track moving objects throughout observed areas and will provide radar imagery of areas of interest and stationary objects.

Although only 15 nations are involved in the purchase of the aircraft, all members of NATO will participate in operating and supporting AGS in service.  As part of the development plans, Global Hawks have already undertaken test flights across Europe including across UK airspace

BAE System’s Taranis Drone

On top of these deployments of existing drones, two major combat drone development programmes are underway in Europe.

In the UK, BAE Systems has built and flown theTaranis combat drone prototype,  while a number of nations (France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland) have been involved in Dassault-led nEUROn programme.

While development work continues on both of these prototypes, the UK and France are also co-operating and jointly funding work on the development of a future unmanned system currently dubbed the Future Combat Air System (FCAS).

Dassault’s nEUROn drone

There has rightly been much attention paid to the US use of drones, particular for extra-judicial targeted killing, over the past few years.  However  with the increasing proliferation of these system it likely that we may look back and see such use as having only been the tip of the iceberg.  Armed drones are a real danger to global peace and security and it can only be right that much more attention is paid to all those nations operating such systems.

The ISIS terror group, which is standing on its last legs in Iraq, razed Al-Hadba’a University in Mosul. Ghayas Surchi, media representative of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Iraq, in an interview with IRNA reporter in Arbil, stated: “On Monday morning, ISIS exploded law school of Al-Hadba’a University.” This private Iraqi University which is located in the city center, was completely demolished. Earlier ISIS had torn down other schools of this University. As stated by Sourchi, ISIS expressed that teaching non-Islamic law courses in the university, had been the reason.

ISIS, which is spending its last days in Iraq, has also razed lots of Iraq’s heritage to the ground, such as historical buildings, holy shrines, tombs of prophets, mosques and temples in this city.

Earlier, ARA News reported media activist Abdullah Mullah said that masked militants of ISIS executed professor Wadallah Ibrahim Sultan, head of the Faculty of Law at al-Hadbaa University.

The terror group had arrested the victim in his house in al-Muthanna sub-district north of Mosul.

Mullah pointed out that the group’s Court has sentenced Sultan to death in the village of Azba south of Mosul.

“Professor Sultan was beheaded in the village’s main square in front of a crowd of people,” the source said, adding that ISIS hasn’t explained the reasons behind Sultan’s execution. By razing the faculty one might estimate his guilt has been teaching law and being the head of the faculty.

Noteworthy, ISIS has been in control of the city of Mosul since June 2014, after a sudden collapse of the Iraqi army and security forces. The group has executed hundreds of civilians after imposing its control over the city and its suburbs.

After liberating Falluja, the Iraqi army is looking to conqure Mosul in fight against terror and defeat the ISIS in Iraq.

The neo-con “West” and its allies want to destroy the Middle East so that they can control the Middle East.

Under the auspices of their imperial “New Middle East” project, the criminals (U.S–led NATO, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and Israel, are targeting everything that they falsely profess to cherish.

All of the “values” that the politicians falsely parade as important, even sacrosanct, are instrumentalized as false fronts that belie the dark undercurrents dragging humanity towards a barren “New World Order” of globalized degeneracy and despair.

Nation-state self-determination, sovereignty, territorial integrity – all vital components of world peace, prosperity, and democracy are meaningless to the elites, except for their propaganda value.

A meta-national project of top down control, enforced by anonymous elites, controls how we think, feel, and live.

Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, author of America’s “War on Terrorism”   identifies the largely hidden “powers” behind the system as

those of the global banks and financial institutions, the military-industrial complex, the oil and energy giants, the biotech and pharmaceutical conglomerates and the powerful media and communications giants, which fabricate the news and overtly influence the course of world.

This dystopian present has rendered political choices moot.  Choices are non-choices, puppet shows sold by empty words and conflicting narratives — all bereft of substance.

The real agenda is unspeakable.  The real agenda must be unspeakable, because it is poison, a dark distillate of degenerate barbarism, mostly hidden from view.

This real agenda, masked beneath the Big Lies, and the stories told by scripted “politicians”, bares its sanguine teeth, and imposes its dark will with barely a whimper.  There are no “mistakes”.  It’s all by design.

War planners knew full well that the sanctions imposed prior to the invasion of Iraq were targeting children.  They accurately predicted when the plants would fail, and how many lives would be lost.

A Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document accurately predicted that,

IT PROBABLY WILL TAKE AT LEAST SIX MONTHS (TO JUNE 1991) BEFORE THE (water treatment) SYSTEM IS FULLY DEGRADED.

And that,

“FAILING TO SECURE SUPPLIES WILL RESULT IN A SHORTAGE OF

PURE DRINING WATER FOR MUCH OF THE POPULATION. THIS COULD LEAD

TO INCREASED INCIDENCES, IF NOT EPIDEMICS, OF DISEASE …

The end result?  Over 500,000 children under the age of five were killed, with intent (murder), in addition to over one million other people, none of whom who had committed a crime.

The “West” regularly targets innocent people, including children, with a view to weakening the morale of countries about to be conquered.  Madeleine Albright infamously intoned that the “price (murdering 500,000 children) … is worth it”, in one of the rare moments when dark truths and media messaging intersect.

War planners also knew that they were supporting al Qaeda ground troops in Libya when they exploited the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) clause to bomb the sovereign state of Libya, to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi, to destroy water infrastructure, to loot, to plunder, to commit genocide, and to set up an ISIS strongehold.  Prior to the invasion, Libya’s standard of living was the highest in Africa. There were no mistakes.

The weapons ratline from Libya to Syria was not a mistake either. The West intentionally funded its terrorist proxies so that they would be well provisioned to invade Syria.  The weaponization and training of its terrorist foot soldiers supplements the terrorists’ now dwindling additional sources of income such as funding from illicit drugs, the plunder of historical Syrian artifacts, the theft of Syrian oil resources, and so on.   All planned by the West.  Again, no mistakes.

Equally degenerate is the fact that the Western intelligence agencies, allied with Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan’s ISIS, perpetuate the degeneracy by raising new recruits into the culture of the un-islamic, Wahhabi ideology.  Chossudovsky explains that,

In 1979, the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA was launched in Afghanistan: With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, who wanted to turn the Afghan Jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan’s fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually, more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad.

Just as the CIA, through the Pakistani ISI, creates “radicals” by indoctrinating children in “madrasah” schools, so too ISIS indoctrinates Syrian children in the ways of the degenerate Wahhabi ideology in ISIS occupied areas of Syria.

Samuel Westrop writes in “U.K: Jihadists as Charity Workers”,  that

ISIS has supplemented its violence with dawa’h programs – a system of social provision, or ‘soft-power outreach’ – in areas under its control. A key component of this dawa’h … is providing educational outreach initiatives ‘as part of its wider strategy to foster a new generation of Syrians in support of its ideological agenda.’

The cancer of this un-islamic ideology is intentionally promoted in occupied areas of secular, pluralist, democratic Syria with a view to “weaponizing” children, and to destroying the country with an internalized cancer of Wahhabism and violence.

None of this is accidental.  All of it is the fruit of considerable forethought and pre-planning by the imperial “West”, its allies, and their intelligence agencies.

Whereas the West proclaims that it is spreading democracy, it is spreading terrorism, Wahhabism, death and destruction on each and every one of its pre-planned imperial invasions.

Syria’s stand against the Western agencies of death and destruction is a stand for all of humanity against the dark forces that fester beneath our politician’s empty words and the courtesan media’s toxic lies.

Little is known in the outside world about the National Security Act in South Korea. It was enacted in 1948 and has been used to quash any opposition to the US military in South Korea or to the South Korean political establishment, which was founded by Washington when it selected the subservient and traitorous Korean collaborators that worked for the Japanese during Tokyo’s occupation of the Korean Peninsula to run South Korea instead of allowing the fiercely independent Korean resistance fighters that had fought against the Japanese during the Second World War takeover. Under the National Security Act in South Korea praising North Korea and questioning the stance of the South Korean or US governments on North Korea or Korean unification have been persecuted as crimes and threats to the security and the safety of South Korea. Ordinary South Korean citizens who visit North Korea are imprisoned for life, which is an improvement from the past when South Korean authorities use to execute South Koreans who visited North Korea. Even political parties and groups that are supportive of Korean unification or North Korea are disbanded and persecuted by South Korean authorities. In summary, the National Security Act has been used to censor support for North Korea or calls for unification, to violate human rights, and to neutralize legitimate opposition movements. Many innocent South Koreans have been executed or arrested as political prisoners under it.

It is in the context of the National Security Act that the case of Representative Lee Seok-ki, a lawmaker or legislator of the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea, and the conspiracy he is accused of leading should be studied and understood. The case of Lee started in 2013 when South Korean intelligence officials accused Representative Lee Seok-ki of planning to overthrow the South Korean government in the scenario of a possible war between South Korea and North Korea. South Korean officials alleged that Lee Seok-ki and an inner circle of the United Progressive Party held a secret meeting discussing how they could initiate an insurgency against the South Korean government.

Representative Lee was incarcerated as a criminal under a sentence that he serve twelve years in prison and the United Progressive Party, which formed a significant political force and legitimate opposition movement to the government in South Korea, was outlawed and disbanded by the South Korean government with the support of the Constitutional Court of Korea. Lee and the United Progressive Party, which was a constant target of the security and intelligence networks of South Korea before it was outlawed, maintained their innocence. They proudly admitted that they would oppose any type of war with North Korea as an attack on all the Korean people, as a collective and single nation, but consistently rejected the accusations that they were planning a coup in South Korea.

The twelve-year prison sentence of Representative Lee was reduced to nine years in 2015 and an appeal by him reduced the charges against that were made against him. The appeal judges upheld the charges made against Lee under the National Security Act, but ruled that Representative Lee did not actively plot a coup or insurgency and only encouraged it through his language or speech. Despite the 2015 court ruling that concludes that Lee and his associates were not actively planning an insurgency or conspiracy and only guilty of language encouraging and insurrection by saying that South Koreans should oppose a war with North Korea, the same dropped or overturned charges have been used by South Korean authorities to prosecute other South Korean citizens opposing a war with North Korea.

In effect opposing a war in the Korean Peninsula is being outlawed in South Korea. This serves both US foreign policy in East Asia and the South Korean political establishment, which seeks to legitimize itself by opposing North Korea. Those voices in South Korea calling for moderation, inter-Korean dialogue, and the criminalization of war are being silenced in the name of national security. 

The following text edited by Asia-Pacific Research is from South Korea and is based on an appeal for help and international solidarity from the Korean Committee to Save Representative Lee Seok-ki of the Insurrection Conspiracy Case. It also draws attention to the arrests of Park Min-jung, Lee Yung-chun, Wu Wi-young, and other South Korean citizens that are being prosecuted on the same charges that were made against Representative Lee that were judicially overturned in 2015.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Asia-Pacific Research Editor, 28 July 2016.

Korean Committee to Save Representative Lee Seok-ki of the Insurrection Conspiracy Case, July, 15, 2016

We strongly, denounce the decision of the Court of Appeals on three people additionally arrested with suspicious of getting involved in the case.

Democracy in America isn’t “messy” the way some duopoly power insiders portray it.  It’s nonexistent, policymakers ignoring the will of the people and their welfare entirely.

Events in Philadelphia alone expose how America is run, for its privileged class alone – flagrant electoral rigging anointing a party standard bearer belonging in prison, not high office.

Hillary is the most widely reviled Democrat in party history – beyond rehabilitation no matter how hard DNC handlers try reinventing her.

“I just don’t see how her numbers at this late date are going to improve on the likability issue or the trust factor,” University of Virginia’s Miller Center presidential studies director Barbara Perry explained.

Scandals since the 1990s made her damaged goods, most voters believing she’s a self-serving corporate shill, a law breaker not to be trusted – exposed electoral rigging the latest example.

She didn’t win her party’s nomination. It was handed to her, party bosses choosing her for standard bearer before campaigning began last year. Sanders never had a chance and he knew it.

Endorsements from party notables can’t erase her Lady McBeth image, her Machiavellian history, her high crimes too serious to paper over.

On Wednesday night, Obama gave it his best shot, his usual demagoguery, substituting fiction for facts, a deplorable display like all his speeches.

One anti-populist war criminal praised another. Obama turned truth on its head, “say(ing) with confidence there has never been a man or a woman more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as President of the United States of America.”

The possibility of a neocon lunatic Sino/Russia hating war criminal/racketeer becoming US president should terrify everyone.

Outside Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, thousands protested. Police reacted violently as expected. Free speech and assembly are more myths than fundamental rights.

At stake is freedom v. fascism, the last vestiges of a free society disappearing in plain sight, tyranny replacing it no matter who succeeds Obama – already with a firm foothold controlling things.

What’s coming? Perpetual wars for conquest and dominance, harsher neoliberal pain and suffering for ordinary Americans while super-rich ones get richer, Wall Street and other corporate interests more dominant than ever, and militarized police terrorizing nonbelievers.

Humanity trembles at what’s coming once a new administration assumes power next January. All bets are off if Hillary heads it – the possibility of world war elevated to a high probability under her leadership.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Cults of Security and Terror: Fear Ahead of the Rio Olympic Games

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, July 28 2016

The Olympics remains a black hole of needless expenditure, sucking services into it with impending and merciless doom. Unused stadia, tracks left to moulder, services supposedly linked to urban renewal turned into dilapidated wonders. That is the Olympic legacy in its lingering aftermath.

Attempt to Ban Russian Olympic Team – New Cold War at Its ‘Best’!

By Andre Vltchek, July 28 2016

The Empire is becoming thoroughly unpredictable. It is attacking on all fronts. It lost all its shame and decency. New Cold War is now in full swing and the West is using both old and new tactics, in order to demonize and discredit all of its opponents: from Russia to China, Venezuela, North Korea, South Africa and Iran.

Police State South Korea Clamps Down on Peace Movement. Deployment of US THAAD Missile System in South Korea

By Gregory Elich, July 28 2016

On July 26, 2016, the South Korean government blocked the entry of two Korean American peace activists – Juyeon Rhee and Hyun Lee – into its country. The two are representatives of the U.S.-based Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea. They had traveled to South Korea to participate in the annual Jeju Peace March as well as join protests against the recent U.S.-South Korean decision to deploy the controversial Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system in South Korea.

America’s Conquest of Western Europe: Is Europe Doomed By Vassalage To Washington?

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, July 28 2016

World War II resulted in Europe being conquered, not by Berlin but by Washington. The conquest was certain but not all at once.  Washington’s conquest of Europe resulted from the Marshall Plan, from fears of Stalin’s Red Army that caused Europe to rely on Washington’s protection and to subordinate.

The Artistic Representation of War and Peace, Politics and the Global Crisis

By Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, July 28 2016

Most art either reflects local reality (landscapes, cityscapes, portraits) or internal ‘reality’ (surrealism, conceptual art). But there are artists (in this case, I will focus on painters) who do not shy away from depicting the difficulties facing ordinary people or the elites who create those difficulties in the first place. Here we will look at particular ways in which painters deal with contemporary reality using old and new forms of art to draw attention to injustices or general social issues.

The Philippines was under American colonial rule from 1898 to 1946. Despite gaining independence, the island nation is now being used as a tool to apply pressure on China, America’s biggest rival in the South China Sea.

SHANGHAI — (Analysis) The Permanent Court of Arbitration’s non-binding ruling on the territorial dispute between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of the Philippines is largely misunderstood.

Sovereignty or ownership of disputed land formations were never going to be adjudicated or awarded as many Filipinos and Filipinas thought or were led to believe by the past and present leadership of the Philippines.

What the Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal studied were the geo-legal status definitions of the disputed territory. In part, the Chinese claim of sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal, which Beijing refers to as the Nansha Islands and Huangyan Island, respectively, is under dispute because of the status of the “adjacent waters.” It is mainly the definition and legal status of the adjacent waters that Manila — and Washington — are concerned about, and what The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration examined. This is the crux of the matter.

Adjacent waters are a 12 nautical mile territorial (22 kilometers) stretch in bodies of water that extends from the shoreline of any land territory. The water that is within the 12 nautical miles of territory claimed by a specific country is to be legally treated as its internal waters or territorial sea. This alone gives Beijing control over a large swath of strategic water.

Moreover, Beijing’s official position is that the Spratly/Nansha Islands are entitled to an exclusive economic zone (EEZ), and that China has legal control over the continental shelf under both Chinese domestic law and under the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. Although a country and its government do not have sovereignty in their EEZ or on the continental shelf, they do have “sovereign rights” and jurisdiction over a distance of up to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) for the purpose of exploring and developing the natural resources of the seabed and subsoil in these areas.

However, low-tide elevations and rocks that cannot sustain human life do not include any of the maritime entitlements that Beijing claims. This is why the argument on the legal and geographic definition of the Spratly/Nansha Islands as rocks, reefs, low-tide elevations, or islands is so important.

Through its claims, the Philippines has, in part, sought to limit the nautical miles that China can claim for exploration and development. In fact, the Philippines brought the case against China to the Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal exclusively as a maritime dispute and not a territorial dispute as an ipso facto means of extending the EEZ of the Philippines and reducing China’s EEZ.

The location of the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea.

This is why China generally claims that the Spratly/Nansha Islands are geographically and legally islands, and the Philippines, now with the support of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, claims otherwise. In this context, fearing that the Chinese-controlled Ligao Island/Itu Aba could be categorized as an island that would give an extensive EEZ to the Chinese, Florin Hilbay, the acting solicitor-general of the Philippines, and Francis H. Jardeleza, who was the solicitor-general of the Philippines from 2012 to 2014, originally wanted to exclude Ligao Island/Itu Aba from the legal dossier Manila submitted to the Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal.

Nationalism and tactics of deliberate confusion

Despite their close proximity to the Philippines, the Spratly/Nansha Islands have not been recognized as Philippine territory. Manila has not even sought an answer on this from the case it brought to the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Instead, the tribunal ruled on geo-legal definitions, recommended that China should not build artificial islands in the area, and concluded that disputed islands are located on the continental shelf that forms the archipelago of the Philippines.

The Philippine claims that the disputed islands belong to the Philippines due to the ruling about the continental shelf by the tribunal of the Permanent Court of Arbitration are misleading. This does not even legally mean that the Philippines has sovereignty or ownership over the islands. Geographic proximity is never an indicator of legal ownership. Many countries have islands located on continental shelves that other countries are situated on. For example, Greece has many islands located on the continental shelf of Turkey, and France has the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, which are located off Canada’s continental shelf. What the Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal did is simply answer a geographic question.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, attends the 23rd ASEAN regional retreat meeting in Vientiane, Laos. Despite the Philippines taking on China in a territorial dispute in the South China Sea and winning big, other Southeast Asian nations with similar disputes who attended the meetings are backing down from their claims.

Beijing has both a strong historical and legal case in regards to its claims over the disputed land formations. The Chinese established trade rights in the waters of the disputed territories over a thousand years ago under the Han Dynasty. Since then, the land formations there were tied to China during the Yuan, Ming, Qing, and Republican periods, until Japan annexed them. In 1947, after the Second World War and as part of China’s diplomatic, legal, and political efforts to regain the Chinese territory that Japan had annexed, the Kuomintang government of the Republic of China established the demarcation line that is the basis for Beijing’s territorial claims in its dispute with Manila. A year earlier, in 1946, when Philippine President Elpidio Quirino asked Washington to help secure the disputed area for the Philippines, he was told that the area in question was already claimed by the Chinese and French. Beijing has, however, refused to participate in the non-binding tribunal proceedings of the Permanent Court of Arbitration because the Chinese government realizes that the geo-legal definitions it promotes would be changed and that the nautical miles and EEZ it claims would be reduced and undermined.

The oldest direct claim of the Philippines is based on the establishment of the municipality of Kalayaan (Freedom) by Tomas Cloma in 1956, which Ferdinand Marcos used to support his regime’s claim of ownership over the area in 1978. What may surprise Filipinos and Filipinas is that the disputed islands were never included in Article III of the Treaty of Paris as part of the territory of the Philippines that the Spanish surrendered to the United States in 1898. Though a protest was made by the Philippines, Washington did not object when France claimed the disputed territory in 1933. For the same reasons, Washington, unlike the French government that claimed the islands, did not object when the Japanese occupied the disputed islands when Tokyo claimed that they were part of the Chinese province of Formosa/Taiwan in 1938. Washington was even involved in 1952 with the signing of the Treaty of Peace between Japan and the Republic of China, in which Japan renounced all territorial claims to the Pescadores Islands, the Spratly Islands, and Taiwan as a means of returning them to China.

Although any country has the right to change geographic names, the domestic renaming of the South China Sea to the West Philippine Sea by President Benigno Aquino III is a break with history. Historically, Filipinos and Filipinas have called the body of water the South China Sea. While the name change is meant to politically accent the objectives of the Philippines to gain a share of the South China Sea’s resources and challenge China, it is problematic. The name change that has been readily adopted in the Philippines illustrates how the Aquino III administration used a nationalist approach to Filipinos and Filipinas’ understanding of the dispute with China. Philippine citizens who do not call the South China Sea the West Philippine Sea are chided and scolded as unpatriotic or Chinese apologists. Even worse, under the atmosphere that the Aquino III administration has cultivated, the loyalty of Philippine citizens of Chinese ethnic background is being unjustly questioned over the dispute in the South China Sea.

Through a tactic of using nationalism and simplistic explanations that deliberately ignore history in preference of geographic proximity, the Aquino III administration misled the people of the Philippines on the dispute with Beijing. In the process, the Aquino III administration readily demonized China as a hostile country and the Chinese as an enemy of the Philippines.

Has Manila singled out Beijing at Washington’s behest?

The territorial disputes in the South China also include Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Vietnamese have historically been the most aggressive in their territorial claims, and the pre-Vietnamese unification state of South Vietnam even had tense military altercations with the Philippines over Southwest Cay in 1975. Even though the Spratly/Nansha Islands are divided among these states, Manila has focused on challenging and demonizing Beijing.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, right, welcomes U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry during his visit at the Malacanang presidential palace in Manila, Philippines on Wednesday, July 27, 2016.

The demonization of China not only comes at the expense of good relations between China and the Philippines. It serves Washington’s agenda to encircle China, which President Benigno Aquino III was all too happy to go along with. From a strategic standpoint, Washington wants China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea to be eroded so that the South China Sea can be an open body of water where the U.S. can position its military forces.

The purpose of eroding Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea is part of a U.S. strategic military balancing act in Asia. The positioning of the U.S. military in the waters of the South China Sea will give Washington the ability to obstruct Chinese shipping in the event of a conflict between Beijing and Washington. This is why Washington, which itself has refused to sign the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, has consistently encouraged the Philippines to challenge China and done everything possible to condense Chinese maritime jurisdiction in the South China Sea. In this regard, one of the objectives of the Philippines is to guarantee open access to the waters of the South China Sea for the U.S. military. This is why the main concern of the Chinese is not to get their nautical miles reduced as much as possible, but to keep the U.S. military out of the South China Sea to maintain their security.

 For Mint Press News by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya. Originally published  on July 27, 2016.

Contemporary art is often criticised as pointless or overvalued by art market elites. Even the word ‘artist’ has lost much of its meaning. The many ongoing global socio-political crises seem to make even the idea of art fade into insignificance. Most art either reflects local reality (landscapes, cityscapes, portraits) or internal ‘reality’ (surrealism, conceptual art). But there are artists (in this case, I will focus on painters) who do not shy away from depicting the difficulties facing ordinary people or the elites who create those difficulties in the first place. Here we will look at particular ways in which painters deal with contemporary reality using old and new forms of art to draw attention to injustices or general social issues.

When we see art that is trying to depict contemporary reality we can easily be drawn into the content of the picture without realising that the very forms used are themselves a result of conflicts of differing styles for formal and ideological reasons arising from within the artistic ‘community’ itself. While the forms can range from the purely abstract to the hyper-real, most socio-political art tends towards differing degrees of realism.

Nationalism

Historically, nationalist artists concerned with political change resisted modern forms and looked back into their own nation’s history for inspiration. For example, the intertwining of nationalism and art in Ireland has led, in many cases, to a very inward-looking identity, a striving for Irishness in Irish art (e.g. Celtic art), a misplaced resistance to centuries of colonisation. However, in Ireland, as James Christen Steward writes:

“As it has been throughout the century, internationalism in Irish painting can still be seen as emotionally fraught, the adoption of foreign influence as a form of emigration signifying Ireland’s colonization (specifically as a colonized woman). Those artists who have resisted internationalism have often sought consciously to invoke links between the individual, the community, and the Irish landscape to assert a sense of distinct identity, and this remains the case for Irish painters working in the landscape idiom.” [1]

However, there are examples of nineteenth century Irish artists who used their art and the new style of realism to highlight local social ills, such as James Brennan (1837-1907) as Claudia Kinmonth has noted:

“It was rare for artists to be able to afford the indulgence of painting precisely what they wanted to paint, so the blatantly unfashionable images by James Brennan, for example, were facilitated by his salary as head of Cork School of Art. He was further driven to depict the plight of families of farmers or fishermen at home by his altruistic involvement in the setting up of Irish lace schools and his work for the Great Exhibition in London. His careful attention to the minutiae of what was once commonplace, showing cabin interiors furnished with nothing but the barest necessities, provides some of the most useful windows onto social history.” [2]

News from America (1875) (James Brennan)

Realism

However, the realist form needed real subjects and they were not always enthused by the new attention and focus on their lives and occupations. Some artists converged on the Claddagh in Galway (in the west of Ireland) in the move towards realism and away from romanticism. These included socially engaged British artists. The international focus of realism on the peasant and working class allowed these artists to leapfrog nationalist concerns and paint outside their own community. The initial suspicions of the local people towards artists suddenly taking an interest in their lives soon changed, as is shown by the experiences of the English painters Goodall and Topham in the Claddagh. While at first perceived to be ‘tax-collectors, spies or Protestants’, they were eventually accepted by the people and even stayed with them.[3] Despite typical hostility to outsiders, Julian Campbell writes,

“It was here in the Claddagh and the fish market that a colony of Irish and British artists began to gather in the 1830s and 1840s, the period just before the Great Famine and the arrival of the steam train to Galway. Significantly, this was exactly the same time as the Barbizon School of landscape painters was beginning to form in the forest of Fontainebleau in France.  Unlike the earlier groups of painters in county Kerry whose interest had been primarily in landscape, the artists in Galway focused their attention on the everyday lives and activities of the Galway people in a series of genre pictures. […] The Claddagh provided an authentic fishing village of thatched dwellings to study, and the fish market much colourful activity to observe.” [4]

Cottage Interior, Claddagh, Galway (1845) (Francis William Topham) 

Barbizon School

The French Barbizon artists were initially influenced by the English artist, John Constable, to draw their inspiration directly from nature and to leave the formalism of the Classical style in the studio. Soon, however, this idea was developed by Jean-François Millet from painting the landscape to depicting the local people themselves:

“Millet extended the idea from landscape to figures — peasant figures, scenes of peasant life, and work in the fields. In The Gleaners (1857), for example, Millet portrays three peasant women working at the harvest. Gleaners are poor people who are permitted to gather the remains after the owners of the field complete the main harvest. The owners (portrayed as wealthy) and their laborers are seen in the back of the painting. Millet shifted the focus and the subject matter from the rich and prominent to those at the bottom of the social ladders. To emphasize their anonymity and marginalized position, he hid their faces. The women’s bowed bodies represent their everyday hard work.”

The Gleaners (1857) (Jean-François Millet)

Ashcan School

As we move into the twentieth century even realism itself became institutionalized, producing reactions such as the Ashcan School in New York. They used a darker, rougher style of realist painting to express the poverty of the working class in the ghettoes. Artists working in this style such as Robert Henri (1865–1929), George Luks (1867–1933), William Glackens (1870–1938), John Sloan (1871–1951), and Everett Shinn (1876–1953) were not a formal group, but:

“Their unity consisted of a desire to tell certain truths about the city and modern life they felt had been ignored by the suffocating influence of the Genteel Tradition in the visual arts. Robert Henri, in some ways the spiritual father of this school, “wanted art to be akin to journalism… he wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter.””

Hairdresser’s Window (John Sloan)

German Expressionism

Back in Europe, during the 1920s and 1930s German Expressionism was at its height and artists like George Grosz and Max Beckman focused less on the working class and more on decadent society and the rise of the Nazis. German expressionism contrasts with the Ashcan School on a formal level as expressionism presents ‘the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas’ unlike realism where the emphasis on objectivity is more important. The use of distortion, caricature and the general aesthetics of ugliness became the formal basis of the art of George Grosz who used this form as an implicit criticism of what he saw around him:

“In his drawings, usually in pen and ink which he sometimes developed further with watercolor, Grosz did much to create the image most have of Berlin and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Corpulent businessmen, wounded soldiers, prostitutes, sex crimes and orgies were his great subjects.”

Max Beckman looked back even further into the history of art and mixed expressionism with medieval aesthetics and forms to represent contemporary reality as he saw it:

“Beckmann reinvented the religious triptych and expanded this archetype of medieval painting into an allegory of contemporary humanity. […] Many of Beckmann‘s paintings express the agonies of Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Some of his imagery refers to the decadent glamor of the Weimar Republic’s cabaret culture, but from the 1930s on, his works often contain mythologized references to the brutalities of the Nazis. Beyond these immediate concerns, his subjects and symbols assume a larger meaning, voicing universal themes of terror, redemption, and the mysteries of eternity and fate.”

Departure (1932-5) (Max Beckman)

Contemporary Visions

Contemporary versions of these approaches can be seen in the realist work of the American painterMax Ginsberg and the more expressionist approach of the English painter John Keane. Ginsburg’s painting Foreclosure has a baroque feel to it. While today baroque is associated with over-the-top exaggeration and opulence, it was rooted much more in realism than romanticism (a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment and the scientific rationalization of nature). The features of baroque consisted of dramatic tension, heightened realism, illusions of motion, and classical elements used without classical restraint. Ginsburg, like Beckman, is looking back at earlier forms to express contemporary dilemmas.

Foreclosure (Max Ginsberg)

His work is usually straight-up realism but the baroque style of Foreclosure allows him to use more dramatic expressions of the crisis in hand. His interest and concern is reflected in his comment on the painting:

“It is unconscionable that people are being evicted from their homes, especially when banks and corporations are being bailed out. This injustice is not supposed to happen in America.  In this painting I wanted to express the anguish and frustration of people in this situation.”

Ginsburg’s painting War-Pieta shows a similar interest in art history put to contemporary use. He writes:

“I wanted to bring attention to the horror of war, and in this case the war in Iraq. I thought of a mother losing her son and the Pieta paintings of the Old Masters and of Michelangelo’s sculpture, Pieta, showing the Madonna mourning the death of her son. In my painting I sought to symbolically connect, and contrast, the image of a real mother screaming in anguish over the death of her soldier son with the Old Master images of the Madonna mourning the death of her son in a rather unreal, quiet and serene way. The torn fatigues, the mangled soldier’s body and the flag symbolize one of the many young Americans who have been killed in this war.”

War-Pieta (Max Ginsberg)

The English artist John Keane uses expressionism as a form for dealing with Tony Blair’s ‘mercurial’ appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war. While Ginsburg’s work depicts ordinary people in sometimes extraordinary situations, Keane has focused on those who caused them. Here we can see realism used as a form to depict the victims of a state agenda and expressionist distortion used to depict one of the executors of that same agenda.

Figure at an Inquiry no 5 (John Keane)

However, the challenge for contemporary artists is not to fall into the trap of constantly portraying people as victims. Art must be inspired and inspiring. As an artist one can draw attention to the difficulties faced by people the world over but it is also important to recognize that everywhere there are people active in solving problems and trying to change society for the better, both socially and politically. The massive demonstrations against war in Iraq are a case in point:

“On February 15, 2003, there was a coordinated day of protests across the world in which people in more than 600 cities expressed opposition to the imminent Iraq War. It was part of a series of protests and political events that had begun in 2002 and continued as the war took place. Social movement researchers have described the 15 February protest as “the largest protest event in human history””

Peace-March (Max Ginsburg)

Ginsburg describes the process of painting an image of many people of all ages and types on the streets demonstrating noting also influential artists and styles:

“The differences and individuality of people marching for peace is quite different than the mechanical sameness of soldiers marching. I took many photographs at a Peace March protesting the war in Iraq and selected ten of them that were good for expression and composition to use as reference. Attention was paid to the variation of individuals and the expression of determination. Based on these photographs, I made a compositional sketch for the grouping of figures, perspective and darks and lights. Then, with the aid of a grid, I transferred the drawings to the large canvas to scale. And then I proceeded to paint, in my usual direct alla prima style. I was greatly influenced by Ilya Repin’s Religious Processionpainting and Kathe Kollwitz’ The Weavers.”

Subject / Object

The change in realism over time from Millet’s peasants to narrative painting has also seen the move from the depiction of people as oppressed objects to passive subjects to engaged subjects. It seems that the opposite happens with expressionist depictions – a shift from the subject to the object. By objectifying our problems, bad leaders etc a certain distancing is achieved. Images of unity in mass demonstrations counter media strategies of divide and rule while the subjective, up-close, prettified televised images of silver-tongued politicians need some objectification to put conservative policies and agendas into perspective. Socially and politically conscious artists counteract the controlled images of the state and find new ways of seeing by looking back to images and forms of the past while at the same time searching for new methods of depicting the problems of the present.

Notes:

[1] James Christen Steward et al, When Time Began to Rant and Rage: Figurative Painting from Twentieth-Century Ireland (London: Merrell Holberton Publishers, 1999) p.22
[2] Crawford Art Gallery, Whipping the Herring: Survival and Celebration in Ninteenth-Century Irish Art (Cork: Gandon Editions, 2006) p.37
[3] Crawford Art Gallery, Whipping the Herring: Survival and Celebration in Nineteenth-Century Irish Art (Cork: Gandon Editions, 2006) p.28
[4] Crawford Art Gallery, Whipping the Herring: Survival and Celebration in Nineteenth-Century Irish Art (Cork: Gandon Editions, 2006) p.27

Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist who has exhibited widely around Ireland. His work consists of paintings based on cityscapes of Dublin, Irish history and geopolitical themes (http://gaelart.net/). His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art 

“I believe that the risk of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than it was during the Cold War – and yet our public is blissfully unaware of the new nuclear dangers they face.” – William J. Perry, U.S. Defense Secretary (1994-1997), January 2016

Former Bill Clinton cabinet member Perry perceives a danger that none of this year’s presidential wannabes have paid much if any attention to. The most recent candidate to make nuclear arms a central issue was Congressman Dennis Kucinich in 2008. President Obama has played both sides of the nuclear dilemma: rounding up and securing nuclear materials around the world, but also modernizing and miniaturizing American nuclear weapons to make them more “usable.” These days, no one in leadership – or aspiring to leadership – seems committed to actually making the world any safer from nuclear catastrophe. With rare exceptions like Kucinich, this unquestioned reliance on nuclear weapons is mainstream American military group-think, endlessly echoed in mainstream media, and that’s the way it’s been for decades.

In November 2015, William J. Perry published “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink” with Stanford University Press, a short book (234 pages) with a global warning that goes unheeded and almost unmentioned in out denial-drenched culture. A quick Google search turns up no reviews of the book – none – in mainstream media. Pro forma book trade reviews by outfits like Kirkus or Publishers Weekly or Amazon make Perry’s book sound pretty bland and boring, but then so does the publisher’s own blurb. It’s as if these people are saying: yes, we know there’s a pack of wolves in the woods, and that’s not necessarily such a good thing, but we don’t want to be accused of crying wolf, and besides we’ve got our own wolves at home, and they’re trim and well fed, and they haven’t attacked anybody since 1945, so why is anyone worried?

That’s Perry’s point, of course, that nobody’s worried – worse: “our people are blissfully unaware.” He doesn’t go on to argue that our people are deliberately kept unaware by a government and media pyramid that manages public consciousness for its own ends. Listen, Perry was free to publish his book, people are free not to read it, what more can one ask? That’s the nature of repressive tolerance.

“A Stark Nuclear Warning”

California governor Jerry Brown reviewed Perry’s book in the New York Review of Books for July 14, 2016, under the headline: “A Stark Nuclear Warning.” William J. Perry spent an adult lifetime working in the world of nuclear weapons. Perry has long expressed his concern that the detonation of just one nuclear weapon could produce a “nuclear catastrophe … that could destroy our way of life.” Perry has been a manager of nuclear weapons “deterrence,” which he now considers “old thinking.” The fact that deterrence hasn’t failed for more than 70 years is not evidence that the policy is successful. In Perry’s view, nuclear weapons do not provide security for anyone, and the more nuclear weapons there are in more and more and more hands, the more they endanger us all.

In his review, Brown tried to break through the complacent collective quiet in response to the bipartisan American nuclear risk-taking that Perry objects to:

… as a defense insider and keeper of nuclear secrets, he is clearly calling American leaders to account for what he believes are very bad decisions, such as the precipitous expansion of NATO, right up to the Russian border, and President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, originally signed by President Nixon.

Twenty years of American stealth aggression against Russia, particularly in Ukraine and Georgia, is only the most obvious flashpoint, though perhaps not the most dangerous one. Another obvious and over-hyped threat comes from North Korea. Most countries in the world don’t have nuclear weapons, and don’t want them. Even Iran is in that group, thanks to the multi-national deal that Perry wholeheartedly approves. But in the Middle East, what threat might seem serious enough to persuade Israel – or France – to launch a nuclear strike against the Islamic State? How long will India and Pakistan, already at proxy war in Afghanistan, maintain their uneasy standoff? And how secure is the Pakistani arsenal from an Islamist government in Islamabad? Will Turkey somehow get its hands on the NATO nuclear weapons at the air base at Incirlik (still under virtual siege more than a week after the failed coup)?

And then there’s China, which is not in the habit of nuclear saber-rattling. As if the U.S. weren’t risking enough in its perennial confrontation with Russia, in recent years the American “pivot to Asia” has begun to look like the early stages of another game of nuclear chicken.

How many nuclear detonations would create a global wasteland?

Nobody really knows how many nuclear explosions it would take to bring on nuclear winter or create the radioactive conditions to kill millions of not billions of people. Probably it would take more than ten, although ten would have a devastating impact. Maybe fewer than a hundred nuclear attacks could destroy the world as we know it. Not to worry, there are thousands at the ready around the world. The U.S. and Russia, and maybe others, have massive numbers of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert – believed to be a necessary element of nuclear deterrence.

Rhetorically, President Obama has called for the elimination of nuclear weapons, but as a practical matter the Obama administration has reduced the American nuclear arsenal by the smallest amount in 36 years – less than any amount under Presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush, or Reagan. Under President Obama, the U.S. has maintained its aggressive policy against Russia, with one consequence being a new nuclear arms race on which the Obama administration wants to spend $1 trillion to make mass killing easier to achieve in smaller increments. No candidate for President has challenged this nuclear orthodoxy, not even Jill Stein of the Green Party.

The world has more than 15,000 nuclear weapons ready-to-use by common estimate, with enough Uranium and Plutonium available to make more than 100,000 more. The U.S. has more than 4,500 nuclear weapons, Russia about 7,000, and the other nuclear weapons states have “only” a few hundred each at most (except North Korea, with a few to none). Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Sudan are the only three countries in the world that have not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970.

And what might we expect from the next American President?

Republican Donald Trump seems to have published no formal policy on nuclear weapons or foreign policy. In interviews, Trump has indicated a dislike of nuclear proliferation, but has also said it’s probably “going to happen anyway,” and maybe the U.S. “may very well be better off” if countries like Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea had their own nuclear weapons. He implied a willingness to use nuclear weapons against the Islamic State, or even in Europe under undefined circumstances: “I’m not going to take it off the table.” He also told the New York Times on July 20 that if Russia, for no particular reason, attacked one of the Baltic states, he’d want to make sure that they “have fulfilled their obligations to us” before coming to their defense. He did not address the U.S. treaty obligations under NATO. He has called for re-negotiating treaties that he says are too expensive for the U.S. But, in an odd and perhaps inadvertent way, his answer on the Baltic states speaks indirectly to the 20-year madness of putting Russia’s neighboring countries into the hostile NATO alliance. Trump has also spoken of pulling back forward deployments of American forces around the world, including elements of nuclear deterrence.

Democrat Hillary Clinton has called Trump’s positions “truly scary.” Clinton has indicated her willingness to use nuclear weapons – “massive retaliation” – against Iran in defense of Israel. She has expressed but limited support and limited opposition to the Obama administration plan to spend $1 trillion upgrading the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In an ad falsely claiming she was responsible for “securing a massive reduction in nuclear weapons,” Clinton has over-stated the impact of the new START treaty, which has been minimal in reducing nuclear weapons. As Secretary of State, Clinton appointed an utterly unqualified political donor to the International Security Advisory Board dealing with nuclear weapons. Clinton, like Trump, seems to have published no formal foreign policy on nuclear weapons of foreign policy. She has opposed the idea of Japan having its own nuclear arsenal, while at the same time falsely saying Trump “encouraged” the idea.

Where is the candidate who speaks truthfully of reality?

In an address at the University of Sydney in March 2016, titled “A World War Has Begun,” Australian journalist John Pilger argued that Hillary Clinton is more dangerous than Donald Trump. At the heart of Pilger’s argument is his perception of President Obama:

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying.

The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American President.

Clinton has pledged, forcefully but selectively, to “defend President Obama’s accomplishments and build upon them.” In this written statement, Clinton makes no mention of nuclear weapons, defense spending, or U.S. military deployments on Russia’s borders (among other omissions). Pilger has that covered:

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two – led by the United States – is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia….

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

Those who don’t speak up are complicit in silence

In 1996, Secretary of Defense William J. Perry was the only member of President Clinton’s cabinet who got it right, including the President himself. Perry was the only cabinet member who opposed enlarging NATO with former Soviet bloc countries. Perry was the only cabinet member then, and perhaps since, to object to the American policy of steady, stealthy, soft aggression against Russia (including the Ukraine coup) that would lead inevitably to direct confrontation between the world’s largest nuclear weapons states. Perry has called for radical change in the U.S. nuclear force structure consistent with actual deterrence, actual defense, not aggressive war. He would reduce the nuclear triad (about which Trump apparently knew nothing last October), keeping only the sea-based missiles in nuclear submarines and eliminating nuclear bombers and nuclear missiles. This would save millions of dollars and reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war. But it is heresy among the believers in faith-based nuclear policy.

And yet, in an election year, “no one is discussing the major issues that trouble Perry,” as Jerry Brown wrote: “And why does most all of official Washington disagree with him and live in nuclear denial?” In January 2016, while promoting his book, Perry wrote:

What I am really advocating is not so much a particular force structure, but a serious national discussion on this issue, the outcome of which has hugely important security and financial consequences — for the U.S. and for the world. Considering the huge costs entailed, and, even more importantly, the transcendental security issues at stake, we must not simply drift into a decision….

And yet the country drifts on, blissfully unaware, and it’s a mystery why a man as accomplished and respected as Perry has not done more to wake the country out of its sleepwalking incomprehension. But it may be a tragedy that we have neither a President nor a would-be President who would or could confront our potentially fatal collective denial.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

The way things are supposed to work on this planet is like this: in the United States, the power structures (public and private) decide what they want the rest of the world to do. They communicate their wishes through official and unofficial channels, expecting automatic cooperation. If cooperation is not immediately forthcoming, they apply political, financial and economic pressure. If that still doesn’t produce the intended effect, they attempt regime change through a color revolution or a military coup, or organize and finance an insurgency leading to terrorist attacks and civil war in the recalcitrant nation. If that still doesn’t work, they bomb the country back to the stone age. This is the way it worked in the 1990s and the 2000s, but as of late a new dynamic has emerged.

In the beginning it was centered on Russia, but the phenomenon has since spread around the world and is about to engulf the United States itself. It works like this: the United States decides what it wants Russia to do and communicates its wishes, expecting automatic cooperation. Russia says “Nyet.” The United States then runs through all of the above steps up to but not including the bombing campaign, from which it is deterred by Russia’s nuclear deterrent. The answer remains “Nyet.” One could perhaps imagine that some smart person within the US power structure would pipe up and say: “Based on the evidence before us, dictating our terms to Russia doesn’t work; let’s try negotiating with Russia in good faith as equals.” And then everybody else would slap their heads and say, “Wow! That’s brilliant! Why didn’t we think of that?” But instead that person would be fired that very same day because, you see, American global hegemony is nonnegotiable. And so what happens instead is that the Americans act baffled, regroup and try again, making for quite an amusing spectacle.

The whole Edward Snowden imbroglio was particularly fun to watch. The US demanded his extradition. The Russians said: “Nyet, our constitution forbids it.” And then, hilariously, some voices in the West demanded in response that Russia change its constitution! The response, requiring no translation, was “Xa-xa-xa-xa-xa!” Less funny is the impasse over Syria: the Americans have been continuously demanding that Russia go along with their plan to overthrow Bashar Assad. The unchanging Russian response has been: “Nyet, the Syrians get to decide on their leadership, not Russia, and not the US.” Each time they hear it, the Americans scratch their heads and… try again. John Kerry was just recently in Moscow, holding a marathon “negotiating session” with Putin and Lavrov. Above is a photo of Kerry talking to Putin and Lavrov in Moscow a week or so ago and their facial expressions are hard to misread. There’s Kerry, with his back to the camera, babbling away as per usual. Lavrov’s face says: “I can’t believe I have to sit here and listen to this nonsense again.” Putin’s face says: “Oh the poor idiot, he can’t bring himself to understand that we’re just going to say ‘nyet’ again.” Kerry flew home with yet another “nyet.”

What’s worse, other countries are now getting into the act. The Americans told the Brits exactly how to vote, and yet the Brits said “nyet” and voted for Brexit. The Americans told the Europeans to accept the horrendous corporate power grab that is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the French said “nyet, it shall not pass.” The US organized yet another military coup in Turkey to replace Erdoǧan with somebody who won’t try to play nice with Russia, and the Turks said “nyet” to that too. And now, horror of horrors, there is Donald Trump saying “nyet” to all sorts of things—NATO, offshoring American jobs, letting in a flood of migrants, globalization, weapons for Ukrainian Nazis, free trade…

The corrosive psychological effect of “nyet” on the American hegemonic psyche cannot be underestimated. If you are supposed to think and act like a hegemon, but only the thinking part still works, then the result is cognitive dissonance. If your job is to bully nations around, and the nations can no longer be bullied, then your job becomes a joke, and you turn into a mental patient. The resulting madness has recently produced quite an interesting symptom: some number of US State Department staffers signed a letter, which was promptly leaked, calling for a bombing campaign against Syria in order to overthrow Bashar Assad. These are diplomats. Diplomacy is the art of avoiding war by talking. Diplomats who call for war are not being exactly… diplomatic. You could say that they are incompetent diplomats, but that wouldn’t go far enough (most of the competent diplomats left the service during the second Bush administration, many of them in disgust over having to lie about the rationale for the Iraq war). The truth is, they are sick, deranged non-diplomatic warmongers. Such is the power of this one simple Russian word that they have quite literally lost their minds.

But it would be unfair to single out the State Department. It is as if the entire American body politic has been infected by a putrid miasma. It permeates all things and makes life miserable. In spite of the mounting problems, most other things in the US are still somewhat manageable, but this one thing—the draining away of the ability to bully the whole world—ruins everything. It’s mid-summer, the nation is at the beach. The beach blanket is moth-eaten and threadbare, the beach umbrella has holes in it, the soft drinks in the cooler are laced with nasty chemicals and the summer reading is boring… and then there is a dead whale decomposing nearby, whose name is “Nyet.” It just ruins the whole ambiance!

The media chattering heads and the establishment politicos are at this point painfully aware of this problem, and their predictable reaction is to blame it on what they perceive as its ultimate source: Russia, conveniently personified by Putin. “If you aren’t voting for Clinton, you are voting for Putin” is one recently minted political trope. Another is that Trump is Putin’s agent. Any public figure that declines to take a pro-establishment stance is automatically labeled “Putin’s useful idiot.” Taken at face value, such claims are preposterous. But there is a deeper explanation for them: what ties them all together is the power of “nyet.” A vote for Sanders is a “nyet” vote: the Democratic establishment produced a candidate and told people to vote for her, and most of the young people said “nyet.” Same thing with Trump: the Republican establishment trotted out its Seven Dwarfs and told people to vote for any one of them, and yet most of the disenfranchised working-class white people said “nyet” and voted for Snow White the outsider.

It is a hopeful sign that people throughout the Washington-dominated world are discovering the power of “nyet.” The establishment may still look spiffy on the outside, but under the shiny new paint there hides a rotten hull, with water coming in though every open seam. A sufficiently resounding “nyet” will probably be enough to cause it to founder, suddenly making room for some very necessary changes. When that happens, please remember to thank Russia… or, if you insist, Putin.

[O poder do “não”]

The Olympics remains a black hole of needless expenditure, sucking services into it with impending and merciless doom. Unused stadia, tracks left to moulder, services supposedly linked to urban renewal turned into dilapidated wonders. That is the Olympic legacy in its lingering aftermath.

Another feature of the Olympics is the tendency to turn a city into a super security haven, crawling with armed troops, security personnel and surveillance.  In London 2012, efforts to transform humble tenements into rocket launching pads was one of the stranger spectacles that bothered residents.

The Brazilian experience does not look like being anything different, though commentators have gotten on the highest of horses to claim that the state’s security remains “pre-9/11”.[1]  Well it might be that Brazilians are used to the presence of armed gangs and police on the streets, claimed The Independent, but they still lived in a world untouched by the knee-jerk security complex.  It is typical for those permanently immersed in the argot of security that the events of September 11, 2001 had to shape everything else. But not all countries felt that need.

In addition to traditional favela-bred woes, there are fears that the virus of ISIS-Islamic State inspiration will find form amongst Brazilians in an effort to inflict mayhem on locals and visitors.  This might well be, but in the reasoning of the security establishment, nothing about such an assessment is ever proportionate, let alone reasoned.

Last week’s arrest of 10 Brazilians (some reports put the figure at 12) suspected of planning attacks across the Rio games has been seen as a jolt. A country more accustomed to dealing with its own indigenous variants of violence and poverty did not need another incursion of ideological concern.  That was for other countries to wrestle with.

When it came to the arrests of alleged Islamic State members, a certain sense of panic moved through the body politic, a sweat inducing fear.  Were cells being cultivated in paradise?  Would the vicious lone-wolf make a long waited debut?  Judicial authorities in the state of Parana claimed to have intercepted calls suggesting a terrorist cell’s wishes to use “weapons and guerrilla tactics” in attaining its goals.[2]

Operation Hashtag, as it was called, sparked confidence in certain officials within the presidential circle.  Something was being done, which is always the operating premise of the guardians.  “This shows,” claimed Brazil’s presidential chief of staff Eliseu Padilha, “that Brazil is on its toes and monitoring any suspects that could become a threat.”

Brazil ’s security establishment, suggested Padilha, had been making visits to France to pick up tips in the aftermath of the Nice attacks.  How useful such tips are to keep Brasilia on its toes, given the specific Gallic context, is hard to see.

The arrests did not inspire confidence at all levels.  The Justice Minister Alexandre de Moraes seemed unimpressed, merely seeing bungling children at play. They were dabbling “amateurs” who had flirted with social media rather than any serious terrorist game.

Moraes did note that the men were rather green converts, having come to Islam after conducting Internet driven research on jihadism, and exchanging sympathetic messages on such chat platforms as WhatsApp and Telegram.  (Others had also met in Egypt in efforts to learn Arabic.)  Among topics of discussion: weapons training, and the possibility of an online purchase of an AK-47 assault rifle from a Paraguayan-based outlet.

ABIN, the Brazilian secret service, whose members were turning scarlet with rage, suggested that the issue was far more serious, one of greater organisation than the minister was giving them credit for.

A federal police source cited in The Japan Times expressed irritation that the minister “gave the impression that this is a minor problem that does not represent a risk. That’s not right. We cannot spread that idea.”[3]

The genie of fear is truly out of the bottle, roaming the land, sensible or otherwise.  “Amateurs or not,” claimed a former captain of an elite police squad in Rio de Janeiro, “they were organising themselves.” The Islamic States’s recruitment drive thrived on a perceived sense of disorganisation.

The Islamic State’s techniques, and the recent spate of international attacks, are taken to have come from a different stable, a separate blue print.  Robert Muggah, research director at the Rio de Janeiro-based think tank, the Igarape Institute, noted the qualitative difference about such organisations, that “they are more diffuse and widely distributed and may materialise where you don’t expect them.”

The official front from Brazil’s intelligence community, at least for the time being, is that the slate on specific plans for attacking the Olympics is not so much clean as tidy.  There is one fundamental fear: the lone wolf, a sort of terrorist parthenogenesis.

Modern states, with their muscular reach and brutal measures, remain incapable of detecting the point when an idea is implanted, and becomes a faith manifested in knife, bomb, or, in Nice, a murderous truck.  A bloated security state can hardly be the answer, since it was never a solution to begin with.

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

Notes

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rio-olympics-security-brazil-terrorism-a7158071.html
[2] https://www.rt.com/news/352505-rio-olympics-terror-isis/
[3] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/07/23/world/plot-rio-olympics-raises-fears-lone-wolf-terrorist-attacks/#.V5hdTfl96Uk

On July 26, 2016, the South Korean government blocked the entry of two Korean American peace activists – Juyeon Rhee and Hyun Lee – into its country. The two are representatives of the U.S.-based Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea. They had traveled to South Korea to participate in the annual Jeju Peace March as well as join protests against the recent U.S.-South Korean decision to deploy the controversial Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system in South Korea.

After being detained by immigration officers at Incheon International Airport, the two were deported pursuant to Articles 11 and 12 of the Korea Immigration Law, which prohibits the entry of foreigners who, among other things, are “deemed likely to commit any act detrimental to national interests of the Republic of Korea or public safety.”

The two activists had traveled to South Korea numerous times in the past with no problems. They have never broken any laws in South Korea and had never been denied entry nor deported in the past.

The denial of their entry can only be seen as an attempt by the Park Geun-hye administration to block peace activists from internationalizing the growing opposition in South Korea against THAAD deployment. Since announcing its decision to collaborate with the U.S. military to deploy the missile system in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province, the government has waged an aggressive campaign to crack down on all those who oppose the government’s decision. President Park recently referred to those voicing opposition as “subversive forces” and declared, “It’s important to block subversive forces from all affairs, and we must be thorough in weeding them out.”

The rushed decision by the South Korean and U.S. governments to deploy the THAAD system in South Korea was undemocratic with no input from South Korean citizens. The burden of producing and operating the THAAD system will ultimately be borne by U.S. and South Korean taxpayers. The cost of the system is estimated at $1.3 billion, and the average annual operating and sustainment costs amount to $200 million. Many fear that long-term exposure to high frequency electromagnetic waves emitted by the THAAD radar and noise caused by its engines may be detrimental to the health of the Seongju residents who live near the designated site. The THAAD system has been deemed ineffective in the defense of South Korea. Its deployment is a provocative move against North Korea, China and Russia and will redraw Cold War lines as well as escalate tensions in a region that is already heavily militarized with weapons of mass destruction.

The South Korean government’s action of refusing entry to peace activists shows just how much it has devolved into a police state under the Park Geun-hye administration and that it deems international solidarity a threat to its policy of military confrontation. Indeed, only the strength of international solidarity between citizens of the United States and South Korea can stop the two governments’ provocative action towards increased militarization. The Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea is resolved to redouble its efforts of solidarity with the people of South Korea fighting for democracy and peace and call on all those who stand on the side of justice to join the opposition against the dangerous U.S. move to deploy the THAAD missile defense system in South Korea.

US establishment figures are so hellbent for Hillary, they’re reaching new lows to make her America’s 45th president – a legally challenged, trigger-happy Wall Street tool she-devil perhaps eager for global war.

Trump is no solution to changing America’s deplorable state. Compared to Clinton, he’s the lesser of two malign forces.

With no public track record, he’s judged by his rhetoric alone, along with knowing all politicians and wannabe ones lie. Nothing they say is credible. Judge them by their actions alone.

Clinton’s notorious history is abominable, DNC party bosses and complicit media scoundrels suppressing what’s too scandalous and criminal to ignore.

Trump’s unorthodox, anti-establishment-sounding rhetoric makes him political enemy number one. Propaganda targeting him incredibly suggests he’s a Manchurian candidate for Russia’s President Putin.

Brainwashed Americans believe most anything repeated enough. Propaganda works this way – a tool for deception, for misinformation and Big Lies, for convincing people about anything powerful interests want them to believe, suppressing hard truths they’re not told.

One-sidedly supporting Clinton, Washington Post editors call Trump “a threat to the Constitution…a unique and present danger…uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament.”

The New York Times deplorably said Trump’s calling on Russia to find Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails is “another bizarre moment in the mystery (sic) of whether (Putin is) seeking to influence the United States’ presidential race.”

Trump said “(o)f course I’m being sarcastic” in urging Moscow to uncover and reveal Hillary’s missing emails.

“They have no idea if it’s Russia…China (or) somebody else,” responsible for hacking and revealing DNC emails. “(T)he real problem is what was said” and done. “It’s disgraceful…and (now) they’re just trying to deflect from that.”

Calling Trump a Manchurian candidate for Putin reflects how far US dark forces will go to distract attention from their own wrongdoing – aided and abetted by media scoundrels, substituting managed news misinformation for hard truths.

One observer said calling Trump a Manchurian candidate sounds like pilot for a new TV show. Another suggested he’s a Democrat plant to get Clinton elected.

Trump and Putin never met. Suggesting he’s a Manchurian candidate for Russia’s leader or fronting for Clinton is absurd, offensive, and typical of US mainstream misreporting.

Trump entered the race to win. Any close examination of his demeanor, comments and energy show he wants to be president.

How he’ll govern if elected remains to be seen. Progressive change is off the table. If he wants normal relations with Russia, all to the good.

Whether he means what he says can’t be believed unless and until he proves it, if elected in November.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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

“One Ring to rule them all . . . and in the darkness bind them.”  — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

World War II resulted in Europe being conquered, not by Berlin but by Washington.

The conquest was certain but not all at once.  Washington’s conquest of Europe resulted from the Marshall Plan, from fears of Stalin’s Red Army that caused Europe to rely on Washington’s protection and to subordinate

Europe’s militaries to Washington in NATO, from the replacement of the British pound as world reserve currency with the US dollar, and from the long process of the subordination of the sovereignty of individual European countries to the European Union, a CIA initiative implemented by Washington in order to control all of Europe by controlling only one unaccountable government.

With few exceptions, principally the UK, membership in the EU also meant loss of financial independence. As only the European Central Bank, an EU institution, can create euros, those countries so foolish as to accept the euro as their currency no longer have the power to create their own money in order to finance budget deficits.

The countries that joined the euro must rely on private banks to finance their deficits.  The result of this is that over-indebted countries can no longer pay their debts by creating money or expect their debts to be written down to levels that they can service.  Instead, Greece, Portugal, Latvia, and Ireland were looted by the private banks.

The EU forced the pseudo-governments of these countries to pay the northern European private banks by suppressing the living standards of their populations and by privatizing public assets at pennies on the dollar. Thus retirement pensions, public employment, education and health services have been cut and the money redirected to private banks.  Municipal water companies have been privatized with the result being higher water bills.  And so on.

As there is no reward, only punishment, for being a member of the EU, why did governments, despite the expressed wishes of their peoples, join?

The answer is that Washington would have it no other way. The European founders of the EU are mythical creatures. Washington used politicians that Washington controlled to create the EU.

Some years ago CIA documents proving that the EU was a CIA initiative were released. See:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/1356047/Euro-federalists-financed-by-US-spy-chiefs.html   and  http://benwilliamslibrary.com/blog/?p=5080

In the 1970s my Ph.D. dissertation chairman, then a very high-ranking official in Washington with control over international security affairs, asked me to undertake a sensitive mission abroad.  I refused. Nevertheless, he answered my question: “How does Washington get foreign countries to do what Washington wants?”

“Money,” he said. “We give their leaders bagfuls of money.  They belong to us.”

The record is clear that the EU serves the interests of Washington, not the interests of Europe.  For example, the French people and government are opposed to GMOs, but the EU permits a “precautionary market authorization” of GMO introduction, relying perhaps on the “scientific findings” of the scientists on Monsanto’s payroll. When the US state of Vermont passed a law requiring labeling of GMO foods, Monsanto sued the state of Vermont. Once the paid-off EU officials sign the TTIP agreement written by US global corporations, Monsanto will take over European agriculture.

But the danger to Europe goes far beyond the health of European peoples who will be forced to dine on poisonous foods.  Washington is using the EU to force Europeans into conflict with Russia, a powerful nuclear power capable of destroying all of Europe and all of the United States in a few minutes.

This is happening because the paid-off with “bagfuls of money” European “leaders” had rather have Washington’s money in the short-run than for Europeans to live in the long-run.

It is not possible that any European politician is sufficiently moronic to believe that Russia invaded Ukraine, that Russia any moment will invade Poland and the Baltic states, or that Putin is a “new Hitler” scheming to reconstruct the Soviet Empire.  These absurd allegations are nothing but Washington propaganda devoid entirely of truth. Washington’s propaganda is completely transparent.  Not even an idiot could believe it.

Yet the EU goes along with the propaganda, as does NATO.

Why?  The answer is Washington’s money. The EU and NATO are utterly corrupt. They are Washington’s well paid whores.

The only way Europeans can prevent a nuclear World War III and continue to live and to enjoy what remains of their culture that the Americans have not destroyed with America’s culture of sex and violence and greed, is for the European governments to follow the lead of the English and exit the CIA-created European Union.  And exit NATO, the purpose of which evaporated with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and which is now being used as an instrument of Washington’s World Hegemony.

Why do Europeans want to die for Washington’s world hegemony?  That means Europeans are dying for Washington’s hegemony over them as well.

Why do Europeans want to support Washington when Washington’s high officials, such as Victoria Nuland, say “Fuck the EU.”

Europeans are already suffering from the economic sanctions that their overlord in Washington forced them to apply to Russia and Iran.  Why do Europeans want to be destroyed by war with Russia?  Do Europeans have a death wish?  Have Europeans been Americanized and no longer appreciate the historic accumulation of artistic and architectural beauty, literature and music achievements of which their countries are custodians?

The answer is that it makes no difference whatsoever what Europeans think, because Washington has set up a government for them that is totally independent of their wishes. The EU government is accountable only to Washington’s money.  A few people capable of issuing edicts are on Washington’s payroll. The entire peoples of Europe are Washington’s serfs.

Therefore, if Europeans remain the gullible, insouciant, and stupid peoples that they currently are, they are are doomed, along with the rest of us.

On the other hand, if the European peoples can come to their senses, free themselves from The Matrix that Washington has imposed on them, and revolt against Washington’s agents who control them, the European peoples can save their own lives and the lives of the rest of us.

The 2014 attacks on Gaza killed more than 2,000 Palestinians and injured 11,000, leaving approximately 900 with permanent disabilities. As our latest infographic shows, needing to access care after the conflict struggle to do so due to the nine-year blockade and closure of Gaza, and the damage caused to Gaza’s health sector in 2014.

During the attacks 17 hospitals, 56 primary health clinics, and 45 ambulances were damaged or destroyed, and 16 medical workers lost their lives while on duty.Last year, we partnered with the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza and Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights to highlight some of these cases in our ‘No More Impunity: Gaza’s Health Sector Under Attack‘ report, and called for thorough, independent investigation into potential violations of international humanitarian law. This year, we have revisited the victims and survivors of these attacks, to ask how the lack of accountability or access to justice has affected their lives.

Last month, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) highlighted the continuing challenges for Gaza’s health system, including shortages of medicines and long waiting lists for surgeries caused by operating room personnel shortages. Their report also found that progress made in rehabilitating damaged health infrastructure. All of the damaged facilities have been or are in the process of being rehabilitated, though the Al Wafa Hospital – featured in our report – has not been rebuilt.

This week, writing in The National about his team’s struggle to provide adequate care to patients in their temporary site, Al Wafa Hospital Director Dr Basman Alashi said:

“Though we hope to rebuild, we cannot do so in the same place for fear of being attacked again. Our only hope is to rebuild on a new site, but even this cannot guarantee our safety in Gaza. The prospect of new attacks hangs over us.”

With the blockade still in place, patients continue to struggle to access adequate health services inside Gaza, and are often prevented or delayed when seeking to travel abroad for urgent care. Though progress has been made in rebuilding after the 2014 attacks, Al Wafa remains in ruins

Medical Aid for Palestinians has joined with 42 other aid and faith organisations to call for an end to the blockade and closure of Gaza.

The Empire is becoming thoroughly unpredictable. It is attacking on all fronts. It lost all its shame and decency.

When Theresa May proclaims in Parliament that we need the £200 billion Trident nuclear missile system to see off the North Korean nuclear threat, writes David Lowry, just bear this in mind. It is a threat that the UK, global nuclear proliferator in chief, created in the first place, providing both the reactor technology and vital centrifuge materials to make North Korea’s nuclear dream come true.

North Korean nuclear reactor construction under way on 24th April 2008. Photo: Wapster / Google Maps via Flickr (CC BY).

In the debate on Trident nuclear WMD renewal in Parliament last week, the new UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, in a peculiarly ill-informed speech – demonstrating her political career that has virtually no experience in security or defence affairs – made, inter alia, the following unsupported assertions:

• ” … today the threats from countries such as Russia and North Korea remain very real.”
• “North Korea has stated a clear intent to develop and deploy a nuclear weapon, and it continues to work towards that goal, in flagrant violation of a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions.”
• “North Korea is the only country in the world to have tested nuclear weapons this century, carrying out its fourth test this year, as well as a space launch that used ballistic missile technology. It also claims to be attempting to develop a submarine-launch capability and to have withdrawn from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.”
• “Based on the advice I have received, we believe that North Korea could already have enough fissile material to produce more than a dozen nuclear weapons. It also has a long-range ballistic missile, which it claims can reach America, and which is potentially intended for nuclear delivery.”

It reminded me of the similarly ill-informed former Prime Minister Tony Blair, in his speeches to MPs trying to win them over with dodgy ‘advice’ from British intelligence, to go to war by invading Iraq in 2003.

MPs have short memories, despite the Chilcot Report on the Iraq invasion disaster not yet two weeks old, and 472 motley MP fools backed May and Trident replacement. As with the Iraq invasion, MPs will in future have to admit their regrets at being fooled. And again, they ignord the thousands of demonstrators outside, calling for Trident to be abandoned.

Britain’s nuclear proliferation ‘secret’

But May was right in one way. North Korea has developed nuclear weapons. But what she did not say was they did it with copied British bomb-making technology.

There is significant evidence that the British Magnox nuclear plant design – which was primarily built as a military plutonium production factory – provided the blueprint for the North Korean military plutonium programme based in Yongbyon. Here is what Douglas (now Lord) Hogg, then a Conservative minister, admitted in a written parliamentary reply in 1994 to Labour MP Llew Smith:

We do not know whether North Korea has drawn on plans of British reactors in the production of its own reactors. North Korea possesses a graphite moderated reactor which, while much smaller, has generic similarities to the reactors operated by British Nuclear Fuels plc. However, design information of these British reactors is not classified and has appeared in technical journals.

The uranium enrichment programmes of both North Korea and Iran also have a UK connection. The blueprints of this type of plant were stolen by Pakistani scientist, A Q Khan, from the URENCO enrichment plant in The Netherlands in the early 1970s.
(see David Albright, Peddling Peril, 2010 pp 15-28, Free Press, New York)

This plant was – and remains – one-third owned by the UK government. The Pakistan government subsequently sold the technology to Iran, who later exchanged it for North Korean Nodong missiles.

A technical delegation from the A Q Khan Research Labs visited North Korea in the summer of 1996. The secret enrichment plant was said to be based in caves near Kumch’ang-ni, 100 miles north of the capital, Pyonyang, where US satellite photos showed tunnel entrances being built.

Hwang Jang-yop, a former aid to President Kim Il-sung (the grandfather of the current North Korean President) who defected in 1997, revealed details to Western intelligence investigators. (Levy A, Scott-Clark C Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Global Weapons Conspiracy, 2007, p.281, Atlantic Books)

Magnox machinations

Magnox is a now obsolete type of nuclear power plant ( except in North Korea) which was designed by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) in the early 1950s, and was exported to Italy and Japan The name ‘magnox’ comes from the alloy used to clad the fuel rods inside the reactor.

The reactors at Calder Hall on the Sellafield site – then called Windscale, and operated by the UKAEA – were opened by the young Queen Elizabeth on 17th October 1956. But it was never meant as a commercial civilian nuclear plant: the real purpose was to make plutonium for nuclear bombs.

The UKAEA official historian Kenneth Jay wrote about Calder Hall, in his short book of the same name, published to coincide with the opening of the plant, referring (p.88) to“major plants built for military purposes, such as Calder Hall.” Earlier, he wrote (p.80): ” … The plant has been designed as a dual-purpose plant, to produce plutonium for military purposes as well as electric power.”

The term Magnox also encompasses:

• Three North Korean reactors, all based on the open access blueprints of the Calder Hall Magnox reactors, including,
• A small 5 MWe experimental reactor at Yongbyon, operated from 1986 to 1994, and restarted in 2003. Plutonium from this reactor’s spent fuel has been used in the North Korea nuclear weapons program.
• A 50 MWe reactor, also at Yongbyon, whose construction commenced in 1985 but was never finished in accord with the 1994 US-North Korea Agreed Framework.
• A 200 MWe reactor at Taechon, construction of which also halted in 1994.

Nuclear ‘self sufficiency’ on the Korean peninsula

Olli Heinonen, senior fellow at the internationally reknown Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University in the US has explained how North Korea obtained its uranium enrichment capability. He wrote five years ago:

The pre-eminence of Juche, the political thesis of Kim Il Sung, stresses independence from great powers, a strong military posture, and reliance on national resources. Faced with an impoverished economy, political isolation from the world, and rich uranium deposits, nuclear power-both civilian as well as military-fulfills all three purposes.

History and hindsight have shown a consistency in North Korea’s efforts to develop its own nuclear capability. One of the first steps North Korea took was to assemble a strong national cadre of nuclear technicians and scientists. In 1955, North Korea established itsAtomic Energy Research Institute. In 1959, it signed an agreement with the Soviet Union to train North Korean personnel in nuclear related disciplines. The Soviets also helped the North Koreans establish a nuclear research center and built a 2 MW IRT nuclear research reactor at Yongbyon, which began operation in 1969.

Throughout the 1970s, North Korea continued to develop its nuclear capabilities, pursuing a dual track approach that was consistent with the idea of nuclear self-reliance. While engaging in discussions to obtain Light Water Reactors (LWRs) from the Soviet Union, North Korea proceeded with parallel studies on graphite moderated gas cooled reactors, using publicly available information based on the Magnox reactor design.

North Korea also carried out plutonium separation experiments at its Isotope Production Laboratory (IPL), and successfully separated plutonium in the same decade. The North Koreans worked on the design of a reprocessing plant for which, the chemical process was modeled after the Eurochemic plant.

Eurochemic was a research plant dedicated to the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. It was owned by thirteen countries which shared and widely published technologies developed. The plant, located in Dessel, Belgium, operated from 1966 to 1974.

When negotiations to acquire four LWRs from the Soviet Union failed, North Korea had already embarked on its indigenous nuclear program. Throughout the 1980s, North Korea constructed a 5 MWe reactor, fuel fabrication plant, and a reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, with no known documented external help and with minimal foreign equipment procured.

When the joint statement on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was concluded in December 1991, all three facilities had been fully operational for a number of years, with two additional (50 MWe and 200 MWe) graphite moderated gas cooled reactors under construction.

Why enrich the people when you can enrich uranium?

North Korea’s closed society and isolationist position has made it immensely difficult to accurately gauge its nuclear activities. Pyongyang has gone to great lengths to hide much of its nuclear program, including its enrichment route.

Nevertheless, there have been indications, including procurement related evidence, that point in the direction that North Korea has been actively pursuing enrichment since the mid-1990s, with likely exploratory attempts made up to a decade earlier.

It is clear that North Korea received a key boost in its uranium enrichment capability from Pakistan through the A Q Khan network. Deliveries of P-1 and P-2 centrifuges, special oils, and other equipment from Pakistan to North Korea in the late 1990s were acknowledged by former Pakistani President General P. Musharraf in his memoirs, In the Line of Fire.

President Musharraf also wrote that, separately, North Korean engineers were provided training at A Q Khan’s Research Laboratories in Kahuta under the auspices of a government-to-government deal on missile technology that had been established in 1994. In all likelihood, North Korea also received the blue prints for centrifuges and other related process equipment from the Khan network during that period of time.

In the late 1980s, North Korea acquired vacuum equipment from a German company. While such equipment was primarily meant for North Korea’s fuel fabrication plant then under construction, some of the vacuum pumps could have been used for enrichment experiments. But additional attempts made in 2002 to again acquire vacuum technology after the completion of the fuel fabrication plant strongly pointed to its use for enrichment purposes.

Evidence of North Korea’s procurement activities in the late 1990s to the early 2000s showed its objective to achieve industrial or semi-industrial scale enrichment capacity, based on a more efficient Pakistani P-2 centrifuge design. In 1997, an attempt was made to acquire large amounts of maraging steel suitable for manufacturing centrifuges.

UK contributes again – by exporting high strength aluminium

In 2002 / 2003, North Korea successfully procured large quantities of high strength aluminium from Russia and the United Kingdom, another requirement in making centrifuges.

A simple tally of the amounts and types of equipment and material sought by North Korea suggests plans to develop a 5,000-centrifuge strong enrichment capacity. This appears consistent with a separate earlier enrichment offer A Q Khan had made to Libya.

For North Korea to have embarked on procuring equipment and materials meant for a (semi-)industrial scale enrichment facility, it is highly likely that the known Uranium Enrichment Workshop (UEW) at Yongbyon, which in reality approximates a full sized facility, is not the only one that exists. More workshops would have been needed to serve as test beds for pilot cascades of P-1 and P-2 centrifuges prior to (semi-)industrial scale enrichment operations.

While we have signs of North Korea’s enrichment goals, the final picture remains unclear given that the actual amount of items procured remains unknown. This problem is compounded by the fact that the North Koreans have and are continuing to source nuclear material and equipment from several parties. Moreover, there remains a high degree of uncertainty concerning the level of North Korea’s enrichment technology development.

In April 2009, after expelling IAEA inspectors, North Korea publicly announced for the first time that it was proceeding with its own enrichment program. To reinforce its intentions, North Korea followed up with a letter to the UN Security Council on September 3 to confirm that it was embarking on an enrichment phase.

In November 2010, the North Koreans unveiled to Siegfried Hecker, a pre-eminent nuclear expert and former director of the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory, an enrichment facility in Yongbyon with 2000 centrifuge machines similar to the P-2 version, built with maraging steel rotors. (S. Hecker, ‘Redefining Denuclearization in North Korea’, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, December 20, 2010.)

Implications and consequences

On March 22, 2011, North Korea’s official news agency, KCNA, portrayed Libya’s decision to give up its nuclear weapons as a mistake that opened the country to NATO intervention following its domestic Arab Spring uprising.

Such conclusions drawn by North Korea make an already difficult case to engage North Korea to give up its nuclear weapon deterrence that much harder. At the same time, the alternative of disengagement will in all likelihood bring about greater problems.

In engaging North Korea, several key hurdles have to be tackled. First, North Korea shows a poor proliferation record. It was the suspected supply source of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to Libya via the A Q  Khan network – the uranium gas used in centrifuges to separate out the fissionable 235U needed in nuclear bombs from non-fissionable 238U.

There is also mounting evidence that North Korea was involved in the construction of a secret nuclear reactor at Dair Alzour in Syria that was subsequently destroyed in 2007. It is plausible that North Korean personnel assisted Syria in building the reactor. (‘North Korea’s Nuclear Enrichment: Capabilities and Consequences‘, 38 North.org; 22 June 2011).

Lessons of history

This sorry tale has several important lessons for us today. First – and this must never be forgotten – the UK’s early ‘atoms for peace’ nuclear power programme was specifically designed and intended to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs. And it was not just nuclear waste from Calder Hall that went for plutonium extraction at Windscale, but from other sites that were meant to be purely civilian such as Hinkley Point.

The UK is therefore guilty of ‘breaking the rules’ that are meant to separate civil and military nuclear activities, and its complaints of other states doing the same all carry the unmistakeable whiff of ripest humbug.

Second, for all its public position of seeking to restrain nuclear proliferation, the UK is actually one of the world’s most egregious nuclear proliferators: providing arch-nuclear enemy North Korea with both the Magnox technology it has used to produce plutonium for atom bombs; and the high strength aluminium it has used for its uranium centrifuges.

So when Theresa May stands up in Parliament and proclaims that we need the Trident nuclear missile system to see off the North Korean nuclear threat, remember: it is a threat that the UK created in the first place, providing both the nuclear reactor technology and the centrifuge materials to make it happen.

And when the UK cites the nuclear threat from North Korea as a reason to spend an estimated £200 billion on the next generation of Trident, we can be sure that North Korea and other countries aspiring to their own nuclear weapons are applying precisely the same logic to the British nuclear threat.

And that considering the UK’s history of aggressive regime-changing interventions in Iraq and Libya, the hundreds of (up to 225) nuclear warheads in its possession, and its ability to target them accurately anywhere in the world, North Korea’s fears are probably a great deal better founded than Mrs May’s.

Dr David Lowry is senior research fellow at the Institute for Resource and Security Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Psychological Operations or PSYOP are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals.

The beginning of interest in post-Cold War information operations can be traced to the UN intervention in Somalia and the Rwanda Genocide. Relatively honest and direct reporting from these war zones meant that the public opinion of Western countries was a factor that had to be considered by the political classes. Hence the  complaining at the time about the so-called “CNN Effect” which forced the politicians to send and/or withdraw troops irrespective of what the elites actually wanted to happen at the time.

The early methods of influencing the public opinion by manipulating the media, though reasonably effective, were not enough. We have seen their strengths and limitations during both wars against Iraq, in which the bulk of the media was effectively co-opted through the process of frequent press briefings (featuring no shortage of videos showing NATO bombs unerringly falling toward their obviously evil targets) and later by “embedding” the mostly male reporters in military units, which naturally had the dual effect of stroking their egos and adopting the military’s point of view.

Still, in spite of all that, it proved impossible to control the narrative, and the public support for the various US and NATO wars collapsed under the pressure of inconvenient news coming even from mainstream media which clearly maintained a degree of independence. But if you fast-forward a decade, to the current wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Ukraine, and others, it is clear that something has changed. There is one dominant narrative that is being pushed by literally every mainstream media source, irrespective of their ostensible ideological bent. No matter where you turn, you read or hear about Assad’s “barrel bombs”, Gaddafi’s “massacres”, or “Russian aggression.”

These reports invariably represent a point of view that is not only completely one-sided, but also factually wrong, even on the most basic of issues. How did US and NATO manage to achieve such an amazing discipline within the supposedly free and independent Western media?

There are essentially three parts to the answer:

• state oversight of the media;
• co-opting individual reporters;
• disseminating propaganda through covert means.

The first two are obvious enough and have long been practiced. Media corporations are just that–corporations, subject to variety of laws and regulations whose enforcement can be used to steer individual outlets toward adopting a desired point of view. Individual reporter’s coin of the realm is “access” to privileged information, which may be granted or withheld depending on their effectiveness as government propagandist. The third, the covert dissemination of propaganda, is new, and that factor likely explains the lack of variation from one media outlet to the next. The media are no longer merely encouraged to toe the official line–they have the stories planted for them to pick up through social media and other unofficial channels.

The so-called investigations of the MH17 disaster is a case study, though a fairly crude one due to Ukraine’s crude methods of information warfare. But it is evident that nearly all the “evidence” implicating Russia or the Novorossia insurgents was prepared by Ukrainian secret services, then laundered through social media, before being presented to Western audiences as the truth, the only truth, and nothing but the truth.

NATO is conducting similar operations which are harder to identify and counter because they are more sophisticated, better institutionalized, and provided with higher levels of funding. The United Kingdom, for example, maintains the 77th Brigade whose subunits include the Media Operations Group and the shadowy 15th Psychological Operations Group that has been dubbed the “Twitter detachment.” Germany has established the ZOpKomBw, or the Bundeswehr Rapid Communications Center.

In the US, information operations against the US population appear to be the responsibility of the intelligence community, which is understandable considering the taboo on US military operations on US territory. As such, they remain largely out of public scrutiny, though their handiwork can be readily seen in the form of unverifiable reports from a variety of war zones, and even placing specially prepared “witnesses” in front of Congressional committees. Even non-NATO countries like Sweden are following suit by establishing their own information operations units intended for waging information war on its own population. At the NATO level, information operations are coordinated by NATO doctrine JP 13-3 Information Operations, with practical applications honed by alliance-wide exercises such as the Multinational Information Operations Experiment (MNIOE).

Western voters have been accepting of all these measures because they were sold to them as part of their countries’ counter-terrorism measures. What they failed to take into account is that terrorism is a phenomenon that knows no borders, with the enemy already present among Western societies. Which means that, if counter-terrorist information operations are to be effective, they also have to be aimed at Western publics.

In the short-term, information operations may be effective in manufacturing popular support for policies that otherwise no free society would accept. In the longer term, bypassing the public opinion means the elites are now more free than ever to embark on highly dangerous international adventures that will likely backfire and lower even further the already low standing of the elites. Therefore the fact that the so-called “free world” elites increasingly have to resort to such dirty tricks in order to stay in power means that their grasp on power is slowly weakening.

In the video below, Funny or Die pokes fun at Monsanto’s “feeding the world” message by highlighting some of the most obvious features of genetically engineered (GE) foods, such as the unnatural crossing of genetic material between plant and animal kingdoms, the use of toxic chemicals and Monsanto’s ever-expanding monopoly.

“I own everything!” Mama Monsanto exclaims, and that’s pretty close to the truth. Monsanto has gobbled up seed companies, chemical competitors and even research institutions investigating the impact of pesticides on bee die-offs.

Not to mention the influence the company wields over the U.S. government. It sure seems to “own” that too.

Many have pondered how Monsanto managed to rise to such a powerful position with respect to its influence over the U.S. government, and I think journalist Abby Martin may have pin-pointed the source of this obnoxious loyalty in her recent video report, “America’s Monster” (below).

In it, she details Monsanto’s history as an American “war horse,” which began with its involvement in the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb. Monsanto’s contributions to the U.S. war machine continued during the Vietnam War, when the company became a leading producer of Agent Orange.

These war contributions appear to have cemented a long-lasting and loyal relationship between the U.S. government and Monsanto that continues to this day, to the detriment of the American people.

Sixty-four other nations have been labeling genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for years. Here in the U.S., Monsanto’s influence runs so deep, we just became the first country in the world to UNLABEL GMOs, as President Obama will soon sign a bill that nullifies Vermont’s GMO labeling law, which just went into effect July 1.

Throughout its entire history, which began with the foundation of Monsanto Chemical Works in 1901, Monsanto has specialized in the production of toxic chemicals. Despite attempts to shed its destructive image, Monsanto has utterly failed to do so, for the simple fact that it never actually changed its basic modus operandi.

Nor did it actually change its direction from purveyor of toxins to a life-giving agricultural company. Its focus remains producing and selling toxins. It simply discovered it could sell more chemicals, and ensure ever-increasing profits, by producing GE seeds with herbicide-resistant properties.

Voluntary ‘Smart Label’ Preempts State and Consumer Rights

Earlier this month, Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts and ranking Democrat Debbie Stabenow announced they’d reached a deal1 to create a national labeling standard for GMOs using voluntary “Smart Labels” (so-called QR codes2) rather than clear labeling.

This despite the fact that polls show 88 percent of Americans have said they do NOT want to be forced into using a smartphone app to find this important information.

The bill, S. 2609, which amends the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946 with a national bioengineered food disclosure standard,3,4 is now more or less a done deal. On July 14, the U.S. House passed the bill, 306 to 117, and President Obama has already indicated he will sign it.5

The legislation will supersede and nullify Vermont’s GMO labeling requirement, which took effect mere weeks ago.

It will also bar any other state from enacting GMO labeling requirements that differ from the national standard, and delays the disclosure requirement another two years; three years for smaller food companies.

What’s worse, the new legislation changes and significantly narrows the definition of bioengineering, as applied under this law only, such that the newest biotech methods are exempt from the disclosure standards.

As a result, most GE food products currently on the market will end up being excluded anyway.

With the passing of this bill, the U.S. “war horse” Monsanto won again. Your elected representatives sold you out to the highest bidder. Senator Jeff Merkley has even stated that the bill was “written by and for Monsanto.” As reported by Sputnik International:6

Markley explained that because of loopholes in the legislation, Monsanto-made products ‘would not be covered by it, because the definition excludes them.’

Monsanto Benefits From Farm and Biofuel Subsidies

I recently discussed how government-subsidized commodities such as corn, soy and wheat contribute to the obesity and disease epidemics in the U.S.7,8,9 The Western processed food diet is chockfull of refined added sugars and unhealthy vegetable oils, which are cheap as a result of farm subsidies.

However, as much as 65 percent of the 94.1 million acres of corn grown in the U.S. actually doesn’t enter the food system at all.10 It’s used to produce ethanol fuel.

In a 2009 speech, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said that “energy reform is a strategic imperative,”11 calling for the deployment of “the Great Green Fleet … composed of nuclear ships, surface combatants equipped with hybrid electric alternative power systems running biofuel and aircraft flying only [on] biofuels.”

Mabus had put down 2016 as the deadline for this naval energy reform, but it didn’t come to pass. As noted by Vice News:12

[C]ongressional Republicans … have blocked the Navy from spending more on a gallon of biofuel than it does on a gallon of regular diesel.

Since it costs more to turn seeds, weeds or beef trimmings into usable fuel than it does to extract fossil fuels from the ground and refine them, it’s all but impossible for the fleet to use substantial amounts of biofuels with crude oil prices are as low as they currently are.

Part of the problem is the low production of biofuel, which drives up the price. According to a 2015 report13 by the World Resources Institute (WRI), in order to meet just 20 percent of the global energy demand by 2050, using plant-based biofuels, we would have to DOUBLE the global annual harvest of plant material “in all its forms.”

This makes the “quest for bioenergy at a meaningful scale … both unrealistic and unsustainable,” according to the report. Despite such bleak prognoses, the Biodiesel Tax Incentive Reform and Extension Act of 201614 would provide a $1.00 subsidy for each gallon of biodiesel produced during the taxable year.

In short, not only are your tax dollars continuing the expansion of corn for the production of biofuel, which is “unrealistic and unsustainable” to begin with, government subsidies are also used to grow crops that are primary contributors to obesity and ill health — and both of these schemes end up benefiting Monsanto, since the vast majority of corn grown in the U.S. is genetically modified.

‘The Dumbest Guys in the Room’

In an article titled, “GMO Industry: The Dumbest Guys in the Room,”15 columnist Kurt Cobb16 makes a number of strikingly accurate observations.

I am now convinced the GMO industry has managed to hire the worst public relations strategists in human history. By supporting a deeply flawed GMO labeling bill in the U.S. Congress … the industry is about to open a Pandora’s Box of PR nightmares for years to come,” e writes.

“The anti-GMO groups will likely put out lists of the worst labeling violators and lists of their products containing GMOs. And, of course, there will be lists based on those enigmatic QR codes. Perhaps those codes will become the equivalent of the skull and crossbones feared by one GMO executive.17

Cobb likely predicts the future here, as I believe the QR code will become exactly that — the mark of products and brands that are trying to make a mint from deception by making it as difficult as possible for you to find out the truth about their ingredients. The QR code will become known as the Mark of Monsanto, and shoppers will be able to simply assume admission of guilt when they see it, without ever taking the time to rummage through entire websites filled with extraneous information and advertising.

Forbes contributor Nancy Fink Huehnergarth has made similar observations,18 noting that “Big Food may be shooting itself in the foot again,” as the QR code will make it appear they have something to hide.

“Food/drink packaging already has an ingredient label and nutrition facts panel. How simple would it be to mandate that all food packaging add a few words or a universal symbol to communicate the inclusion of GMO ingredients?” she says.

Why Eat GMOs When They Have No Health Advantages?

Cobb makes another great point when he says:

[T]he industry’s business and public relations strategists are the same ones who made a colossal marketing error — while believing they had achieved a regulatory coup — when they steamrolled the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) into ruling that GMOs are ‘substantially equivalent’ to their non-GMO counterparts and therefore require no testing …

The reason this strategy has turned out to be a colossal marketing error is that as the attacks on GMOs have mounted … the industry finds itself unable to pivot and point to any advantages that GMO foods have for consumers over non-GMO foods …

After all, GMO foods are said to be ‘substantially equivalent.’ That means that the industry cannot give consumers any reasons to prefer GMO foods over their non-GMO counterparts … So far genetic engineering has focused on creating plants [that] produce insecticides internally — not a pleasant thought for those eating them — and which are immune to herbicides made by, you guessed it, the companies producing the GMO seeds.

Chemical Residues — A Major Reason to Avoid GMOs

Indeed, if GMOs are substantially equivalent to conventional crops in terms of nutritional value yet contain higher amounts of pesticides, why eat them? After all, the idea that pesticides are a boon to health is a tough sell.

As you may have noticed, with the exception of DDT, which was marketed as “good for you,” pesticides do not have health claims. And arguments defending the presence of pesticides on food always focus on the notion that the amount present is low enough that it will not produce adverse effects.

However, health statistics tell a different story, and the reason why the “trace defense” doesn’t hold water is because it’s not just about minor traces of chemicals on certain foods items.

Unless you eat organic foods and use “organic everything,” you’re exposed to pesticides from most foods, plus the chemicals used in the processing, plus chemicals to add flavor, texture and preservation power, plus chemicals found in the packaging and in the cashier’s receipt, plus the chemicals found in just about every product you put on your body every day, including the clothes you wear, and the furniture you sit on. There are even chemicals in the air you breathe and the water you drink.

We are barraged with toxins at every turn, and they all ADD UP. That is the problem. And, unfortunately, food appears to be a major source, so avoiding chemicals in your diet can go a long way toward preserving your health. With that in mind, herbicide-resistant and pesticide-producing food crops are an incredibly foolish idea that contributes absolutely nothing to the health and wellbeing of the global community.

US Right to Know Blows Lid Off Another Monsanto Scheme to Tarnish Organics

Since transparent GMO labeling is not going to happen in the U.S. anytime soon, your options become quite straight forward: Buy organic and/or locally-grown food you can verify being non-GMO. This has always been the best option; just not the least expensive or most convenient. Not surprisingly, in addition to defending the quality and safety of its GE products, Monsanto has also tried to cast doubt on organic ethics and value, in order to curb consumer preference for organics.

Emails obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) reveal Monsanto colluded with an organization of “independent” academics to mislead the public into thinking they were being duped by the organic industry. The Huffington Post recently ran an article19 revealing this story. It’s well worth reading in its entirety.

USRTK is a nonprofit organization that pursues truth and transparency in the U.S. food system. In 2014, Academics Review, a nonprofit organization composed of “independent academic experts in agriculture and food sciences” issued a 30-page report claiming organic shoppers were over-paying for organics due to deceptive industry marketing practices.

The report, which was “endorsed by an international panel of independent agricultural science, food science, economic and legal experts from respected international institutions” gained traction in the trade press with headlines such as “Organics Exposed!” and “Organic Industry Booming by Deceiving Customers.”

The press release announcing the report even hammers home the point of independence by stating that “Academics Review has no conflicts-of-interest associated with this publication, and all associated costs … were paid for using our general funds without any specific donor influence or direction.” Alas, emails obtained by USRTK tell a different story.

Academics Review — Just Another False Front Group for Monsanto

Monsanto not only helped raise funds for Academics Review, Monsanto executives also “collaborated on strategy and even discussed plans to hide industry funding,” The Huffington Post writes, adding:

Monsanto’s motives in attacking the organic industry are obvious: Monsanto’s seeds and chemicals are banned from use in organic farming, and a large part of Monsanto’s messaging is that its products are superior to organics as tools to boost global food production.

One of the co-founders of Academics Review was Bruce Chassy, Ph.D., professor emeritus at the University of Illinois. In March of this year, an investigation by Chicago WBEZ news20 discovered Monsanto paid the now retired Chassy more than $57,000 over two years for travel, writing and speaking expenses, yet Chassy never disclosed his financial ties to the company on state and university conflict-of-interest disclosure forms.

Between 2005 and 2015, Monsanto gave at least $5.1 million to University of Illinois employees and programs — all of it undisclosed, as it was funneled via the University of Illinois Foundation, which is exempt from public scrutiny and disclosure.21

Chassy also lobbied federal officials on Monsanto’s behalf to prevent further regulations on GMOs. Chassy claims he did this of his own volition, but emails22 show Monsanto’s Eric Sachs urged Chassy to get involved. The correspondence also reveals this was in fact part of an industry lobbying effort, “with academics out in front,” basically pretending to be acting independently — just like the Academics Review.

FOIA-recovered emails show Chassy was very eager to attack the organic industry but needed money. Jay Byrne, former head of communications at Monsanto, agreed to help, indicating he would discuss “options for taking the Academic Review project … forward” by meeting with Val Giddings, former vice president of the biotech industry trade association BIO.

Eric Sachs, who handles Monsanto’s public relations, also emailed Chassy discussing funding possibilities for Academics Review while “keeping Monsanto in the background.” Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets are often tightly reined in by corporate bias, which prevents the truth to become as widely known as it should. As noted in The Huffington Post:

Despite the revelations in emails and the disclosure of Chassy’s financial ties to Monsanto, the Academics Review website and its report attacking the organic industry are still posted online with all the descriptions claiming independence. And Chassy still enjoys press coverage as an ‘independent’ expert on GMOs. In May 2016, two separate Associated Press stories quoted Chassy on that topic. Neither story mentioned Chassy’s now-public financial ties to Monsanto.

For a number of years Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was my colleague at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Tom, after whom the F-14 Tomcat fighter is named, expressed to me his concern that US politics and foreign policy was in the clutches of Israel and that America was being led into war with the Arab Middle East. Admiral Moorer and the State Department and Pentagon at that time did not think that war with the Arab countries served the interests of the United States. However, Admiral Moorer thought that the war could not be avoided because of the hold Israel has over the US government.

What convinced him of this was Washington’s coverup of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty which resulted in 208 killed and wounded Americans. Tom was disheartened that Admiral John S. McCain Jr., the father of the current US senator, for career reasons had cooperated with the coverup. Tom worried that careerism had destroyed the integrity of the US military.

Last month was the 49th anniversary of the Israeli attack on the American ship. I raised the issue of the USS Liberty eight or nine years ago in a syndicated newspaper column, which, as I suspected would be the case, only a few news sources dared to publish. However, the article editor at Hustler magazine saw the article and contacted me. He said that Hustler was popular among US sailors and now that they were again thrust into needless war they should be aware that the US government could sell them out without notice. Would I write the USS Liberty story for the sailors so they would be aware of the betrayal that might await them?

I had already seen that Admiral Moorer’s prediction that Israel would have us in war against the Arabs had come true. I still hear his bitter statement that “no American president can stand up to Israel.” Tom was deeply wounded by the betrayal of the US Navy by the Commander-in-Chief. The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff was powerless before the Israel Lobby.

I understood that to take on this task meant much work. I would have to hunt down USS Liberty survivors and interview them. I would have to find Captain Ward Boston and a pilot or commander of the rescue fighters that Washington called back, denying protection to the American sailors aboard the USS Liberty. They would have to be willing to talk. I undertook the task, and the story is below.

*        *       *

Surviving Sailors Break Their Silence 40 Years After Israeli Attack on US Navy Ship

by

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Hustler Magazine, July 2008

June 8, 1967 — the fourth day of the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan — was a beautiful day in the Mediterranean. The USS Liberty was in international waters off the coast of Egypt. Israeli aircraft had flown over the USS Liberty in the morning and had reported that the ship was American. The crew, in close proximity to the war zone, was reassured by the presence of Israeli aircraft. But at 2:00 p.m. sailors sunbathing on the deck saw fighter jets coming at them in attack formation. Red flashes from the wings of the fighters were followed by explosions, blood and death. A beautiful afternoon suddenly became a nightmare. Who was attacking the USS Liberty and why? The attack on the Liberty was an attack on America.

The Liberty was an intelligence ship. Its purpose was to monitor Soviet and Arab communications in order to warn both Israel and Washington should the Soviets enter the war on behalf of its Arab allies. The Liberty was armed only with four machineguns to repel boarders. Its request for a destroyer escort had been denied.

The assault on the Liberty is well documented. With no warning, the Liberty was attacked by successive waves of unmarked jets using cannon, rockets and napalm. The attacking jets jammed all of the US communications frequencies, an indication they knew the Liberty was an American ship.

The air attack failed to sink the Liberty. About 30 minutes into the attack three torpedo boats appeared flying the Star of David. The Israeli boats were not on a rescue mission. They attacked the Liberty with cannon, machineguns and torpedoes. One torpedo struck the Liberty mid-ship, instantly killing 25 Americans while flooding the lower decks. The Israeli torpedo boats destroyed the life rafts the Liberty launched when the crew prepared to abandon ship, sending the message there would be no survivors.

At approximately 3:15 two French-built Israeli helicopters carrying armed Israeli troops appeared over the Liberty. Phil Tourney could see their faces only 50/60 feet away. He gave them the finger. Surviving crewmembers are convinced the Israelis were sent to board and kill all survivors.

The Israeli jets destroyed the Liberty‘s communication antennas. While under attack from the jets, crewmembers strung lines that permitted the ship to send a call for help. The USS Saratoga and the USS America launched fighters to drive off the attacking aircraft, but the rescue mission was aborted by direct orders from Washington.

When the Liberty notified the Sixth Fleet it was again under attack, this time from surface ships, the Fleet commander ordered the carriers America and Saratoga to launch fighters to destroy or drive off the attackers. The order was unencrypted and picked up by Israel, which immediately called off its attack. The torpedo boats and the hovering helicopters sped away. Israel quickly notified Washington that it had mistakenly attacked an American ship, and the US fighters were recalled a second time.

The USS Liberty suffered 70% casualties, with 34 killed and 174 wounded. Although the expensive state of the art ship was kept afloat by the heroic crew, it later proved unsalvageable and was sold as scrap.

Why didn’t help come?

No explanation has ever been given by the US government for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s orders for the Sixth Fleet to abort the rescue mission. Lt. Commander David Lewis of the Liberty told colleagues that Admiral L. R. Geis, commander of the Sixth Fleet carrier force, told him that when he challenged McNamara’s order to recall the rescue mission, LBJ came on the line and said he didn’t care if the ship sank, he wasn’t going to embarrass an ally. The communications officer handling the transmission has given the same account.

A BBC documentary on the Israeli raid reports that confusion about the attacker’s identity almost resulted in a US assault on Egypt. Richard Parker, US political counsel in Cairo, confirms in the BBC documentary that he received official communication that an American retaliatory attack on Egypt was on its way.

The US government’s official position on the USS Liberty corresponds with Israel’s: The attack was unintentional and a result of Israeli blunders. This is the official position despite the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Assistant Secretary of State Lucius Battle, and a long list of US Navy officers, government officials and Liberty survivors are on record saying the Israeli attack was intentional.

According to Helms, Battle and the minutes of a White House meeting, President Johnson believed the attack was intentional. Helms says LBJ was furious and complained when The New York Times buried the story on page 29, but that Johnson decided he had to publicly accept Israel’s explanation. “The political pressure was too much,” Helms said

US communications personnel, intelligence analysts and ambassadors report having read US intercepts of Israeli orders to attack the Liberty. In one intercept an Israeli pilot reports that the Liberty is an American ship and asks for a repeat and clarification of his orders to attack an American ship. One Israeli who identified himself as one of the pilots later came to America and met with US Representative Pete McCloskey and Liberty survivors. The pilot said he had refused to participate in the attack when he saw it was an American ship. He was arrested upon returning to base.

The Liberty flew the US flag. The ship’s markings, GTR-5, measured several feet in height on both sides of the bow. On the stern the ship was clearly marked USS LIBERTY. Mistaking the Liberty for an Egyptian ship, as Israel claims to have done, was impossible.

Tattered flags show ferocity of the attacks

The Israelis claim the Liberty flew no flag, but two US flags full of holes from the attack exist. When the first flag was shot down, crewmen replaced it with a flag 7 feet by 13 feet. This flag with its battle scars is on display at NSA headquarters at Ft. Mead, Maryland.

Admiral John S. McCain Jr., the father of the current US senator, ordered Admiral Isaac C. Kidd and Captain Ward Boston to hold a court of inquiry and to complete the investigation in only one week. In a signed affidavit Captain Boston said President Johnson ordered a cover-up and that he and Admiral Kidd were prevented from doing a real investigation. Liberty survivors were ordered never to speak to anyone about the event. Their silence was finally broken 12 years later when Lt. Commander James M. Ennes published his book, Assault on the Liberty.

It is now established fact that the attack on the Liberty was intentional and was covered up by President Johnson and every administration since. There has never been a congressional investigation, nor has the testimony of the majority of survivors ever been officially taken. Moreover, testimony that conflicted with the cover-up was deleted from the official record.

Disgusted by the US government’s official stance discounting the survivors’ reports, Admiral Tom Moorer, retired Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, organized the Moorer Commission to make public the known facts about the attack and cover-up. The Commission consisted of Admiral Moorer, former Judge Advocate General of the US Navy Admiral Merlin Staring, Marine Corps General Raymond G. Davis and former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Akins.

The Commission’s Report concluded:

That there is compelling evidence that Israel’s attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew.

That fearing conflict with Israel, the White House deliberately prevented the US Navy from coming to the defense of USS Liberty by recalling Sixth Fleet military rescue support while the ship was under attack.

That surviving crew members were threatened with ‘court-martial, imprisonment or worse’ if they exposed the truth; and [the survivors] were abandoned by their own government.

That there has been an official cover-up without precedent in American naval history.

That a danger to our national security exists whenever our elected officials are willing to subordinate American interests to those of any foreign nation.

Why did Israel attack the Liberty? Was something super secret going on that is so damaging it must be protected at all cost?

Some experts believe Tel Aviv decided to sink the Liberty because the ship’s surveillance capability would discover Israel’s impending invasion and capture of Syria’s Golan Heights, an action opposed by Washington. Others believe Israel was concerned the Liberty would discover Israel’s massacre of hundreds of Egyptian POWs, a war crime contemporaneous with the attack on the US ship. Still others believe that Israel intended to blame the attack on Egypt in order to bring America into the war. It is known the US was providing Israel with reconnaissance and that there were joint US-Israeli covert operations against the Arabs that Washington was desperate to keep secret.

Survivors with whom I spoke said the attack was the easy part of the experience. The hard part has been living with 40 years of official cover-up and betrayal by the US government. One survivor said that he was asked to leave his Baptist church when he spoke about the Liberty, because the minister and fellow church-goers felt more loyalty to Israel than to a member of the congregation who had served his country. His church’s position was that if our government believed Israel, the survivors should also.

Survivor Phil Tourney said that “being forced to live with a cover-up is like being raped and no one will believe you.”

Survivor Gary Brummett said he “feels like someone who has been locked up for 40 years on a wrongful conviction.” Until the US government acknowledges the truth of the attack, Brummett says the survivors are forced to live with the anger and dismay of being betrayed by the country they served.

Survivor Bryce Lockwood has been angry for 40 years. The torpedo that killed his shipmates, wrecked his ship and damaged his health was made in the USA.

Survivor Ernie Gallo told me he “has been haunted for four decades” by the knowledge that his commander-in-chief recalled the US fighters that could have prevented most of the Liberty‘s casualties.

Every American should be troubled by the fact that the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense prevented the US Sixth Fleet from protecting a US Navy ship and its 294-man crew from foreign attack. They should also be troubled that the President ordered the Navy to determine the attack was unintentional.

This article is based entirely on doumented sources and on interviews with six USS Liberty survivors, as well as Captain Ward Boston and Bill Knutson, the executive officer of the USS America fighter squadron dispatched on the first aborted rescue mission.

This article was reproduced in the Unz Review and other places.

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.

The problem with conspiracy theorists is that, quite frequently, the theorists lack adequate imagination. That seems to be the case when it comes to the Democratic National Committee’s behind-the-scenes machinations to muscle Hillary Clinton into the White House while plotting against her main challenger, Bernie Sanders. That conclusion stems from the trove of 20,000 DNC emails dumped into the public sphere by Wikileaks last Friday.

The leaked emails have cost Debbie Wasserman Schultz her job as Chair of the DNC but other top DNC officials captured in devious plots against Sanders in the email exchanges still have their jobs – or at least no official firings have been announced. This makes the conspiracies seem more like a DNC business model.

The DNC’s own charter demands that it treat all Democratic primary candidates fairly and impartially, but top DNC officials made a mockery of that mandate. In addition to conjuring up ways to smear Clinton challenger Bernie Sanders during the primary battles, the leaked emails show a coordinated effort to cover up what the Sanders camp called “money laundering” between the Hillary Victory Fund and the DNC.

Politico Reporter, Ken Vogel

Despite the fact that the Sanders campaign had no such active arrangement with the DNC, the DNC agreed to participate in the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that sluiced money to both Hillary’s main candidate committee, Hillary for America, as well as into the DNC. To a much tinier degree, funds also went to dozens of separate State Democratic committees.

On May 2 of this year, the Sanders campaign released a statement charging Clinton with “looting funds meant for the state parties to skirt fundraising limits on her presidential campaign,” and exploiting “the rules in ways that let her high-dollar donors like Alice Walton of Wal-Mart fame and the actor George Clooney and his super-rich Hollywood friends skirt legal limits on campaign contributions.”

Despite Clinton’s promise to rein in tax dodges by hedge funds, Wall Street On Parade reported in April that major hedge fund titans were also big donors to the Hillary Victory Fund. We wrote at the time:

Federal Election Commission records show that S. Donald Sussman, founder of hedge fund Paloma Partners, gave $343,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund while also donating $2.5 million to Priorities USA, the Super Pac supporting Hillary. Hedge Fund billionaire George Soros donated $343,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund while sluicing a whopping $7 million into Priorities USA to enhance Hillary’s efforts to move into the Oval Office.

Isaac Arnsdorf, Reporter for Politico

Today, reporters Ken Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf of Politico have provided significant new details from the leaked emails to show how the DNC worked behind the scenes to control the media’s handling of revelations involving the Hillary Victory Fund.

Vogel was criticized by some media outlets when the Wikileaks emails revealed he had allowed a DNC official to review one of his articles critical of the joint fundraising operation prior to publication. Erik Wemple of the Washington Post has provided some necessary clarity to that issue here.

The Clinton camp and the DNC had attempted publicly to defend the joint fundraising operation as providing critical help to State Committees in order to help down-ticket candidates.

Click to read complete article on Wall Street on Parade 

“Israel is not against ‘terrorism’; it is only against anti-Israeli terrorism.”Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, after the outing of a secret Israeli assassination squad in 1990.

The current attempt by Israel’s supporters to equate “Islamic terror” in France to Israeli victimhood requires a reality check, such as comparing the numbers of the Palestinian injured and dead to that of Israelis.  While psychological studies of Israelis show fast adjustment to the situation, studies of Palestinians indicate a high level of PTSD and widespread psychological damage, especially of children.

In fact, Israelis benefit hugely from “living with ‘terror'”: their homes are often built on stolen Palestinian land, their water is largely from Palestinian sources, and they benefit from Israel’s theft of what should be Gaza’s gas. Their profitable “security” industry tests out their new products on the civilians trapped in Gaza or West Bank enclaves.  The occupation is win-win for Israel.

Israelis pay little for this: the international community picks up the humanitarian aid bill for Israel’s legal obligation to ensure that Palestinians under occupation (in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza) have access to adequate food, water and medical care and other necessities of a decent life, such as education.  Israel hobbles humanitarian aid by skimming money off the top and ensures that what reaches Gazans — under siege since 2006 — will not be sufficient to allow their health.  Legal experts, who agree that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is “apartheid”, disagree on whether this is “genocide” or merely “genocidal treatment”.

A key point is the use of language.  Israel often calls its own terrorism (usually illegal) “resistance” before it declared itself a state, and “defense” afterward.  Jewish and Israeli terrorists are merely “militants” and the Jewish Defense League operates openly, despite U.S., Canadian and French anti-terror laws.

Palestinian violence (usually legal under international law) should be called “resistance” because their land and resources continue to be taken illegally and they have been deprived of self-determination.  Israel’s control of the media has made “Palestinian” virtually synonymous with “terrorism” despite its vastly greater terrorism inflicted on Palestinians.

Israel’s definition of “terrorism” has come to have global consequences. Like a parasite that has come to occupy the brain of a host, Israel has been able to infect the west with the belief that countries that challenge Israel’s regional hegemony threaten the safety of the west.

Investigators have found that some of the benefactors of Israel’s illegal settlements (such as the Koret, Fairbrook and Irving Moskowitz foundations) are collectively responsible for much of the media’s Islamophobic racism that has come to characterize the west’s attitude toward Muslims. The political benefit to Israel of Muslim demonization is incalculable; the term “terrorist” has come to be defined popularly — with what should be unacceptable racism — as only Muslim violence. Christian and Jewish terrorists are only described as such if there is a link to Muslims, otherwise, they may be  “mentally ill”.  The common perception that “terrorism” is Muslim indicates the impact of that definition, because studies of violence in the U.S. and Europe have repeatedly shown that Muslims are rarely responsible for violent crimes.

Israel’s claim to terrorist victimhood must be understood for what it is: a self-serving ploy to continue its theft of Palestinian resources and its destruction of Palestinian lives.  The impact of anti-Muslim racism will be increasingly catastrophic as long as Israel and its supporters are allowed to influence western media and governments.

Karin Brothers is a freelance writer

“Get Money out of Politics”: DNC Emails Reveal a Corrupt and Unreformable Party and System

By Gloria La Riva, July 27 2016

Amid a new scandal Debbie Wasserman Schultz was left no alternative but to step down from her role as the Chairwoman to the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, in seeking to sabotage Bernie Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton for the nomination.

Jill, not Hill! Activists in Philadelphia Shift Their Support to Green Party Candidate Jill Stein

By Stephen Lendman, July 27 2016

Activists in Philadelphia’s downtown plaza chanted “Jill, not Hill.” Jill Stein, presumptive Green Party presidential nominee, a longtime physician/activist, a true populist, wanting her professional skills used to heal a sick nation. It desperately needs what she can provide, media-supported corrupted duopoly power denying her the chance to become president by virtually ignoring her candidacy, opposing what she stands for.

Palestine: Both Trump and Clinton Would Approve Illegal Annexations as Demanded by the US-Israel Lobby

By Anthony Bellchambers, July 27 2016

Hugely increased arms shipments and loans would be the policy of the new White House for a US­-armed Israel to dominate the Middle East on behalf of America Whoever is elected US president next November, whether Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton, they will likely have the advantage of hundreds of millions of dollars in casino funds plus the power of the AIPAC lobby in Washington and the CFI lobby and BICOM in London ­ all being either key players or major factors in an international movement to legalise the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

NSA Whistleblower: Not So Fast On Claims Russia Behind Hillary Clinton Email Hack

By Washington’s Blog, July 27 2016

The mainstream media alleges that Russia was behind the hack of Hillary Clinton’s emails. The media is parading out the usual suspects alleged experts to back up this claim. Washington’s Blog asked the highest-level NSA whistleblower in history, William Binney the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”) – what he thinks of such claims.

“Two for the Price of One”: Democrats Nominate Clinton Crime Family for a Second Co-Presidency

By Stephen Lendman, July 27 2016

Bill Clinton once bragged about electing him president meant getting “two for the price of one.” Here we go again. Exposed electoral rigging along with unelected party insider super-delegates handed the Clinton crime family another chance for the nation’s highest office.

Activists in Philadelphia’s downtown plaza chanted “Jill, not Hill.”

Jill Stein, presumptive Green Party presidential nominee, a longtime physician/activist, a true populist, wanting her professional skills used to heal a sick nation.

It desperately needs what she can provide, media-supported corrupted duopoly power denying her the chance to become president by virtually ignoring her candidacy, opposing what she stands for.

She remains redoubtable and heroic, her progressive agenda what the world needs now, genuinely supporting:

• world peace and disarmament;

• democratic values;

• the inviolability of rule of law principles;

• universal healthcare and education as fundamental human rights;

• living wages for all working Americans;

• green, clean energy;

• popular interests served over monied ones;

• electoral reform free from today’s money-controlled process; along with

• real social justice and revolutionary change.

Seeking support in Philadelphia, she accurately accused Clinton of “backstabbing” Sanders by now exposed electoral rigging, urging his supporters to back her, saying “(m)y campaign is here.”

She’s an advocate for progressive change. Perhaps “Never Hillary” activists will give her enough votes to prevent a 2nd Clinton co-presidency – the top political priority above all others.

Her revolutionary spirit is real. Her message is “Americans deserve real solutions for the economic, social and environmental crises we face. But the broken political system is only making things worse.”

“It’s time to build a people’s movement to end unemployment and poverty; avert climate catastrophe; build a sustainable, just economy; and recognize the dignity and human rights of every person.”

“The power to create this new world is not in our hopes; it’s not in our dreams – it’s in our hands.”

Jill is a longtime physician, a mother, activist and organizer, a pioneer advocate for environmental health, a promoter of healthy communities, a fighter for peace, equity and justice so desperately needed.

Imagine America led by someone with her dedication for people over profits, assuring enforcement of human and civil rights, a distinguished woman of principle and honor – polar opposite duopoly choices.

I’m proud to support an eminently qualified candidate for president, a dedicated woman, saying “(w)e can build a better future together” and meaning it.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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

Offshore protections allow those involved to exploit natural resources, while evading taxes and dodge prosecution for corruption and money laundering.

Bill Clinton once bragged about electing him president meant getting “two for the price of one.”

Here we go again. Exposed electoral rigging along with unelected party insider super-delegates handed the Clinton crime family another chance for the nation’s highest office.

Will November electoral rigging assure it, letting both legally challenged Clintons lead America – perhaps into the abyss if occurs?

Sanders capped his sellout to everything he campaigned against, urging Hillary be nominated by acclamation. In disgust, over 500 of his delegates walked out.

He transformed himself into Hillary’s puppet, urging his followers to betray their principles –  selling out to wealth and power like all the rest.

All-out activism against a corrupted system is crucial.

The alternative is a nation more unsafe and unfit to live in than ever, Wall Street and war-profiteers more greatly empowered, and the unthinkable risk of WW III.

That’s what “two for the price of one” emerging triumphant in November means. Defeating the Clinton crime family is vital.

The unacceptable danger of a 2nd Clinton crime family presidency is explained by Hillary once saying “(w)hat do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life” – code language for endless wars of aggression, benefitting privileged Americans exclusively, no matter the cost to humanity.

Straightaway post-9/11, she urged waging war on terror – a pretext for forcefully transforming all sovereign independent nations into US vassal states.

She threatened Iran with total “obliterat(ion) (if they) consider(ed) launching an attack on Israel…”

As me-first lady, she supported genocidal sanctions on Iraq, killing 5,000 children aged five or under monthly. She praised George Bush’s Islamophobia, fully supporting his agenda.

She favors nuclear weapons use, calling them peacekeeping deterrents. As secretary of state, she orchestrated war on Libya and Syria, raping and destroying both countries.

US foreign policy under her leadership ousted democratically elected Honduran and Paraguayan leaders. Following Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, she was involved in raping the country for profit along with rigging its election, installing a US puppet to run things.

The Clinton Foundation is a money-laundering racket masquerading as a charitable NGO – selling influence to special interests in return for millions of dollars in contributions.

It’s hard imagining a more despicable choice for president than Killary – partnered with husband Bill for a second time around to run the country into the ground – likely taking planet earth with it this time if elected in November.

Top priority is preventing their return to the White House. Humanity’s fate hangs in the balance.

They’re a duo only Wall Street, war-profiteers and other corporate predators could love, a scourge for everyone else.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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

“Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.” -William J. Perry, U.S. Sec. Of Defense (1994-97)

Perry has been an inside player in the business of nuclear weapons for over 60 years and his book, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink,” is a sober read. It is also a powerful counterpoint to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) current European strategy that envisions nuclear weapons as a deterrent to war: “Their [nuclear weapons] role is to prevent major war, not to wage wars,” argues the Alliance’s magazine, NATO Review.

But, as Perry points out, it is only by chance that the world has avoided a nuclear war—sometimes by nothing more than dumb luck—and, rather than enhancing our security, nukes “now endanger it.”

The 1962 Cuban missile crisis is generally represented as a dangerous standoff resolved by sober diplomacy. In fact, it was a single man—Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov—who countermanded orders to launch a nuclear torpedo at an American destroyer that could have set off a full-scale nuclear exchange between the USSR and the U.S.

There were numerous other incidents that brought the world to the brink. On a quiet morning in November 1979, a NORAD computer reported a full-scale Russian sneak attack with land and sea-based missiles, which led to scrambling U.S. bombers and alerting U.S. missile silos to prepare to launch. There was no attack, just an errant test tape.

Lest anyone think the Nov. 9 incident was an anomaly, a little more than six months later NORAD computers announced that Soviet submarines had launched 220 missiles at the U.S.—this time the cause was a defective chip that cost 49 cents—again resulting in scrambling interceptors and putting the silos on alert.

But don’t these examples prove that accidental nuclear war is unlikely? That conclusion is a dangerous illusion, argues Perry, because the price of being mistaken is so high and because the world is a more dangerous place than it was in 1980.

It is 71 years since atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and humanity’s memory of those events has dimmed. But even were the entire world to read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, it would have little idea of what we face today.

The bombs that obliterated those cities were tiny by today’s standards, and comparing “Fat Man” and “Little Boy”—the incongruous names of the weapons that leveled both cities—to modern weapons stretches any analogy beyond the breaking point. If the Hiroshima bomb represented approximately 27 freight cars filled with TNT, a one-megaton warhead would require a train 300 miles long.

Each Russian RS-20V Voevoda intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) packs 10 megatons.

What has made today’s world more dangerous, however, is not just advances in the destructive power of nuclear weapons, but a series of actions by the last three U.S. administrations.

First was the decision by President Bill Clinton to abrogate a 1990 agreement with the Soviet Union not to push NATO further east after the reunification of Germany or to recruit former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact.

NATO has also reneged on a 1997 pledge not to install “permanent” and “significant” military forces in former Warsaw Pact countries. This month NATO decided to deploy four battalions on, or near, the Russian border, arguing that since the units will be rotated they are not “permanent” and are not large enough to be “significant.” It is a linguistic slight of hand that does not amuse Moscow.

Second was the 1999 U.S.-NATO intervention in the Yugoslav civil war and the forcible dismemberment of Serbia. It is somewhat ironic that Russia is currently accused of using force to “redraw borders in Europe” by annexing the Crimea, which is exactly what NATO did to create Kosovo. The U.S. subsequently built Camp Bond Steel, Washington’s largest base in the Balkans.

Third was President George W, Bush’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the decision by the Obama administration to deploy anti-missile systems in Romania and Poland, as well as Japan and South Korea.

Last is the decision by the White House to spend upwards of $1 trillion upgrading its nuclear weapons arsenal, which includes building bombs with smaller yields, a move that many critics argue blurs the line between conventional and nuclear weapons.

The Yugoslav War and NATO’s move east convinced Moscow that the Alliance was surrounding Russia with potential adversaries, and the deployment of anti-missile systems (ABM)—supposedly aimed at Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons—was seen as a threat to the Russian’s nuclear missile force.

One immediate effect of ABMs was to chill the possibility of further cuts in the number of nuclear weapons. When Obama proposed another round of warhead reductions, the Russians turned it down cold, citing the anti-missile systems as the reason. “How can we take seriously this idea about cuts in strategic nuclear potential while the United States is developing its capabilities to intercept Russian missiles?” asked Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin.

When the U.S. helped engineer the 2014 coup against the pro-Russian government in Ukraine, it ignited the current crisis that has led to several dangerous incidents between Russian and NATO forces—at last count, according to the European Leadership Network, more than 60. Several large war games were also held on Moscow’s borders. Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachevwent so far as to accuse NATO of “preparations for switching from a cold war to a hot war.”

In response, the Russians have also held war games involving up to 80,000 troops.

It is unlikely that NATO intends to attack Russia, but the power differential between the U.S. and Russia is so great—a “colossal asymmetry,” Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told the Financial Times—that the Russians have abandoned their “no first use” of nuclear weapons pledge.

It the lack of clear lines that make the current situation so fraught with danger. While the Russians have said they would consider using small, tactical nukes if “the very existence of the state” was threatened by an attack, NATO is being deliberately opaque about its possible tripwires. According to NATO Review, nuclear “exercises should involve not only nuclear weapons states…but other non-nuclear allies,” and “to put the burden of the doubt on potential adversaries, exercises should not point at any specific nuclear thresholds.”

In short, keep the Russians guessing. The immediate problem with such a strategy is: what if Moscow guesses wrong?

That won’t be hard to do. The U.S. is developing a long-range cruise missile—as are the Russians—that can be armed with conventional or nuclear warheads. But how will an adversary know which is which? And given the old rule in nuclear warfare—use ‘em, or lose ‘em—uncertainty is the last thing one wants to engender in a nuclear-armed foe.

Indeed, the idea of no “specific nuclear thresholds” is one of the most extraordinarily dangerous and destabilizing concepts to come along since the invention of nuclear weapons.

There is no evidence that Russia contemplates an attack on the Baltic states or countries like Poland, and, given the enormous power of the U.S., such an undertaking would court national suicide.

Moscow’s “aggression” against Georgia and Ukraine was provoked. Georgia attacked Russia, not vice versa, and the Ukraine coup torpedoed a peace deal negotiated by the European Union, the U.S., and Russia. Imagine Washington’s view of a Moscow-supported coup in Mexico, followed by an influx of Russian weapons and trainers.

In a memorandum to the recent NATO meetings in Warsaw, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity argued “There is not one scintilla of evidence of any Russian plan to annex Crimea before the coup in Kiev and coup leaders began talking about joining NATO. If senior NATO leaders continue to be unable or unwilling to distinguish between cause and effect, increasing tension is inevitable with potentially disastrous results.”

The organization of former intelligence analysts also sharply condemned the NATO war games. “We shake our heads in disbelief when we see Western leaders seemingly oblivious to what it means to the Russians to witness exercises on a scale not seen since Hitler’s army launched ‘Unternehumen Barbarossa’ 75 years ago, leaving 25 million Soviet citizens dead.”

While the NATO meetings in Warsaw agreed to continue economic sanctions aimed at Russia for another six months and to station four battalions of troops in Poland and the Baltic states— separate U.S. forces will be deployed in Bulgaria and Poland —there was an undercurrent of dissent. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called for deescalating the tensions with Russia and for considering Russian President Vladimir Putin a partner not an enemy.

Greece was not alone. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeler called NATO maneuvers on the Russian border “warmongering” and “saber rattling.” French President Francois Hollande said Putin should be considered a “partner,” not a “threat,” and France tried to reduce the number of troops being deployed in the Baltic and Poland. Italy has been increasingly critical of the sanctions.

Rather than recognizing the growing discomfort of a number of NATO allies and that beefing up forces on Russia’s borders might be destabilizing, U.S. Sec. of State John Kerry recently inked defense agreements with Georgia and Ukraine.

After disappearing from the radar for several decades, nukes are back, and the decision to modernize the U.S. arsenal will almost certainly kick off a nuclear arms race with Russia and China. Russia is already replacing its current ICBM force with the more powerful and long range “Sarmat” ICBM, and China is loading its ICBM with multiple warheads.

Add to this volatile mixture military maneuvers and a deliberately opaque policy in regards to the use of nuclear weapons, and it is no wonder that Perry thinks that the chances of some catastrophe is a growing possibility.

Amid a new scandal Debbie Wasserman Schultz was left no alternative but to step down from her role as the Chairwoman to the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, in seeking to sabotage Bernie Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democrat’s presidential nomination. 

Just days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks released some 20,000 emails between top DNC officials. These emails show clearly that functionaries of the DNC were actively supporting the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, while trying to destroy that of Bernie Sanders, despite publicly claiming to be neutral in the primaries. Supporters of Sanders were justifiably outraged at the revelations, which confirmed what Sanders himself had been saying for months.

Even more telling, the leaked emails illuminate in great detail how political favors are bought and sold, not as an exception but on a routine basis, and how major donors are rewarded with access to powerful government officials. This is equally if not even more true for the Republican party.

In reporting on the rewarding of big donors, a New York Times article reported: “The emails capture a world where seating charts are arranged with dollar totals in mind, where a White House celebration of gay pride is a thinly disguised occasion for rewarding wealthy donors and where physical proximity to the president is the most precious of currencies.”

As has long been the case, paid “proximity” to the president and other influential politicians regularly translates into economic advantage for the big donors. And campaign contributions are critical to election and re-election campaigns from city councils to legislatures to the White House.

Party for Socialism and Liberation presidential candidate Gloria La Riva, commented:

“These latest revelations show once again that our so-called ‘democratic’ political system is irredeemably corrupt, that big money – not the votes nor the interests of the people – is the decisive factor. It’s a system that cannot be reformed, but must be replaced with a new system, a socialist system where the great wealth created by working people is taken out of the hands of the banks, corporations and the super-rich.That is the way, the only way, that the popular demand ‘get money out of politics’ can actually be met.”

The mainstream media alleges that Russia was behind the hack of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The media is parading out the usual suspects alleged experts to back up this claim.

Washington’s Blog asked the highest-level NSA whistleblower in history, William Binney – the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”) – what he thinks of such claims:

Edward Snowden says the NSA could easily determine who hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails:

But mainstream media say it couldn’t:   http://www.businessinsider.com/dnc-hack-russian-government-2016-7

The mainstream media is also trumpeting the meme that Russia was behind the hack, because it wants to help Trump get elected. In other words, the media is trying to deflect how damaging the email leaks are to Clinton’s character by trying to somehow associate Trump with Putin. See e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/us/politics/kremlin-donald-trump-vladimir-putin.html

Who’s right?

Binney responded:

Snowden is right and the MSM is clueless. Here’s what I said to Ray McGovern and VIPS with a little humor at the end. [McGovern is a 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials. McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (“VIPS” for short).]

Ray, I am suspicious that they may have looked for known hacking code (used by Russians). And, I’m sure they were one probably of many to hack her stuff. But, does that mean that they checked to see if others also hacked in?

Further, do they have evidence that the Russians downloaded and later forwarded those emails to wikileaks? Seems to me that they need to answer those questions to be sure that their assertion is correct. Otherwise, HRC and her political activities are and I am sure have been prime targets for the Russians (as well as many others) but without intent of course.

I would add that we proposed to do a program that would monitor all activity on the world-wide NSA network back in 1991/92. We called it “Wellgrounded.” NSA did not want anyone (especially congress) to know what was going on inside NSA and therefore rejected that proposal. I have not read what Ed has said, but, I do know that every line of
code that goes across the network is logged in the network log. This is where a little software could scan, analyze and find the intruders initially and then compile all the code sent by them to determine the type of attack. This is what we wanted to do back in 1991/92.

The newest allegation tying the Clinton email hack to Russia seems to be all innuendo.

Binney explained to us:

 My problem is that they have not listed intruders or attempted intrusions to the DNC site.  I suspect that’s because they did a quick and dirty look for known attacks.

Of course, this brings up another question; if it’s a know attack, why did the DNC not have software to stop it?  You can tell from the network log who is going into a site.  I used that on networks that I had.  I looked to see who came into my LAN, where they went, how long they stayed and what they did while in my network.

Further, if you needed to, you could trace back approaches through other servers etc. Trace Route and Trace Watch are good examples of monitoring software that help do these things.  Others of course exist … probably the best are in NSA/GCHQ and the other Five Eyes countries.  But, these countries have no monopoly on smart people that could do similar detection software.

Question is do they want to fix the problems with existing protection software.  If the DNC and OPM are examples, then obviously, they don’t care to fix weakness probably because the want to use these weaknesses to their own advantage.

Why is this newsworthy?

Well, the mainstream narrative alleges that the Clinton emails are not important … and that it’s a conspiracy between Putin and Trump to make sure Trump – and not Clinton – is elected.

But there are other issues, as well …

For example, an allegation of hacking could literally lead to war.

So we should be skeptical of such serious and potentially far-reaching allegations – which may be true or may be false – unless and until they are proven.

Hugely increased arms shipments and loans would be the policy of the new White House for a US­-armed Israel to dominate the Middle East on behalf of America

Whoever is elected US president next November, whether Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton, they will likely have the advantage of hundreds of millions of dollars in casino funds plus the power of the AIPAC lobby in Washington and the CFI lobby and BICOM in London ­ all being either key players or major factors in an international movement to legalise the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

Upon completion of the land grab, the Netanyahu government would carry out a unilateral annexation of all of the Occupied Territories whilst contemporaneously expelling the 5 million indigenous Palestinians in a forced transfer from ancestral lands to new refugee camps in adjoining states.

This would signal the commencement of the ‘Greater Israel’ project: an illegal expansionist programme that extends from the Nile to the Euphrates in order to fulfil the Likud Zionist agenda for a nuclear hegemon that would be able to control not only the Middle East but, through its agents and government ministers embedded in the British Parliament and the US Congress, to dictate the global foreign defence and trade policy of NATO, NAFTA, Britain and the EU.

Both Trump and Clinton, in their individual bids to achieve the White House incumbency, are expected to promise unlimited support for the legalisation of the settlements and their annexation as they reject the establishment of a Palestinian state by deliberately rejecting the will of the United Nations in a gross violation of international law.

In direct opposition to the hard­-won democratic values for which so many allied forces died in two world wars, these self-­interested politicians and their backers intend to take the world back to a time of military domination in order to create a neo­-colonial, (nuclear) super state that will impose its will upon the political and economic direction of over half the world, and the disintegration of Europe.

But only if we, and the UN Security Council, are prepared to allow such a global catastrophe.

Secretary of State John Kerry says he raised the email hack of the Democratic National Committee with Russia’s top diplomat but stopped short of making any allegation about who might be responsible. 

Republicans were touted as the divided party this year.

It looks almost unified compared to dissension in Democrat ranks.  

Monday inside and outside Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center was raucous and unruly – anti-Clinton delegates and tens of thousands in the streets protesting against her.

If this keep up throughout the convention, she’ll be greater damaged goods than already – unable to unify a a deeply divided party.

What better strategy than to change the subject. What better target than Putin. He’s blamed for practically everything short of Philadelphia’s scorching heat.

A Romanian hacker with no connection to Russia, using the name Guccifer 2.0, hacked into a treasure trove of DNC emails, showing now defrocked former chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz rigged enough primaries and caucuses to assure Hillary’s nomination – handing the incriminating evidence to WikiLeaks for publication.

Hard as party bosses tried, it proved too great a scandal to conceal, throwing a king-sized spanner at Hillary’s already despicable record. It’s clear she was involved in the chicanery, perhaps responsible for orchestrating it.

How any intelligent voter can support her is beyond comprehension. So is why she’s not in prison doing hard time for multiple high crimes too serious to ignore.

The media support her anyway, concealing her despicable public record – knee-jerk Trump bashing instead featured, a daily onslaught combining facts with over-the-top fiction.

When in doubt or at any convenient time, blame Putin. Throughout his tenure as Russian president, no evidence suggests he interfered with the electoral process in any country – not America’s or any others.

Yet in virtual unison, the media blame him for hacking into DNC emails, collaborating with WikiLeaks for publication – covertly aiding the Trump campaign.

Headlines practically scream Putin for Trump. Cable television channels accuse him despite no evidence suggesting it. Even the FBI suspects his involvement.

Obama officials blame him. Hillary accused him through her campaign manager Robby Mook, saying:

“What is disturbing to us is that experts (sic) are telling us that Russians broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are now releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump.”

“I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention here and that’s disturbing.”

 

The accusation is as baseless as others claiming nonexistent “Russian aggression.” Yet it’s reported repeatedly as fact.

Big Lies have a life of their own, manipulating most people to believe what’s polar opposite truth – the essence of how propaganda works.

Trump slammed the notion of Russia aiding his campaign, saying Clinton’s team “will say anything to be able to win.”

“The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails, which never should have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

“I mean this is time and time again, lie after lie…It’s disgusting…so phony.”

At the Asean summit in Vientiane, Laos, Sergey Lavrov responded to a reporter’s question on the baseless allegation, saying

“I don’t want to use four-letter words.”

Democrat party bosses, including Clinton, were caught red-handed rigging the electoral process against Sanders. Finger-pointing elsewhere won’t change reality.

Wealth, power and privileged interests run America – for their own self-interest at the expense of most others.

Leaked DNC emails provide damning evidence of sham democracy – in name only like it’s always been from the republic’s inception.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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

The following article from Australia is a sharp rebuke of Australian Prime Minister Malcolm B. Turnbull by an Aborigine candidate of the Australian Senate that rightly criticizes his government for doing nothing to stop the torture and widespread abuse of children and juveniles at the Don Dale Detention Centre that was exposed by investigative journalist Caro Meldrum-Hanna on Australian national television on July 25, 2016. The indigenous or Aborigine Australian community repeatedly demanded that the Australian government take legal action. Reports about Aborigine or First Nation children and juveniles, which are the bulk of the detention wards in the Northern Territory, being brutalized were frequently made without meaningful consequences.

Leaks from Don Dale Detention Centre show children being forcefully stripped naked, hog tied like cattle, carried by the neck, knocked down, and thrown by facility staff. Prison guards systematically de-humanized and humiliated children and juveniles with insults, beatings, and gassing in what amounts to nothing short of unjust abuse of authority and criminal acts. Prior to the leaked footage aired by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners program that explicitly shows children and juveniles being abused and tortured by guards, current and past Australian governments were well aware of what was happening at the youth detention centre for approximately two  to five years. These governments, however, refused to take any action. Only when the broader general public became aware of the horrific crimes at Don Dale Dentention Centre did the Australian government feign outrage and pledge to take action by saying that it would establish a royal commission of inquiry. This is utter hypocrisy and dishonesty on the part of the federal government of Australia, which has been motivated by the self-interest of saving face.

Along with the long history of the Australian state to abuse vulnerable peoples, the racist attitudes that serve to justify the marginalization of the Aborigine of Australia are deeply entrenched in Australian society and have enabled what has happened in Don Dale Detention Centre. The victims were not seen or respected as being equals. Instead the victims were viewed as lesser people by virtue of their socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Essentially they were treated as non-people that could be abused with impunity. This is why Don Dale Detention Centre should be viewed as nothing short of being Australia’s own Abu Ghraib. The Iraqis that were tortured by the US military in Abu Ghraib were also viewed as non-people by the US personnel stationed there, which for the US perpetrators excused the violation of the rights of their Iraqi victims. Moreover, the comparison between Abu Ghraib and Don Dale is especially fitting since many of the wards at Don Dale are children and juveniles from Australian indigenous communities, which are a dispossessed people that have been driven off their ancestral lands by the colonial process that established Australia.

 Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Asia-Pacific Research Editor, 26 July 2016.

 Dylan Voller, a thirteen-year old boy, being strangled at  Don Dale Detention Centre.

 Dylan, age seventeen, is seen above and below being tied to a chair in adult prison.

Malcolm Turnbull has called for a Royal Commission after seeing on ABC’s Four Corners the brutality that has been happening under both his government and the previous Labor government.

He said this evidence had not been brought forth at previous inquiries. Not good enough Turnbull!

People have been screaming for the past five years about the Don Dale detention centre and your government and the Labor government have chosen to ignore this pure evil. You not only ignored it, you let it fester.

You either knew and thus are complicit, or you did not know and are simply not fit to govern. You cannot get out of this one with a slippery smile, Turnbull.

A Royal Commission? What a joke! You have all the evidence you need; it shocked a whole nation. Predominantly First Nations children are being brutalised by a system you let continue in your pretence of ignorance.

The evidence is there. Sack everyone in Corrective Services in the Northern Territory. Those who did not actually do anything would have known of these practices and allowed it to happen.

Sack the NT government and while you are at it, sweep the federal parliament of the rubbish currently holding seats of power who sat by and watched while our kids were being tortured.

This is an international disgrace and this country should be dragged before the United Nations and stripped of its powers. The Australian government had its racist intervention into the NT so maybe its time for an international intervention into Australia?

Put simply the Coalition and Labor have lost the ability to govern.

Ken Canning is a First Nations activist who was a Senate candidate for the Socialist Alliance in the July 2 elections.

To read a past report about abuse at Don Dale Detention Centre please click here. 

A Civil War Looming in Israel?

By Adeyinka Makinde, July 26 2016

“We are on the verge of an uprising of hatred, racism, darkness and upcoming killings and assassination based on the overwhelming internal hatred here. We hear hatred at every turn, whether it is directed toward women by military rabbis, by Ashkenazi Jews against Sephardi Jews and Mizrahi Jews against Ashkenazis. This way the seeds of the uprising of hatred are planted, which will lead to a civil war. This hatred is being carried out by the full support and cover of those in charge.” – Isaac Herzog, leader of the opposition Zionist Union coalition in the Israeli Knesset.

The Man behind the Failed Coup in Turkey? US Army General John F. Campbell. Report

By Global Research News, July 26 2016

According to the conservative English language newspaper Yeni Savak,  ”a former U.S. commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan, was the organizer of the July 15 military coup attempt in Turkey”.

Two Faces of Emmett Till: When Black Lives Really Didn’t Matter. Today White Racism is Alive in America

By Gary Kohls, July 26 2016

61 years ago  (August 28, 1955), an innocent 14 year old black youth, Emmett Till, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by an angry vigilante mob of white racists in Money, Mississippi. 96 years ago last month (June 15, 1920), three innocent black men were tortured and murdered by an angry vigilante mob of white racists in Duluth, Minnesota. A couple of days ago ex-Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, and Louisiana Republican Party member David Duke, announced his candidacy for the US Senate, crediting the political statements and announced agenda of Donald Trump and, presumably, the platform of the Republican Party.

Another US Foreign Policy Triumph: Syrian “Moderate Rebels” Behead Innocent Child

By Steven MacMillan, July 26 2016

The world was shocked this week after a horrific video surfaced showing a US-backed rebel group in Syria beheading a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, in yet another example of how the Syrian rebels are the complete antithesis of moderate. Psychopathic members of the Nour al-Din al-Zenki group – which was formed in late 2011 and operates around the city of Aleppo – carried out the atrocity. In a ridiculous statement, the leaders of the al-Zenki group called the atrocity a “mistake” – how anyone can characterize hacking a child’s head off with a knife a “mistake” is beyond me.

The New York Times: Hillary’s Press Agent

By Stephen Lendman, July 26 2016

Throughout the political season, the NYT represented the Clinton campaign, acting as a pseudo-official mouthpiece, turning journalism into PR promotion.  Branding four days as “Hillary’s Convention,” The Times continues promoting an agenda threatening world peace, supporting monied interests over popular ones, and tyranny masquerading as democracy.

The Northern Territory has the highest rate of youth detention in the country, six times the national average. Of those detained in the juvenile justice system 97% are Aboriginal youth.

There have been a number of reports and investigations in the past two years into the treatment of Aboriginal youth in custody. They show that by deliberate design and policy Aboriginal youth are treated in a barbarous, inhumane and illegal way.

Multiple incidents have been reported of handcuffing, gassing, shackling, spit hooding and solitary confinement for 22 out of 24 hours, lasting from 7 to 17 days, and being forced to eat their meals with their hands.

The Human Rights Law Centre’s senior lawyer, Ruth Barson, said the recent case of a 17-year-old boy being hooded and strapped to a chair for close to two hours suggests there is a pattern of mistreating young people in the Northern Territory’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre.

“It is deeply concerning that yet another case of a child having their human rights violated has emerged,” she said. “The Northern Territory must once and for all commit to treating children in detention humanely. These types of punitive practices must end.”

In January last year a review of the Northern Territory Youth Justice system conducted by Michael Vita found there was a “lack of understanding and coordination of how risk assessment, case management, classification, pro-social modelling and the incentive scheme should work together to provide an environment that is conducive to stability, harmony, safety and security”.

He found the juvenile detention system’s management is incompetent, staff is under trained, operational practices are haphazard and overly-punitive and there have been cover-ups when things go wrong. The system is also doing nothing to rehabilitate the young people it locks up.

Another report by NT children’s Commissioner Howard Bath looked into the practices occurring at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre found evidence of inappropriate reactions from staff employed in these facilities. An example was the tear gassing of six teenagers while they were sitting in their cells playing cards. The report also made a list of recommendations including addressing the lack of accountability, training of employees and improving the facilities.

Late last year the Human Rights Law Centre sent a request to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture for intervention, with a view to ensuring the NT government comply with its international human rights law obligations.

Barson said: “You have to question whether the NT government is taking its obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child seriously.

“If it’s genuinely committed to the wellbeing of vulnerable children in its care, it needs to seriously rethink the way it’s treating them. It is clear that the Northern Territory’s youth justice system needs a thorough overhaul.”

Amnesty International Julian Cleary said: “Young people are fundamentally different to adults and must be treated in a way that prioritises their best interests.

“Evidence shows that the best way to keep our community safe in the long run is to focus on the rehabilitation and education of children. The Northern Territory’s current youth justice system is failing these children and the wider community.”

In November the NT Government announced that all children detained in Alice Springs Youth Detention Centre would be transferred to Darwin. This means children as young as 10 would be taken thousands of kilometres away from their families and communities.

In 2014, all children detained in Darwin were moved from the former Don Dale Youth Detention Centre to the Berrimah adult prison, which has since been renamed Don Dale.

Barson said: “We have received reports that children are being locked down for up to 15 hours per day in prison cells that have no air conditioning, and that are reaching temperatures of 35 degrees Celcius. A decommissioned, run-down, adult prison is clearly not an appropriate facility for children.”

The unjust treatment of Aboriginal youth in custody is not accidental, but a by-product of the continued systematic racism towards Indigenous Australians. The punitive and inhumane policies against Aboriginal children is a disgrace and a blight on the entire Australian legal system. It has to end immediately.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. As a former World Bank staff member, he has thirty years of global experience in the fields environment and water resources; Koenig has earned several publications on various news websites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; he is also co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

In an exclusive interview with Khamenei.ir, Mr. Koenig enlightens us on his experience with the World Bank  and the IMF, plus his own perspective on US domination over the global economy.

The following is part one of the interview:

Based on years of working as a staff in the World Bank, does the organization help poor countries to develop?

PK: The World Bank was always dominated by the United States, but in its earlier years and up to the 1980’s – the time when neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus – started their merciless ascent, the World Bank financed and carried out some real ‘grass-roots’ projects, i.e. in rural areas, expanding drinking water and sanitation systems, bringing drinking water to the villages, thereby increasing productivity for local communities, increasing school attendance especially for girls, and reducing intestinal and diarrheal diseases, thereby reducing child mortality and morbidity. In the health sector rural health centers were built; and small-holder agriculture was promoted and funded – all for the benefit of the marginalized rural population. – Of course, the hidden agenda was that these communities would support the central government that provided them with these basic needs services.

These times of social improvement projects have long since gone. Starting in the 1980’s so-called ‘structural adjustment’ loans would gradually replace the poverty alleviation targeted projects described before. The proportions of ‘structural adjustment’ (SA) type loans – I call them ‘blank checks’ – to governments have rapidly increased throughout the nineties.

Today these ‘blank checks’ go under different euphemisms of SAs (which has become a bad term even in the mainstream media – MSM). They are called, ‘sector loans’, ‘program loans, ‘budget support’ – whatever suits the purpose – all ‘blank checks’ with the same objective: enslaving the borrowing countries with debt. And that even more so, when the country disposes of natural resources that the West covets to maintain its oligarchy’s luxury way of life – and, not to forget – to feed the armament industry.

But this World Bank and IMF ‘official’ indebting does more harm than just increasing the national debt from these Bretton Woods Institutions. These international financial institutions’ loans represent a green light for private banking to lend even more money to countries with corrupt leaders. Thus the leverage effect of WB / IMF lending is a multiple of their own lending. Here the question ought to be asked – who is worse, the corruptor or the corruptee? – In my opinion, the one who scrupulously offers money or goods to vulnerable leaders – often leaders the west has put in place as puppets – bears the bulk of the blame.

After all, that’s how the west, Europe in particular, has enslaved, plundered and raped Asia, Africa and Latin America for centuries. So, what the World Bank does today is but a modern continuation of colonialism disguised as development assistance.

Today, SA type blank checks account for nearly 90% of the World Bank’s lending portfolio. They have become hardly anything else than instruments to buy corrupt government officials with unaccounted for blank checks – loans or credits that increase national debt and increase dependence on the western predatory corporate and finance system. Its neocolonialism at its best – nothing to do with ‘development of poor countries’. To the contrary – its debt-dependence for easy exploitation.

How does the international monetary system help the United States to keep its dominance over the global economy?

PK: The current US dollar-based western fiat monetary system was specifically designed by the US to dominate the global economy. The Euro was also created by the US, modeled after the dollar, as a fiat currency (Fiat money has no backing what-so-ever; it is money with a value established by [government] decree and can be produced at will with a mouse click by private banks, as debt).

Perhaps we have to be reminded at this point, that neither the European Union (EU) or the Euro are products of Europe; they are purely constructs of the United States; ideas fostered and developed during and especially after WWII. Churchill, in his famous ‘Speech to the academic youth’ held at the University of Zurich in 1946, said: “There is a remedy which … would in a few years make all Europe … free and … happy. It is to re-create the European family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe.” He was then as Cameron is today a mouthpiece for the United States, expressing Washington’s ideas as a Trojan horse in Europe.

In 1944 Washington created the so-called Bretton Woods Institutions, the World Bank and the IMF. The WB was to administer the Marshall Plan funds – US$ 13 billion (in today’s terms about US$ 130 billion) from the US side and for this purpose newly created Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau – German Bank for Reconstruction and Development – on the German side. The Marshall Plan funds were the first common development funds for Europe.

The IMF was to ‘regulate’ the convertible currencies of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, then tied to the US-dollar via the gold-standard established by the IMF at the order of the FED, i.e. US$ 35 per troy-ounce of gold. In fact, the IMF was to watch over adherence to the gold standard to strengthen the link or dependence of other currencies to the dollar.

When in 1971 Nixon abandoned the ‘gold standard’ – the US dollar became de facto the reference currency for the world, meaning the main reserve currency for nations around the globe. This was a smart but Machiavellian move giving the FED basically unlimited power to print dollars as they pleased. Simultaneously, Father Busch (George H. W.), a friend of the House of Saud, made sure that Saudi Arabia remained at the head of OPEC and would not allow hydrocarbons to be traded in other currencies than the US dollar. As compensation the US would militarily protect Saudi Arabia – which was followed by the implantation of several military bases.

As a result of all hydrocarbons being traded in US-dollars, the demand for US-dollars increased further, almost exponentially – leaving virtually unlimited space to produce dollars as required for US-instigated wars and conflicts, for funding lie- and slander propaganda and for financing proxy wars around the globe. That every dollar created meant new US debt was irrelevant for at least two reasons, (i) the entire world would carry the debt, as their reserve coffers were filled with dollars, and (ii) the US debt was never meant to be paid back. As Alan Greenspan, former chief of the FED once answered a journalist’s question on how the US was ever able to repay their debt – Greenspan said, ‘we never will pay our debt, since we can just print new money’. This confirms the pyramid principle of the dollar based monetary system: You create dollars as debt which bears interest which you pay by new debt.

One of the most flagrant of such cases is Greece, now strangled into misery by a fraudulent monetary system. Other fraudulent uses of the dollar denominated pyramid or ‘Ponzi’ scheme, are ‘sanctions’ dished out on countries that do not submit to the tyrannical dominance of the empire, or the confiscation of assets abroad, the blockage of foreign currency accounts abroad – and-so-on. All this is possible, because the world is based on the fraudulent dollar which dominates all international trade. With these hundreds of trillions of dollars floating the globe, it is of course possible to manipulate any currency, including gold. This is best done through the Basle-based BIS (Bank for International Settlement), which is entirely private, dominated by Rothschild and Co, as is the FED, also entirely privately owned.

The good news is that this is changing rapidly. BREXIT is hope for change, not only for the UK and Europe, but for the world at large. BREXIT is a conscious decision of a majority of UK citizens that they have enough of the corrupt monetary and economic system that reigns the world and of which the European Union is a mere puppet. According to different polls, a considerable majority of the people throughout Europe, regardless of the member countries they belong to, are fed-up with the EU, its Euro monetary policy and its impositions of laws and regulations which are gradually but surely depriving European nations of their sovereignty.

Of course Washington is surprised and don’t like this new BREXIT revelation one bit. Obama is sending Kerry to talk to Cameron on how to avoid or prevent BREXIT. Kerry has already said to the press, there are many ways of avoiding or circumventing the UK leaving the EU. An obvious one is that the referendum is not binding and has to be approved by the British Parliament – which could decide that BREXIT is not good for the UK and not good for Europe. I believe, such a decision could cause a revolt in Britain. A subtler way would be extending the ‘exit negotiations’ for the allowed 24 months (or more by mutual agreement), time enough for launching a new referendum for which according to BBC already 2.3 million signatures have been collected.

Whatever may happen – and I don’t doubt one bit in Washington’s capability to strong-arm a country or an entire people into doing what Washington wants – a signal has been set; a signal that says ‘yes we can’ to others who are weary of external domination. People are also aware of the Washington – Brussels incited 2007 / 2008 – and counting – crisis in Europe, to safe the dollar from declining against the Euro and being gradually replaced by the Euro as world reserve currency. Suffocating Greece, the denominated culprit for its ‘high’ debt of at that time about 109% of GDP, was a mere farce, an outrageous manipulation of the truth. Greece, a strategically located Mediterranean European NATO country, with barely 2% of the Eurozone’s GDP, had a debt ratio totally manageable without outside interference. Accusing it for the EU crisis was and still is an outright lie. The EU has demonstrated that it has no sense of solidarity towards fellow member countries, and therefore is not really a ‘union’, but rather a predatory association of a bunch of corporate-finance dominated nations. Such a ‘union’ is by definition not sustainable – and less so its common currency the euro. Through the infamous troika (ECB, EC and IMF), the finance and corporate elite can do whatever they want with Europe. Especially targeted are the strategic southern countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. – But BREXIT was a wakeup call. Awareness is growing. A momentum, I trust, that cannot be stopped.

And there is more good news. Dollar-denominated reserves around the world, close to 90% about 20 years ago, have dropped to below 60% today, fluctuating, of course, depending on the manipulated value of the dollar. When it drops to below 50%, a more rapid shift by reserves into other currencies, including the Chinese Yuan, may take place. The Yuan is now formally admitted as one of the five IMF reserve currencies making up the basket of currencies determining the value of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR).

In addition, a couple of years ago China and Russia have abandoned the western banking ‘order’ of trading hydrocarbons in US dollars, using their own currencies. Other SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) countries have joined this trend. Russia and China have also largely detached themselves from the US-dollar monetary and international transfer system, SWIFT, using their own, the China International Payment System – CIPS .

When the world demand for dollars falls below a critical point around the globe, a trend that has started, then the US-dollar system and by extension the US economy is truly on the ropes.

Part 2 of the Interview

http://english.khamenei.ir/news/4024/Economy-of-Resistance-liberates-Iran-from-sanctions-former Jul 19, 2016

The ‘Economy of Resistance’, an economy mainly based on self-reliance is an excellent idea. Not only does it help liberate Iran from the foreign imposed sanctions, but it also helps propel own domestic capacities, create labor, added value in the country and ultimately Iran may develop exports far above what they would be in a globalized western and WTO (World Trade Organization) controlled world trade.

Whistle-blowers reporting the corruption inside the World Bank have been under pressure for their efforts. How can we believe the Panama Papers “leaks”?

PK: In short, the Panama Papers are a farce, if there ever was one. They are blown out of proportion by western media to point accusing fingers on politicians who are disliked by Washington, to slander them – this is precisely what these ‘leaked’ papers were supposed to do. They were largely successful in meeting their objective.

The Papers were released by the International Coalition of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), an organization in the hands of western secret services. This is revealed by looking at the parent organization of ICIJ, the Center for Public Integrity (CFPI) which is funded by such eminent establishment figures like the Rockefellers, Carnegie Foundations, the George Soros Foundation, as well as Paul Volker, former chairman of the FED and many other prominent figures from the world of corporate finance with links to the CIA, NSA, Mossad and others. Many of the sponsors are members of such semi-secret organizations as the Trilateral Commission, The Bilderberger Society and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

The Law firm, Mossack Fonseca, which apparently released the so-called Panama Papers to the ICIJ, containing information of off-shore holdings by prominent political figures, may or may not be part of the deal. They claim the information was stolen. In any case, from first sight it is obvious that the powerful western elite who concocted this ‘leak’ had a very specific purpose, namely to mud-racking and slandering politicians disliked by Washington with lie-propaganda.

Prominently appears of course Mr. Putin, even though he is not mentioned personally, he is immediately linked to others who are on the Panama Papers list – thus by implication putting guilt on him. Any clear thinking person would, of course know, that Mr. Putin or his associates – even if they had money to hide for which there has never been proof – they would most certainly not use Panama as an off-shore place for hiding. Panama is Washington’s most watched spot in the US ‘backyard’, as Obama likes to call Latin America, where you can’t even flush a toilette without the White House knowing it.

Besides, none of the figures accused of hiding money is a prominent American. How come? – It is widely known that more US corporate and individual money – amounts can be estimated in trillions – is hidden in the Caribbean than in the rest of the world combined, including Switzerland. – No matter how wrong or distorted, once the information is out on the mainstream propaganda trail – CNN, BBC, CNBC et al – there is no truth that can stop it. This is modern propaganda technique taught at most Ivy League Universities. Once people are impregnated by a lie, it is virtually impossible to replace it by the truth.

What are the counter measures independent countries can adopt to neutralize US dominance over global markets?

PK: As explained in the question above, why does the US dominate the international monetary system? – this trend is gradually reversing. Countries which do not want to bend to US-imposed rules, like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea and many others, are at best systematically financially and economically ‘sanctioned’. If that doesn’t do the trick, then ‘regime change’ is of the order – which has many models – direct assassination (the internet is full with leaders that were killed by the CIA and other secret service forces) by Obama’s personally approved drone program which are extra-judiciary killings (of which – hilariously! – Obama just accused North Korea to justify further sanctions), military invasions, bombings, by US and NATO (Europe) forces, or by proxies, like funding and arming Saudi Arabia to wipe out Yemen, killing tens of thousands of civilians, most of them women and children, just to take control of one of the most strategically located Persian Gulf country.

There is no limit of Washington’s imagination to subdue nations and entire populations around the world, always with the ultimate objective of full spectrum dominance. It is estimated that between 10 and 15 million people were killed around the world since 9/11 through US / NATO direct invasions, wars and conflicts carried out by proxy (mercenary) forces and US / Brussels instigated civil wars. No wonder people and sovereign nations want to get out from under this oppressive western bulldozer that not only aims at controlling the world militarily, but also by its US-dollar based western fiat pyramid or Ponzi-style monetary system – to which the euro also belongs, as it was modeled according to the dollar. A pyramid scheme is the creation of money through interest-bearing debt by private banks, with debt repayment through new loans and so on until the system collapses in itself.

Russia and China have already developed their own internal monetary and transfer system, the China International Payment System – CIPS, gradually being extended to the members of the SCO, BRICS (unfortunately for now without the ‘B’) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Together they are accounting for about half of the world population and one third of the world GDP. If I am not wrong, Iran is currently in the process of being integrated in the SCO. This would certainly be one way out of the US dominated monetary system. As Mr. Putin recently declared, the ‘sanctions’ were one of the best things that happened to Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It allowed a massive development of Russia’s own agriculture and industry, i.e. loosening Russia from western dependence. Russia is rapidly achieving food self-sufficiency.

In addition, China is promoting the new Silk Road, all the way from Shanghai through Eastern China, Russia, Central Asia, Eastern and Central Europe – and President Xi Jinping offered Madame Merkel in March 2014 to become the western most link of the Silk Road. She had not reacted at that time. But the writing is on the wall, loud and clearly- the economic future for Europe is with the East, Russia, Central and Eastern Asia and China. The potential for joint development investments, trading and research is enormous, by far outweighing the treacherous and deceptive machinations with the west.

Iran’s leader has introduced “Economy of Resistance” as the breakthrough to counter US economic aggression. The “Economy of Resistance” doctrine is intended to make the Iranian economy resistant to all external economic shocks in the long term, including Western sanctions and global financial crises by utilizing the domestic capabilities. What’s your take in this regard?

PK: The ‘Economy of Resistance’, an economy mainly based on self-reliance is an excellent idea. Not only does it help liberate Iran from the foreign imposed sanctions, but it also helps propel own domestic capacities, create labor, added value in the country and ultimately Iran may develop exports far above what they would be in a globalized western and WTO (World Trade Organization) controlled world trade. A resistance economy is what Mr. Putin applies, as I explained before, by intensifying development of local agriculture and industries, depending less on imports and, of course, shedding Russia from the impact of totally illegal sanctions.

Resistance Economy is to a large extent synonymous with a concept called ‘import substitution’, promoting and developing local capacities over imports. Once goods and services formerly imported are available locally, they offer great advantages to national economies, in this case the Iranian economy. For example, instead of exporting crude hydrocarbons, building up a petro-chemical industry, creating jobs, technologies and added value in the country – and perhaps most important, Resistance Economy, substituting imports by local production, is a blow to the nefarious US-corporate driven globalization.

The neoliberal argument that Iran’s economy should be restructured to focus on ‘comparative advantages’ of Iran with imports for everything else, can easily be nullified. This is clearly a neocon argument favoring globalization and making a country vulnerable to economic ‘sanctions’ of all kinds. ‘Comparative advantages’ is hardly anything inherently available in a country, but can be planned and built, especially in times of crisis – as is the case for countries being punished with illegal ‘sanctions’ due to a monetary system totally dominated by the West. This has been proven time and again.

One of the first cases was China; she kept her borders closed until she could declare food, medical and education self-sufficiency – which was the case in the 1980s, when China opened her borders and started exporting food grains. One of the most recent cases, as mentioned before, is Russia, producing for local markets and for export to likeminded countries with whom they are associated, mainly China, the SCO and the BRICS. At the same time de-dollarizing their monetary and international transfer system frees them from illegal and wanton punishments form the west. Iran becoming a member of the SCO is on the right track.

As Ayatollah Khamenei said, “The Resistance Economy is an inspiring pattern of the Islamic economic system and a good chance to make an economic epic.”

Over the last decade the city of Detroit has been negatively impacted by the role of the financial institutions which engineered the theft of tens of thousands of homes, jobs and small businesses straight across the largest per capita African American populated major municipality in the United States. Once a working class city with neighborhoods filled with single-family, two-family and multiple-residents housing, Detroit stood out among most other large metropolitan areas in the country.

The housing crisis in Detroit is inextricably linked to the restructuring of the industrial and commercial base of the U.S. Beginning in the mid-1950s, and extending through the first decade of the 21^st century, the theft of millions of jobs around the U.S. particularly had a devastating impact on Detroit. With a declining population and tax base, the city was subjected to even more predatory activity by some of the largest financial institutions internationally.

Nonetheless, people have fought back against these atrocities by the ruling capitalist class and its agents within the state. The Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI), founded in September 2002 amid the Pentagon build-up in the Persian Gulf region in preparation for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, had expanded its focus over the years to examine how the defense budget destroys the capacity of urban areas to provide housing, education, utility services and environmental quality.

By the spring of 2008, a coalition of forces came together with MECAWI to form the Moratorium NOW! Coalition to Stop Foreclosures, Evictions and Utility Shut-offs. The impetus for the formation of this alliance was the willingness of former Democratic State Senator Hansen Clarke of Detroit to submit a bill within the state legislature which would have mandated a two-year moratorium on foreclosures and evictions.

This bill met with immediate opposition from varied elements among both the Republican and Democratic Parties failing to even get out of the finance committee. The-then Governor Jenifer Granholm (Democrat) rejected the idea saying that it was not necessary or that the banks would not like it. She expressed fear that they would be in court the following day even though Granholm was the former Attorney General of Michigan. Granholm in 2009 imposed emergency management over the Detroit Public Schools resulting in the closing of over 100 buildings and the decimation of the district, the largest in Michigan.

Earlier Granholm had appointed an emergency manager over the predominantly African American city of Benton Harbor on Lake Michigan. The city had been subjected to racist disinvestment leaving thousands unemployed and impoverished. Granholm, after the Benton Harbor rebellion of June 2003, rather than provide real assistance to Benton Harbor to create jobs, housing and economic opportunities, instead endorsed the privatization of Lake Michigan’s Jean Klock Park, a public entity, leading to the Harbor Shores Development scheme which ended up gentrifying the waterfront area and constructing a golf course for the rich and powerful.

Class Action Lawsuit Filed in Detroit Demanding Moratorium

The latest phase of the housing struggle in Detroit opened up in mid-July when the Michigan American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) along with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Covington & Burling LLP, a private law firm, filed a class-action lawsuit to impose a moratorium on property tax foreclosures within Wayne County. The suit contends that the majority African American city of Detroit has been disproportionately affected due to overinflated tax rates stemming from the failure of the municipal government to conduct proper assessments of the values of properties and to grant poverty exemptions from property taxes for those who qualify.

Statistics cited in the Michigan ACLU complaint indicates that “owner-occupied homes in 100 percent African American Census blocks are more than 13 times more likely to be at risk of a tax foreclosure sale than 100 percent non-African American Census blocks.” Such stark disparities are clearly racist in their nature and character.

In addition, the Michigan ACLU also says, “Wayne County is foreclosing on and selling homes based on property taxes that the homeowners should never have had to pay. Michigan property owners are required to pay taxes on the market value of their property, and these taxes were based on values that were much higher than the homes were actually worth. Furthermore, many impoverished Detroit homeowners should have been exempt from paying property taxes under the poverty exemption that the city is required to provide under state law.”

Concentrations of Poverty and Its Racial Implications

Detroit has the highest concentration of poverty among any other major city in the U.S. as spelled out in a recent study by the Brookings Institution. Even without access to this data compiled and analyzed by this research center and think tank, all one needs to do is drive around the city to see the devastation brought about by corporate policies led by the banks through predatory lending and racially-oriented red lining.

In an article published by the Non-profit Quarterly in April based upon a review written by the Detroit Free Press, “According to the Brookings Institution’s analysis of the 2010-2014 census data, Detroit has the highest concentration of poverty among the nation’s top 25 metro areas and all U.S. cities with more than 300,000 residents. In Detroit’s six-county region, ‘32 percent of the poor live in census tracts where at least 40 percent of the population is below the poverty line,’ up from nine percent in 2000. Despite a local billionaire buying up much of downtown and the rise of worker-owned cooperatives, despair stubbornly stands shoulder to shoulder with aspiration in Detroit. Decades of bitterness remain palpable. The drawbridges are standing up for those who want to leave this castle of poverty but are too poor to do so.”

No one really knows what is meant by “worker-owned cooperatives” mentioned in the report with the city having one of the highest jobless rates in the country. Nevertheless, the role of misguided and deceptive so-called “development policies” are doing nothing for the majority African American population accept driving them further into poverty and destitution.

This same above-mentioned article goes on to note that “The quality of poverty in Detroit is life-threatening. Detroit’s infant mortality rate is higher than any other city. The chances of surviving to age 1 are better in Mexico than in Detroit.  After Camden, New Jersey, and East St. Louis, Illinois, Detroit ranks 3rd among the nation’s most dangerous cities.  Another recent report cited by Warikoo (Detroit Free Press writer) ‘shows that the poorest residents in southeast Michigan have a life expectancy rate significantly lower than the poor of comparable incomes in other major metro areas.’”

During the period between 1957 and 1968, four significant Civil Rights bills were passed by the U.S. Congress: the Civil Rights Act of 1957 on voting; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing discrimination; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ostensibly guaranteeing universal suffrage; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Since this time period the overall status of the Civil Rights of African Americans have been in precipitous decline with rising poverty, mass unemployment and poverty along with attacks on the right to vote through the gutting of the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act and the failure to enforce the Fair Housing Act where the government allowed African Americans to be systematically expropriated of their only real wealth embodied in homeownership.

The Michigan ACLU stressed in their press release coinciding with the filing of the class-action lawsuit, “The Fair Housing Act prohibits housing-related practices that have a discriminatory effect on racial minorities without a substantial legitimate justification, even if the discriminatory effect happens to be unintentional. Because Wayne County cannot provide a substantial legitimate justification for foreclosing on homes on the basis of illegal tax debts, the tax foreclosures constitute an arbitrary barrier to homeownership for African Americans.”

This class-action lawsuit provides further material evidence of the collusion of the banks and their political collaborators in undermining the right to housing and a decent quality of life for African Americans. The mass struggle which fought for people’s homes and their right to remain within the city and Wayne County must continue because it is the pressure from the bottom up that will transform the U.S. from a country dominated by a small section of the ruling class to one controlled by the masses of working families and the nationally oppressed.

61 years ago  (August 28, 1955), an innocent 14 year old black youth, Emmett Till, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by an angry vigilante mob of white racists in Money, Mississippi.

96 years ago last month (June 15, 1920), three innocent black men were tortured and murdered by an angry vigilante mob of white racists in Duluth, Minnesota.

A couple of days ago ex-Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, and Louisiana Republican Party member David Duke, announced his candidacy for the US Senate, crediting the political statements and announced agenda of Donald Trump and, presumably, the platform of the Republican Party. Months earlier, after Duke publicly endorsed Trump for President, Trump unconvincingly claimed that he didn’t know anything about Duke.

Because a multitude of unbiased observers have documented what is obvious to many others (that white racism is alive and well in America), I submit selected  excerpts of articles that will give readers a good historical update of what really happened in our not-too-distant racist past. 

They’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors, the circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner, they’ve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker, the other is in his pants
And the riot squad they’re restless, they need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight, from Desolation Row

– Bob Dylan, from “Desolation Row”

The Death Of Emmett Till

by Bob Dylan

’Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago
When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door
This boy’s dreadful tragedy I can still remember well
The color of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till

Some men they dragged him to a barn and there they beat him up
They said they had a reason, but I can’t remember what
They tortured him and did some things too evil to repeat
There were screaming sounds inside the barn, there was laughing sounds
out on the street

Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a bloody red rain
And they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screaming pain
The reason that they killed him there, and I’m sure it ain’t no lie
Was just for the fun of killin’ him and to watch him slowly die

And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial
Two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till
But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit this
awful crime
And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind

I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see
The smiling brothers walkin’ down the courthouse stairs
For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free
While Emmett’s body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea

If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust
Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood
it must refuse to flow
For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!

This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man
That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan
But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live

*     *     *

“Bush, Cheney, and their subordinates may have given the order to torture detainees, but it was the apathy, fear, and ignorance of millions of Americans that laid the groundwork for these abuses to take place”…“Today, as we consider the decision of ( President Obama) to block the release of hundreds of photographs showing the torture and abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, I hope that those of us who are defending his decision will consider the example of Emmett Till, and of how seeing with open eyes the horrors that he endured …”  – “Big Tex” (pseudonymous author of below 2009 article from Daily Kos) scroll down for full article

A Mob Lynches Three Black Men by Chris Julin and Stephanis Hemphill – June 2001

Posted at: http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/2001/06/lynching/page1.shtml

On a June night in 1920, hundreds of angry men and thousands of curious onlookers surrounded the downtown headquarters of the Duluth police department. The crowd might have reached 10,000. They wanted the handful of police officers inside to turn over their prisoners – a group of young, black circus workers. The police had arrested the men earlier that day. They accused some of the out-of-towners of raping a young, white woman at the circus grounds. Later investigations cast serious doubt on the rape charges, but the howling mob outside the police station had no doubts.

“This is where the mob broke in,” says Michael Fedo, who wrote a book about the 1920 lynchings. “I think this was a Sears store or a hardware store. The mob came into this store – which is now the casino – and the proprietor gave them rope for the hangings and said it was on the house.”

Standing in the heart of downtown Duluth, Fedo points across Superior St. to a handsome, three-story brownstone building full of offices. The word “POLICE” is still carved in the stone over the door.

Fedo says when the mob closed in on the police station, the city’s public safety commissioner ordered the 12 officers inside to holster their guns. He didn’t want anyone in the crowd to get hurt. A few officers came out onto the street, and tried to fight the mob back with their bare hands and a fire hose. But the crowd surged past them into the jail, with a roar that could be heard a mile away.

Post card photo of the lynching of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie – Duluth, MN 6-15-20

While members of the mob sawed and smashed on the bars, some of the men inside the cells pleaded their innocence. Others prayed.

“The people in the mob believed that six had attacked the girl, so they tried to get six – they only managed to get into three of the cells. There were several people in the cells with the prisoners, asking questions, trying to find out in their minds who the six were among the more than a dozen who were in the cells,” says Fedo.

“The people who were outside were saying, ‘Just give us somebody,’ and that first somebody was a young man named Isaac McGhie, who was just thrown from the cell to the hands of the mob who took him out front, brought him up the hill here one block, where he was the first one hanged,” Fedo recalls.

Isaac McGhie was beaten and bloody when he got to this corner, right next to the Duluth Shrine Temple, which is still here.

“This is where they were brought to be hanged. I don’t know why they would have been brought up the hill instead of down the hill. But it may have been because there was a young man perched on top of this pole, and they just assumed, ‘He’s already there, we’ll take them up there, we’ll have this kid tie a knot on the lamppost above the street, and take care of business that way,'” says Fedo.

A priest named William Powers pushed his way to the front of the crowd, and climbed part way up the lamppost. The priest managed to quiet the crowd for a few moments. He begged them to stop. But members of the mob pulled Rev. Powers down, and hoisted Isaac McGhie up.

Then the mob dragged Elmer Jackson and Elias Clayton out of the jail, and up the hill to the street light. When all three men were hanging, battered and dead, the crowd parted so a photographer could capture the scene.

“This was a significantly posed photo,” says Fedo. “It took a couple of automobiles with lights to illuminate the scene so the photographer could get his picture taken.”

In the center of the crisp, black and white photo, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie hang from the street light, stripped to the waist, their necks impossibly stretched and twisted. Elias Clayton lies beneath their feet, tossed onto the sidewalk, to make it easier to frame the picture. Dozens of men lean into the picture facing the camera.

“What this looks like is the kind of photo you would see at a hunting lodge, where the guys had been out shooting bear, and they came back and they said, ‘We got three.’ You can see people on tip-toe. They’ve crowded into this shot. These are not people who are ashamed to be seen here. This is, ‘I want to be in this picture.'”

“The one that quite stood out is the fellow who’s to the left of the bodies who is beaming. He looks like he’s very proud of what has transpired, and that is the face that really stands out to me,” says Fedo.

Someone made postcards out of the photo, and sold them as souvenirs. Postcards of lynchings were fairly common. A recent book, Without Sanctuary, is a collection of photos and postcards from nearly 100 lynchings. It includes the picture from Duluth.

A lynching in northern Minnesota was big news. It made headlines across the country. It stayed in the local news for months during the criminal trials that followed. Juries in Duluth convicted three men of rioting. The longest sentence served was two years. No one was convicted of murder. But one of the black men who survived the attack on the jail was convicted of rape, in spite of compelling evidence he was innocent. He served four years in prison.

And then, the story of the lynching disappeared from the news.

The Face of Emmett Till (UPDATED) by “Big Tex”

 – May 14, 2009

“Two months ago, I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the Negroes in the South I said, ‘That’s their business, not mine.’ Now I know how wrong I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all.” — Mamie Till Bradley (mother of Emmett Till)

On September 6, 1955, a little over a week after he was kidnapped, beaten, and murdered (August 28, 1955) for whistling at a white woman, Emmett Till was laid to rest at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. By the time his journey to the grave had ended, Till’s body had been seen by as many as 50,000 people who personally came to view his body at a Chicago funeral home. But before long, it would be seen by millions more, as photographs of his badly disfigured corpse circulated around the country, ultimately appearing on the cover of Jet magazine. The image of a 14-year-old boy with his eye gouged out and his head caved in was a shock to the senses of all who saw it; but it was also a rallying point for a generation of young African-Americans, and many whites as well, who saw in his mutilated face the suffering of a people, and who were inspired to end that suffering by organizing, by marching, and by voting.

A Mob Lynches Three Black Men

The face of Emmett Till might not have inspired so many if it were not for the grim determination of his mother, Mamie Till Bradley. The funeral home where Till’s body was displayed resisted allowing the casket to be opened, but Mrs. Bradley insisted, threatening to open the casket herself if need be. She wanted to see her son one last time before he left this world, but she wanted others to see him too. And so, because of her perseverance, the casket of Emmett Till was opened, his body was photographed for posterity, and the world saw what they did to Mrs. Bradley’s baby.

Funeral photo of Emmett Till

For African-Americans in the South, the horrors reflected in the face of Emmett Till were a daily fact of life. But for African-Americans who had moved away from the South and its Jim Crow laws to places like Chicago, the face of Emmett Till was a reminder that the brutality of racism could not be left behind so easily.

As for white Americans, they were forced to take a serious look at the human toll of the injustice that they had participated in, or tolerated, or tried to ignore. Though many whites, particularly in the South, were unmoved by what they saw (or at least pretended to be), many more were deeply affected by it.

Despite the publicity and anger generated by the photographs of Emmett Till, the people who murdered him were never brought to justice. A little over two weeks after Till was laid to rest, an all-white, all-male jury acquitted the only two men ever formally charged with his murder: Roy Bryant, the husband of the woman who Till whistled at, and Bryant’s half-brother, J.W. Milam. Both men would later admit to murdering Till, safe from prosecution due to double jeopardy protection. They’re dead now, and while as many as 12 other people may have participated in the crime, no one else has been charged in connection with Till’s murder.

But though Emmett Till and his family never received justice from the state of Mississippi, the wave of activism spawned by those who were inspired by the sight of his mutilated body brought justice of a different sort. The face of Emmett Till would inspire Rosa Parks not to give up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama later that year. It would inspire nine African-American schoolchildren to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957. It would inspire sit-ins in Greensboro in 1960, and Freedom Riders in 1961. It would inspire voter registration drives, and a letter from a Birmingham jail cell. It would inspire over 300,000 people to march on Washington, and millions to dream of a day when people would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” It would inspire the Freedom Summer of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

And more than 50 years after the death of Emmett Till, in a country where racism still endures but without the power that it once had, it would inspire millions of voters, black and white, to reject the prejudices and fears of the past, and elect the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya to be the 44th President of the United States.

Today, as we consider the decision of that same President to block the release of hundreds of photographs showing the torture and abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, I hope that those of us who are defending his decision will consider the example of Emmett Till, and of how seeing with open eyes the horrors that he endured brought about change in the hearts and minds of so many.

Bush, Cheney, and their subordinates may have given the order to torture detainees, but it was the apathy, fear, and ignorance of millions of Americans that laid the groundwork for these abuses to take place. We as a nation need to be confronted with our failures and to take ownership of them, so we can set a positive example for young Americans to prevent such abuses from happening in the future. And we need to show those outside America that we can and will live up to our democratic values, so that we’ll be taken seriously when we attempt to share those values with the rest of the world. This isn’t about the next election–it’s about the next generation, and about what kind of America they will build on the ashes of what we allowed to be ruined.

Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. He writes a weekly column for the Reader, Duluth’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns mostly deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, psychiatric drugging, over-vaccination regimens, Big Pharma and other movements that threaten the environment or America’s health, democracy, civility and longevity. Many of his columns are archived at

http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls

or at

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

Michael Roddan gives a chilling depiction of economic manoeuvres, both past and present, undertaken by the Indonesian government in a bid to marginalise the indigenous Papuans. From the transmigration program, to the rural-urban divide and the permitted acts of multinational corporations in the region, Australia’s passive stance in the face of multiple human rights violations is questioned.

Just some 300km north of our borders human rights violations are being committed on a vast scale  [APR editor’s note: Roddan, the author, means north of Australia, MDN]. Torture, rape, extrajudicial killings, false imprisonment, and violent suppression of peaceful demonstrations are happening en masse, and it’s all being carried out in West Papua – one of Australia’s closest neighbours.

There has been a movement for West Papuan independence from Indonesia for half a century and this article, amongst other things, will hopefully show how economics is exacerbating the problem faced by the West Papuan people.

A Dutch colony until 1962, Indonesia garnered the right to act as the temporary authority over the western half of the island of New Guinea until the time came when the Papuan people decided to vote for independence or Indonesian annexation.

The ‘Act of Free Choice’ was held in 1969. Just over a thousand village elders were handpicked to represent over a million Papuans and were instructed to vote at gunpoint for annexation under threat of death for them and their families. The result was unsurprisingly unanimous and West Papua would remain in the hands of the Indonesians. Locals know the referendum as the ‘Act of No Choice’.

So how valuable is this land? Yale and Sydney University reports suggest that it is valuable enough to warrant the deaths of 500,000 Papuans. Taking place over the last 50 years, it’s known as ‘slow-motion genocide’ .

Two years before the 1969 referendum, dictator President Suharto signed a contract with Freeport, a US mining company, giving them full rights to the Ertsberg mine in West Papua. When the Freeport-Indonesia company (of which 9.36% is owned by the State) exhausted all of the material from the Ertsberg mountain in the 1980s, they set up a new mine a few miles away at Grasberg mountain.

Grasberg mine is now the largest gold mine in the world and the third largest copper mine in the world. It is also Indonesia’s sole biggest taxpayer. Pretty valuable and understandable that the government would want to hold onto it, even though the actual business deal struck under Suharto was illegal, being a 30 year lease on land that the government didn’t actually own at the time.

After the fall of Suharto, many (notably Desmond Tutu) have called for a subsequent and proper referendum on West Papuan Independence. However, as it stands, Indonesia has suppressed the Papuans to the extent where this may not be feasible.

In 1961, people of Papuan ethnicity made up 96% of the population of West Papua. Indonesians are largely Javanese Muslims, as opposed to the predominately Protestant Melanesian Papuans, and thus, the division of New Guinea is one of the more perplexing colonial administrative errors.

Economically, Jakarta has sought to socially engineer this problem away and quell any chance of successful referendum, should it ever take place. Economic incentives guide Indonesia’s transmigration program that seeks to entice Javanese to the archipelago’s fringe islands. The urban poor are given assisted passage (read: free passage) and tax incentives to relocate to West Papua, once there they are given capital to start new businesses.

The transmigration program has meant that the demographics have swung wildly since 1961. A Sydney University estimate by Jim Elmslie using the last comprehensive data from 2000 gives us a non-Papuan majority in West Papua. Of a population of 3,612,854 in 2010, only 49.55% of people on the island were indigenous Papuans. By 2030, indigenous peoples will make but 15% of the population.

Economic marginalisation of the Papuans continues unabated, too. Grasberg mine benefits the state enormously and is impossibly profitable ($4.1 billion in operating profit on revenue of $6.4 billion in 2010). But the mine pays its workers, who are overwhelmingly Papuan, just $1.50 an hour. Although it houses Indonesia’s biggest taxpayer, West Papua is the nation’s poorest province – profits are simply not going to the Papuans.

There is a huge divide between the rural and the urban in West Papua. Javanese constitute around 70% of the population in sizeable towns and urban areas of the province. Yet in regional and remote areas where the indigenous Papuans are still the overwhelming majority, the indigenous are largely excluded from the mainstream economy, let alone basic services such as education and healthcare.

Currently, Chevron and BP are carving up West Papua for oil and gas exploitation while deforestation and logging are executed at a terrifying pace. The economic exploitation of the land will spell disaster for Papuans, only deepening their poverty trap. The Grasberg mine discharges so much tailing into nearby waterways, around 230,000 tons daily, which arguably puts it in breach of national law. The World Bank no longer funds any such operations, and no developed country on earth disposes of their mining waste such a manner.

The Australian Rio Tinto has a joint venture agreement with Freeport, the owners of Grasberg mine, which allows a large share of resource production. Most Australian financial institutions invest in Rio Tinto, which means that we too are implicated. To top it off, Australia equips, funds and trains an Indonesian counter terrorism squad called Detachment 88 that regularly kills and tortures peaceful West Papuan Independence activists.

Bob Carr, most glorious Foreign Minister, said on the 20th March “It would be a reckless Australian indeed who wanted to associate himself with a small separatist group which threatens the territorial integrity of Indonesia and that would produce a reaction among Indonesians towards this country.”

While the issue of whether an independent West Papua would be a viable state is another issue entirely, can Australians really argue that territorial integrity is more meritorious than the avoidance and eradication of genocide?

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki urged the Arab League to help the Palestinian Authority to sue the United Kingdom over the Balfour Declaration of 1917 on Monday.

Speaking on behalf of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, al-Maliki delivered a speech Thursday at the Arab League’s annual summit, which is being held this year in the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott.

Al-Maliki apologized on behalf of Abbas, who couldn’t attend the summit due to his brother’s recent death, before urging Arab countries to “help us bring a suit against the British government over the ominous Balfour Declaration which resulted in the Nakba (catastrophe) for the Palestinian people.”

Nearly a century ago, a letter sent from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild, a British Jewish leader, declared British support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Palestinians have since viewed the declaration as paving the way for the creation of the State of Israel at the expense of the land’s original inhabitants.

The declaration was made before the British had wrested control of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, and was not made public until several years after the World War I, in 1920.

By that time, Britain had been formally granted a mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations, and was struggling with its contradictory obligations of “rewarding” Arabs for their support during the war, while also fulfilling their pledge to create a Jewish state.

After World War II, British forces withdrew from Palestine, leaving it in the hands of the newly created United Nations, which favored partition, particularly as evidence slowly emerged of the vast scale of the Holocaust in Europe.

The decision led to the 1948 war between Arab nations, including Palestinians, and Jewish immigrants, ultimately resulting in the creation of the state of Israel and the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes inside its borders, an event known as the Nakba among Palestinians.

In February, the Palestine Liberation Organization said in a statement that Great Britain bore “the primary responsibility” for “historical injustice in Palestine.”